Grad R. P.?












THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAR BALLADS
EDITED BY
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
PART I.





THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAK BALLADS

















THE
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAK BALLADS
EDITED BY
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD

IN FIVE VOLUMES
VOLUME I
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
LONDON: HENRY STEVENS, SON AND STILES


On* (Jtbottfanft CopW printrt
JVb
COPYRIGHT, 1882, 1884, BY F. J. CHiLD
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY ELIZABETH sEDGWICK CHILD
ALL RIGHTs REsERVED


To
»
FREDERICK J. FURNIVALL, ESQ.
of london
My Dear Furnivall-.
Without the Percy MS. no one would pretend to make a collection of the
English Ballads, and but for you that manuscript would still, I think, be
beyond reach of man, yet exposed to destructive chances. Through your
exertions and personal sacrifices, directly, the famous and precious folio
has been printed; and, indirectly, in consequence of the same, it has been
transferred to a place where it is safe, and open to inspection. This is only
one of a hundred reasons which I have for asking you to accept the dedica-
tion of this book from
Your grateful friend and fellow-student,
F J. Child.
Cambridge, Mass., December i, 1882.





>W-^ ft ft X ,
44<<io3>
ADVERTISEMENT TO PART I
NUMBERS 1-28
It was my wish not to begin to print The English and Scottish Popular Ballads until
this unrestricted title should be justified by my having at command every valuable copy of
every known ballad. A continuous effort to accomplish this object has been making for some
nine or ten years, and many have joined in it. By correspondence, and by an extensive
diffusion of printed circulars, I have tried to stimulate collection from tradition in Scotland,
Canada, and the United States, and no becoming means has been left unemployed to obtain
possession of unsunned treasures locked up in writing. The gathering from tradition has
been, as ought perhaps to have been foreseen at this late day, meagre, and generally of
indifferent quality. Materials in the hands of former editors have, in some cases, been lost
beyond recovery, and very probably have lighted fires, like that large cantle of the Percy
manuscript, maxime deflendus! Access to several manuscript collections has not yet been
secured. But what is still lacking is believed to bear no great proportion to what is in hand,
and may soon come in, besides: meanwhile, the uncertainties of the world forbid a longer'
delay to publish so much as has been got together.
Of hitherto unused materials, much the most important is a large collection of ballads
made by Motherwell. For leave to take a copy of this I am deeply indebted to the present
possessor, Mr Malcolm Colquhoun Thomson, of Glasgow, who even allowed the manuscript
to be sent to London, and to be retained several months, for my accommodation. Mr J.
Wylie Guild, of Glasgow, also permitted the use of a note-book of Motherwell's which
supplements the great manuscript, and this my unwearied friend, Mr James Barclay
Murdoch, to whose solicitation I owe both, himself transcribed with the most scrupulous
accuracy. No other good office, asked or unasked, has Mr Murdoch spared.
Next in extent to the Motherwell collections come those of the late Mr Kinloch. These
he freely placed at my disposal, and Mr William Macmath, of Edinburgh, made during
Mr Kinloch's life an exquisite copy of the larger part of them, enriched with notes from
Mr Kinloch's papers, and sent it to me across the water. After Mr Kinloch's death his
collections were acquired by Harvard College Library, still through the agency of Mr
Macmath, who has from the beginning rendered a highly valued assistance, not less by his
suggestions and communications than by his zealous mediation.
No Scottish ballads are superior in kind to those recited in the last century by Mrs
Brown, of Falkland. Of these there are, or were, three sets. One formerly owned by
Robert Jamieson, the fullest of the three, was lent me, to keep as long as I required, by my
honored friend the late Mr David Laing, who also secured for me copies of several ballads
of Mrs Brown which are found in an Abbotsford manuscript, and gave me a transcript of
the Glenriddell manuscript. The two others were written down for William Tytler and


viii
ADVERTISEMENT TO PART I
Alexander Fraser Tytler respectively, the former of these consisting of a portion of the
Jamieson texts revised. These having for some time been lost sight of, Miss Mary Fraser
Tytler, with a graciousness which I have reason to believe hereditary in the name, made
search for them, recovered the one which had been obtained by Lord Woodhouselee, and
copied it for me with her own hand. The same lady furnished me with another collection
which had been made by a member of the family.
For later transcriptions from Scottish tradition I am indebted to Mr J. F. Campbell of
Islay, whose edition and rendering of the racy West Highland Tales is marked by the rarest
appreciation of the popular genius; to Mrs A. F. Murison, formerly of Old Deer, who
undertook a quest for ballads in her native place on my behalf; to Mr Alexander Laing, of
Newburgh-upon-Tay; to Mr James Gibb, of Joppa, who has given me a full score; to Mr
David Louden, of Morham, Haddington; to the late Dr John Hill Burton and Miss Ella
Burton; to Dr Thomas Davidson.
The late Mr Robert White, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, allowed me to look through
his collections in 1873, and subsequently made me a copy of such things as I needed,
and his ready kindness has been continued by Mrs Andrews, his sister, and by Miss
Andrews, his niece, who has taken a great deal of trouble on my account.
In the south of the mother-island my reliance has, of necessity, been chiefly upon
libraries. The British Museum possesses, besides early copies of some of the older ballads,
the Percy MS., Herd's MSS and Buchan's, and the Roxburgh broadsides. The library of
the University of Cambridge affords one or two things of first-rate importance, and for these
I am beholden to the accomplished librarian, Mr Henry Bradshaw, and to Professor Skeat.
I have also to thank the Rev. F. Gunton, Dean, and the other authorities of Magdalen
College, Cambridge, for permitting collations of Pepys ballads, most obligingly made for me
by Mr Arthur S. B. Miller. Many things were required from the Bodleian library, and
these were looked out for me, and scrupulously copied or collated, by Mr George Parker.
Texts of traditional ballads have been communicated to me in America by Mr W. W.
Newell, of New York, who is soon to give us an interesting collection of Children's Games
traditional in America; by Dr Huntington, Bishop of Central New York; Mr G. C. Mahon,
of Ann Arbor, Michigan; Miss Margaret Reburn, of New Albion, Iowa; Miss Perine, of
Baltimore; Mrs Augustus Lowell, Mrs L. F. Wesselhoeft, Mrs. Edward Atkinson, of Boston;
Mrs Cushing, of Cambridge; Miss Ellen Marston, of New Bedford; Mrs Moncrieff, of
London, Ontario.
Acknowledgments not well despatched in a phrase are due to many others who have
promoted my objects: to Mr Furnivall, for doing for me everything which I could have
done for myself had I lived in England; to that master of old songs and music, Mr William
Chappell, very specially; to Mr J. Payne Collier; Mr Norval Clyne, of Aberdeen; Mr
Alexander Young, of Glasgow; Mr Arthur Laurenson, of Lerwick, Shetland; Mr J. Burrell
Curtis, of Edinburgh; Dr Vigfusson, of Oxford; Professor Edward Arber, of Birmingham;
the Rev. J. Percival, Mr Francis Fry, Mr J. F. Nicholls, of Bristol; Professor George
Stephens, of Copenhagen; Mr R. Bergstrom, of the Royal Library, Stockholm; Mr W. R.
S. Ralston, Mr William Henry Husk, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, Mr A. F. Murison, of
London: Professor Sophocles; Mr W. G. Medlicott, of Longmeadow; to Mr M. Heilprin, of
New York, Mme de Maltchyce\ of Boston, and Rabbi Dr Cohn, for indispensable translations
from Polish and Hungarian; to Mr James Russell Lowell, Minister of the United States at
London; to Professor Charles Eliot Norton, for such "pains and benefits" as I could ask
only of a life-long friend.


ADVERTISEMENT TO PART I
ix
In the editing of these ballads I have closely followed the plan of Grundtvig's Old
Popular Ballads of Denmark, a work which will be prized highest by those who have used it
most, and which leaves nothing to be desired but its completion. The author is as much at
home in English as in Danish tradition, and whenever he takes up a ballad which is common
to both nations nothing remains to be done but to supply what has come to light since the
time of his writing. But besides the assistance which I have derived from his book, I have
enjoyed the advantage of Professor Grundtvig's criticism and advice, and have received from
him unprinted Danish texts, and other aid in many ways.
Such further explanations as to the plan and conduct of the work as may be desirable
can be more conveniently given by and by. I may say here that textual points which may
seem to be neglected will be considered in an intended Glossary, with which will be given a
full account of Sources, and such indexes of Titles and Matters as will make it easy to find
everything that the book may contain.
With renewed thanks to all helpers, and helpers' helpers, I would invoke the largest
cooperation for the correction of errors and the supplying of deficiencies. To forestall
a misunderstanding which has often occurred, I beg to say that every traditional version of a
popular ballad is desired, no matter how many texts of the same may have been printed
already.
F. J. Child.
[Decembeb, 1882.]


ADVERTISEMENT TO PART II
NUMBERS 29-53
I HAVE again to express my obligations and my gratitude to many who have aided in
the collecting and editing of these Ballads.
To Sir Hugh Hume Campbell, for the use of two considerable manuscript volumes of
Scottish Ballads.
To Mr Allardyce, of Edinburgh, for a copy of the Skene Ballads, and for a generous
permission to print such as I required, in advance of a possible publication on his part.
To Mr Mansfield, of Edinburgh, for the use of the Pitcairn manuscripts.
To Mrs Robertson, for the use of Note-Books of the late Dr Joseph Robertson, and to
Mr Murdoch, of Glasgow, Mr Lugton, of Kelso, Mrs Alexander Forbes, of Edinburgh, and
Messrs G. L. Kittredge and G. M. Richardson, former students of Harvard College, for
various communications.
To Dr Reinhold Kohler's unrivalled knowledge of popular fiction, and his equal
liberality, I am indebted for valuable notes, which will be found in the Additions at the end
of this volume.
The help of my friend Dr Theodor Vetter has enabled me to explore portions of the
Slavic ballad-field which otherwise must have been neglected.
Professors D. Silvan Evans, John Rhys, Paul Meyer, and T. Frederick Crane have lent
me a ready assistance in literary emergencies.
The interest and cooperation of Mr Furnivall and Mr Macmath have been continued to
me without stint or weariness.
It is impossible, while recalling and acknowledging acts of courtesy, good will, and
friendship, not to allude, with one word of deep personal grief, to the irreparable loss which
all who are concerned with the study of popular tradition have experienced in the death of
Svend Grundtvig.
F. J. C.
Jukb, 1884


CONTENTS
VOLUME I
una paqb
Biographical Sketch of Professor Child xvii
1. Riddles Wisely Expounded 1
(Additions and Corrections: I, 484; H, 495 j LU, 496; IV, 439; V, 205, 283.)
2. The Elfin Knight 6
(Additions and Corrections: I, 484; H, 495; HT, 496; IV, 439; V, 205, 284.)
3. The Fause Knight upon the Road 20
(Additions and Corrections: I, 485; H, 496; HI, 496; IV, 440.)
4. Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight . 22
(Additions and Corrections: I, 485; II, 496; III, 496; IV, 440; V, 206, 285.)
5. Gil Beenton 62
(Additions and Corrections: I, 489; II, 498; III, 497; IV, 442; V, 207, 285.)
6. Willie's Lady 81
(Additions and Corrections: II, 498; LU, 497; V, 207, 285.)
7. Eabl Brand 88
(Additions and Corrections: I, 489; H, 498; LU, 497; IV, 443; V, 207, 285.)
8. Erlinton * 106
(Additions and Corrections: LU, 498; IV, 445.)
9. The Fair Flower of Northumberland Ill
(Additions and Corrections: I, 493; II, 498; LU, 499; V, 207.)
10. The Twa Sisters 118
(Additions and Corrections: I, 493; H, 498; HI, 499; IV, 447; V, 208, 286.)
11. The Cruel Brother 141
(Additions and Corrections: I, 496; H, 498; LU, 499; IV, 449; V, 208, 286.)
12. Lord Randal 151
(Additions and Corrections: I, 498; H, 498; LU, 499; TV, 449; V, 208, 286.)
13. Edward 167
(Additions and Corrections: I, 501; n, 499; HI, 499; V, 209, 287.)
14. Babylon; or, The Bonnie Banks o Fordie 170
(Additions and Corrections: I, 170, 501; H, 499; LU, 499; IV, 450; V, 209, 287.)
15. Leesome Brand 177
(Additions and Corrections: I, 501; H, 499; LU, 500; IV, 450; V, 209, 287.)
16. Sheath and Kndje 185
(Additions and Corrections: H, 499; LU, 500; IV, 450; V, 210.)
17. Hind Horn 187
(Additions and Corrections: I, 502; H, 499; LU, 501; IV, 450; V, 210, 287.)
18. Sir Lionel 208
(Additions and Corrections: H, 500; IV, 451.)
19. King Orfeo 215
(Additions and Corrections: H, 500; LU, 502; IV, 451; V, 211.)
20. The Cruel Mother 218
(Additions and Corrections: I, 504; H, 500; LU, 502; TV, 451; V, 211, 287.)
*


XU CONTENTS
21. The Maid and the Palmer (The Samaritan Woman) 228
(Additions and Corrections: II, 501; III, 502; IV, 451; V, 212, 288.)
22. St. Stephen and Herod 233
(Additions and Corrections: I, 505; II, 501; In, 602; IV, 451; V, 212, 288.)
23. Judas 242
(Additions and Corrections: V, 288.)
24. Bonnie Annie 244
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 452.)
25. Willie's Lyke-Wake 247
(Additions and Corrections: I, 506; H, 502; Id, 503; IV, 453; V, 212, 289.)
26. The Three Ravens 253
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 454; V, 212.)
27. The Whummil Bore 255
(Additions and Corrections: V, 212.)
28. Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane 256
(Additions and Corrections: I, 507; III, 503.)
29. The Boy and the Mantle 257
(Additions and Corrections: I, 507; H, 502; LU, 503; IV, 454; V, 212, 289.)
30. King Arthur and King Cornwall 274
(Additions and Corrections: i, 507; II, 502; III, 503; V, 289.)
31. The Marriage of Sir Gawain 288
(Additions and Corrections: L 507; II, 502; IV, 454; V, 213, 289.)
32. King Henry 297
(Additions and Corrections: H, 502; IV, 454; V, 289.)
33. Kempy Kay 300
(Additions and Corrections: V, 213, 289.)
34. Kemp Owynb 306
(Additions and Corrections: II, 502; III, 504; IV, 454; V, 213, 290.)
35. Allison Gross 313
(Additions and Corrections: III, 504; V, 214.)
36. The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea 315
(Additions and Corrections: V, 214, 290.)
37. Thomas Rymer 317
(Additions and Corrections: II, 505; III, 504; IV, 454, 290.)
38. The Wee Wee Man 329
39. Tam Lin 335
(Additions and Corrections: I, 507; II, 505; m, 504; IV, 455; V, 215, 290.)
40. The Queen of Elfan's Nourice 358
(Additions and Corrections: II, 505; III, 505; IV, 459; V, 215, 290.)
41. Hind Etin 360
(Additions and Corrections: I, 508; H, 506; LU, 506; IV, 459; V, 215.)
42. Clerk Colvill 371
(Additions and Corrections: II, 506; HI, 506; IV, 459; V, 215, 290.)
43. The Broomfield Hill 390
(Additions and Corrections: I, 508; H, 506; IH, 506 ; IV, 459, 290.)
44. The Twa Magicians 399
(Additions and Corrections: II, 506; III, 506; IV, 459; V, 216, 290.)
45. King John and the Bishop 403
(Additions and Corrections: I, 508; H, 506; IV, 459; V, 216, 291.)


CONTENTS Xlli
46. Captain Wedderburn's Courtship 414
(Additions and Corrections: II, 507; III, 507; IV, 459; V, 216, 291.)
47. Proud Lady Margaret 425
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 460; V, 291.)
48. Young Andrew 432
49. The Twa Brothers 435
(Additions and Corrections: II, 507; III, 607; IV, 460 j V, 217, 291.)
50. The Bonny Hind 444
(Additions and Corrections: V, 218.)
51. Lizie Wan 447
52. The King's Dochter Lady Jean 450
53. Young Beichan 454
(Additions and Corrections: II, 508; TO, 507; IV, 460; V, 218, 291.)
Additions and Corrections 484
VOLUME II
54. The Cherry-Tree Carol 1
(Additions and Corrections: II, 509; V, 220.)
55. The Carnal and the Crane 7
(Additions and Corrections: II, 509; III, 507; IV. 462; V, 220.)
56. Dives and Lazarus 10
(Additions and Corrections: II, 510; III, 507; IV, 462; V, 220, 292.)
57. Brown Robyn's Confession 13
(Additions and Corrections: IT, 510; HI, 508; IV, 462; V, 220, 292.)
58. Sir Patrick Spens 17
(Additions and Corrections: H, 510; V, 220.)
59. Sir Aldingar 33
(Additions and Corrections: H, 510; LU, 508; IV, 463; V, 292.)
60. King Estmere 49
(Additions and Corrections: H, 510; HI, 508; IV, 463.)
61. Sir Cawline 56
(Additions and Corrections: II, 511; HL, 508; IV, 463.)
62. Fair Annie 63
(Additions and Corrections: H, 511; IV, 463; V, 220.)
63. Child Waters 83
(Additions and Corrections: II, 511; IH, 508; IV, 463; V, 220.)
64. Fair Janet 100
(Additions and Corrections: III, 508; IV, 464; V, 222, 292.)
65. Lady Maisry 112
(Additions and Corrections: IH, 508; IV, 466; V, 222, 292.)
66. Lord Ingram and Chiel Wyet 126
(Additions and Corrections: H, 511; HI, 508; V, 223, 292.)
67. Gla8gerion 136
(Additions and Corrections: H, 511; IH, 509; IV, 468; V, 293.)
68. Young Hunting 142
(Additions and Corrections: H, 512; IH, 509; IV, 468; V, 223.)
69. Clerk Saunders 156
(Additions and Corrections: H, 512; HI, 509; IV, 468; V, 223, 298.)
70. Willie and Lady Maisry 167


xiv CONTENTS
71. The Bent Sae Brown 170
(Additions and Corrections: m, 509; IV, 469; V, 223.)
72. The Clerk's Twa Sons o Owsenford 173
(Additions and Corrections: H, 512; III, 509; IV, 469; V, 293.)
73. Lord Thomas and Fair Annet 179
(Additions and Corrections: II, 512; HI, 509; IV, 469; V, 223, 293.)
74. Fair Margaret and Sweet William 199
(Additions and Corrections: V, 224, 293.)
75. Lord Lovel 204
(Additions and Corrections: II, 512; HI, 510; IV, 471; V, 225, 294.)
76. The Lass of Roch Royal 213
(Additions and Corrections: IH, 510; IV, 471; V, 225, 294.)
77. Sweet William's Ghost 226
(Additions and Corrections: II, 512; IV, 474; V, 225, 294.)
78. The Unquiet Grave 234
(Additions and Corrections: II, 512; LU, 512; IV, 474; V, 225, 294.)
79. The Wife of Usher's Well 238
(Additions and Corrections: III, 513; V, 294.)
80. Old Robin of Portingale 240
(Additions and Corrections: II, 513; III, 514; IV, 476; V, 225, 295.)
81. Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard 242
(Additions and Corrections: II, 513; IV, 476; V, 225.)
82. The Bonny Birdy 260
83. Child Maurice 263
(Additions and Corrections: LU, 514; IV, 478.)
84. Bonny Barbara Allan 276
(Additions and Corrections: III, 514.)
85. Lady Alice 279
(Additions and Corrections: LU, 514; V, 225.)
86. Young Benjie 281
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 478.)
87. Prince Robert 284
(Additions and Corrections: V, 295.)
88. Young Johnstone 288
89. Fause Foodrage 296
(Additions and Corrections: H, 513; LU, 515; IV, 479.)
90. Jellon Grame 302
(Additions and Corrections: H, 513; IH, 515; IV, 479; V, 226, 295.)
91. Fair Mary of Wallington 309
(Additions and Corrections: H, 513; LU, 515; TV, 479; V, 227.)
92. Bonny Bee Hom 317
(Additions and Corrections: V, 229.)
93. Lamkln 320
(Additions and Corrections: H, 513; LU, 615; IV, 480; V, 229, 295.)
94. Young Waters 342
(Additions and Corrections: HI, 516.)
95. The Maid Freed from the Gallows 346
(Additions and Corrections: H, 514; LU, 516; IV, 481; V, 231, 298.)
96. The Gay Goshawk 355
(Additions and Corrections: HI, 517 ; IV, 482; V, 234, 296.)


