rounds,
this extreme antiquity cannot be maintained. It is now supposed that
they were composed at various times between 1300 and 1500, and that in
their present form they bear the stamp of the period when they were first
collected by the Danish antiquaries of the sixteenth century.

The circumstances in which this famous collection of folk-songs came into
public notice were of a romantic nature. Sophia, Queen of Denmark, when
sailing across the Sound in the year 1586, was driven by stress of
weather to take shelter in the little island-harbour of Hveen, where the
famous observatory stood, close by the house of the astronomer, Tycho
Brahe. It so happened that at that very time Brahe was entertaining as a
guest the most eminent Danish man of letters of that age, Anders Sorensen
Vedel (1542-1616). Vedel, whose labours were encyclopaedic, was engaged
in preserving all the monuments of Danish mediaeval history and learning
which he could discover in the monasteries and libraries of Denmark. He
had been much encouraged in this work by the Monk of Roeskilde, Peder
Olufsen, who on his death-bed, about 1570, had placed in Vedel's hands
all the MSS. which he had collected. Queen Sophia, cloistered in the
Ouranienborg with her antiquary and her astronomer, and waiting for the
tempest to moderate, desired to be amused with stories of her national
history. Vedel ventured to read to her some of the legendary poems which
still lingered among the people, and she was so enchanted with them, that
she commanded him, when he returned to the mainland, to make a collection
of these ballads and publish them.

Accordingly, in 1591, Vedel issued from the private printing-press in his
house called Liljeborg at Ribe in Jutland, a selection of 100 mediaeval
ballads, under the title of _Et Hundred udvalgte danske Viser_. This
volume is one of the landmarks of Scandinavian, and indeed of European,
literary history. Vedel made another collection, this time of ancient
love-ballads, which he called _Tragica_; it was not published until 1657,
long after his death. But the volume of 1591 is the fountain-head of all
that has since been written about the Heroic Ballads of the North, and it
is impossible to overrate the services of Vedel in preserving what was
even then ready to disappear. It seems, moreover, that he was careful of
the text, and later scholarship has come more and more to place
confidence in his transcripts.

This was, unfortu