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

three ballads

by GEORGE BORROW

by

Edited with an introduction by EDMUND GOSSE, C.B.

Edited

with an introduction

by

London: printed for private circulation 1913

London

printed for private circulation

p. 4Copyright in the United States of America by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. for Clement Shorter.

p. 4

p. 5INTRODUCTION Borrow and the Kjæmpeviser.

p. 5

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 Kjæmpeviser 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 

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