CONTENTS Xv
97. Brown Robin 368
98. Brown Adam 373
99. Johnik Scot 377
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 486; V, 234.)
100. Willie o Winsbury 398
(Additions and Corrections: H, 514 j IH, 517; IV, 491; V, 296.)
101. Willie o Douglas Dale 406
(Additions and Corrections: III, 517; V, 235.)
102. Willie and Earl Richabd's Daughter 412
(Additions and Corrections: III, 518.)
103. Rose the Red and White Lily 415
104. Prince Heathen 424
(Additions and Corrections: V, 296.)
105. The Bailiff's Daughter of Islington 426
(Additions and Corrections: III, 518; V, 237.)
106. The Famous Flower of Serving-Men 428
(Additions and Corrections: III, 518; IV, 492.)
107. Will Stewart and John 432
(Additions and Corrections: V, 237.)
108. Christopher White 439
109. Tom Potts 441
(Additions and Corrections: III, 518.)
110. The Knight and Shepherd's Daughter 457
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 492 ,, V, 237.)
111. Crow and Pie 478
112. The Baffled Knight 479
(Additions and Corrections: m, 518; IV, 495; V, 239, 296.)
113. The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry 494
(Additions and Corrections: III, 518; IV, 495.)
Additions and Corrections 495
VOLUME HI
114. Johnie Cock 1
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 495.)
115. ROBYN AND GaNDELEYN 12
116. Adam Bell, Cllm of the Clough, and William of Cloudesly .... 14
(Additions and Corrections: HI, 518; IV, 496; V, 297.)
117. A Gest of Robyn Hode 39
(Additions and Corrections: HT, 519; IV, 496; V, 240, 297.)
118. Robin Hood and Guy of Gisbobne 89
119. Robin Hood and the Monk 94
120. Robin Hood's Death 102
(Additions and Corrections: V, 240, 297.)
121. Robin Hood and the Potter 108
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 497.)
122. Robin Hood and the Butcher 115
123. Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar 120
(Additions and Corrections: V, 297-)


xvi CONTENTS
124. The Jolly Ptnder of Wakefield 129
125. Robin Hood and Little John 133
(Additions and Corrections: V, 297.)
126. Robin Hood and the Tanner 137
127. Robin Hood and the Tinker 140
128. Robin Hood newly Revived 144
129. Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon 147
130. Robin Hood and the Scotchman 150
131. Robin Hood and the Ranger 152
132. The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood 154
(Additions and Corrections: V, 240.)
133. Robin Hood and the Beggar, I 155
134. Robin Hood and the Beggar, II 158
135. Robin Hood and the Shepherd 165
136. Robin Hood's Delight 168
137. Robin Hood and the Pedlars 170
138. Robin Hood and Allen a Dale 172
139. Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham 175
140. Robin Hood rescuing Three Squires 177
141. Robin Hood rescuing Will Stutly 185
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 497.)
142. Little John a Begging 188
143. Robin Hood and the Bishop 191
144. Robin Hood and the Bishop of Hereford 193
145. Robin Hood and Queen Katherine 196
146. Robin Hood's Chase 205
147. Robin Hood's Golden Prize 208
(Additions and Corrections: III, 519.)
148. The Noble Fisherman, or, Robin Hood's Preferment 211
149. Robin Hood's Birth, Breeding, Valor and Marriage 214
150. Robin Hood and Maid Marian 218
(Additions and Corrections: III, 519.)
151. The King's Disguise, and Friendship with Robin Hood 220
152. Robin Hood and the Golden Arrow 223
(Additions and Corrections: V, 241.)
153. Robin Hood and the Valiant Knight 225
154. A True Tale of Robin Hood 227
155. Sir Hugh, or, The Jew's Daughter 233
(Additions and Corrections: III, 519 ; IV, 497; V, 241, 297.)
156. Queen Eleanor's Confession 257
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 498; V, 241, 297.)
157. Gude Wallace 265
(Additions and Corrections: V, 242.)
158. Hugh Spencer's Feats in France 275
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 499; V, 243.)
159. Durham Field 282
(Additions and Corrections: V, 297.)


CONTENTS xvii
160. The Knight of Liddesdalk 288
161. The Battle of Otterburn 289
(Additions and Corrections: III, 520; IV, 499; V, 243, 297.)
162. The Hunting of the Cheviot 303
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 502; V, 244, 297.)
163. The Battle of Harlaw 316
(Additions and Corrections: V, 245.)
164. King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France 320
(Additions and Corrections: V, 245.)
165. Sir John Butler 327
166. The Rose of England 331
167. Sir Andrew Barton 334
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 502; V, 245.)
168. Flodden Field 361
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 507; V, 298.)
169. Johnie Armstrong 362
(Additions and Corrections: HI, 520; IV, 507 j V, 298.)
170. The Death of Queen Jane 372
(Additions and Corrections: V, 245, 298.)
171. Thomas Cromwell 377
172. Musselburgh Field . . 378
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 507.)
173. Mary Hamilton 379
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 507; V, 246, 298.)
174. Earl Bothwell 399
(Additions and Corrections: V, 247.)
175. The Rising in the North 401
176. Northumberland betrayed by Douglas 408
(Additions and Corrections: V, 299.)
177. The Earl of Westmoreland 416
(Additions and Corrections: V, 299.)
178. Captain Car, or, Edom o Gordon 423
(Additions and Corrections: III, 520; IV, 513; V, 247, 299.)
179. Rookhope Ryde 439
180. King James and Brown 442
181. The Bonny Earl of Murray 447
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 515.)
182. The Laird o Logie 449
(Additions and Corrections: m, 320; IV, 515; V, 299.)
183. WiLLrE Macintosh 456
(Additions and Corrections: TV, 516.)
184. The Lads of Wamphray 458
(Additions and Corrections: III, 520.)
185. Dick o the Cow 461
186. Kinmont Willie 469
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 516.)
187. Jock o the Side 475
188. Archie o Cawfield 484
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 516.)
Additions and Corrections 496
vOL. l o


xviii
CONTENTS
VOLUME IV
189. Hobie Noble 1
190. Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead 4
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 518; V, 249, 300.)
191. Hughie Gkame 8
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 518; V, 300.)
192. The Lochmaben Hakper 16
(Additions and Corrections: V, 300.)
193. The Death of Parcy Reed 24
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 520.)
194. The Laird of Wariston 28
195. Lord Maxwell's Last Goodnight 34
(Additions and Corrections: V, 251.)
196. The Fire of Frendraught 39
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 521; V, 251, 301.)
197. James Grant 49
(Additions and Corrections: V, 251.)
198. Bonny John Seton 51
(Additions and Corrections: V, 251.)
199. The Bonnie House o Airlie 54
(Additions and Corrections: V, 252.)
200. The Gypsy Laddie 61
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 522; V, 252, 301.)
201. Bessy Bell and Mary Gray 75
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 522; V, 253.)
202. The Battle of Philiphaugh 77
203. The Baron of Brackley 79
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 522; V, 253.)
204. Jamie Douglas 90
205. Loudon Hill, or, Drumclog 105
206. Bothwell Bridge 108
207. Lord Delamere 110
208. Lord Derwentwater 115
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 622; V, 254.)
209. Geordie 123
210. Bonnie James Campbell 142
211. Bewick and Graham . . . . . . 144
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 522.)
212. The Duke of Athole's Nurse 150
213. Sir James the Rose 155
214. The Braes o Yarrow 160
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 522; V, 255.)
215. Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow, or, The Water o Gamrie .... 178
(Additions and Corrections: V, 256.)
216. The Mother's Malison, or, Clyde's Water 185
(Additions and Corrections: V, 256, 301.)
217. The Broom of Cowdenknows 191
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 523; V, 257.)
218. The False Lover won back 209


CONTENTS xix
219. The Gabdeneb 212
(Additions and Corrections: V, 258.)
220. The Bonny Lass of Anglesey 214
221. Kathabine Jaffray 216
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 523; V, 260.)
222. Bonny Baby Livingston 231
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 523; V, 261.)
223. Eppie Mokbie 239
(Additions and Corrections: V, 262.)
224. The Lady of Abngosk 241
225. Rob Roy 243
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 523; V, 262.)
226. Lizie Lindsay 255
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 524; V, 264.)
227. Bonny Lizie Baillee 266
(Additions and Corrections: V, 265.)
228. Glasgow Peggie 270
(Additions and Corrections: V, 266.)
229. Earl Crawford 276
(Additions and Corrections: V, 301.)
230. The Slaughter of the Laird of Mellerstain 281
231. The Earl of Errol 282
(Additions and Corrections: V, 267.)
232. Richie Story 291
(Additions and Corrections: V, 270.)
233. Andrew Lammie 300
234. Charlie MacPhebson 308
(Additions and Corrections: V, 301.)
235. The Eabl of Aboyne 311
(Additions and Corrections: V, 270, 301.)
236. The Laird o Drum 322
(Additions and Corrections: V, 272.)
237. The Duke of Gordon's Daughter 332
(Additions and Corrections: V, 273.)
238. Glenlogie, or, Jean o Bethelnte 338
(Additions and Corrections: V, 273, 302.)
239. Lord Saltoun and Auchanachce 347
(Additions and Corrections: V, 273.)
240. The Rantin Laddie 351
(Additions and Corrections : V, 274.)
241. The Baron o Leys 355
(Additions and Corrections: V, 275.)
242. The Coble o Cabgill 358
243. James Habris (The D^imon Loveb) 360
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 524.)
244. James Hatley 370
245. Young Allan 375
(Additions and Corrections: V, 275.)
246. Redesdale and Wise William 383
(Additions and Corrections: V, 276.)


XX CONTENTS
247. Lady Elspat 387
248. The Grey Cock, ok, Saw you my Father? 389
(Additions and Corrections: V, 302.)
249. Auld Matrons 391
250. Henry Martyn 393
(Additions and Corrections: V, 302.)
251. Lang Johnny More 396
(Additions and Corrections: IV, 524.)
252. The Kitchie-Boy 400
(Additions and Corrections: V, 277.)
253. Thomas o Yonderdale 409
254. Lord William, or, Lord Lundy 411
255. Willie's Fatal Visit 415
256. Alison and Willie 416
257. Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick 417
(Additions and Corrections: V, 278.)
258. Brought? Wa's 423
259. Lord Thomas Stuart 425
(Additions and Corrections: V, 279.)
260. Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret 426
261. Lady Isabel 429
262. Lord Livingston 431
263. The New-Slain Knight 434
(Additions and Corrections: V, 279.)
264. The White Fisher .... 435
265. The Knight's Ghost 437
Additions and Corrections 439
VOLUME V
266. John Thomson and the Turk 1
(Additions and Corrections: V, 279.)
267. The Heir of Linne 11
268. The Twa Knights 21
269. Lady Diamond 29
(Additions and Corrections: V, 303.)
270. The Earl of Mar's Daughter 38
271. The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward 42
(Additions and Corrections: V, 280.)
272. The Suffolk MntACLE 58
(Additions and Corrections: V, 303.)
273. King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth 67
(Additions and Corrections: V, 303.)
274. Our Goodman 88
(Additions and Corrections: V, 281, 303.)
275. Get up and bar the Door 96
(Additions and Corrections: V, 281, 304.)
276. The Friar in the Well 100


CONTENTS Xxi
277. The Wife Wrapt in Wether's Skin 104
(Additions and Corrections: V, 304.)
278. The Farmer's Curst Wife 107
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
279. The Jolly Beggar 109
280. The Beggar-Laddie 116
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
281. The Keach i the Creel 121
282. Jock the Leg and the Merry Merchant 126
283. The Crafty Farmer 128
284. John Dory 131
285. The George Aloe and the Sweepstake 133
286. The Sweet Trinity (The Golden Vanity) 135
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
287. Captain Ward and the Rainbow 143
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
288. The Young Earl of Essex's Victory oyer the Emperor of Germany . . . 145
289. The Mermaid 148
290. The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie 153
291. Child Owlet 156
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
292. The West-Country Damosel's Complaint 157
293. John of Hazelgreen 159
294. Dugall Quin 165
(Additions and Corrections: V, 305.)
295. The Brown Girl 166
296. Walter Lesly 168
297. Earl Rothes 170
298. Young Peggy 171
299. Trooper and Maid 172
(Additions and Corrections: V, 306.)
300. Blancheflour and Jellyflorice 175
301. The Queen of Scotland • 176
302. Young Bearwell 178
303. The Holy Nunnery 179
304. Young Ronald 181
305. The Outlaw Murray 185
(Additions and Corrections: V, 307.)
Fragments 201
(Additions and Corrections: V, 307.)
Additions and Corrections 205,283
Glossary 809
Sources of the Texts 897
Index of Published Airs 405
Ballad Airs from Manuscript:
3. The Fause Knight upon the Road 411
9. The Fair Flower of Northumberland 411
10. The Twa Sisters 411


xxii
CONTENTS
11. The Cruel Brother 412
12. Lord Randal 412
17. Hind Horn 413
20. The Cruel Mother 413
40. The Queen of Elian's Nourice 413
42. Clerk Colvill 414
46. Captain Wedderburn's Courtship 414
47. Proud Lady Margaret 414
63. Young Beichan 415
58. Sir Patrick Spens 415
61. Sir Colin 415
63. Child Waters 415
68. Young Hunting 416
75. LordLovel 416
77. Sweet William's Ghost 416
84. Bonny Barbara Allan 416
89. Fause Foodrage 416
95. The Maid freed from the Gallows 417
97. Brown Robin 417
98. Brown Adam 417
99. Johnie Scot 418
100. Willie o Winsbury 418
106. The Famous Flower of Serving-Men 418
144. Johnie Cock 419
157. Gude Wallace 419
161. The Battle of Otterburn 419
163. The Battle of Harlaw 419
164. King Henry Fifth's Conquest of France 420
169. Johnie Armstrong 420
173. Mary Hamilton 421
182. The Laird o Logie 421
222. Bonny Baby Livingston 421
226. Lizie Lindsay 421
228. Glasgow Peggie 422
235. The Earl of Aboyne 422
247. LadyElspat 422
250. Andrew Bartin 423
256. Alison and Willie 423
258. Broughty Wa's 423
278. The Farmer's Curst Wife 423
281. The Keach i the Creel . . 424
286. The Sweet Trinity 424
299. Trooper and Maid 424
Index of Ballad Titles 42^
Titles of Collections of Ballads, ob Books containing Ballads, which abe vert bbiefly
cited in this wobk
ACQ
Index of Mattebs and Litebatube
BlBLiOGEAPHY'
COBBECTIONS TO BE MADE iN THE PbiNT • ^7


I
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
Fkancis James ChIld was born in Boston
on the first day of February, 1825. He was
the third in a family of eight children. His
father was a sailmaker, "one of that class of
intelligent and independent mechanics," writes
Professor Norton, "which has had a large
share in determining the character of our
democratic community, as of old the same
class had in Athens and in Florence." The
boy attended the public schools, as a matter of
course; and, his parents having no thought of
sending him to college, he went, in due time,
not to the Latin School, but to the English
High School of his native town. At that
time the head master of the Boston Latin
School was Mr Epes Sargent Dixwell, who is
still living, at a ripe old age, one of the most
respected citizens of Cambridge. Mr Dix-
well had a keen eye for scholarly possibilities
in boys, and, falling in with young Francis
Child, was immediately struck with his ex-
traordinary mental ability. At his sugges-
tion, the boy was transferred to the Latin
School, where he entered upon the regular
preparation for admission to Harvard Col-
lege. His delight in his new studies was un-
bounded, and the freshness of it never faded
from his memory. "He speedily caught up
with the boys who had already made consid-
erable progress in Greek and Latin, and soon
took the first place here, as he had done in
the schools which he had previously attended."
Mr Dixwell strongly advised his father to
permit him to continue his studies, and made
arrangements by which his college expenses
should be provided for. The money Profes-
sor Child repaid, with interest, as soon as his
means allowed. His gratitude to Mr. Dix-
well and the friendship between them lasted
through his life.
In 1842 Mr Child entered Harvard College.
The intellectual condition of the college at
that time and the undergraduate career of
Mr Child have been admirably described by
his classmate and lifelong friend, Professor
Norton, in a passage which must be quoted
in full1: —
"Harvard was then still a comparatively
small institution, with no claims to the title
of University; but she had her traditions of
good learning as an inspiration for the studious
youth, and still better she had teachers who
were examples of devotion to intellectual pur-
suits, and who cared for those ends the at-
tainment of which makes life worth living.
Josiah Quincy was approaching the close of
his term of service as President of the Col-
lege, and stood before the eyes of the students
as the type of a great public servant, embody-
ing the spirit of patriotism, of integrity, and
of fidelity in the discharge of whatever duty
he might be called to perform. Among the
Professors were Walker, Felton, Peirce, Chan-
ning, Beck, and Longfellow, men of utmost
variety of temperament, but each an instructor
who secured the respect no less than the grati-
tude of his pupils.
"The class to which Child belonged num-
bered hardly over sixty. The prescribed
course of study which was then the rule
brought all the members of the class together
in recitations and lectures, and every man
soon knew the relative standing of each of his
fellows. Child at once took the lead and kept
it. His excellence was not confined to any
1 C. E. Norton,'Francis James Child,' in the Proceedings
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, XXXII,
334, 335; reprinted, with some additions, in the Harvard
Graduates'Magazine, VI, 161-169 (Boston, 1897). I have
used this biographical sketch freely in my brief account of
Professor Child's boyhood.
*


FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
one special branch of study; he was equally
superior in all. He was the best in the clas-
sics, he was Peirce's favorite in mathematics,
he wrote better English than any of his class-
mates. His intellectual interests were wider
than theirs, he was a great reader, and his
tastes in reading were mature. He read for
amusement as well as for learning, but he did
not waste his time or dissipate his mental
energies over worthless or pernicious books.
He made good use of the social no less than
of the intellectual opportunities which college
life affords, and became as great a favorite
with his classmates as he had been with his
schoolfellows.
"The close of his college course was marked
by the exceptional distinction of his being
chosen by his classmates as their Orator, and
by his having the first part at Commencement
as the highest scholar in the class. His class
oration was remarkable for its maturity of
thought and of style. Its manliness of spirit,
its simple directness of presentation of the
true objects of life, and of the motives by
which the educated man, whatever might be
his chosen career, should be inspired, together
with the serious and eloquent earnestness with
which it was delivered, gave to his discourse
peculiar impressiveness and effect."
Graduating with the degree of Bachelor of
Arts in 1846, Mr Child immediately entered
the service of the college, in which he con-
tinued till the day of his death. From 1846
to 1848 he was tutor in mathematics. In
1848 he was transferred, at his own request,
to a tutorship in history and political eco-
nomy, to which were annexed certain duties
of instruction in English. In 1849 he ob-
tained leave of absence for travel and study
in Europe. He remained in Europe for about
two years, returning, late in 1851, to receive
an appointment to the Boylston Professorship
of Rhetoric and Oratory, then falling vacant
by the resignation of Professor Edward T.
Channing.
The tutorships which Mr Child had held
were not entirely in accordance with his
tastes, which had always led him in the direc-
tion of literary and linguistic study. The
faculty of the college was small, however,
and it was not always possible to assign an
instructor to the department that would have
been most to his mind. But the governors
of the institution were glad to secure the
services of so promising a scholar; and Mr
Child, whose preference for an academic ca-
reer was decided, had felt that it was wise
to accept such positions as the college could
offer, leaving exacter adjustments to time and
circumstances. Meantime he had devoted his
whole leisure to the pursuit of his favorite
studies. His first fruits were a volume en-
titled Four Old Plays,1 published in 1848,
when he was but twenty-three years old.
This was a remarkably competent perform-
ance. The texts are edited with judgment
and accuracy; the introduction shows literary
discrimination as well as sound scholarship,
and the glossary and brief notes are thor-
oughly good. There are no signs of imma-
turity in the book, and it is still valued by
students of our early drama.
The leave of absence granted to Mr Child
in 1849 came at a most favorable moment.
His health had suffered from close application
to work, and a change of climate had been
advised by his physicians. His intellectual
and scholarly development, too, had reached
that stage in which foreign study and travel
were certain to be most stimulating and fruit-
ful. He was amazingly apt, and two years
of opportunity meant much more to him than
to most men. He returned to take up the
duties of his new office a trained and mature
scholar, at home in the best methods and tra-
ditions of German universities, yet with no
sacrifice of his individuality and intellectual
independence.
While in Germany Mr Child studied at
Berlin and Gottingen, giving his time mostly
1 Four Old Plays | Three Interludes: Thersytes Jack
Jugler | and Heywoods Pardoner and Frere: | and Jocasta a
Tragedy | by Gascoigne and | Kinwelmarsh | with an |
Introduction and Notes | Cambridge | George Nichols |
MDCCCXLVIII. The editor's name does not appear in
the title-page, but the Preface is signed with the initials
F. J. C. Jocasta was printed from Steeyens's copy of the
first edition of Gascoigne's Posies, which had come into Mr
Child's possession.


