Yet despite all these blemishes they are ballads as surely as _Sir Patrick Spens_ or _Ungen Sveidal_ are ballads. Nor is Professor Ker quite just to the ballads of the Faroes in saying[32] that because of their length, and "because they were made out of books, nothing but the lyrical form and the dancing custom kept them from turning into ordinary romances." Surely no material could be less promising than King Heithrek's Riddles; yet in virtue of what has been forgotten and what has been selected--the telescoping of the riddles and the elaboration of the setting--the ballad spirit has entered in and shaped from the unwieldy mass an artistic whole. Indeed whatever their faults one realises in all these ballads the truth of Sidgwick's epigram[33]: "You never know what a ballad will say next, though you _do_ know how it is going to say it!" For it is even less similarity of theme than similarity of form that links the ballads of the Faroes with those of Denmark and the North. The invariable accompaniment of the refrain; the fluctuation between assonance and rhyme, the disregard of alliteration, and the general verse form; the love of repetition and ballad formulae,--especially of repetition of whole phrases or verses with the alteration of merely the words that rhyme, or of repetition with inversion of word order; the balladist's love of colour, of the material and the concrete, of glitter and shine; the large element of dialogue; the abrupt dramatic openings; the condensation and concentration of narrative and the strict exclusion of the irrelevant or superfluous; the infallible feeling for a 'situation'; the atmosphere of the tragic or the critical; the "echo, without comment, of the clash of man and fate[34]." All these are the elements that make the ballad a form of literature distinct from other lyric or epic forms; all these are the elements that go to make the Faroese ballads what they are--part of what Ker calls the "Platonic Idea, a Ballad in itself, unchangeable and one, of which the phenomenal multitude of ballads are 'partakers[35].'" [Footnote 1: Cf. S. Grundtvig, _Meddelelse AngÂende FÊr¯ernes Litteratur og sprog_, in _Aarb¯ger for Nordisk Oldkyndighed_, published by the Royal Norse Early Text Society (Copenhagen), 1882, p. 358.] [Footnote 2: _FÊroa Reserata_ (Copenhagen, 1673), pp. 251 and 308 (tr. John Sterpin, London, 1676).] [Footnote 3: _Reliques_, Vol. I, _Epistle to the Countess of Northumberland_.] [Footnote 4: Cf. W. A. Craigie, _Evald Tang Kristensen, A Danish Folk-lorist_, in _Folklore_, Vol. IX, 1898, pp. 194-220.] [Footnote 5: Cf. C. J. Sharp, _English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians_ (London, 1917), p. xxii.] [Footnote 6: Axel Olrik, _Om Svend Grundtvigs og Jˆrgen Blochs F¯royjakvÊi og fÊr¯ske ordbog_, in _Arkiv fˆr Nordisk Filologi_ (Lund, 1890), p. 249.]