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‘They dance all under the greenwood tree’: British and Danish Romantic-Period Adaptations of Two Danish ‘Elf Ballads’

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Romantic Norths

Abstract

Lis Møller recovers a relatively undocumented source of inspiration, or cultural exchange, shared by Danish and British romantics: Danish popular medieval balladry. Focusing on the two ballads ‘Elverhøj’ and ‘Elverskud’, the first part of Møller’s essay examines influential English translations. The second identifies those translations as intertexts of John Keats’s celebrated ballad ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ (1817), thus recovering a key Danish influence on British romantic writing. The third then reads Keats’s ballad as itself an influence on some later, Danish, romantic adaptations of ‘Elverhøj’ and ‘Elverskud’, including, in particular, the libretto written by the Danish critic Christian Molbech (1783–1857) for the romantic nationalist ‘concert piece’ Elverskud, composed by the Danish musician Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817–1890) in 1853.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The list of works by Danish romantic authors translated into English before 1850 comprises a few dramatic works, including Adam Oehlenschläger’s tragedy Hakon Jarl; historical novels by B. S. Ingemann; and selected poems by Oehlenschläger, Baggesen, Hauch, and Ingemann. For a detailed list, see Robert E. Bjork, ‘A Bibliography of Modern Scandinavian Literature (Excluding H. C. Andersen) in English Translation, 1533 to 1900, and Listed by Translator’, Scandinavian Studies 77/1 (2005), pp. 105–16. The international dissemination of (by far) the best-known Danish romantic (or ‘Golden Age’) authors, Hans Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard, occurred mainly after 1850.

  2. 2.

    See Robert W. Rix (ed.), Norse Romanticism: Themes in British Literature, 1760–1830, Romantic Circles (2012) at www.rmc.edu/editions/norse (accessed 8 March 2017); and Peter Mortensen, ‘“The Descent of Odin”: Wordsworth, Scott and Southey among Norsemen’, Romanticism 6 (2000), pp. 211–33.

  3. 3.

    Two annotated editions of Tales of Wonder were published in 2010: Tales of Wonder, ed. Brett Rutherford, 2 vols. (Providence: Yogh & Thorn, 2010; second revised edition 2012), and Tales of Wonder, ed. Douglass H. Thomson (London: Broadview, 2010). All quotations from ‘Elvers hoh’ here are from Rutherford, ed. (vol. 1, pp. 44–5) but I also refer to Thomson’s ‘Introduction’.

  4. 4.

    André Parreaux, The Publication of The Monk. A Literary Event 1796–1798 (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1960), p. 43.

  5. 5.

    Walter Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’, p. 28, quoted from http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/poetry/apology/essay.html (accessed on 11 August 2015). See also Parreux, p. 49.

  6. 6.

    Quoted from Thomson’s ‘Introduction’ to Tales of Wonder, p. 17.

  7. 7.

    Ibid., p. 28.

  8. 8.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, p. 25.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., p. 26.

  10. 10.

    See Parreux, especially the chapter on ‘Influence of German poetry and fiction in 1796‘; Thomson; Peter Mortensen, British Romanticism and Continental Influences. Writing in an Age of Europhobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 81ff.; and Jayne Winter, ‘International Traditions: Ballad Translations by Johann Gottfried Herder and Matthew Lewis’, German Life and Letters 67/1 (2014), pp. 22–37.

  11. 11.

    Thomson, p. 14.

  12. 12.

    Scott, ‘Essay on Imitations’, p. 20.

  13. 13.

    ‘Europhobia’ in post-revolutionary Britain is the topic of Mortensen’s British Romanticism and Continental Influences. See also Thomson, p. 17, and Winter, p. 30, both of whom quote Mortensen.

  14. 14.

    Adam Oehlenschläger, Digte 1803 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1979 [1802]). ‘Ellehöien’ is quoted from this edition (pp. 54–57). An English translation by George Borrow of ‘Ellehöien’, entitled ‘Elvir-Shades’, appeared in 1826 in Borrow’s Romantic Ballads Translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces (Norwich: S. Wilkin, 1826). In the following I use Borrow’s translation when it is more faithful to the original. Other translations from Oehlenschläger’s poem are my own.

  15. 15.

    Peder Syv (ed.), Et hundrede udvalde Danske Viser, om allehaande mærkelige Krigs-Bedrivt og anden selsom Eventyr, som sig her udi Riget ved gamle Kæmper, navnkundige Konger, og ellers fornemme Personer begivet haver, af Arilds Tid til denne nærværende Dag. Forøgede med det Andet hundrede Viser, om Danske Konger, Kæmper og Andre, samt hosføyede Antegnelser, til Lyst og Lærdom (Copenhagen: Høpffner, 1787 [1695]). Both elf ballads will be quoted from this edition: ‘Elver Høy’ (pp. 160–1) and ‘Elveskud’ (pp. 698–701).

  16. 16.

    Winter, p. 31. Winter’s comparative reading is somewhat inhibited by her inability to read the Danish text which Herder translated.

  17. 17.

    Quoted from Thomson, p. 17.

  18. 18.