FRANCIS JAMES CHILI*
XXV
to Germanic philology, then cultivated with
extraordinary vigor and success. The hour
was singularly propitious. In the three or
four decades preceding Mr Child's residence
in Europe, Germanic philology (in the wider
sense) had passed from the stage of "ro-
mantic" dilettantism into the condition of a
well-organized and strenuous scientific disci-
pline, but the freshness and vivacity of the
first half of the century had not vanished.
Scholars, however severe, looked through the
form and strove to comprehend the spirit.
The ideals of erudition and of a large hu-
manity were not even suspected of incompati-
bility. The imagination was still invoked as
the guide and illuminator of learning. The
bond between antiquity and medievalism and
between the Middle Ages and our own century
was never lost from sight. It was certainly
fortunate for American scholarship that at
precisely this juncture a young man of Mr
Child's ardent love of learning, strong individ-
uality, and broad intellectual sympathies was
brought into close contact with all that was
most quickening in German university life.
He attended lectures on classical antiquity
and philosophy, as well as on Germanic phi-
lology; but it was not so much by direct in-
struction that he profited as by the inspiration
which he derived from the spirit and the ideals
of foreign scholars, young and old. His own
greatest contribution to learning, The Eng-
lish and Scottish Popular Ballads, may even,
in a very real sense, be regarded as the fruit
of these years in Germany. Throughout his
life he kept a picture of William and James
Grimm on the mantel over his study fire-
place.
Mr Child wrote no "dissertation," and
returned to Cambridge without having at-
tempted to secure a doctor's degree. Never
eager for such distinctions, he had been un-
willing to subject himself to the restrictions
on his plan of study which candidacy for the
doctorate would have imposed. Three years
after, however, in 1854, he was surprised and
gratified to receive from the University of
Gottingen the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
accompanied by a special tribute of respect
VOL. L D
from that institution. Subsequently he re-
ceived the degree of LL. D. from Harvard (in
1884) and that of L. H. D. from Columbia
(in 1887) ; but the Gottingen Ph. D., coming
as it did at the outset of his career, was in a
high degree auspicious.
The Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and
Oratory, to which, as has been already men-
tioned, Mr Child succeeded on his return to
America toward the end of 1851, was no sine-
cure. In addition to academic instruction of
the ordinary kind, the duties of the chair in-
cluded the superintendence and criticism of a
great quantity of written work, in the nature
of essays and set compositions prepared by
students of all degrees of ability. For twenty-
five years Mr Child performed these duties
with characteristic punctuality and devotion,
though with increasing distaste for the
drudgery which they involved. Meantime a
great change had come over Harvard: it had
developed from a provincial college into a
national seminary of learning, and the intro-
duction of the "elective system " — corre-
sponding to the " Lernfreiheit" of Germany
— had enabled it to become a university in
the proper sense of the word. One result
of the important reform just referred to was
the establishment of a Professorship of Eng-
lish, entirely distinct from the old chair of
Rhetoric. This took place on May 8, 1876,
and on the 20th of the next month Mr Child
was transferred to the new professorship. His
duties as an instructor were now thoroughly
congenial, and he continued to perform them
with unabated vigor to the end. In the oner-
ous details of administrative and advisory
work, inseparable, according to our exacting
American system, from the position of a uni-
versity professor, he was equally faithful and
untiring. For thirty years he acted as secre-
tary of the Library Council, and in all that
time he was absent from but three meetings.
As chairman of the Department of English
and of the Division of Modern Languages, and
as a member of many important committees,
he was ever prodigal of time and effort. How
steadily he attended to the regular duties of
the class-room, his pupils, for fifty years, are


FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
the best witnesses. They, too, will best un-
derstand the satisfaction he felt, that, in the
fiftieth year of his teaching, he was not ab-
sent from a single lecture. No man was ever
less a formalist; yet the most formal of na-
tures could not, in the strictest observance of
punctilio, have surpassed the regularity with
which he discharged, as it were spontaneously,
the multifarious duties of his position.
Throughout his service as professor of rhe-
toric, Mr Child, hampered though he was by
the requirements of his laborious office, had
pursued with unquenchable ardor the study of
the English language and literature, particu-
larly in their older forms, and in these sub-
jects he had become an authority of the first
rank long before the establishment of the
English chair enabled him to arrange his uni-
versity teaching in accordance with his tastes.
Soon after he returned from Germany he un-
dertook the general editorial supervision of
a series of the « British Poets,' published at
Boston in 1853 and several following years,
and extending to some hundred and fifty vol-
umes. Out of this grew, in one way or an-
other, his three most important contributions
to learning: his edition of Spenser, his Ob-
servations on the Language of Chaucer and
Gower, and his English and Scottish Popular
Ballads.
Mr Child's Spenser appeared in 1855.1
Originally intended, as he says in the pre-
face, as little more than a reprint of the
edition published in 1839 under the superin-
tendence of Mr George Hillard, the book grew
upon his hands until it had become something
quite different from its predecessor. Securing
access to old copies of most of Spenser's poems,
Mr Child subjected the text to a careful re-
vision, which left little to be done in this
regard. His Life of Spenser was far better
than any previous biography, and his notes,
though brief, were marked by a philological
exactness to which former editions could not
pretend. Altogether, though meant for the
1 The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. The text
carefully revised, and illustrated with notes, original and
selected, by Francis J. Child. Boston: Little, Brown, and
Company. 1855. 5 vols.
general reader and therefore sparingly an-
notated, Mr Child's volumes remain, after
forty years, the best edition of Spenser in
existence.
The plan of the 'British Poets' originally
contemplated an edition of Chaucer, which
Mr Child was to prepare. Becoming con-
vinced, however, that the time was not ripe
for such a work, he abandoned this project,
and to the end of his life he never found
time to resume it. Thomas Wright's print
of the Canterbury Tales from the Harleian
MS. 7334 had, however, put into his hands
a reasonably faithful reproduction of an
old text, and he turned his attention to a
minute study of Chaucer's language. The
outcome was the publication, in the Me-
moirs of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences for 1863, of the great treatise to
which Mr Child gave the modest title of
Observations on the Language of Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales. It is difficult, at the pre-
sent day, to imagine the state of Chaucer
philology at the moment when this paper ap-
peared. Scarcely anything, we may say, was
known of Chaucer's grammar and metre in a
sure and scientific way. Indeed, the difficul-
ties to be solved had not even been clearly
formulated. Further, the accessible mass of
evidence on Anglo-Saxon and Middle English
was, in comparison with the stores now at
the easy command of every tyro, almost in-
significant. Yet, in this brief treatise, Mr
Child not only defined the problems, but
provided for most of them a solution which
the researches of younger scholars have only
served to substantiate. He also gave a
perfect model of the method proper to such
inquiries — a method simple, laborious, and
exact. The Observations were subsequently
rearranged and condensed, with Professor
Child's permission, by Mr A. J. Ellis for his
work On Early English Pronunciation; but
only those who have studied them in their
original form can appreciate their merit fully.
"It ought never to be forgotten," writes Pro-
2 The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer. A new
text, with illustrative notes. Edited by Thomas Wright.
London, printed for the Percy Society, 1847-51. 3 vols.


FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
xxvii
feasor Skeat, "that the only full and almost
complete solution of the question of the right
scansion of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is due
to what Mr Ellis rightly terms 'the wonder-
ful industry, acuteness, and accuracy of Pro-
fessor Child.'" Had he produced nothing
else, this work, with its pendant, the Observa-
tions on Gower,1 would have assured him a
high place among those very few scholars who
have permanently settled important problems
of linguistic science.
Mr Child's crowning work, however, was
the edition of the English and Scottish Popu-
lar Ballads, which the reader now has before
him. The history of this is the history of
more than half a lifetime.
The idea of the present work grew out of
Mr Child's editorial labors on the series of
the 'British Poets,' already referred to. For
this he prepared a collection in eight small
volumes (1857-58) called English and Scot-
tish Ballads.2 This was marked by the be-
ginnings of that method of comparative study
which is carried out to its ultimate issues in
the volumes of the present collection. The
book circulated widely, and was at once ad-
mitted to supersede all previous attempts in
the same field. To Mr Child, however, it was
but the starting-point for further researches.
He soon formed the plan of a much more ex-
tensive collection on an altogether different
model. This was to include every obtainable
version of every extant English or Scottish
ballad, with the fullest possible discussion of
related songs or stories in the "popular" lit-
erature of all nations. To this enterprise he
resolved, if need were, to devote the rest of
1 The paper entitled Observations on the Language of
Chancer was laid before the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences on Jnne 3,1862, and was published in the Memoirs
of the Academy, Vol. VIII, pt. ii, 445-502 (Boston, 1863).
The second paper, entitled Observations on the Language
of Gower*8 Confessio Amantis, was laid before the Acad-
emy on January 9, 1866, and appeared in Memoirs, IX, ii,
265-315 (Boston, 1873). A few copies of each paper were
struck off separately, but these are now very hard to find.
Mr Ellis's rearrangement and amalgamation of the two
papers, which is by no means a good substitute for the
papers themselves, may be found in Part I of his Early
English Pronunciation, London, 1869, pp. 343-97.
1 English and Scottish Ballads. Selected and edited by
Francis James Child. Boston, 1857-58.
his life. His first care was to secure trust-
worthy texts. In his earlier collection he
had been forced to depend almost entirely on
printed books. No progress, he was con-
vinced, could be made till recourse could be
had to manuscripts, and in particular to the
Percy MS. Accordingly he directed his most
earnest efforts to securing the publication of
the entire contents of the famous folio. The
Percy MS. was at Ecton Hall, in the posses-
sion of the Bishop's descendants, who would
permit no one even to examine it. Two at-
tempts were made by Dr Furnivall, at Mr
Child's instance, to induce the owners to al-
low the manuscript to be printed,—one as
early as 1860 or 1861, the other in 1864, —
but without avail. A third attempt was
more successful, and in 1867-68 the long-
secluded folio was made the common property
of scholars in an edition prepared by Profes-
sor Hales and Dr Furnivall.3
The publication of the Percy MS. not only
put a large amount of trustworthy material
at the disposal of Mr Child; it exposed the
full enormity of Bishop Percy's sins against
popular tradition. Some shadow of suspicion
inevitably fell on all other ballad collections.
It was more than ever clear to Mr Child that
he could not safely take anything at second
hand, and he determined not to print a line of
his projected work till he had exhausted every
effort to get hold of whatever manuscript
material might be in existence. His efforts
in this direction continued through many
years. A number of manuscripts were in
private hands; of some the whereabouts was
not known; of others the existence was not
suspected. But Mr Child was untiring. He
was cordially assisted by various scholars, an-
tiquaries, and private gentlemen, to whose
cooperation ample testimony is borne in the
Advertisements prefixed to the volumes in the
present work. Some manuscripts were secured
* How inseparable were the services of Dr Furnivall and
those of Professor Child in securing this devoutly wished
consummation may be seen by comparing Dr Furnivall's
Forewords (I, ix, x), in which he gives much of the credit
to Mr Child, with Mr Child's Dedication (in vol. I of the
present collection), in which he gives the credit to Dr Fur-
nivall.


xxviii
FRANCIS JAMBS CHILD
for the Library of Harvard University — no-
tably Bishop Percy's Papers, the Kinloch
MSS, and the Harris MS.,1 — and of others
careful copies were made, which became the
property of the same library. In all these
operations the indispensable good offices of
Mr William Macmath, of Edinburgh, deserve
particular mention. For a long series of years
his services were always at Mr Child's dis-
posal. His self-sacrifice and generosity appear
to have been equalled only by his persever-
ance and wonderful accuracy. But for him
the manuscript basis of The English and
Scottish Popular Ballads would have been
far less strong than it is.
Gradually, then, the manuscript materials
came in, until at last, in 1882, Mr Child felt
justified in beginning to print. Other impor-
tant documents were, however, discovered or
made accessible as time went on. Especially
noteworthy was the great find at Abbotsford
(see the Advertisement to Part VIII). In
1877 Dr David Laing procured, "not without
difficulty," leave to prepare for Mr Child a
copy of the single manuscript of ballads then
known to remain in the library at Abbotsford.
This MS., entitled "Scottish Songs," was so
inconsiderable, in proportion to the accumu-
lations which Sir Walter Scott had made in
preparing his Border Minstrelsy, that further
search seemed to be imperatively necessary.
In 1890 permission to make such a search, and
to use the results, was given by the Honorable
Mrs Maxwell-Scott. The investigation, made
by Mr Macmath, yielded a rich harvest of
ballads, which were utilized in Parts VII-IX.
To dwell upon the details would be endless.
The reader may see a list of the manuscript
sources at pp. 397 ff. of the fifth volume; and,
if he will observe how scattered they were, he
will have no difficulty in believing that it re-
quired years, labor, and much delicate nego-
tiation to bring them all together. One
manuscript remained undiscoverable, Wil-
liam Tytler's Brown MS., but there is no
1 Since Mr Child's death the important "Buchan original
MS" has been secured for the Child Memorial Library of
the University, — a collection endowed by friends and pupils
of the dead master.
reason to believe that this contained anything
of consequence that is not otherwise known.2
Meanwhile, concurrently with the toil of
amassing, collating, and arranging texts,
went on the far more arduous labor of com-
parative study of the ballads of all nations;
for, in accordance with Mr Child's plan it was
requisite to determine, in the fullest manner,
the history and foreign relations of every
piece included in his collection. To this end
he devoted much time and unwearied dili-
gence to forming, in the Library of the Uni-
versity, a special collection of "Folk-lore," par-
ticularly of ballads, romances, and Marchen.
This priceless collection, the formation of
which must be looked on as one of Mr
Child's most striking services to the univer-
sity, numbers some 7000 volumes. But these
figures by no means represent the richness of
the Library in the departments concerned, or
the services of Mr Child in this particular.
Mediaeval literature in all its phases was his
province, and thousands of volumes classified
in other departments of the University Li-
brary bear testimony to his vigilance in order-
ing books, and his astonishing bibliographical
knowledge. Very few books are cited in the
present collection which are not to be found
on the shelves of this Library.
In addition, Mr Child made an effort to
stimulate the collection of such remains of the
traditional ballad as still live on the lips of
the people in this country and in the British
Islands. The harvest was, in his opinion,
rather scanty; yet, if all the versions thus re-
covered from tradition were enumerated, the
number would not be found inconsiderable.
Enough was done, at all events, to make it
clear that little or nothing of value remains
to be recovered in this way.
To readers familiar with such studies, no
comment is necessary, and to those who are
unfamiliar with them, no form of statement
can convey even a faint impression of the
industry, the learning, the acumen, and the
literary skill which these processes required.
In writing the history of a single ballad,
Mr Child was sometimes forced to examine
s See V, 397 b.


FRANCIS JAMBS CHILD
hundreds of books in perhaps a dozen different
languages. But his industry was unflagging,
his sagacity was scarcely ever at fault, and his
linguistic and literary knowledge seemed to
have no bounds. He spared no pains to per-
fect his work in every detail, and his success
was commensurate with his efforts. In the
Advertisement to the Ninth Part (1894), he
was able to report that the three hundred and
five numbers of his collection comprised the
whole extant mass of this traditional material,
with the possible exception of a single ballad.1
In June, 1896, Mr Child concluded his
fiftieth year of service as a teacher in Harvard
College. He was at this time hard at work
on the Tenth and final Part, which was to
contain a glossary, various indexes, a biblio-
graphy, and an elaborate introduction on the
general subject. For years he had allowed
himself scarcely any respite from work, and,
in spite of the uncertain condition of his
health, — or perhaps in consequence of it, —
he continued to work at high pressure through-
out the summer. At the end of August he
discovered that he was seriously ill. He died
at Boston on the 11th day of September. He
had finished his great work except for the
introduction and the general bibliography.
The bibliography was in preparation by an-
other hand and has since been completed.
The introduction, however, no other scholar
had the hardihood to undertake. A few
pages of manuscript, — the last thing writ-
ten by his pen, — almost illegible, were found
among his papers to show that he had actually
begun the composition of this essay, and many
sheets of excerpts testified to the time he had
spent in refreshing his memory as to the opin-
ions of his predecessors, but he had left no
collectanea that could be utilized in supplying
the Introduction itself. He was accustomed
to carry much of his material in his memory
till the moment of composition arrived, and
this habit accounts for the fact that there are
no jottings of opinions and no sketch of pre-
i This is * Young Betrice,' No 5 in William Tytler's
lost Brown MS. (V, 397), which "may possibly be a version
of 'Hugh Spencer's Feats in France'" (see II, 377; HI,
275).
cisely what line of argument he intended to
take.
Mr Child's sudden death was felt as a bit-
ter personal loss, not only by an unusually
large circle of attached friends in both hemi-
spheres, but by very many scholars who knew
him through his works alone. He was one of
the few learned men to whom the old title of
"Master" was justly due and freely accorded.
With astonishing erudition, which nothing
seemed to have escaped, he united an infec-
tious enthusiasm and a power of lucid and
fruitful exposition that made him one of the
greatest of teachers, and a warmth and open-
ness of heart that won the affection of all who
knew him. In most men, however complex
their characters, one can distinguish the quali-
ties of the heart, in some degree, from the
qualities of the head. In Professor Child no
such distinction was possible, for all the ele-
ments of his many-sided nature were fused in
his marked and powerful individuality. In
his case, the scholar and the man cannot be
separated. His life and his learning were one;
his work was the expression of himself.
As an investigator Professor Child was at
once the inspiration and the despair of his dis-
ciples. Nothing could surpass the scientific
exactness of his methods and the unwearied
diligence with which he conducted his re-
searches. No possible source of information
conld elude him; no book or manuscript was
too voluminous or too unpromising for him to
examine on the chance of its containing some
fact that might correct or supplement his
material, even in the minutest point. Yet
these qualities of enthusiastic accuracy and
thoroughness, admirable as they undoubtedly
were, by no means dominated him. They
were always at the command of the higher
qualities of his genius, — sagacity, acumen,
and a kind of sympathetic and imaginative
power in which he stood almost alone among
recent scholars. No detail of language or
tradition or archaeology was to him a mere
lifeless fact; it was transmuted into something
vital, and became a part of that universal hu-
manity which always moved him wherever he
found it, whether in the pages of a mediaeval


FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
chronicle, or in the stammering accents of a
late and vulgarly distorted ballad, or in the
faces of the street boys who begged roses from
his garden. No man ever felt a keener inter-
est in his kind, and no scholar ever brought
this interest into more vivifying contact with
the technicalities of his special studies. The
exuberance of this large humanity pervades
his edition of the English and Scottish bal-
lads. Even in his last years, when the lan-
guor of uncertain health sometimes got the
better, for a season, of the spirit with which
he commonly worked, some fresh bit of genu-
ine poetry in a ballad, some fine trait of pure
nature in a stray folk-tale, would, in an in-
stant, bring back the full flush of that enthu-
siasm which he must have felt when the
possibilities of his achievement first presented
themselves to his mind in early manhood.
For such a nature there was no old age.
From this ready sympathy came that rare
faculty — seldom possessed by scholars —
which made Professor Child peculiarly fit for
his greatest task. Few persons understand
the difficulties of ballad investigation. In no
field of literature have the forger and the ma-
nipulator worked with greater vigor and suc-
cess. From Percy's day to our own it has
been thought an innocent device to publish a
bit of one's own versifying, now and then, as
an "old ballad" or an "ancient song." Often,
too, a late stall-copy of a ballad, getting into
oral circulation, has been innocently furnished
to collectors as traditional matter. Mere
learning will not guide an editor through
these perplexities. What is needed is, in ad-
dition, a complete understanding of the " popu-
lar" genius, a sympathetic recognition of the
traits that characterize oral literature wher-
ever and in whatever degree they exist. This
faculty, which even the folk has not retained,
and which collectors living in ballad-singing
and tale-telling times have often failed to ac-
quire, was vouchsafed by nature herself to
this sedentary scholar. In reality a kind of
instinct, it had been so cultivated by long and
loving study of the traditional literature of all
nations that it had become wonderfully swift
in its operations and almost infallible. A
forged or retouched piece could not deceive
him for a moment; he detected the slightest
jar in the genuine ballad tone. He speaks in
one place of certain writers " who would have
been all the better historians for a little read-
ing of romances." He was himself the better
interpreter of the poetry of art for this keen
sympathy with the poetry of nature.
Constant association with the spirit of the
folk did its part in maintaining, under the
stress of unremitting study and research, that
freshness and buoyancy of mind which was
the wonder of all who met Professor Child for
the first time, and the perpetual delight of his
friends and associates. It is impossible to de-
scribe the charm of his familiar conversation.
There was endless variety without effort.
His peculiar humor, taking shape in a thou-
sand felicities of thought and phrase that fell
casually and as it were inevitably from his
lips, exhilarated without reaction or fatigue.
His lightest words were full of fruitful sug-
gestion. Sudden strains of melancholy or
high seriousness were followed, in a moment,
by flashes of gaiety almost boyish. And per-
vading it all one felt the attraction of his per-
sonality and the goodness of his heart.
Professor Child's humor was not only one
of his most striking characteristics as a man;
it was of constant service to his scholarly re-
searches. Keenly alive to any incongruity in
thought or fact, and the least self-conscious of
men, he scrutinized his own nascent theories
with the same humorous shrewdness with
which he looked at the ideas of others. It is
impossible to think of him as the sponsor of
some hypotheses which men of equal eminence
have advanced and defended with passion;
and, even if his goodness of nature had not
prevented it, his sense of the ridiculous would
not have suffered him to engage in the ab-
surdities of philological polemics. In the in-
terpretation of literature, his humor stood
him in good stead, keeping his native sensi-
bility under due control, so that it never de-
generated into sentimentalism. It made him
a marvelous interpreter of Chaucer, whose
spirit he had caught to a degree attained by
no other scholar or critic.


FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
To younger scholars Professor Child was an
influence at once stimulating and benignant.
To confer with him was always to be stirred
to greater effort, bat, at the same time, the
serenity of his devotion to learning chastened
the petulance of immature ambition in others.
The talk might be quite concrete, even definite-
ly practical,—it might deal with indifferent
matters; but, in some way, there was an irra-
diation of the master's nature that dispelled
all unworthy feelings. In the presence of his
noble modesty the bustle of self-assertion was
quieted and the petty spirit of pedantic wran-
gling could not assert itself. However severe
his criticism, there were no personalities in it.
He could not be other than outspoken, — con-
cealment and shuffling were abhorrent to him,
— yet such was his kindliness that his frank-
est judgments never wounded; even his re-
proofs left no sting. With his large charity
was associated, as its necessary complement
in a strong character, a capacity for righteous
indignation. "He is almost the only man I
know," said one in his lifetime, " who thinks
no evil." There could be no truer word. Yet
when he was confronted with injury or op-
pression, none could stand against the anger
of this just man. His unselfishness did not
suffer him to see offences against himself, but
wrong done to another roused him in an in-
stant to protesting action.
Professor Child's publications, despite their
magnitude and importance, are no adequate
measure either of his acquirements or of his
influence. He printed nothing about Shak-
spere, for example, yet he was the peer of
any Shaksperian, past or present, in know-
ledge and interpretative power. As a Chaucer
scholar he had no superior, in this country or
in Europe: his published work was confined,
as we have seen, to questions of language, but
no one had a wider or closer acquaintance
with the whole subject. An edition of Chaucer
from his hand would have been priceless. His
acquaintance with letters was not confined to
special authors or centuries. He was at home
in modern European literature and profoundly
versed in that of the Middle Ages. In his
immediate territory, — English, — his know-
ledge, linguistic and literary, covered all pe-
riods, and was alike exact and thorough. His
taste and judgment were exquisite, and he
enlightened every subject which he touched.
As a writer, he was master of a singularly fe-
licitous style, full of individuality and charm.
Had his time not been occupied in other
ways, he would have made the most delight-
ful of essayists.
Fortunately, Professor Child's courses of
instruction in the university — particularly
those on Chaucer and Shakspere — gave him
an opportunity to impart to a constantly in-
creasing circle of pupils the choicest fruits of
his life of thought and study. In his later
years he had the satisfaction to see grow up
about him a school of young specialists who
can have no higher ambition than to be worthy
of their master. But his teaching was not
limited to these, — it included all sorts and
conditions of college students; and none, not
even the idle and incompetent, could fail to
catch something of his spirit. One thing
may be safely asserted: no university teacher
was ever more beloved.
And with this may fitly close too slight a
tribute to the memory of a great scholar and
a good man. Many things remain unsaid.
His gracious family life, his civic virtues, his
patriotism, his bounty to the poor, — all must
be passed by with a bare mention, which yet
will signify much to those who knew him. In
all ways he lived worthily, and he died having
attained worthy ends.
G. L. KiTTEEDGE.
I





THE
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAR BALLADS
EDITED BY
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
PART I

BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
NEW YORK: 11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET
Wsp Kibcrfitoe press, Cambridge
London: Henry Stevens, 4 Trafalgar Square


One ftfunijtfartfi <£Topic? JSrinteb.
No.2:l:.....
Copyright, 1882, by F. J. Chiid.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge:
Printed by H. 0. Houghton and Company.


To
FREDERICK % FURNIVALL, ESQ.,
of london.
My Dear Furnivall:
Without the Percy MS. no one would pretend to make a collection of the
English Ballads, and but for you that manuscript would still, I think, be beyond
reach of man, yet exposed to destructive chances. Through your exertions and
personal sacrifices, directly, the famous and precious folio has been printed; and,
indirectly, in consequence of the same, it has been transferred to a place where
it is safe, and open to inspection. This is only one of a hundred reasons which
. I have for asking you to accept the dedication of this book from
Your grateful friend and fellow-student,
F. J. CHILD.
Cambridge, Mass., December i, 1882.





ADVERTISEMENT
It was my wish not to begin to print The Eng-
lish and Scottish Popular Ballads until this unre-
stricted title should be justified by my having at
command every valuable copy of every known bal-
lad. A continuous effort to accomplish this object
has been making for some nine or ten years, and
many have joined in it. By correspondence, and
by an extensive diffusion of printed circulars, I have
tried to stimulate collection from tradition in Scot-
land, Canada, and the United States, and no becom-
ing means has been left unemployed to obtain pos-
session of unsunned treasures locked up in writing.
The gathering from tradition has been, as ought
perhaps to have been foreseen at this late day,
meagre, and generally of indifferent quality. Ma-
terials in the hands of former editors have, in some
cases, been lost beyond recovery, and very probably
have lighted fires, like that large cantle of the Percy
manuscript, maxime deflendits I Access to several
manuscript collections has not yet been secured.
But what is still lacking is believed to bear no great
proportion to what is in hand, and may soon come
in, besides: meanwhile, the uncertainties of the
world forbid a longer delay to publish so much as
has been got together.
Of hitherto unused materials, much the most im-
portant is a large collection of ballads made by
Motherwell. For leave to take a copy of this I am
deeply indebted to the present possessor, Mr Mal-
colm Colquhoun Thomson, of Glasgow, who even
allowed the manuscript to be sent to London, and
to be retained several months, for my accommoda-
tion. Mr J. Wylie Guild, of Glasgow, also per-
mitted the use of a note-book of Motherwell's which
supplements the great manuscript, and this my un-
wearied friend, Mr James Barclay Murdoch, to
whose solicitation I owe both, himself transcribed
with the most scrupulous accuracy. No other good
office, asked or unasked, has Mr. Murdoch spared.
Next in extent to the Motherwell collections
come those of the late Mr Kinloch. These he
freely placed at my disposal, and Mr William Mac-
math, of Edinburgh, made during Mr Kinloch's life
an exquisite copy of the larger part of them, en-
riched with notes from Mr Kinloch's papers, and
sent it to me across the water. After Mr Kinloch's
death his collections were acquired by Harvard Col-
lege Library, still through the agency of Mr Mac-
math, who has from the beginning rendered a highly
valued assistance, not less by his suggestions and
communications than by his zealous mediation.
No Scottish ballads' are superior in kind to those
recited in the last century by Mrs Brown, of Falk-
land. Of these there are, or were, three sets. One
formerly owned by Robert Jamieson, the fullest
of the three, was lent me, to keep as long as I re-
quired, by my honored friend the late Mr David
Laing, who also secured for me copies of several
ballads of Mrs Brown which are found in an Ab-
botsford manuscript, and gave me a transcript of
the Glenriddell manuscript. The two others were
written down for William Tytler and Alexander
Fraser Tytler respectively, the former of these con-
sisting of a portion of the Jamieson texts revised.
These having for some time been lost sight of, Miss
Mary Fraser Tytler, with a graciousness which I
have reason to believe hereditary in the name, made
search for them, recovered the one which had been
obtained by Lord Woodhouselee, and copied it for
me with her own hand. The same lady furnished
me with another collection which had been made
by a member of the family.
For later transcriptions from Scottish tradition I
am indebted to Mr J. F. Campbell of Islay, whose
edition and rendering of the racy West Highland
Tales is marked by the rarest appreciation of the
popular genius; to Mrs A. F. Murison, formerly
of Old Deer, who undertook a quest for ballads in
her native place on my behalf; to Mr Alexander
Laing, of Newburgh-upon-Tay; to Mr James Gibb,
of Joppa, who has given me a full score; to Mr
David Louden, of Morham, Haddington; to the


vi
ADVERTISEMENT
late Dr John Hill Burton and Miss Ella Burton;
to Dr Thomas Davidson.
The late Mr Robert White, of Newcastle-upon-
Tyne, allowed me to look through his collections in
1873, and subsequently made me a copy of such
things as I needed, and his ready kindness has been
continued by Mrs Andrews, his sister, and by Miss
Andrews, his niece, who has taken a great deal of
trouble on my account.
In the south of the mother-island my reliance
has, of necessity, been chiefly upon libraries. The
British Museum possesses, besides early copies of
some of the older ballads, the Percy MS., Herd's
MSS and Buchan's, and the Roxburgh broadsides.
The library of the University of Cambridge affords
one or two things of first-rate importance, and for
these I am beholden to the accomplished librarian,
Mr Henry Bradshaw, and to Professor Skeat I
have also to thank the Rev. F. Gunton, Dean, and
the other authorities of Magdalene College, Cam-
bridge, for permitting collations of Pepys ballads,
most obligingly made for me by Mr Arthur S. B.
Miller. Many things were required from the Bod-
leian library, and these were looked out for me,
and scrupulously copied or collated, by Mr George
Parker.
Texts of traditional ballads have been communi-
cated to me in America by Mr W. "VV. Newell, of
New York, who is soon to give us an interesting
collection of Children's Games traditional in Amer-
ica; by Dr Huntington, Bishop of Central New
York; Mr G. C. Mahon, of Ann Arbor, Michigan;
Miss Margaret Reburn, of New Albion, Iowa; Miss
Perine, of Baltimore; Mrs Augustus Lowell, Mrs
L. F. Wesselhoeft, Mrs Edward Atkinson, of Bos-
ton; Mrs Cushing, of Cambridge; Miss Ellen Mars-
ton, of New Bedford; Mrs Moncrieff, of London,
Ontario.
Acknowledgments not well despatched in a phrase
are due to many others who have promoted my ob-
jects : to Mr Furnivall, for doing for me everything
which I could have done for myself had I lived in
England; to that master of old songs and music,
Mr William Chappell, very specially; to Mr J.
Payne Collier; Mr Norval Clyne, of Aberdeen; Mr
Alexander Young, of Glasgow ; Mr Arthur Lauren-
son, of Lerwick, Shetland; Mr J. Burrell Curtis, of
Edinburgh; Dr Vigfusson, of Oxford; Professor
Edward Arber, of Birmingham; the Rev. J. Per-
cival, Mr Francis Fry, Mr J. F. Nicholls, of Bris-
tol; Professor George Stephens, of Copenhagen;
Mr R. Bergstrom, of the Royal Library, Stock-
holm; Mr W. R. S. Ralston, Mr William Henry
Husk, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, Mr A. F. Muri-
son, of London; Professor Sophocles; Mr W. G.
Medlicott, of Longmeadow; to Mr M. Heilprin, of
New York, Mme de Maltchyce, of Boston, and
Rabbi Dr Cohn, for indispensable translations from
Polish and Hungarian; to Mr James Russell Low-
ell, Minister of the United States at London; to
Professor Charles Eliot Norton, for such " pains and
benefits" as I could ask only of a life-long friend.
In the editing of these ballads I have closely fol-
lowed the plan of Grundtvig's Old Popular Ballads
of Denmark, a work which will be prized highest
by those who have used it most, and which leaves
nothing to be desired but its completion. The author
is as much at home in English as in Danish tra-
dition, and whenever he takes up a ballad which is
common to both nations nothing remains to be done
but to supply what has come to light since the time
of his writing. But besides the assistance which I
have derived from his book, I have enjoyed the
advantage of Professor Grundtvig's criticism and
advice, and have received from him unprinted Dan-
ish texts, and other aid in many ways.
Such further explanations as to the plan and con-
duct of the work as may be desirable can be more
conveniently given by and by. I may say here that
textual points which may seem to be neglected will
be considered in an intended Glossary, with which
will be given a full account of Sources, and such
indexes of Titles and Matters as will make it easy
to find everything that the book may contain.
With renewed thanks to all helpers, and helpers'
helpers, I would invoke the largest cooperation for
the correction of errors and the supplying of de-
ficiencies. To forestall a misunderstanding which
has often occurred, I beg to say that every tra-
ditional version of a popular ballad is desired, no
matter how many texts of the same may have been
printed already.
F. J. CHILD.


CONTENTS
Paoi
1. Riddles Wisely Expounded 1
2. The Elfin Knight 6
3. The Fause Knight upon the Road 20
4. Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight 22
5. Gil Bbenton • 62
6. Willie's Lady 81
7. Earl Brand '. 88
8. Erlinton 106
9. The Fair Flower of Northumberland Ill
10. The Twa Sisters 118
11. The Cruel Brother 141
12. Lord Randal 151
13. Edward 167
14. Babylon ; or, The Bonnie Banks o Fordie 170
15. Leesome Brand 177
16. Sheath and Knife 185
17. Hind Horn 187
18. Sir Lionel 208
19. King Orfeo 215
20. The Cruel Mother 218
21. The Maid and the Palmer (The Samaritan Woman) 228
22. St. Stephen and Herod 233
23. Judas 242
24. Bonnie Annie 244
25. Willie's Lyke-Wake 247
26. The Three Ravens 253
27. The Whummil Bore • 255
28. Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane 256





1
RIDDLES WISELY EXPOUNDED
A. a. 'A Noble Riddle Wisely Expounded; or, The
Maid's Answer to the Knight's Three Questions,'
4to, Rawlinson, S66, foL 193, Bodleian Library;
Wood, E. 25, fol. 15, Bod. Lib. b. Pepys, m, 19,
No 17, Magdalen College, Cambridge, c. Douce,
ii, fol. 168 b, Bod. Lib. d. 'A Riddle Wittily Ex-
pounded,' Pills to Purge Melancholy, iv, 129, ed.
1719. "iI, 129, ed. 1712."
B. 'The Three Sisters.' Some Ancient Christmas
Carols . . . together with two Ancient Ballads, etc.
By Davies Gilbert, 2d ed., p. 65.
C. 'The Unco Knicht's Wowing,' Motherwell's MS.,
p. 647.
D. Motherwell's MS., p. 142.
The four copies of A differ but very slight-
ly: a, b, o are broadsides, and d is evidently
of that derivation, a and b are of the 17th
century. There is another broadside in the
Euing collection, formerly Halliwell's, No
253. The version in The Borderer's Table
Book, ViI, 83, was compounded by Dixon
from others previously printed.
Riddles, as is well known, play an impor-
tant part in popular story, and that from very
remote times. No one needs to be reminded
of Samson, CEdipus, Apollonius of Tyre. Rid-
dle-tales, which, if not so old as the oldest of
these, may be carried in all likelihood some
centuries beyond our era, still live in Asiatic
and European tradition, and have their repre-
sentatives in popular ballads. The largest
class of these tales is that in which one party
has to guess another's riddles, or two rivals
compete in giving or guessing, under penalty
in either instance of forfeiting life or some
other heavy wager; an example of which is
the English ballad, modern in form, of 'King
John and the Abbot of Canterbury.' In a
second class, a suitor can win a lady's hand
only by guessing riddles, as in our 'Captain
Wedderburn's Courtship' and 'Proud Lady
Margaret.' There is sometimes a penalty of
loss of life for the unsuccessful, but not in
these ballads. Thirdly, there is the tale (per-
haps an offshoot of an early form of the first)
of The Clever Lass, who wins a husband, and
sometimes a crown, by guessing riddles, solv-
ing difficult but practicable problems, or match-
ing and evading impossibilities; and of this
class versions A and B of the present ballad
and A-H of the following are specimens.
Ballads like our 1, A, B, 2, A-H, are very
common in German. Of the former variety
are the following:
A. 'Rathsellied,' Biisching, Wochentliche
Nachrichten, I, 65, from the neighborhood of
Stuttgart. The same, Erlach, m, 37; Wun-
derhorn, rv, 139 ; Liederhort, p. 338, No 153;
Erk u. Irmer, H. 5, p. 32, No 29; Mittler, No
1307 (omits the last stanza); Zuccalmaglio,
n, 574, No 317 [with change in st. 11]. A
knight meets a maid on the road, dismounts,
and says, " I will ask you a riddle; if you guess
it, you shall be my wife." She answers, " Your
riddle shall soon be guessed; I will do my best
to be your wife ;" guesses eight pairs of rid-
dles, is taken up behind him, and they ride
off. B. 'Rathsel um Riithsel,' Wunderhorn,
n, 407 [429, 418] = Erlach, i, 439. Zuccal-
maglio, n, 572, No 316, rearranges, but adds
nothing. Mittler, No 1306, inserts three
stanzas (7, 9, 10). This version begins:
"Maid, I will give you some riddles, and if
you guess them will marry you." There are
seven pairs, and, these guessed, the man says,
"I can't give you riddles: let's marry;" to


