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This ballad about a maid who kills a would-be lady-killer is known in England as "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight", in France as "Renaud le Tueur de Femmes", in Scandinavia as "Kvindemorderen", and in the Netherlands and Belgium as "Heer Halewijn"; in the German-speaking area it is called "Ulinger" or "Ulrich". Having analysed the features acquired by the ballad in different countries and compared the traditions of various language areas, the author draws the conclusion that the Netherlands ballad is the oldest of them all and acted as a model for Scandinavian and French versions.
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THE BALLAD OF HEER HALEWI JN THE BALLAD OF HEER HALEWIJN ITS FORM S AND VARIATIONS IN W ESTERN EUROPE A Study o f the History and Nature o f a B allad Tradition BY H O LG E R OL OF NYGÅRD T H E U N IV E R S IT Y O F TE N N ESSEE PRESS K N O X V IL L E , TEN N ESSEE 1958 This study is published jointly with the Finnish Academy of Sciences (Folklore Fellows Communications). Copyright, 1958, by The University of Tennessee Press. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 58-12087. PRINTED IN FINLAND by the H e ls in g i n L i i k e k i r j a p a i n o Oy Dedicated to the Memory of M Y FATHER FOREWORD The historian of ballad scholarship, Sigurd B. Hustvedt, a generation ago called for »a multitude of special enquiries in relatively limited fields, following as a rule a path of investigation from the present known toward the past unknown.» This study is written in the spirit of Hustvedt’s directive. The whole array of ballad riddles is no more shaped into a semblance of unity in our day than in 1930; the Lord Bacon of ballad learning predicted by Hustvedt as forthcoming with a conspectus of ballad learning must yet await the multitude of special enquiries. That attention in this work has been devoted to the ballad Heer Halewijn needs no apologies in spite of the spate of studies that this song perhaps more than any other in European oral traditions has evoked among scholars from the days of Svend Grundtvig and Sophus Bugge to our own time. The richness of the record, the breadth of spread of the song, the many involutions of change m word and narrative provide the investigator with an excellent laboratory sample of ballad tradition, and every investigator is afforded ample room for his experimentations and for the exercise of hypotheses and theories that readers must scruti nize and weigh. If a theoretical position is implicit in this work, it proceeds from the conviction that ballad texts are of necessity studied not from a priori assumptions of meaning and original content but from present known toward past unknown, and that conviction is best captured in the phrase that I have devised for the purpose, »the retention of verbal structure.» The pursuit of Heer Halewijn and the rather misnamed Elf-Knight and Lady Isabel through centuries and over boundaries has occupied me for some time. As a student of oral traditions international in scope I find myself indebted in many ways to the numerous collectors, editors, and scholars of many lands whose work substantially contributes to the success of my own, and to the archivists and custodians of collections who have provided me with the primary materials of study. For the many kindnesses they have shown me I express my gratitude in parti cular to the late H. Grüner N i^ en of the Dansk Folkemindesamling, the late Knut Liestøl and Professors Reidar Th. Christiansen and Svale Solheim of the Norsk Folkeminnesamling, Professor Dag Strömbäck of the University of Uppsala, Professor Otto Andersson of Åbo Akademi, Phil. lie. Ulf Peder Olrog of Svenskt Visarkiv, and Dr. Marius Barbeau of the National Museum of Canada. It is my pleasant duty to record my debt of gratitude also to Professors Archer Taylor, Bertrand