loor,
but that did not mend the matter, for still I did not understand the
book, which however I began to see was written in rhyme. . . . For
the book was a book of ballads, about the deeds of knights and
champions, and men of huge stature. . . . collected by one Anders
Vedel.

This story of a vellum copy of the rare edition of 1591 thrown up on the
shore of Norfolk with a common sailor's effects is told in Borrow's best
style. But how far is it true? Whether it is entirely or only partly
romance, the inference that Borrow translated the _kjaempeviser_ by the
light of nature from this "Gothic" text must be abandoned. He may or may
not have handled a copy of Vedel, but he made his translations, as
internal evidence amply proves, from the five volumes of Abrahamson,
Nyerup and Rahbek, published between 1812 and 1814. This was a cheap and
highly accessible edition, and was in the hands of the booksellers
complete at least six years before Borrow began to read Danish. He
accepted the text of these scholars and their arrangement; he translated
their notes word for word,--and gave them out as his own; his volume of
1826 and the privately printed later ballads are wholly founded upon
Abrahamson, Nyerup and Rahbek, and yet, so far as I can discover, he
never mentions their names in any part of his writings. He professed
that the public should believe his knowledge to be wholly derived from a
mysterious black-letter volume washed up on the sands of his native
county, and read by him with agonies of labour by the pure light of
divination.

In January, 1830, a prospectus was put forth in which "_The Songs of
Scandinavia_, _translated by Dr. Bowring and Mr. Borrow_" was offered to
subscribers at the price of a guinea. This was an attempt on the part of
Borrow, languidly assented to by Bowring, to give publicity to some 70
_kjaempeviser_ which the former had translated since the publication of
his _Romantic Ballads_ of 1826. "I am terribly afraid," writes Borrow,
"of being forestalled in the Kaempe Viser by some of those Scotch
blackguards," a hit, no doubt, at Jamieson. He was working hard at his
translations, and he was further stimulated by meeting in London with the
Danish theologian and poetical student, Nikolai Frederik Severin
Grundtvig, who had done much to popularise the _kjaempeviser_ in his
native country. But Bowring proved a broken reed, and Borrow suffered
once again one of those disapp