2
I. RIDDLES WISELY EXPOUNDED
which she gives no coy assent: but this con-
clusion is said not to be genuine (Liederhort,
p. 341, note). 0. 'Rathsellied,' Erk, Neue
Sammlung, Heft 3, p. 64, No 57, and Lieder-
hort, 340, No 153", two Brandenburg ver-
sions, nearly agreeing, one with six, the other
with five, pairs of riddles. A proper conclu-
sion not having been obtained, the former was
completed by the two last stanzas of B, which
are suspicious. C begins like B. D. 'Rath-
selfragen,' Peter, Volksthiimliches ans Oster-
reichisch-Schlesien, I, 272, No 83. A knight
rides by where two maids are sitting, one of
whom salutes him, the other not. He says to
the former, "I will put you three questions,
and if you can answer them will marry you."
Pie asks three, then six more, then three, and
then two, and, all being answered, bids her,
since she is so witty, build a house on a
needle's point, and put in as many windows
as there are stars in the sky; which she par-
ries with, " When all streams flow together,
and all trees shall fruit, and all thorns bear
roses, then come for your answer." E. 'Rath-
sellied,' Tschischka u. Schottky, Oesterreich-
ische Volkslieder, 2d ed., p. 28, begins like B,
C, has only three pairs of riddles, and ends with
the same task of building a house on a needle's
point. . F. 'Rathsellied,' Hocker, Volkslieder
von der Mosel, in Wolf's Zeits. fur deutsche
Myth., I, 251, from Trier, begins with the
usual promise, has five pairs of riddles, and
no conclusion. G. 'Rathsel,' Ditfurth, Frank-
ische V. L., n, 110, No 146, has the same be-
ginning, six pairs of riddles, and no conclusion.
* D 4, What is green as clover * What is white as milk?
comes near to English A 15, C 13, D 5, What is greener
than grass? C 11, D 2, What is whiter than milk? We
have again, What is greener than grass f in ' Capt. Wedder-
bnrn's Courtship,' A 12; What is whiter than snow 1 What
is greener than clover? in ' Riithselfragen,' Firmenich, Ger-
maniens Volkerstimmen, m, 634; in 'Kranzsingen,' Erk's
Liederhort, p. 342, 3; 'Traugemundslied,' 11;' Ein Spiel
von den Freibeit,' Fastnachtspiele aus dem I'm Jahrhun-
dert, n, 555; Altdeutsche Wilder, in, 138. So, What is
whiter than a'swan? in many of the versions of Svend
Vonved, Grnndtvig, in, "86; iv, 742-3-7-8; Afzelius, n,
139, etc.; and Sin is blacker than a sloe, or coal (cf. C 15,
Sin is heavier nor the lead), Grundtvig, i, 240,247; iv,
748, 9; Afzelins, n, 139. The road without dust and
the tree without leaves are in ' Ein Spiel von den Freiheit,'
p. 557 ; and in Meier, Deutsche Kinderreime, p. 84, no doubt
Some of the riddles occur in nearly all the
versions, some in only one or two, and there
is now and then a variation also in the an-
swers. Those which are most frequent are:
Which is the maid without a tress? A-D, Q.
And which is the tower without a crest? A-D, F, G.
(Maid-child in the cradle; tower of Bahel.)
Which is the water without any sand ? A, B, C, F, G.
And which is the king without any land? A, B, C,
F, G.
(Water in the eyes; king in cards.)
Where is no dust in all the road? A-G.
Where is no leaf in all the wood? A-G.
(The milky way, or a river; a fir-wood.)
Which is the fire that never burnt? A, C-G.
And which is the sword without a point? C-G.
(A painted fire; a broken sword.)
Which is the house without a mouse? C-G.
Which is the beggar without a louse? C-G.
(A snail's house; a painted beggar.)*
A ballad translated in Ralston's Songs of
the Russian People, p. 356, from Buslaef's
Historical Sketches of National Literature and
Art, I, 31, resembles very closely German A.
A merchant's son drives by a garden where a
girl is gathering flowers. He salutes her; she
returns her thanks. Then the ballad pro-
ceeds:
'Shall I ask thee riddles, beauteous maiden?
Six wise riddles shall I ask thee?'
'Ask them, ask them, merchant's son,
Prithee ask the six wise riddles.'
'Well then, maiden, what is higher than the for-
est?
Also, what is brighter than the light?
a fragment of a ballad, as also the verses in Firmenich.
The question in German, A 4, Welches ist das trefflichste
Holz? (die Rebe) is in the Anglo-Saxon prose Salomon and
Saturn: Kemble, Sal. and Sat. 188, No 40; 204; see also
287, 10. Riddle verses with little or no story (sometimes
fragments of ballads like D) are frequent. The Trauge-
mundslied, Uhland, i, 3, and the Spiel von den Freiheit,
Fastnachtspiele, n, 553, have only as much story as will
serve as an excuse for long strings of riddles. Shorter pieces
of the kind are (Italian) Kaden, Italiens Wunderhern, p. 14;
(Servian) 'The Maid and the Fish,' Vuk, i, 196, No 285,
Talvj, n, 176, Goetze, Serbische V. L., p. 75, Bowring, Ser-
vian Popular Poetry, p. 184; (Polish) Wojcicki, i, 203;
(Wendish) Haupt and Schmaler, i, 177, No 150, n, 69, No
74 ; (Russian) Wenzig, Bibliothek Slav. Poesie, p. 174 ; (Es-
thonian) Neus, Ehstnische V. L., 390 ft, and Fosterlandskt
Album, i, 13, Prior, Ancient Danish Ballads, n, 341.


1. RIDDLES WISELY EXPOUNDED
3
Also, maiden, what is thicker than the forest?
Also, maiden, what is there that's rootless?
Also, maiden, what is never silent?
Also, what is there past finding out?'
'I will answer, merchant's son, will answer,
All the six wise riddles will I answer.
Higher than the forest is the moon;
Brighter than the light the ruddy sun;
Thicker than the forest are the stars;
Bootless is, O merchant's son, a stone;
Never silent, merchant's son, the sea;
And God's will is past all finding out.'
'Thou hast guessed, O maiden fair, guessed rightly,
All the six wise riddles hast thou answered;
Therefore now to me shalt thou be wedded,
Therefore, maiden, shalt thou be the merchant's
wife.' *
Among the Gaels, both Scotch and Irish, a
ballad of the same description is extremely
well known. Apparently only the questions
are preserved in verse, and the connection
with the story made by a prose comment. Of
tiiese questions there is an Irish form, dated
1738, which purports to be copied from a
manuscript of the twelfth century. Fionn
would marry no lady whom he could pose.
Graidhne, "daughter of the king of the
fifth of Ullin," answered everything he asked,
and became his wife. Altogether there are
thirty-two questions in the several versions.
Among them are: What is blacker than
the raven? (There is death.) What is
whiter than the snow? (There is the truth.)
'Fionn's Questions,' Campbell's Popular Tales
of the West Highlands, m, 36; 'Fionn's Con-
versation with Ailbhe,' Heroic Gaelic Ballads,
by the same, pp. 150, 151.
The familiar ballad-knight of A, B is con-
verted in C into an " unco knicht," who is the
devil, a departure from the proper story which
is found also in 2 J. The conclusion of C,
As soon as she the fiend did name,
He flew awa in a blazing flame,
reminds us of the behavior of trolls and nixes
under like circumstances, but here the naming
amounts to a detection of the Unco Knicht's
quiddity, acts as an exorcism, and simply
obliges the fiend to go off in his real charac-
ter. D belongs with C: it was given by the
reciter as a colloquy between the devil and a
maiden.
The earlier affinities of this ballad can be
better shown in connection with No 2.
Translated, after B and A, in Grundtvig's
Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 181: Her-
der, Volkslieder, I, 95, after A d.
A
a. Broadside in the Rawlinson collection, 4to, 566, fol.
193, Wood, E. 25, fol. 15. b. Pepys, in, 19, No 17. c.
Donee, n, fol. 168 b. d. Pills to Purge Melancholy, iv,
130, ed. 1719.
1 There was a lady of the North Country,
Lay the bent to the bonny broom
And she had lovely daughters three.
Fa la la la, fa la la la ra re
2 There was a knight of noble worth
Which also lived in the North.
3 The knight, of courage stout and brave,
A wife he did desire to have.
• 'Capt. Wedderburn's Courtship,' 12: What's higher
than the tree? (heaven). Wojcicki, Piesni, i, 203, l. 11,206,
1.3; What grows without a root? (a stone).
4 He knocked at the ladie's gate
One evening when it was late.
5 The eldest sister let him in,
And pin'd the door with a silver pin.
6 The second sister she made his bed,
And laid soft pillows under his head.
7 The youngest daughter that same night,
She went to bed to this young knight.
8 And in the morning, when it was day,
These words unto him she did say:
9 'Now you have had your will,' quoth she,
'I pray, sir knight, will you marry me?'
10 The young brave knight to her replyed,
'Thy suit, fair maid, shall not be deny'd.


4
1. RIDDLES WISELY EXPOUNDED
11 'If thou canst answer me questions three,
This very day will I marry thee.'
12
14
15
16
17 'And thunder is louder than the horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn.
B
Gilbert's Christmas Carols, 2d ed., p. 65, from the editor's
recollection. West of England.
1 Theke were three sisters fair and bright,
Jennifer gentle and rosemaree
And they three loved one valiant knight.
As the dew flies over the mulberry tree
2 The eldest sister let him in,
And barred the door with a silver pin.
3 The second sister made his bed,
And placed soft pillows under his head.
4 The youngest sister, fair and bright,
Was resolved for to wed with this valiant
knight.
0
Motherwell's MS., p. 647. From the recitation of Mrs
Storie.
1 There was a knicht riding frae the east,
Sing the Cather banks, the bonnie brume
Wha had been wooing at monie a place.
And ye may beguile a young thing sune
18 'And poyson is greener than the grass,
And the Devil is worse than woman was.'
5 'And if you can answer questions three,
O then, fair maid, I will marry with thee.
6 'What is louder than an horn,
And what is sharper than a thorn?
7 'Thunder is louder than an horn,
And hunger is sharper than a thorn.'
8 'What is broader than the way,
And what is deeper than the sea?'
9 'Love is broader than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.'
*****
10
'And now, fair maid, I will marry with thee.'
2 He came unto a widow's door,
And speird whare her three dochters were.
3 The auldest ane's to a washing gane,
The second's to a baking gane.
4 The youngest ane's to a wedding gane,
And it will be nicht or she be hame.
'Kind sir, in love, 0 then,' quoth she,
'Tell me what your [three] questions be.'
'0 what is longer than the way,
Or what is deeper than the sea?
'Or what is louder than the horn,
Or what is sharper than a thorn?
'Or what is greener than the grass,
Or what is worse then a woman was?'
'O love is longer than the way,
And hell is deeper than the sea.
19 When she these questions answered had,
The knight became exceeding glad.
20 And having [truly] try'd her wit,
He much commended her for it.
21 And after, as it is verifi'd,
He made of her his lovely bride.
22 So now, fair maidens all, adieu,
This song I dedicate to you.
23 I wish that you may constant prove
Vnto the man that you do love.


1. RIDDLES WISELY EXPOUNDED
5
5 He sat him doun upon a stane,
Till thir three lasses came tripping hame.
6 The auldest ane '■ to the bed making,
And the second ane's to the sheet spreading.
7 The youngest ane was bauld and bricht,
And she was to lye with this unco knicht.
8 'Gin ye will answer me questions ten,
The morn ye sall be made my ain.
9 'O what is heigher nor the tree?
And what is deeper nor the sea?
10 'Or what is heavier nor the lead?
And what is better nor the breid?
11 'O what is whiter nor the milk?
Or what is safter nor the silk?
12 'Or what is sharper nor a thorn?
Or what is louder nor a horn?
13 'Or what is greener nor the grass?
Or what is waur nor a woman was?'
14 'O heaven is higher nor the tree,
And hell is deeper nor the sea.
15 'O sin is heavier nor the lead,
The blessing's better nor the bread.
16 'The snaw is whiter nor the milk,
And the down is safter nor the silk.
17 'Hunger is sharper nor a thorn,
And shame is louder nor a horn.
18 'The pies are greener nor the grass,
And Clootie's waur nor a woman was.'
19 As sune as she the fiend did name,
He flew awa in a blazing flame.
D
Motherwell's MS., p. 142.
1 * O what is higher than the trees?
Gar lay the bent to the bonny broom
And what is deeper than the seas?
And you may beguile a fair maid soon
2 'O what is whiter than the milk?
Or what is softer than the silk?
3 'O what is sharper than the thorn?
O what is louder than the horn?
4 'O what is longer than the way?
And what is colder than the clay?
5 'O what is greener than the grass?
And what is worse than woman was?'
6 'O heaven's higher than the trees,
And hell is deeper than the seas.
7 'And snow is whiter than the milk,
And love is softer than the silk.
8 'O hunger's sharper than the thorn,
And thunder's louder than the horn.
9 'O wind is longer than the way,
And death is colder than the clay.
10 'O poison's greener than the grass,
And the Devil's worse than eer woman was.'
A. a. Title. A Noble Riddle wisely Expounded:
or, The Maids answer to the Knights Three
Questions.
She with her excellent wit and civil carriage,
Won a young Knight to joyn with him in mar-
riage;
This gallant couple now is man and wife, c. Knights questions. Wed a knight . . .
And she with him doth lead a pleasant Life. with her in marriage.
Tune of Lay the bent to the bonny broom.
WOODCUT OF
THE KNiGHT.
WOODCUT OF
THE MAiD.


6
2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
a. Printed for F. Coles, T. Vere, L Wright,
and I. Clarke.
b. Printed for W. Thackeray, E. M. and A. M.
O. Licens'd according to Order. London.
Printed hy Tho. Norris, at the L[o]oking
glass on London-bridge. And sold by J.
Walter, in High Holborn.
In Rawlinson and Wood the first seven lines
are in Roman and Italic type; the remain-
der being in black letter and Roman. The
Pepys copy has one line of the ballad in
black letter and one line in Roman type.
The Douce edition is in Roman and Italic.
A. I1. o, i' th' North: d, in the.
31. O, This knight.
51. a, b, o, d, The youngest sister.
7\ b, d, The youngest that same, c, that
very same.
72. a, with this young knight.
9s. d, sir knight, you marry me.
After 10, there is a wood-cut of the knight
and the maid in a; in b two cuts of the
knight.
11". o, 11l marry, d, I will.
121. o omits in love. 122. b, c, d, three
questions.
141. d, a horn. .
After 15: a, Here follows the Damosels an-
swer to the Knight's Three Questions: o,
The Damsel's Answers To The Knight's
Questions: d, The Damsel's Answer to the
Three Questions.
17, 18. b, c, d, thunder's, hunger's, poy-
son's, devil's.
182. d, the woman.
191. c, those.
20. a, b omit truly.
211. b, o, d, as't is.
B. The burden is printed by Gilbert, in the text,
"Jennifer gentle and Rosemaree." He ap-
pears to take Jennifer and Rosemaree to be
names of the sisters. As printed under the
music, the burden runs,
Juniper, Gentle and Rosemary.
No doubt, juniper and rosemary, simply, are
meant; Gentle might possibly be for gentian.
In 2 H. the burden is,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme:
curiously varied in I thus:
Every rose grows merry wi thyme:
and in G,
Sober and grave grows merry in time.
C. 18. "Vergris in another set." M.
D. MS. before st. 1, "The Devil speaks ;" before
st. 6, "The maiden speaks."
2
THE ELFIN KNIGHT
A. 'A proper new ballad entituled The Wind hath
blown my Plaid away, or, A Discourse betwixt a
young [Wo]man and the Elphin Knight;' a broad-
side in black letter in the Pepysian library, bound up
at the end of a copy of Blind Harry's ' Wallace,'
Edin. 1673.
B. 'A proper new ballad entitled The Wind hath
blawn my Plaid awa,' etc. Webster, A Collection
of Curious Old Ballads, p. 3.
C. 'The Elfin Knicht,' Kinloch's Anc. Scott. Ballads,
p. 145.
D. 'The Fairy Knight,' Buchan, u, 296.
E. Motherwell's MS., p. 492.
F. 'Lord John,' Kinloch MSS, i, 75.
Q-. 'The Cambrick Shirt,' Gammer Gurton's Garland,
p. 3, ed. 1810.
H. 'The Deil's Courtship,' Motherwell's MS., p. 92.
I. 'The Deil's Courting,' Motherwell's MS., p. 103.
J. Communicated by Rev. Dr Huntington, Bishop of
Western New York, as sung at Hadley, Mass.
K. Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, p. 109, No
171, 6th ed.
L. Notes and Queries, 1st S., vn, 8.


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
7
PlNKEETON gave the first information con-
cerning A, in Ancient Scotish Poems . . .
from the MS. collections of Sir Richard Mait-
land, etc., n, 496, and he there printed the
first and last stanzas of the broadside. Moth-
erwell printed the whole in the appendix to
his Minstrelsy, No I. What stands as the
last stanza in the broadside is now prefixed to
the ballad, as having been the original burden.
It is the only example, so far as I remember,
which our ballads afford of a burden of this
kind, one that is of greater extent than the
stanza with which it was sung, though this
kind of burden seems to have been common
enough with old songs and carols.*
The " old copy in black letter" used for B
was close to A, if not identical, and has the
burden-stem at the end like A. 'The Jock-
ey's Lamentation,' Pills to Purge Melancholy,
v, 317, has the burden,
'T is oer the hills and far away [thrice],
The wind hath blown my plaid away.
The 'Bridal Sark,' Cromek's Remains of
Nithsdale and Galloway Song, p. 108, and
'The Bridegroom Darg,' p. 113, are of mod-
ern manufacture and impostures; at least,
they seem to have imposed upon Cromek.
A like ballad is very common in German.
A man would take, or keep, a woman for his
love or his wife [servant, in one case], if she
would spin brown silk from oaten straw. She
will do this if he will make clothes for her
of the linden-leaf. Then she must bring him
shears from the middle of the Rhine. But
• All that was required of the burden, Mr Chappell kindly
writes me, was to support the voice by harmonious notes
under the melody; it was not sung after each half of the
stanza, or after the stanza, and it was heard separately only
when the voices singing the air stopped. Even the Danish
ballads exhibit but a few cases of these "burden-stems," as
Grundtvig calls them: see Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser,
n, 221, B 1; 295, B 1; 393, A 1: ni, 197, D; 470, A.
Such burden-stems are, however, very common in Icelandic
ballads. They are, for the most part, of a different metre
from the ballad, and very often not of the same .number of
lines as the ballad stanza. A part of the burden stem would
seem to be taken for the refrain; as fslenzk FornkvaeSi, i,
30, of four verses, 1, 2, 4; 129, of two, the last half of the
first and all the second; 194, of four, the last; 225, of five,
the last two; n, 52, of five, the second and last two.
In later times the Danish stev-stamme was made to con-
first he must build her a bridge from a single
twig, etc., etc. To this effect, with some va-
riations in the tasks set, in A, 'Eitle Dinge,'
Rhaw, Bicinia (1545), Uhland, i, 14, No 4
A, Bohme, p. 376, No 293. B. 'Van ideln
unmoglichen Dingen,' Neocorus (f c. 1630),
Chronik des Landes Ditmarschen, ed. Dahl-
mann, p. 180 = Uhland, p. 15, No 4 B, Miil-
lenhof, p. 473, Bbhme, p. 37-6, No 294. C.
Wunderhorn, n, 410 [431] = Erlach, i, 441,
slightly altered in Kretzschmer [Zuccalma-
glio], II, 620. D.' Unmoglichkeiten,' Sehmel-
ler, Die Mundarten Bayerns, p. 556. E. Schle-
sische Volkslieder, p. 115, No 93. F. 'Liebes-
Neckerei,' Meier, Schwabische V. L., p. 114,
No 39. G. 'Liebesspielereien,' Ditfurth,
Frankische V. L., n, 109, No 144. H. 'Von
eitel unmoglichen Dingen,' Erk's Liederhort,
p. 337, No 152". I. 'Unmogliches Begehr-
en,' V. L. aus Oesterreich, Deutsches Mu-
seum, 1862, iI, 806, No 16. J. • Unmog-
liche Dinge,' Peter, Volksthiimliches aus
Osterreichisch-Schlesien, I, 270, No 82. In
K, 'Wettgesang,' Meinert, p. 80, and L,
Liederhort, p. 334, No 152, there is a simple
contest of wits between a youth and a maid,
and in M, Erk, Neue Sammlung, H. 2, No
11, p. 16, and N, 'Wunderbare Aufgaben,'
Prohle, Weltliche u. geistliche Volkslieder, p.
36, No 22 B, the wit-contest is added to the
very insipid ballad of ' Gemalte Rosen.'
'Store Fordringar,' Kristensen, Jydske
Folkeviser, i, 221, No 82, and 'Opsang,'
Lindeman, Norske Fjeldmelodier, No 35
(Text Bilag, p. 6), closely resemble German
form to the metre of the ballad, and sung as the first stanza,
the last line perhaps forming the burden. Compare the stev-
stamme, Grundtvig, in, 470, with the first stanza of the bal-
lad at p. 475. If not so changed, says Grundtvig, it dropped
away. Lyngbye, at the end of his Fssroiske Qvaeder, gives
the music of a ballad which he had heard sung. The whole
stem is sung first, and then repeated as a burden at the end
of every verse. The modern way, judging by Berggreen,
Folke-Sange og Melodier, 3d ed., i, 352,358, is simply to sing
the whole stem after each verse, and so says Grundtvig, m,
200, D. The whole stem is appended to the last stanza
(where, as usual, the burden, which had been omitted after
stanza 1, is again expressed) in the Ficroe ballad in Grundt-
vig, m, 199, exactly as in our broadside, or in Motherwell's
Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. iii. I must avow myself to be very
much in the dark as to the exact relation of stem and bur-
den.