    Anders Sørensen Vedel, Hundredvisebog. Faksimileudgave med indledning og noter, ed. Karen Thuesen (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Forlag, 1993), p. 138. Similarly, Syv supplied the ‘Elveskud’ ballad with an epigraph in the form of a moralising proverb: ‘Mangen rider rank og rød/Er dog morgen krank og død’ [Many ride out proud and glowing/The morrow they are sorry and dead] (Syv, p. 698).

  19. 19.

    In Borrow’s translation: ‘Let each young warrior from such places fly:/Disease and death beneath the flowers lurk;/And elves would suck the warm blood from his eye’ (76–8).

  20. 20.

    ‘Miss Aikin drew from her pocket-book a version of “Lenoré,” executed by William Taylor, Esq., of Norwich, with as much freedom as was consistent with great spirit and scrupulous fidelity. She read this composition to the company, who were electrified by the tale. […] When Miss Aikin had finished her recitation, she replaced in her pocket-book the paper from which she had read it, and enjoyed the satisfaction of having made a strong impression on the hearers, whose bosoms thrilled yet the deeper, as the ballad was not to be more closely introduced to them’ (Scott, ‘Essay’, pp. 31–2).

  21. 21.

    Sigurd Hustvedt, Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain During the Eighteenth Century (New York: The American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1916), p. 288. Founded by Christen Henriksen Pram and Knud Lyne Rahbek, Minerva was the leading Danish periodical in the years 1785–1808. The journal published articles on political issues as well as on contemporary literature.

  22. 22.

    Adam Oehlenschläger, Ungdomserindringer (Copenhagen: Jespersen og Pios Forlag, 1963), p. 149.

  23. 23.

    Tales of Wonder (ed. Rutherford), vol. 1, p. 44.

  24. 24.

    ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ is quoted from John Barnard (ed.), John Keats. The Complete Poems, (London: Penguin, 1988), pp. 334–6.

  25. 25.

    Parreaux, pp. 55–6. Thomson refers to Parreaux’s contention in his edition of Tales of Wonder (p. 70, n.1).

  26. 26.

    For an overview of probable sources see The Poems of John Keats, ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1970), pp. 500–6.

  27. 27.

    Robert Graves, The White Goddess. A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, ed. Grevel Lindop (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013 [1948]), p. 421.

  28. 28.

    Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone. Keats’ Major Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953), pp. 65–83. Following Graves and Wasserman, numerous editors and critics have acknowledged this ballad as one of Keats’s more significant intertexts. See, for instance: Karl Kroeber, Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 66–71; Christoph Bode, John Keats: Play On (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1996), pp. 159–162; Sarah Wooton, Consuming Keats. Nineteenth-Century Representations in Art and Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 110ff.; and David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 145ff.

  29. 29.

    Wasserman, p. 68.

  30. 30.

    Jamieson, vol. 1, p. 209.

  31. 31.

    ‘[…] die Thaten stehen streng neben einander, wie Berge, deren Gipfel bloss beleuchtet sind’. Wilhelm Carl Grimm, Altdänische Heldenlieder (1811), in Kleinere Schriften Kleinere von Wilhelm Grimm, ed. Gustav Hinrichs (Berlin: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1881), p. 182; my translation.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., p. 193; my translation.

  33. 33.

    Graves, pp. 422–3.

  34. 34.

    Wasserman, pp. 77.

  35. 35.

    See Wasserman, pp. 74–5.

  36. 36.

    Johan Ludvig Heiberg, Elverhöj. Drama i fem Akte. (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1891).

  37. 37.

    See P. Hansen’s ‘Introduction’ Elverhöj, ‘“Elverhöj” og det kongelige Teater’, ibid., pp. 3–33.

  38. 38.

    On the genesis of the libretto see Erik Sønderholm, ‘Elverskud. H. C. Andersen og Chr. K. F. Molbech’, Musik 2 (1968), pp. 5–9. Sønderholm’s article prints the full text of Andersen’s and Molbech’s drafts. See also Inger Sørensen, Niels W. Gade. Et dansk verdensnavn (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2002), pp. 162–6.

  39. 39.

    Part III, 66. Quotations from Elverskud are from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AElverskud_NW_Gade_tekst.pdf (accessed 5 October 2015). All English translations are my own.

  40. 40.

    Grimm, Altdänische Heldenlieder, p. 189.

Bibliography

  • Jamieson, Robert, Popular Ballads – the full title of which is Popular Ballads and Songs from Tradition, Manuscripts, and Scarce Editions; with Translations of Similar Pieces from the Ancient Danish Language, and a Few Originals by the Editor (Edinburgh, 1806).

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  • Lewis, Matthew Gregory, Tales of Wonder (London, 1801).

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  • ———, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, songs, and other pieces of our Earlier Poets, Together with Some Few of Later Date (London, 1765).

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  • Scott, Walter, ‘Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad’ (1830) (available at http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/poetry/apology/essay.html)

  • ———, The Monk (London, 1796).

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  1. Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Lis Møller

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  1. Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Cian Duffy

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Møller, L. (2017). ‘They dance all under the greenwood tree’: British and Danish Romantic-Period Adaptations of Two Danish ‘Elf Ballads’. In: Duffy, C. (eds) Romantic Norths. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51246-4_6

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