Elvehøj ( Elf Hill ) is the Danish name of a Scandinavian ballad ( Danmarks gamle folkeviser no. 46), known in Swedish as Älvefärd ( Sveriges medeltida ballader no. 31), type A 65 ('knight released from elves at dawn') in The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad ; it is also attested in Norwegian.
7-425: The ballad is in the first person. The narrator, an attractive young man, falls asleep beside an elf-mound (or elvehøj ). Some women (usually elf-maidens) then attempt to woo the narrator, singing so beautifully that the natural world responds (the streams stop flowing, fish dance for joy, etc., depending on the variant). The narrator, however, resists their blandishments, grasping his sword (usually in silence). The man
14-667: A fairy tale called ' Elverhøi ' in 1845, 'and the celebrated elfin mound has now become a tourist spot in Stevns Peninsula , Denmark. The ballad was one of the inspirations for the 1828 patriotic play Elverhøj (Elves' Hill) by Johan Ludvig Heiberg . Elverhøj is still a popular play in Denmark. Jens Billes visebog Jens Billes visebog ('Jens Bille's song-book', Odense, Landsarkivet for Fyn, Karen Brahe E I,2, also called 'Jens Billes håndskrift' and 'Jens Billes poesiebog' and once known as 'Steen Billes Haandskrift')
21-455: Is from Jens Bille, who named himself in the manuscript as its owner, that the manuscript takes its modern name. Poems 1-86 were written in the period 1555–89, and poem 87, on the death of Frederick II of Denmark , in 1589. The book contains some of our earliest attestations of Scandinavian ballads, such as Elvehøj . Many of the texts it contains are edited in Danmarks gamle Folkeviser . In
28-469: Is most often rescued by the crowing of a cock awaking him, though in the Danish A-version, from the mid-sixteenth-century Jens Billes visebog (known to Grundtvig as 'Sten Bille’s Haandskrift'), he is saved by the advice of his sister who, previously enchanted, is one of the elf-maidens. The ballad usually ends with moralising advice to the listeners. The following table, by Lynda Taylor, charts
35-526: Is the second oldest major collection of Danish poetry, after the Heart Book . It was compiled in the second half of the 1550s. The manuscript is a small quarto in size (20×14½cm), paper, with 162 folios, all with the same watermark. The manuscript contains 87 poems written in around 17 different hands of which the most important are those of Jens Bille (1531–75), Sten Clausen Bille , and Anne Skave ; they are numbered in pencil by Svend Grundtvig . It
42-588: The B-version is fragmentary, with only four stanzas. Each one is very different from the others. A is the oldest Swedish version, collected in the 1670s from a farmer’s wife in Västergötland; C was collected in Östergötland in the 1840s. 16 The ballad can be seen as a 'happy ending' version of the much more famous Elveskud . The story is also similar to the ballads Herr Magnus och havsfrun , SMB 26, and Jungfrurnas gäst , SMB 30. H. C. Andersen wrote
49-507: The differences between the main versions. He obeys, offering to rescue her from the elves. She tells him that is impossible. the cockerel; otherwise he would have ended up in the mountain with the elves. DgF includes three main variants of ‘'Elvehøj'’, one of which survives in several near-identical copies. There are three versions in Sveriges medeltida ballader : two (A and C) are complete, with eight four-line stanzas each, while
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