Ballad of Eric
Open-knowledge reference entry
The "Ballad of Eric" (Swedish: "Eriksvisan") is a ballad found in Latin and Swedish about the Gothic king, Eric. It was once seen as a source for Migration Period history but is now regarded as an inauthentic piece of fakelore created during the 16th century.
Contents
The ballad was published for the first time in Latin by Johannes Magnus in his Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sueonumque regibus (1554). While his reliability may be called into question, Johannes Magnus claims that the original was a song widely sung in Sweden at the time. The Latin text is composed of ten Sapphic stanzas. It tells the story of King Eric, whose career bears some similarities to a later king Berig whom Magnus claimed united the Swedes and Goths 400 years after Eric. Berig is also found in the Jordanes' 6th-century work Getica. According to the text, Eric, the first king of the Goths, sent troops southwards to a country named Vetala, where no one had yet cultivated the land. In their company, there was a wise man, a law speaker, who was to uphold the law. Finally, the Gothic king Humli sent his son Dan to rule the settlers, and after Dan, Vetala was named Denmark.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ballad of Eric” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.