Borrow’s relation to these texts must now be considered, and it offers some difficulty. In 1826 he published a volume of verse entitled _Romantic Ballads translated from the Danish_, and in the preface he uses these words:—“I expect shortly to lay before the public a complete translation of the KIÆMPÉ VISER, made by me some years ago.” It is necessary to bear in mind that there are these two collections of Borrow’s translations from the _kjæmpeviser_, the second of which, as we shall see, he did not contrive to publish.
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). It is scarcely possible that Borrow was not aware of all this, yet he never mentions the name of Jamieson, and in 1826 he spoke boldly of himself as breaking into “unknown and untrodden paths.” It is not impossible that Sir Walter Scott’s patronage of Jamieson had something to do with the ungenerous petulance of Borrow’s references to the great novelist in _Lavengro_.
But Borrow’s attitude to the contemporary scholars of Denmark is still more surprising. Without saying so in exact words, he gives us to understand that he translated all the _kjæmpeviser_ from the original edition of Vedel. It would be rash to say that Borrow was not acquainted with the _Danske Viser_ of 1591, for he does, in one place, quote, whether at first-hand or not, from Vedel’s preface. 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:—