eed we know from Jordanes[5] and elsewhere that
heroic poetry was common among the Goths themselves and that they were
wont to celebrate the deeds of their ancestors in verse sung to the
accompaniment of the harp.

This poem is no doubt much older than the saga. Originally it would
seem to have been complete in itself; but many verses have probably
been lost. Thus there can be little doubt that the prose passages in
chs. XII-XV are often merely a paraphrase of lost verses, though it
must not be assumed that all the prose in this portion of the saga
originated in such a way[6]. "It is difficult to tell ... where the
prose of the manuscripts is to be taken as standing in the place
of lost narrative verses, and where it fills a gap that was never
intended to be filled with verse, but was always left to the reciter
to be supplied in his own way[7]." The difficulty, however, is greater
in some cases than in others. The following picturesque passage
from the opening of ch. 14 of the _Hervarar Saga_ is a very probable
instance of a paraphrase of lost verses:

It happened one morning at sunrise that as Hervoer was standing
on the summit of a tower over the gate of the fortress, she
looked southwards towards the forest and saw clouds of dust,
arising from a great body of horse, by which the sun was
hidden for a long time. Next she saw a gleam beneath the dust,
as though she were gazing on a mass of gold--fair shields
overlaid with gold, gilded helmets and white corslets.

The motif of a chief or his lady standing on the pinnacle of a tower
of the fort and looking out over the surrounding country for an
approaching army is a very common one in ballads. The motif of the
above passage from _Hervarar Saga_, including the armour of the foe
and the shining shields, occurs in the opening stanzas of the Danish
Ballad _De vare syv og syvsindstyve_[8], which probably dates from
the fourteenth century (though it may possibly be later[9]) and which
derives its material ultimately from old heroic lays[10].

To the same period approximately as the poem on the battle with the
Huns belong the two pieces from the _Older Edda_ contained in the
_Thattr[11] of Nornagest_. The _Reginsmal_ indeed, of which only about
half is quoted, may be even earlier than the former (in the form in
which it appears in _Hervarar Saga_), while the _Hellride of Brynhild_
can hardly be later than the early part of the eleventh century.