8
2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
M, N. In the Stev, or alternate song, in
Landstad, p. 375, two singers vie one with an-
other in propounding impossible tasks.
A Wendish ballad, Haupt and Schmaler, I,
178, No 151, and a Slovak, Celakowsky, n,
68, No 12 (the latter translated by Wenzig,
Slawische Volkslieder, p. 86, Westslaviseher
Marchenschatz, p. 221, and Bibliothek Sla-
vischer Poesien, p. 126), have lost nearly all
their story, and, like German K, L, may be
called mere wit-contests.
The Graidhne whom we have seen winning
Fionn for husband by guessing his riddles, p.
3, afterwards became enamored of Diarmaid,
Fionn's nephew, in consequence of her acci-
dentally seeing a beauty spot on Diarmaid's
forehead. This had the power of infecting
with love any woman whose eye should light
upon it: wherefore Diarmaid used to wear his
cap well down. Graidhne tried to make Diar-
maid run away with her. But he said," I will
not go with thee. I will not take thee in soft-
ness, and I will not take thee in hardness; I
will not take thee without, and I will not take
thee within ; I will not take thee on horseback,
and I will not take thee on foot." Then he
went and built himself a house where he
thought he should be out of her way. But
Graidhne found him out. She took up a posi-
tion between the two sides of the door, on a
buck goat, and called to him to go with her.
For, said she, "I am not without, I am not
within; I am not on foot, and I am not on a
horse; and thou must go with me." After
this Diarmaid had no choice. 'Diarmaid and
Grainne,' Tales of the West Highlands, m,
39-49; 'How Fingal got Graine to be his
wife, and she went away with Diarmaid,'
Heroic Gaelic Ballads, p. 153; 'The Death
of Diarmaid,' ib., p. 154. The last two were
written down c. 1774.
In all stories of the kind, the person upon
whom a task is imposed stands acquitted, if
another of no less difficulty is devised which
must be performed first. This preliminary
may be something that is essential for the ex-
* Urundtvig has noticed the resemblance of 6. B. 64 and
the ballad. — Mnch of what follows is derived from the ad-
mirable Benfey's papers, ' Die kluge Dirne, Die indischen
ecution of the other, as in the German bal-
lads, or equally well something that has no
kind of relation to the original requisition, as
in the English ballads.
An early form of such a story is preserved
in Gesta Romanorum, c. 64, Oesterley, p. 374.
It were much to be wished that search were
made for a better copy, for, as it stands, this
tale is to be interpreted only by the English
ballad. The old English version, Madden,
xxnI, p. 142, is even worse mutilated than
the Latin. A king, who was stronger, wiser,
and handsomer than any man, delayed, like
the Marquis of Saluzzo, to take a wife. His
friends urged him to marry, and he replied
to their expostulations, " You know I am rich
enough and powerful enough; find me a maid
who is good looking and sensible, and I will
take her to wife, though she be poor." A maid
• was found who was eminently good looking
and sensible, and of royal blood besides. The
king wished to make trial of her sagacity, and
sent her a bit of linen three inches square,
with a promise to marry her if she would
make him a shirt of this, of proper length and
width. The lady stipulated that the king
should send her " a vessel in which she could
work," and she would make the shirt: "inichi
vas concedat in quo operari potero, et camisiam
satis longam ei promitto." So the king sent
"vas debitum et preciosum," the shirt was
made, and the king married her.* It may be
doubted whether the sagacious maid did not,
in the unmutilated story, deal with the prob-
lem as is done in a Transylvanian tale, Halt-
rich, Deutsche Volksmiirchen, u. s. w., No 45, p.
245, where the king requires the maid to make
a shirt and drawers of two threads. The
maid, in this instance, sends the king a couple
of broomsticks, requiring that he should first
make her a loom and bobbin-wheel out of them.
The tale just cited, 'Der Burghiiter und
seine kluge Tochter,' is one of several which
have been obtained from tradition in this
century, that link the ballads of The Clever
Lass with oriental stories of great age. The
Marchenvon den klugen Rathsellosern, und ihre Verbreitung
iiber Asien nnd Europa,' Ausland, 1859, p. 457,486, 511, 567,
589, in Nos 20, 21, 22, 24, 25.


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
9
material points are these. A king requires
the people of a parish to answer three ques-
tions, or he will be the destruction of them
all: What is the finest sound, the finest song,
the finest stone? A poor warder is instructed
by his daughter to reply, the ring of bells, the
song of the angels, the philosopher's stone.
"Right," says the king, " but that never came
out of your head. Confess who told you, or
a dungeon is your doom." The man owns
that he has a clever daughter, who had told
him what to say. The king, to prove her sa-
gacity further, requires her to make a shirt and
drawers of two threads, and she responds in
the manner just indicated. He next sends her
by her father an earthen pot with the bottom
out, and tells her to sew in a bottom so that
no seam or stitch can be seen. She sends her
father back with a request that the king
should first turn the pot inside out, for cob-
blers always sew on the inside, not on the out.
The king next demanded that the girl should
come to him, neither driving, nor walking, nor
riding; neither dressed nor naked; neither
out of the road,nor in the road; and bring him
something that was a gift and no gift. She
put two wasps between two plates, stripped,
enveloped herself in a fishing-net, put her
goat into the rut in the road, and, with one
foot on the goat's back, the other stepping
along the rut, made her way to the king.
There she lifted' up one of the plates, and
the wasps flew away: so she had brought the
king a present and yet no present. The king
thought he could never find a shrewder woman,
and married her.
Of the same tenor are a tale in Zingerle's
Tyrolese Kinder u. Hausmarchen, 'Was ist
das Schb'nste, Stiirkste und Reichste?' No
27, p. 162, and another in the Colshorns'
Hanoverian Marchen u. Sagen, 'Die kluge
Dime,' No 26, p. 79. Here a rich and a poor
peasant [a farmer and his bailiff] have a case
in court, and wrangle till the magistrate, in
his weariness, says he will give them three
• Ragnar LoSbrdk (Saga, c. 4, Rafn, Fornaldar Sogur, i,
345), as pointed oat by the Grimms, notes to No 94, re-
quires Kraka (Aslaug) to come to him clothed and not
clothed, fasting and not" fasting, alone and not without a
questions, and whichever answers right shall
win. The questions in the former tale are:
What is the most beautiful, what the strong-
est, what the richest thing in the world?
In the other, What is fatter than fat? How
heavy is the moon? How far is it to heaven?
The answers suggested by the poor peasant's
daughter are: Spring is the most beautiful of
things, the ground the strongest, autumn the
richest. And the bailiff's daughter answers:
The ground is fatter than fat, for out of it
comes all that's fat, and this all goes back
again; the moon has four quarters, and four
quarters make a pound; heaven is only one
day's journey, for we read in the Bible, " To-
day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." The
judge sees that these replies are beyond the
wit of the respondents, and they own to hav-
ing been prompted by a daughter at home.
The judge then says that if the girl will come
to him neither dressed nor naked, etc., he will
marry her; and so the shrewd wench becomes
a magistrate's wife.
'Die kluge Bauerntochter,' in the Grimms'
K. u. H. marchen, No 94, and 'Die kluge
Hirtentochter,' in Prohle's Marchen fur die
Jugend, No 49, p. 181, afford another variety
of these tales. A peasant, against the advice
of his daughter, carries the king a golden mor-
tar, as he had found it, without any pestle.
The king shuts him up in prison till he shall
produce the pestle [Grimms]. The man does
nothing but cry, "Oh, that I had listened to
my daughter!" The king sends for him, and,
learning what the girl's counsel had been, says
he will give her a riddle, and if she can make
it out will marry her. She must come to him
neither clothed nor naked, neither riding nor
driving, etc. The girl wraps herself in a fish-
ing-net [Grimms, in bark, Prohle], satisfies the
other stipulations also, and becomes a queen.*
Another story of the kind, and very well
preserved, is No 25 of Vuk's Volksmarchen
der Serben, ' Von dem Madchen das an Weis-
heit den Kaiser iibertraf,' p. 157. A poor
companion. She puts on a fishing-net, bites a leek, and
takes her dog with her. References for the very frequent oc-
currence of this feature may be found in Oesterley's note to
Gesta Romanorum, No 124, at p. 732.
2


10
2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
man had a wise daughter. An emperor gave
him thirty eggs, and said his daughter must
hatch chickens from these, or it would go hard
with her. The girl perceived that the eggs
had been boiled. She boiled some beans, and
told her father to be ploughing along the road,
and when the emperor came in sight, to sow
them and cry, "God grant my boiled beans
may come up!" The emperor, hearing these
ejaculations, stopped, and said, "My poor
fellow, how can boiled beans grow?" The
father answered, according to instructions,
"As well as chickens can hatch from boiled
eggs." Then the" emperor gave the old man
a bundle of linen, and bade him make of it,
on pain of death, sails and everything else
requisite for a ship. The girl gave her father
a piece of wood, and sent him back to the
emperor with the message that she would per-
form what he had ordered, if he would first
make her a distaff, spindle, and loom out of
the wood. The emperor was astonished at the
girl's readiness, and gave the old man a glass,
with which she was to drain the sea. The girl
dispatched her father to the emperor again
with a pound of tow, and asked him to stop
the mouths of all the rivers that flow into
the sea; then she would drain it dry. Here-
upon the emperor ordered the girl herself be-
fore him, and put her the question, "What
is heard furthest?" "Please your Majesty,"
she answered, "thunder and lies." The em-
peror then, clutching his beard, turned to his
assembled counsellors, and said, "Guess how
much my beard is worth." One said so much,
another so much. But the girl said, "Nay,
the emperor's beard is worth three rains in
summer." The emperor took her to wife.
With these traditional tales we may put the
story of wise Petronelle and Alphonso, king
of Spain, told after a chronicle, with his usual
prolixity, by Gower, Confessio Amantis, Pauli,
I, 145 ff. -The king valued himself highly for
his wit, and was envious of a knighJ who hither-
to had answered all his questions. Determined
to confound his humbler rival, he devised
three which he thought unanswerable, sent
for the knight, and gave him a fortnight to
consider his replies, which failing, he would
lose his goods and head. The knight can
make nothing of these questions, which are,
What is that which needs help least and gets
most? What is worth most and costs least?
What costs most and is worth least? The
girl, who is but fourteen years old, observing
her father's heavy cheer, asks him the reason,
and obtains his permission to go to court with
him and answer the questions. He was to say
to the king ftiat he had deputed her to an-
swer, to make trial of her wits. The answer
to the first question is the earth, and agrees
in the details with the solution of the query,
What is fatter than fat? in the Tyrolese and
the Hanoverian tale. Humility is the answer
to the second, and pride the third answer.
The king admires the young maid, and says
he would marry her if her father were noble;
but she may ask a boon. She begs for her
father an earldom which had lately escheated;
and, this granted, she reminds the king of
what he had said; her father is now noble.
The king marries her.
In all these seven tales a daughter gets her
father out of trouble by the exercise of a su-
perior understanding, and marries an emperor,
a king, or at least far above her station. The
Grimms' story has the feature, not found in
the others, that the father had been thrown
into prison. Still another variety of these
stories, inferior, but preserving essential traits,
is given by Schleicher, Litauische Marchen,
p. 3, ' Vom schlauen Madchen.'
A Turkish tale from South Siberia will
take us a step further, ' Die beiden Fiirsten,'
Radloff, Proben der Volkslitteratur der tiirk-
ischen Stamme Siid-Sibiriens, I, 197. A
prince had a feeble-minded son, for whom he
wished to get a wife. He found a girl gath-
ering fire-wood with others, and, on asking her
questions, had reason to be pleased with her
superior discretion. He sent an ox to the
girl's father, with a message that on the third
day he would pay him a visit, and if by that
time he had not made the ox drop a calf and
give milk^ he would lose his head. The old
man and his wife fell to weeping. The daugh-
ter bade them be of good cheer, killed the ox,
and gave it to her parents to eat. On the


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
11
third day she stationed herself on the road
by which the prince would come, and was gath-
ering herbs. The prince asked what this was
for. The girl said, " Because my father is in
the pangs of child-birth, and I am going to
spread these herbs under him." "Why," said
the prince, " it is not the way, that men should
bear children." "But if a man can't bear
children," answered the girl, "how can an ox
have a calf?" The prince was pleased, but
said nothing. He went away, and sent his
messenger again with three stones in a bag.
He would come on the third day, and if the
stones were not then made into boots, the old
man would lose his head. On the third day
the prince came, with all his grandees. The
girl was by the roadside, collecting sand in a
bag. "What are you going to do with that
sand?" asked the prince. "Make thread,"
said she. "But who ever made thread out of
sand?" "And who ever made boots out of
stones?" she rejoined. The prince laughed
in his sleeve, prepared a great wedding, and
married the girl to his son. Soon after, an-
other prince wrote him a letter, saying, " Do
not let us be fighting and killing, but let us
guess riddles. If you guess all mine, I will
be your subject; if you fail, I will take all
your having." They were a whole year at
the riddles. The other prince "knew three
words more," and threw ours into a deep dun-
geon. From the depths of this dungeon he
contrived to send a profoundly enigmatic dis-
patch to his daughter-in-law, who understood
everything, disguised herself as one of his
friends, and proposed to the victor to guess
riddles again. The clever daughter-in-law
* Benfey, Das Ansland, 1859, p. 459. The versions re-
ferred to are: Shukasaptati (Seventy Tales of a Parrot),
47th and 48th night; the Buddhist Kanjur, Vinaya, in, fol.
71-83, and Dsanglnn, oder der Weise u. der Thor, also from
the Kanjur, translated by I. J. Schmidt, c. 23; the Mongol
translation of Dsanglnn [see Popow, Mongolische Chres-
tomaihie, p. 19, Schiefner's preface to Radloff, i, xi, xii];
an imperfect Singhalese version in Spence Hardy's Manual
of Bnddhism, p. 220,' The History of Wisashi;'' Geschichte
dea weisen Heykar,' 1001 Nacht, Habicht, v. d. Hagen u.
Schall, xm, 71, ed. 1840; 'Histoire de Sinkarib et de ses
denx Visirs,' Cabinet des Feea, xxxix, 266 (Persian); two
old Russian translations of Greek tales derived from Arabic,
Pypin,'in the Papers of the Second Division of the Im-
"knew seven words move" than he, took her
father-in-law out of the dungeon, threw his
rival in, and had all the people and property
of the vanquished prince for her own.
This Siberian tale links securely those which
precede it with a remarkable group of stories,
covering by representatives still extant, or
which may be shown to have existed, a large
part of Asia and of Europe. This group in-
cludes, besides a Wallachian and a Magyar tale
from recent popular tradition, one Sanskrit
form; two Tibetan, derived from Sanskrit;
If
one Mongol, from Tibetan; three Arabic and
one Persian, which also had their source in
Sanskrit; two Middle-Greek, derived from
Arabic, one of which is lost; and two old Rus-
sian, from lost Middle-Greek versions.*
The gist of these narratives is that one king
propounds tasks to another; in the earlier ones,
with the intent to discover whether his brother
monarch enjoys the aid of such counsellors as
will make an attack on him dangerous; in the
later, with a demand that he shall acquit
himself satisfactorily, or suffer a forfeit: and
the king is delivered from a serious strait by
the sagacity either of a minister (whom he had
ordered to be put to death, but who was still
living in prison, or at least seclusion) or of
the daughter of his minister, who came to her
father's assistance. Which is the prior of
these two last inventions it would not be easy
to say. These tasks are always such as re-
quire ingenuity of one kind or another, whether
in devising practical experiments, in contriv-
ing subterfuges, in solving riddles, or even in
constructing compliments.f
One of the Tibetan tales, which, though
pcrial Acad, of Sciences, St Petersburg, 1858, iv, 63-85;'
Planudes, Life of JEsop; A. and A. Schott, Walachische
Msehrchen, p. 125, No 9, 'Vom weissen und vom rothen
Kaiser;' Erdelyi, Nepdalok e's Mondak, in, 262, No 8,' The
Little Boy with the Secret and his Little Sword.' To these is
to be added,' L'Histoire de Moradbak,' Caylus, Nouveaux
Contes Orientaux, CEuvres Badines, vn, 289 fi, Cabinet des
Fe'es, xxv, 9-406 (from the Turkish ?). In the opinion of
Benfey, it is in the highest degree likely, though not demon-
strable, that the Indian tale antedates our era by several
centuries. Ausland, p. 511 ; see also pp. 487,459.
t Ingenuity is one of the six transcendental virtues of
Mahayana Buddhism. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet,
p. 36.


