The Project Gutenberg eBook, Grimhild's Vengeance, by Anonymous, Edited by
Thomas Wise, Translated by George Borrow

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Title: Grimhild's Vengeance
Three Ballads

Author: Anonymous

Editor: Thomas Wise

Release Date: June 12, 2009 [eBook #29103]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GRIMHILD'S VENGEANCE***

Transcribed from the 1913 Thomas J. Wise pamphlet by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org. Many thanks to Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library,
UK, for kindly supplying the images from which this transcription was
made.

GRIMHILD'S VENGEANCE
THREE BALLADS

BY
GEORGE BORROW

EDITED
_WITH AN INTRODUCTION_
BY
EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

LONDON:
PRINTED FOR PRIVATE CIRCULATION
1913

_Copyright in the United States of America_
_by Houghton_, _Mifflin & Co. for Clement Shorter_.

INTRODUCTION
_Borrow and the Kjaempeviser_.

The modern poetical literature of Denmark opens with a collection of
epical and lyrical poems from the Middle Ages, which are loosely
connected under the title of _Kjaempeviser_ or Heroic Ballads. Of these
the latest scholarship recognises nearly 500, but in the time of Borrow
the number did not much exceed 200. These ballads deal with
half-historic events, which are so completely masked by fantastic,
supernatural and incoherent imagery that their positive relation to
history can rarely be discovered. Nevertheless, they throw a very
valuable light upon the manners of mediaeval society in Scandinavia, and
they are often of high poetical beauty. No conjecture can be formed as
to the authors of these ballads, and even the centuries in which they
were composed are uncertain. Grimm believed them to be _uralt_, and
attributed them to the 5th and 6th centuries. But on linguistic g