Agnete og Havmanden

[1] The work has been characterized as a ballad laden with Christian values by literature professor Hans Brix [da] and others.

[9] During the Danish Romantic Period, the motif inspired Jens Baggesen's poem "Agnes fra Holmegaard" (1808) and Adam Oehlenschläger's "Agnete" (1812).

[10] Hans Christian Andersen worked the material into the play Agnete og Havmanden (1834) which was staged, accompanied the music of Niels Gade, but the show was a flop.

[12] The ballad was the basis for Matthew Arnold's 1849 poem "The Forsaken Merman",[13] although Arnold's heroine being named "Margaret" has led to the claim that the actual source might be the folklore account published by Just Mathias Thiele, where the woman enticed by the merman is named "Grethe".

[15] Although the merman in the ballad might be conceived of as half human and half fish,[16] or such beings that can also transform into the guise of a normal human male,[17] he was sung of in the ballad as a presumably handsome man with hair "like the purest gold (som det pureste Guld).

[21] A merman such that "his beard was greener than the salt sea ; his shape was pleasing" is described in Thiele's prose version, which Borrow has translated.