ndic legends. Indeed what Professor Ker says of the Danish
ballads[31] may with equal truth be applied to the ballads of the
Faroes:

The ballads are not rude, rustic travesties of older more
dignified stories; though some, perhaps many, of the older
stories may survive among the ballads. They are for Denmark in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries what the older heroic
lays of the Poetic Edda had been before them in the Northern
lands. They take the place of earlier heroic poetry.

Whatever the nature of their connection with the ballads of the
surrounding lands, the Faroese ballads are no isolated growth. They
exhibit all the main characteristics of the ballad type, especially of
the Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic ballads. Crude and inartistic they
often are compared with the best of the Danish and even the Scottish
ballads. The _Ballad of Hjalmar and Angantyr_ has little to recommend
it beyond its simplicity and naivete, the 'quaintness' of primitive
literature; the _Ballad of Arngrim's Sons_ exhibits a curious lack of
skill in the manipulation of the theme, and perhaps we are justified
in assuming that two earlier ballads or perhaps _taettir_ have been
imperfectly welded. The _Ballad of Nornagest_ is bald to a fault
and lacks inspiration; and all alike show an imperfect artistry in
diction.

Yet despite all these blemishes they are ballads as surely as _Sir
Patrick Spens_ or _Ungen Sveidal_ are ballads. Nor is Professor Ker
quite just to the ballads of the Faroes in saying[32] that because of
their length, and "because they were made out of books, nothing but
the lyrical form and the dancing custom kept them from turning into
ordinary romances." Surely no material could be less promising than
King Heithrek's Riddles; yet in virtue of what has been forgotten
and what has been selected--the telescoping of the riddles and the
elaboration of the setting--the ballad spirit has entered in and
shaped from the unwieldy mass an artistic whole.

Indeed whatever their faults one realises in all these ballads the
truth of Sidgwick's epigram[33]: "You never know what a ballad will
say next, though you _do_ know how it is going to say it!" For it is
even less similarity of theme than similarity of form that links
the ballads of the Faroes with those of Denmark and the North. The
invariable accompaniment of the refrain; the fluctuation between
assonance and rhyme, the disregard of alliteration, and