12
1. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
dating from the beginning of our era, will
very easily be recognized in the Siberian tra-
dition of this century, is to this effect. King
Rabssaldschal had a rich minister, who de-
sired a suitable wife for his youngest son. A
Brahman, his trusty friend, undertook to find
one. In the course of his search, which ex-
tended through many countries, the Brah-
man saw one day a company of five hundred
maidens, who were making garlands to offer to
Buddha. One of these attracted his notice by
her behavior, and impressed him favorably
by replies to questions which he put.* The
Brahman made proposals to her father in
behalf of the minister's son. These were ac-
cepted, and the minister went with a great train
to fetch home the bride. On the way back his
life was twice saved by taking her advice, and
when she was domiciliated, she so surpassed her
sisters-in-law in housekeeping talents and vir-
tues that everything was put under her direc-
tion. Discord arose between the king of the
country she had left and Rabssaldschal, under
whom she was now living. The former wished
to make trial whether the latter had an able
and keen-witted minister or not, and sent him
two mares, dam and filly, exactly alike in ap-
pearance, with the demand that he should dis-
tinguish them. Neither king nor counsellor
could discern any difference; but when the
minister's daughter heard of their difficulty,
she said, " Nothing is easier. Tie the two to-
gether and put grass before them ; the mother
will push the best before the foal." This was
done; the king decided accordingly, and the
hostile ambassador owned that he was right.
Soon after, the foreign prince sent two snakes,
of the same size and form, and demanded which
was male, which female. The king and his
advisers were again in a quandary. The min-
ister resorted to his daughter-in-law. She said,
"Lay them both on cotton-wool: the female
will lie quiet, the male not; for it is of the
feminine nature to love the soft and the com-
fortable, which the masculine cannot tolerate."
* The resemblance to the Siberian tale is here especially
striking.
t The Shukasaptati, in the form in which we have them,
are supposed to date from about the 6th century, and are
They followed these directions; the king gave
his verdict, the ambassador acquiesced, the
minister received splendid presents. For a
final trial the unfriendly king sent a long stick
of wood, of equal thickness, with no knots or
marks, and asked which was the under and
which the upper end. No one could say. The
minister referred the question to his daughter.
She answered, "Put the stick into water:
the root end will sink a little, the upper end
float." The experiment was tried; the king
said to the ambassador, "This is the upper
end, this the root end," to which he assented,
and great presents were again given to the
minister. The adverse monarch was convinced
that his only safe course was peace and con-
ciliation, and sent his ambassador back once
more with an offering of precious jewels and
of amity for the future. This termination was
highly gratifying to Rabssaldschal, who said
to his minister, How could you see through all
these things? The minister said, It was not
I, but my clever daughter-in-law. When the
king learned this, he raised the young woman
to the rank of his younger sister.
The wise daughter is not found in the San-
skrit tale,f which also differs from the Bud-
dhist versions in this: that in the Sanskrit the
minister had become an object of displeasure
to the king, and in consequence had long been
lying in prison when the crisis occurred which
rendered him indispensable, a circumstance
which is repeated in,the tale of The Wise Hey-
kar (Arabian Nights, Breslau transl., xiiI,
73 ff, Cabinet des Fees, xxxix, 266 ff) and
in the Life of ^Esop. But The Clever Wench
reappears in another *tale in the same Sanskrit
collection (with that express title), and gives
her aid to her father, a priest, who has been
threatened with banishment by his king if he
does not clear up a dark matter within five
days. She may also be recognized in Morad-
bak, in Von der Hagen's 1001 Tag, vnI,
199 ff, and even in the minister's wife in the
story of The Wise Heykar.
regarded as abridgments of longer tales. The Yinaya prob-
ably took a permanent shape as early as the beginning of
the Christian era. As already remarked, there is scarcely a
doubt that the Indian story is some centuries older still.


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
13
The tasks of discriminating dam and filly
and the root end from the tip end of a stick,
,which occur both in the Tibetan tales and
the Shukasaptati, are found again, with un-
important changes, in the Wallachian popular
story, and the Hungarian, ,which in general
resemble the Arabic. Some of those in the
Arabian tale and in the Life of -*Esop are of
the same nature as the wit-trials in the Servian
and German popular tales, the story in the
Gesta Romanorum, and the German and Eng-
lish ballads. The wise Heykar, e. g., is re-
quired to sew together a burst mill-stone. He
hands the king a pebble, requesting him first
to make an awl, a file, and scissors out of that.
The king of Egypt tells JSsop, the king of
Babylon's champion sage, that when his mares
hear the stallions neigh in Babylon, they cast
their foal. jEsop's slaves are told to catch a
cat, and are set to scourging it before the
Egyptian public. Great offense is given, on
account of the sacred character of the animal,
and complaint is made to the king, who sends
for .^Isop in a rage, .52sop says his king has
suffered an injury from this cat, for the night
before the cat had killed a fine fighting-cock
of his. "Fie, -3£sop!" says the king of Egypt;
"how could the cat go from Egypt to Babylon
in one night?" "Why not," replies iEsop,
"as well as mares in Egypt hear the stallions
neigh in Babylon and cast their foal?"
The tales in the Shukasaptati and in the
Dsanglun represent the object of the sending
of the tasks to be to ascertain whether the
king retains the capable minister through
whom he has acquired supremacy. According
to the Arabian tale, and those derived from it,
tribute is to be paid by the king whose rid-
dles are guessed, or by him who fails to guess.
• Amasis in return (8) puts some of the questions which
we are apt to think of as peculiarly mediaeval: What is old-
est 1 What is most beautiful, biggest, wisest, strongest? etc.
Two of these we have had in Zingerle's story. They are an-
swered in a commonplace way by the iEthiop, with more re-
finement by Thales. Seven similar questions were propounded
by David to his sons, to determine who was worthiest to
succeed bim, and answered by Solomon, according to an
Arabian writer of the 14th century: Kosenol, i, 167. Ama-
sis also sent a victim to Bias (2), and asked him to cut out
the best and worst of the flesh. Bias cut out the tongue.
Here the two anticipate the Anglo-Saxon Salomon and Sat-
This form of story, though it is a secondary
one, is yet by no means late, as is shown by
the anecdote in Plutarch, Septem Sapientum
Convivium (6), itself probably a fragment of
such a story, in which the king of the JEthiops
gives a task to Amasis, king of Egypt, with a
stake of many towns and cities. This task is
the favorite one of draining [drinking] all the
water in the sea, which we have had in the
Servian tale (it also is in the Life of ./Esop),
and Bias gives the customary advice for deal-
ing with it.*
From the number of these wise virgins
should not be excluded the king's daughter
in the Gesta Romanorum who guesses rightly
among the riddles of the three caskets and
marries the emperor's son, though Bassanio
has extinguished her just fame: Madden's
Old English Versions, p. 238, No 66; Collier,
Shakspere's Library, n, 102.
The first three or four stanzas of A-E form
the beginning of 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-
Knight,' and are especially appropriate to that
ballad, but not to this. The two last stanzas of
A, B, make no kind of sense here, and these
at least, probably the opening verses as well,
must belong to some other and lost ballad.
An elf setting tasks, or even giving riddles,
is unknown, I believe, in Northern tradition,
and in no form of this story, except the Eng-
lish, is a preternatural personage of any kind
the hero. Still it is better to urge nothing more
than that the elf is an intruder in this par-
ticular ballad, for riddle-craft is practised by
a variety of preternatural beings: notoriously
by Odin, Thor, the giant VafpruSnir, and the
dwarf Alwfss in the Edda, and again by a
German "berggeist" (Ey, Harzmarchenbuch,
p. 64,'Die verwiinschte Prinzessin'), a Greek
urn : "Tell me what is best and worst among men." "I tell
thee word is best and worst:" Kemble, p. 188, No 37;
Adrian and Ritheus, p. 204, No 43; and Bedse Collectanea,
p. 326. This is made into a very long story in the Life
of .<Esop, 11. See other examples in Knust, Mittheilungen
aus dem Eskurial, p. 326 f, note b, and Nachlrag, p. 647;
Oesterley's Kirchhof, v, 94, note to 3, 129; and Lands-
berger, Die Fabeln des Sophos, cx, ff. We may add that
Plutarch's question, Which was first, the bird or the
egg? (Quaest. Conviv. l. 2, q. 3), comes up again in The De-
maundes Joyous, No 41, Eemble's Salomon and Saturn,
p. 290.


14
3. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
dragon (Hahn, Griechiscbe u. Albanesische
Marchen, n, 210), the Russian rusalka, the
Servian vila,* the Indian rakshas. For exam-
ple: a rusalka (water-nymph) pursues a pretty
girl, and says, I will give you three riddles: if
you guess them, I will let you go home to your
father; if you do not, I shall take you with
me. What grows without a root? What runs
without any object? What blooms without
any flower? She answers, Stones grow with-
out a root; water runs without any object; the
fern blooms without any flower. These an-
swers seem satisfactory, as riddles go, but the
ballad concludes (with an injustice due to cor-
ruption?), "The girl did not guess the rid-
dles: the rusalka tickled her to death." (Woj-
cicki, Piesni, I, 205.) A rakshas (ogre) says
he will spare a man's life if he can answer four
questions, and shall devour him if he cannot.
What is cruel? What is most to the advan-
tage of a householder? What is love? What
best accomplishes difficult things? These ques-
tions the man answers, and confirms his an-
swers by tales, and gains the rakshas' good
will. (Jacob, Hindoo Tales, or the Adven-
tures of Ten Princes, a translation of the San-
skrit Dasakumaracharitam, p. 260 ff.)
The auld man in J is simply the "unco
knicht" of 1 0, D, over again. He has clearly
displaced the elf-knight, for the elf's attributes
of hill-haunting and magical music remain,
only they have been transferred to the lady.
That the devil should supplant the knight,
unco or familiar, is natural enough. He may
come in as the substitute of the elfin knight
because the devil is the regular successor to any
heathen sprite, or as the embodiment of craft
* Afanasief, Poetic Views of the Slavonians about Na-
ture, i, 25. The poludnitsa seems to belong to the same
class: Afanasief, m, 76; Ralston, Songs of the Russian
People, p. 147.
t The legend of St Andrew in Legends Aurea, Grasse,
cap. n, 9, p. 19 ff; also in the Fornsvenskt Legendarium,
i, 143 ff; Zambrini, Leggende Inedite, n, 94 ff; Pitre',
Canti pop. Siciliani, n, 232 ff: that of St Bartholomew,
Grasse, p. 545, cap. ozxm, 5, and in a German Passional,
and duplicity, and to giv.e us the pleasure of
seeing him outwitted. We find the devil giv-
ing riddles, as they are called (tasks), in the
Grimms' K. u. H. marchen, No 125 (see also
the note in vol. m); Prohle's K. u. V. mar-
chen, No 19; Vernaleken, Oesterreichische K.
u. H. marchen, No 37. He also appears as
a riddle-monger in one of the best stories in
the Golden Legend. A bishop, who was es-
pecially devoted to St Andrew, was tempted
by Satan under the semblance of a beautiful
woman, and was all but lost, when a loud
knocking was heard at the door. A pilgrim
demanded admittance. The lady, being asked
her pleasure about this, recommended that
three questions should be put to the stranger,
to show whether he were fit to appear in such
presence. Two questions having been an-
swered unexceptionably, the fiend proposed a
third, which was meant to be a clincher: How
far is it from earth to heaven?" Go back to
him that sent you," said the pilgrim (none oth-
er than St Andrew) to the messenger, "and
say that he himself knows best, for he meas-
ured the distance when he fell." Antiquum hos-
tis de medio evanv.it. Much the same is re-
lated in the legend of St Bartholomew, and,
in a Slovenian ballad, of St Ulrich, who inter-
poses to save the Pope from espousing Satan
in disguise.f
J, K, L, have completely lost sight of the
original story.
Translated, after A, C, and D, in Grundfc-
vig's Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 251;
R. Warrens, Schottische Lieder der Vorzeit, p.
8; Knortz, Lieder u. Romanzen Alt-Englands,
No 54.
Mone's Anzeiger, 1839, vm, col. 319 f: that of St TJlrich in
Achazel and Korytko, i, 76, ' Svett Ureh,* translated by A.
Grtin, Volkslieder aus Krain, p. 136 ff. The third question
and answer are in all the same. St Serf also has the credit
of having baffled the devil by answering occult questions in
divinity: Wintown's Scottish Chronicle, i, 131, v, 1238 ff,
first pointed out by Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p. lxxiv, who
besides cites the legend of St Andrew.


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
15
A broadside in black letter, "printed, I suppose," says
Pinkerton, " about 1670," bound up with five other pieces at
the end of a copy of Blind Harry's ' Wallace,' Edin. 1673, in
the Pepysian Library.
My plaid awa, my plaid awa,
And ore the hill and far awa,
And far awa to Norrowa,
My plaid shall not be blown awa.
1 The elphin knight sits on yon hill,
Ba, ba, ba, lilli ba
He blaws his horn both lowd and shril.
The wind hath blown my plaid awa
2 He blowes it east, he blowes it west,
He blowes it where he lyketh best.
9 'Thou must shape it knife-and-sheerlesse,
And also sue it needle-threedlesse.'
10 'If that piece of courtesie I do to thee,
Another thou must do to me.
11 'I have an aiker of good ley-land,
Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand.
12 'For thou must eare it with thy horn,
So thou must sow it with thy corn.
13 'And bigg a cart of stone and lyme,
Robin Redbreast he must trail it hame.
14 'Thou must barn it in a mouse-holl,
And thrash it into thy shoes soli.
3 'I wish that horn were in my kist,
Tea, and the knight in my amies two.'
4 She had no sooner these words said,
When that the knight came to her bed.
5 'Thou art over young a maid,' quoth he,
'Married with me thou il wouldst be.'
6 'I have a sister younger than I,
And she was married yesterday.'
7 'Married with me if thou wouldst be,
A courtesie thou must do to me.
8 'For thou must shape a sark to me,
Without any cut or heme,' quoth he.
15 'And thou must winnow it in thy looff,
And also seek it in thy glove.
16 'For thou must bring it over the sea,
And thou must bring it dry home to me.
17 'When thou hast gotten thy turns well done,
Then come to me and get thy sark then.'
18 'I 'l not quite my plaid for my life;
It haps my seven bairns and my wife.'
The wind shall not blow my plaid awa
. 19 'My maidenhead I 'l then keep still,
Let the elphin knight do what he will.'
The wind's not blown my plaid awa
B
A Collection of Curious Old Ballads, etc., p. 3. Partly
from an old copy in black letter, and partly from the recita-
tion of an old lady.
My plaid awa, my plaid awa,
And owre the hills and far awa,
And far awa to Norrowa,
My plaid shall not be blawn awa.
1 The Elphin knight sits on yon hill,
Ba, ba, ba, lillie ba
He blaws his horn baith loud and shrill.
The wind hath blawn my plaid awa
2 He blaws it east, he blaws it west,
He blaws it where he liketh best
3 'I wish that horn were in my kist,
Yea, and the knight in my arms niest.'
4 She had no sooner these words said,
Than the knight came to her bed.
5 'Thou art oer young a maid,' quoth he,
'Married with me that thou wouldst be.'
6 'I have a sister, younger than I,
And she was married yesterday.'


16 2. THE
ELFIN KNIGHT
7 'Married with me if thou wouldst be,
A curtisie thou must do to me.
8 'It's ye maun mak a sark to me,
Without any cut or seam,' quoth he.
9 'And ye maun shape it, knife-, sheerless,
And also sew it needle-, threedless.'
10 'If that piece of courtisie I do to thee,
Another thou must do to me.
11 'I have an aiker of good ley land,
Which lyeth low by yon sea strand.
12 'It's ye maun till't wi your touting horn,
And ye maun saw't wi the pepper corn.
13 'And ye maun harrow't wi a thorn,
And hae your wark done ere the morn.
14 'And ye maun shear it wi your knife,
And no lose a stack o't for your life.
15 'And ye maun stack it in a mouse hole,
And ye maun thrash it in your shoe sole.
16 'And ye maun dight it in your loof,
And also sack it in your glove.
17 'And thou must bring it over the sea,
Fair and clean and dry to me.
18 'And when that ye have done your wark,
Come back to me, and ye 'll get your sark.'
19 'I 'll not quite my plaid for my life;
It haps my seven bairns and my wife.'
20 'My maidenhead I 'll then keep still,
Let the elphin knight do what he will.
0
Kinloch's A. S. Ballads, p. 145. From the recitation of
M. Kinnear, a native of Mearnsshire, 23 Aug., 1826.
1 There stands a knicht at the tap o yon hill,
Oure the hills and far awa
He has blawn his horn loud and shill.
The cauld wind 's blawn my plaid awa
2 'If I had the horn that I hear blawn,
And the knicht that blaws that horn!'
3 She had na sooner thae words said,
Than the elfin knicht cam to her side.
4 'Are na ye oure young a may
Wi onie young man doun to He?'
5 'I have a sister younger than I,
And she was married yesterday.'
6 'Married wi me ye sall neer be nane
Till ye mak to me a sark but a seam.
7 'And ye maun shape it knife-, sheer-less,
And ye maun sew it needle-, threed-less.
8 'And ye maun wash it in yon cistran,
Whare water never stood nor ran.
9 'And ye maun dry it on yon hawthorn,
Whare the sun neer shon sin man was born.'
10 'Gin that courtesie I do for thee,
Ye maun do this for me.
11 'Te 'll get an acre o gude red-land
Atween the saut sea and the sand.
12 'I want that land for to be corn,
And ye maun aer it wi your horn.
13 'And ye maun saw it without a seed,
And ye maun harrow it wi a threed.
14 'And ye maun shear it wi your knife,
And na tyne a pickle o't for your life.
15 'And ye maun moue it in yon mouse-hole
And ye maun thrash it in your shoe-sole.
16 'And ye maun fan it wi your luves,
And ye maun sack it in your gloves.
17 'And ye maun bring it oure the sea,
Fair and clean and dry to me.
18 'And whan that your wark is weill deen,
Yese get your sark without a seam.'


2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
17
D
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, n, 296.
1 The Elfin knight stands on yon hill,
Blaw, blaw, hlaw winds, blaw
Blawing his horn loud and shrill.
And the wind has blawin- my plaid awa
2 'If I had yon horn in my kist,
And the bonny laddie here that I hive best!
3 'I hae a sister eleven years auld,
And she to the young men's bed has made
bauld.
4 'And I mysell am only nine,
And oh! sae fain, luve, as I woud be thine.'
5 'Ye maun make me a fine Holland sark,
Without ony stitching or needle wark.
6 'And ye maun wash it in yonder well,
"Where the dew never wat, nor the rain ever
fell.
7 'And ye maun dry it upon a thorn
That never budded sin Adam was born.'
8 'Now sin ye've askd some things o me,
It's right I ask as mony o thee.
9 'My father he askd me an acre o land,
Between the saut sea and the strand.
10 'And ye maun plow't wi your blawing horn,
And ye maun saw't wi pepper corn.
11 'And ye maun harrow't wi a single tyne,
And ye maun shear't wi a sheep's shank bane.
12 'And ye maun big it in the sea,
And bring the stathle dry to me.
13 'And ye maun barn't in yon mouse hole,
And ye maun thrash't in your shee sole.
14 'And ye maun sack it in your gluve,
And ye maun winno't in your leuve.
15 'And ye maun dry't without candle or coal,
And grind it without quirn or mill.
16 'Ye 'll big a cart o stane and lime,
Gar Robin Redbreast trail it syne.
17 'When ye've dune, and flnishd your wark,
Ye 'll come to me, luve, and get your sark.'
E
Motherwell's MS., p. 492.
1 The Elfin Knight sits on yon hill,
Ba ba lilly ba
Blowing his horn loud and shill.
And the wind has blawn my plaid awa
2 'I love to hear that horn blaw;
I wish him [here] owns it and a'.'
3 That word it was no sooner spoken,
Than Elfin Knight in her arms was gotten.
4 'You must mak to me a sark,
Without threed, sheers or needle wark.'
F
Kinloch MSS, i, 75. From Mary Barr.
1 'Did ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?
Sober and grave grows merry in time
There ye 'll meet wi a handsome young dame,
Ance she was a true love o mine.
2 'Tell her to sew me a holland sark,
And sew it all without needle-wark:
And syne we H be true lovers again.
3 'Tell her to wash it at yon spring-well,
Where neer wind blew, nor yet rain fell.
4 'Tell her to dry it on yon hawthorn,
That neer sprang up sin Adam was born.
5 'Tell her to iron it wi a hot iron,
And plait it a' in ae plait round.'
6 'Did ye ever travel twixt Berwick and Lyne?
There ye 'll meet wi a handsome young man,
Ance he was a true lover o mine.


