George Borrow

“ 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 Sörensen Vedel (1542–1616) . Vedel, whose labours were encyclopædic, 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Hero Hogen’s mother, crying:
“Methought the gallant coursers all
Were either dead or dying.
“And I possess full wit enow
That vision to explain;
If to the Hvenish land ye go
There’ll many a man be slain.” ”

“ This was an attempt on the part of Borrow, languidly assented to by Bowring, to give publicity to some 70 kjæmpeviser 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 Kæmpe 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 kjæmpeviser in his native country. ”

“ Peter Petersen Syv (1631–1702) was a very able philologist, who was also a minor poet of ambition. In 1695 he reprinted and edited Vedel’s text, adding 100 more kjæmpeviser which had been unknown to Vedel. But his work was not so well done; Syv was something of a pedant, and unfortunately either too critical or not critical enough. He ventured to correct the irregularities of the ballads, and not seldom has spoiled them. ”

“ 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 p. 6grounds, 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. ”

“ But it requires great faith to accept his own account of his approach to the poems. In Lavengro, at a point which Knapp has dated 1820, Borrow tells with brilliant picturesqueness how he purchased, by permitting the wife of an elderly yeoman to kiss his cheek, “a strange and uncouth-looking volume” which had formed part of the kit of some red-haired fishermen who were wrecked on the Norfolk coast:—
It was not very large, but instead of the usual covering was bound in wood, and was compassed with strong iron clasps. ”

“ No doubt, he was anxious to emphasise the novelty and rarity of his literary adventures. But his attitude to Jamieson is very strange. As early as 1806 Robert Jamieson (1780–1844) had published a volume of Popular Ballads, in which he had translated several of the kjæmpeviser and had pointed out their value in relation to the ancient Scottish poems of a similar kind. Sir Walter Scott paid much flattering attention to Jamieson’s work, which also attracted a good deal of notice in Denmark and Germany, and inspired the Drei altschottische Lieder of G. D. Gräter (1813) . ”

“ Whether it is entirely or only partly romance, the inference that Borrow translated the kjæmpeviser 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 ”

“ Grimm seems to have worked upon an edition of Syv published in Copenhagen in 1787, which accounts for the corrupt state of some of Grimm’s text. A good deal of unpleasant controversy was awakened on the subject, but all this has now long slumbered under the dust of a century. ”