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.

p. 12

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 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; he translated their notes word for word,—and gave them out as his own; his volume of 1826 and the privately printed p. 13later 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.

p. 13

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 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. But Bowring proved a broken reed, and Borrow suffered once p. 14again one of those disappointments which so naturally embittered him. It was not until 1874, however, some seven years before his death, that he finally gave up all hope. The MSS. of his translations of the kjæmpeviser passed into the hands of 

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