18
2. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
7 'Tell him to plough me an acre o land
Betwixt the sea-side bot and the sea-sand,
And syne we 'll be true lovers again.
8 'Tell him to saw it wi ae peck o corn,
And harrow it a' wi ae harrow tine.
9 'Tell him to shear it wi ae hook-tooth,
Aid carry it hame just into his loof.
Q
Gammer Garten's Garland, p. 3, ed. 1810.
1 'Can you make me a cambrick shirt,
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without any seam or needle work ?,
And you shall be a true lover of mine
2 'Can you wash it in yonder well,
Where never sprung water nor rain ever fell?
3 'Can you dry it on yonder thorn,
Which never bore blossom since Adam was
born?
H
Motherwell's MS., p. 92.
1 'Come, pretty Nelly, and sit thee down by me,
Every rose grows merry wi thyme
And I will ask thee questions three,
And then thou wilt be a true lover of mine.
2 'Thou must buy me a cambrick smock
Without any stitch of needlework.
3 'Thou must wash it in yonder strand,
Where wood never grew and water neer ran.
4 'Thou must dry it on yonder thorn,
Where the sun never shined on since Adam
was formed.'
I
Motherwell's MS., p. 103. From the recitation of John
McWhinnie, collier, Newtown Green, Ayr.
1 A lady wonned on yonder hill,
Hee ba and balou ba
10 'Tell him to stack it in yon mouse-hole,
And thrash it a' just wi his shoe-sole.
11 'Tell him to dry it on yon ribless kiln,
And grind it a' in yon waterless miln.
12 Tell this young man, whan he's finished his
wark,
He may come to me, and hese get his sark.'
4 'Now you have askd me questions three,
I hope you 'll answer as many for me.
5 'Can you find me an acre of land
Between the salt water and the sea sand?
6 'Can you plow it with a ram's horn,
And sow it all over with one pepper corn?
7 'Can you reap it with a sickle of leather,
And bind it up with a peacock's feather?
8 'When you have done, and finishd your work,
Then come to me for your cambrick shirt.'
5 'Thou hast asked me questions three;
Sit down till I ask as many of thee.
6 'Thou must buy me an acre of land
Betwixt the salt water, love, and the sea-sand.
7 'Thou must plow it wi a ram's horn,
And sow it all over wi one pile o corn.
8 'Thou must shear it wi a strap o leather,
And tie it all up in a peacock feather.
9 'Thou must stack it in the sea,
And bring the stale o't hame dry to me.
10 'When my love's done, and finished his work,
Let him come to me for his cambric smock.'
And she had musick at her will.
And the wind has blown my plaid awa
2 Up and cam an auld, auld man,
Wi his blue bonnet in his han.


8. THE ELFIN KNIGHT
19
3 'I will ask ye questions three;
Resolve them, or ye 'll gang wi me.
4 'Ye maun mak to me a sark,
It maun be free o woman's wark.
5 'Te maun shape it knife- sheerless,
And ye maun sew it needle- threedless.
6 'Ye maun wash it in yonder well,
"Whare rain nor dew has ever fell.
7 'Ye maun dry it on yonder thorn,
Where leaf neer grew since man was born.'
8 'I will ask ye questions three;
Resolve them, or ye 'll neer get me.
9 'I hae a rig o bonnie land
Atween the saut sea and the sand.
10 'Ye maun plow it wi ae horse bane,
And harrow it wi ae harrow pin.
11 'Ye maun shear't wi a whang o leather,
And ye maun bind't bot strap or tether.
12 'Ye maun stack it in the sea,
And bring the stale hame dry to me.
13 'Ye maun mak a cart o stane,
And yoke the wren and bring it hame.
14 'Ye maun thresh't atween your lufes,
And ye maun sack't atween your thies.'
15 'My curse on those wha learned thee;
This night I weend ye'd gane wi me.'
Communicated by Eev. F. D. Huntington, Bishop of
Western New York, as sung to him by his father in 1828, at
Hadley, Mass.; derived from a rough, roystering "character"
in the town.
1 Now you are a-going to Cape Ann,
Fo11omingkathellomeday
Remember me to the self-same man.
Ummatiddle, ummatiddle, ummatallyho, tal-
lyho, follomingkathellomeday
2 Tell him to buy me an acre of land
Between the salt-water and the sea-sand.
3 Tell him to plough it with a ram's horn,
Tell him to sow it with one peppercorn.
4 Tell him to reap it with a penknife,
And tell him to cart it with two mice.
5 Tell him to cart it to yonder new barn
That never was built since Adam was born.
6 Tell him to thrash it with a goose quill,
Tell him to fan it with an egg-shell.
7 Tell the fool, when he's done his work,
To come to me, and he shall have his shirt.
Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes of England, 6th ed., p. 109,
No 171.
1 My father left me three acres of land,
Sing ivy, sing ivy
My father left me three acres of land.
Sing holly, go whistle and ivy
2 I ploughed it with a ram's horn,
And sowed it all over with one pepper corn.
3 I harrowed it with a bramble bush,
And reaped it with my little penknife.
4 I got the mice to carry it to the barn,
And thrashed it with a goose's quill.
5 I got the cat to carry it to the mill;
The miller he swore he would have her paw,
And the cat she swore she would scratch his
face.


20
3. THE FAUSE KNIGHT UPON THE ROAD
Notes and Queries, 1st S., vn, 8. Signed D.
1 My father gave me an acre of land,
Sing ivy, sing ivy
My father gave me an acre of land.
Sing green bush, holly and ivy
2 I ploughd it with a ram's horn.
3 I harrowd it with a bramble.
4 I sowd it with a pepper corn.
5 I reapd it with my penknife.
6 I carried it to the mill upon the cat's back.
*
* * * *
7 I made a cake for all the king's men.
The verses here prefixed to the ballad are ap-
pended to the last stanza in the broadside.
For Norrowa, v. 3, Pinkerton has To-morrow.
91, needle and sheerlesse.
'A Proper New Ballad entitled The Wind hath
blawn my Plaid awa, or a Discourse between a
Young Woman and the Elphin Knight. To be
sung with its own proper tune.'
"This ballad is printed partly from an old copy
in black letter, and partly from the recitation
of an old lady, which appears to be the Scot-
tish version, and is here chiefly adhered to."
32. hae made.
91. askd should perhaps be left, or gave, as in
K1, IA
E. Burden2, in MS., 1, blown her; 2, 3, blawn
her; 4, blawn my.
21, blow; 22, and a.
H. I1. He speaks, in the margin of MS.
Burden1, time in margin.
51. Maid speaks, in margin.
I. Not divided regularly into stanzas in tfie MS.
42. needlewark in margin.
101. shin? in margin.
L. After 6: "Then follows some more which I
forget, but I think it ends thus."
THE FAUSE KNIGHT UPON THE ROAD
A. • The Fause Knight upon the Road,' Motherwell's B. 'The False Knight,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ap-
Minstrelsy, Introduction, p. lxxiv. pendix, Musick, p. xxiv.
ThIs singular ballad is known only through
Motherwell. The opening stanza of a second
version is given by the editor of the music, Mr.
Blaikie, in the Appendix to the Minstrelsy.
The idea at the bottom of the piece is that the
devil will carry off the wee boy if he can non-
plus him. So, in certain humorous stories,
a fool wins a princess by dumfounding her:
e. g., Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery
Tales, p. 32 ; Von der Hagen's Gesammtaben-
teuer, No 63, m, 179; Asbjarnsen og Moe,
Norske Folkeeventyr, No 4. But here the
boy always gets the last word. (See further
on, under' Captain Wedderburn's Courtship.')
An extremely curious Swedish ballad of the
same description, from the Lappfiord, Finland,
with the substitution of an old crone, possibly
a witch, and clearly no better than one of the
wicked, for the false knight, is given by Oskar
Rancken in Nagra Prof af Folksang och Saga
i det svenska Osterbotten, p. 25, No 10. It is
a point in both that the replicant is a wee
boy (gossen, som liten var).


3. THE PAUSE KNIGHT UPON THE ROAD
21
1 'Why are you driving over my field?' said the
carlin:
'Because the way lies over it,' answered the boy,
who was a little fellow.
2 'I will cut [hew] your traces,' said etc.:
'Yes, you hew, and I 'll build,' answered etc.
3 'I wish you were in the wild wood :'
'Yes, you in, and I outside.'
4 'I wish you were in the highest tree-top :'
'Yes, you up in the top, and I at the roots.'
5 'I wish you were in the wild sea:'
'Yes, you in the sea, and I in a boat.'
6 'I 'll bore a hole in your boat:'
'Yes, you bore, and I 'll plug.'
7 'I wish you were in hell:'
'Yes, you in, and I outside.'
8 'I wish you were in heaven :'
'Yes, I in, and you outside.'
Chambers, in his Popular Rhymes of Scot-
land, p. 66 of the new edition, gives, without
a word of explanation, a piece, 'Harpkin,'
which seems to have been of the same char-
acter, but now sounds only like a " flyting." *
The first stanza would lead us to expect that
Harpkin is to be a form of the Elfin Knight
of the preceding ballad, but Fin is seen to be
the uncanny one of the two by the light of the
other ballads. Finn (Fin) is an ancestor of
Woden, a dwarf in Vb'luspa 16 (19), and also
a trold (otherwise a giant), who is induced by
a saint to build a church: Thiele, Danske
Folkesagn, I, 45, Grimm, Mythologie, p. 455.
The name is therefore diabolic by many ante-
cedents.
HARPKIN.
1 Hakpkin gaed up to the hill,
And blew his horn loud and shrill,
And by came Fin.
2 'What for stand you there ?' quo Fin:
'Spying the weather,' quo Harpkin.
3 'What for had you your staff on your shou-
ther?' quo Fin:
■ 'To haud the cauld frae me,' quo Harpkin.
4 'Little cauld will that haud frae you,' quo Fin:
'As little will it win through me,' quo Harp-
kin.
5 'I came by your door,' quo Fin:
'It lay in your road,' quo Harpkin.
6 'Your dog barkit at me,' quo Fin:
'It's his use and custom,' quo Harpkin.
7 'I flang a stane at him,' quo Fin:
'I'd rather it had been a bane,' quo Harpkin.
8 'Your wife's lichter,' quo Fin:
'She '11 clim the brae the brichter,' quo Harp-
kin.
9 'Of a braw lad bairn,' quo Fin:
'There 'll be the mair men for the king's wars,'
quo Harpkin.
10 'There's a strae at your beard,' quo Fin:
'I'd rather it had been a thrave,' quo Harp-
kin.
11 'The ox is eating at it,' quo Fin:
'If the ox were i the water,' quo Harpkin.
12 'And the water were frozen,' quo Fin:
'And the smith and his fore-hammer at it,' quo
Harpkin.
13 'And the smith were dead,' quo Fin:
'And another in his stead,' quo Harpkin.
14 'Giff, gaff,' quo Fin:
'Your mou's fou o draff,' quo Harpkin.
The peit (peat) in st. 3, below, as I am in-
formed by Dr Davidson, is the wee boy's con-
tribution to the school firing.
* At the last moment I come upon this: "The only safe- 1880, p. 199.) This view, which has apparently affected
guard against the malice of witches is 'to flight wi dem,' 'Harpkin,' is clearly a modern misunderstanding. Let no
that is, draw them into a controversy and scold them round- one trust to scolding for foiling a witch, unless he " knows
ly:" (Mrs Saxby, in an interesting contribution of folk-lore more words."
from Unst, Shetland, in The Leisure Hour, for March 27,


22
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Introduction, p. lxxiv. From
Galloway.
1 'O whabe are ye gaun?'
Quo the fause knicht upon the road:
'I'm gaun to the scule,'
Quo the wee boy, and still he etude.
2 'What is that upon your back ?' quo etc.
'Atweel it is my bukes,' quo etc.
3 'What's that ye've got in your arm?'
'Atweel it is my peit.'
4 'Wha's aucht they sheep?'
'They are mine and my mither's.'
How monie o them are mine?'
A' they that hae blue tails.'
I wiss ye were on yon tree :'
And a gude ladder under me.'
And the ladder for to break :'
And you for to fa down.'
I wiss ye were in yon sie :'
And a gude bottom under me.'
And the bottom for to break :'
And ye to be drowned.'
B
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xxiv, No xxxii.
'O whabe are ye gaun ?' quo the false knight,
And false, false was his rede:
'I'm gaun to the scule,' says the pretty little
boy,
And still, still he stude.
4
LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
A. a. 'The Gowans sae gay,' Buchan's Ballads of the
North of Scotland, i, 22. b. 'Aye as the Gowans
grow gay,' Motherwell's MS., p. 563.
B. 'The Water o Wearie's Well.' a. Buchan's MSS,
iI, fol. 80. b. Buchan's B. N. S., n, 201. o. Moth-
erwell's MS., p. 561. d. ' Wearie's Wells,' Harris
MS., No 19.
C. a. 'May Colven,' Herd's MSS, i, 166. b. 'May
Colvin,' Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, i, 93. o. 'May
Colvin, or, False Sir John,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
p. 67.
D. a. 'May Collin,' Sharpe's Ballad Book, No 17, p.
45. b. 'Fause Sir John and May Colvin,' Buchan,
B. N. S., n, 45. c. 'May Collean,' Motherwell's
Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xxi.
E. 'The Outlandish Knight,' Dixon, Ancient Poems,
Ballads, etc., p. 74 = Bell, Ancient Poems, Ballads,
etc., p. 61.
F. 'The False Knight Outwitted,' Roxburgh Ballads,
British Museum, m, 449.
Of all ballads this Las perhaps obtained the
widest circulation. It is nearly as well known
to the southern as to the northern nations of
Europe. It has an extraordinary currency in
Poland. The Germans, Low and High, and the
Scandinavians, preserve it, in a full and evi-
dently ancient form, even in the tradition of
this generation. Among the Latin nations it
has, indeed, shrunk to very meagre proportions,
and though the best English forms are not


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
23
•without ancient and distinctive marks, most of
these have been eliminated, and the better
ballads are very brief.
A has but thirteen two-line stanzas. An
elf-knight, by blowing his horn, inspires Lady
Isabel with love-longing. He appears on her
first breathing a wish for him, and induces
her to ride with him to the greenwood.* Ar-
rived at the wood, he bids her alight, for
she is come to the place where she is to die.
He had slain seven kings' daughters there,
and she should be the eighth. She persuades
him to sit down, with his head on her knee,
lulls him asleep with a charm, binds him with
his own sword-belt, and stabs him with his
own dagger, saying, If seven kings' daugh-
ters you have slain, lie here a husband to them
all.
B, in fourteen four-line stanzas, begins unin-
telligibly with a bird coming out of a bush for
water, and a king's daughter sighing, "Wae's
this heart o mine." A personage not charac-
terized, but evidently of the same nature as the
elf-knight in A, lulls everybody but this king's
daughter asleep with his harp,f then mounts
her behind him, and rides to a piece of water
called Wearie's Well. He makes her wade
in up to her chin; then tells her that he has
drowned seven kings' daughters here, and she
* 'The Elfin Knight' begins very much like A, but per-
haps has borrowed its opening stanzas from this ballad. See
page 13.
t The second stanza, which describes the harping, occurs
again in ' Glenkindie' (st. 6).
} Perhaps the change from wood, A, to water, B-F, was
made under the influence of some Merman ballad, or by ad-
mixture with such a ballad; e. g., 'Nakkens Svig,' Grnndt-
vig, No 39. In this (A) the nix entices a king's daughter
away from a dance, sets her on bis horse, and rides with her
over the heath to a wild water, into which she sinks. It is
also qnite among possibilities that there was originally an
English nix ballad, in which the king's daughter saved her-
self by some artifice, not, of course, such as is employed in B-
F, but like that in A, or otherwise. Maid Heiemo, in Land-
stad, No 39, kills a nix with " one of her small knives." Had
she put him to sleep with a charm, and killed him with his
own knife, as Lady Isabel does, there would have been noth-
ing to shock credibility in the story.
Aytoun, Ballads of Scotland, i, 219, 2d ed., hastily pro-
nounces Buchan's ballad not authentic, " being made up of
stanzas borrowed from versions of 'Burd Helen' [' Child
Waters']." There are, indeed, three successive steps into the
water in both ballads, but Aytoun should have bethought
himself how natural and how common it is for a passage to
is to be the eighth. She asks him for one kiss
before she dies, and, as he bends over to give
it, pitches him from his saddle into the water,
with the words, Since ye have drowned seven
here, I 'll make you bridegroom to them all. J
C was first published by David Herd, in the
second edition of his Scottish Songs, 1776, and
afterwards by Motherwell, " collated" with a
copy obtained from recitation. D,§ E, F are
all broadside or stall copies, and in broadside
style. C, D, E, F have nearly the same story.
False Sir John, a knight from the south coun-
try [west country, north lands], entices May
Colven, C, D [a king's daughter, C 16, E 16;
a knight's daughter, Polly, F 4, 9], to ride off
with him, employing, in D, a charm which he
has stuck in her sleeve. At the knight's sug-
gestion, E, F, she takes a good sum of money
with her, D, E, F. They come to a lonely
rocky place by the sea [river-side, F], and the
knight bids her alight: he has drowned seven
ladies here [eight D, six E, F], and she shall
be the next. But first she is to strip off her
rich clothes, as being too good to rot in the
sea. She begs him to avert his eyes, for de-
cency's sake, and, getting behind him, throws
him into the water. In F he is absurdly sent
for a sickle, to crop the nettles on the river
brim, and is pushed in while thus occupied.
slip from one ballad into another, when the circumstances of
the story are the same; and in some such cases no one can
say where the verses that are common originally belonged.
Here, indeed, as Grundtvig remarks, iv, 7, note1*, it may
well be that the verses in question belonged originally to
'Burd Helen,' and were adopted (but in the processes of tra-
dition) into ' The Water of Wearie's Well;' for it must be
admitted that the transaction in the water is not a happy
conception in the latter, since it shocks probability that the
woman should be able to swim ashore, and the man not.
§ "This ballad appears modern, from a great many ex-
pressions, but yet I am certain that it is old: the present
copy came from the housekeeper at Methven." Note by
Sharpe, in Laiug's ed. of the Ballad Book, 1880, p. 130,
xvii. Motherwell, in his Minstrelsy, p. lxx, n. 24, says that
he had seen a stall ballad as early as 1749, entitled 'The
Western Tragedy,' which perfectly agreed with Sharpe's
copy. But in his Note-Book, p. 5 (about 1826-7), Mother-
well says, "The best copy of May Colean with which I
have met occurs in a stall copy printed about thirty years
ago [should we then read 1799 instead of 1749 ?], under the
title of' The Western Tragedy.' I have subsequently seen
a posterior reprint of this stall copy under this title, ' The
Historical Ballad of May Collean.' In Mr. Sharpe's Ballad
Book, the same copy, wanting only one stanza, is given."


24
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
He cries for help, and makes fair promises, C,
E, but the maid rides away, with a bitter jest
[on his steed, D, leading his steed, E, F], and
reaches her father's house before daybreak.
The groom inquires in D about the strange
horse, and is told that it is a found one. The
parrot asks what she has been doing, and is
silenced with a bribe; and when the father
demands why he 'was chatting so early, says
he was calling to his mistress to take away
the cat. Here C, E, F stop, but D goes on to
relate that the maid at once tells her parents
what has happened, and that the father rides
off at dawn, under her conduct, to find Sir
John. They carry off the corpse, which lay
on the sands below the rocks, and bury it, for
fear of discovery.
There is in Hone's Table Book, ih, 130,
ed. 1841, a rifacimento by Dixon of the com-
mon English broadside in what passes for old-
ballad style. This has been repeated in Rich-
ardson's Borderer's Table Book, vI, 367; in
Dixon's Scottish Traditional Versions of An-
cient Ballads, p. 101; and, with alterations,
additions, and omissions, in Sheldon's Min-
strelsy of the English Border, p. 194.
Jamieson (1814) had never met with this
ballad in Scotland, at least in anything like a
perfect state; but he says that a tale to the
same effect, intermixed with scraps of verse,
was familiar to him when a boy, and that he
afterwards found it, "in much the same state,
in the Highlands, in Lochaber and Ardna-
murchan." According to the tradition re-
ported by Jamieson, the murderer had seduced
the younger sister of his wife, and was seeking
to prevent discovery, a difference in the story
which might lead us to doubt the accuracy of
Jamieson's recollection. (Illustrations of North-
ern Antiquities, p. 348.)
Stories like that of this ballad will inevi-
tably be attached, and perhaps more or less
adapted, to localities where they become
known. May Collean, says Chambers, Scot-
tish Ballads, p. 232, note, "finds locality in
that wild portion of the coast of Carrick (Ayr-
shire) which intervenes betwixt Girvan and
Ballantrae. Carlton Castle, about two miles
to the south of Girvan (a tall old ruin, situ-
ated on the brink of a bank which overhangs
the sea, and which gives title to Sir John
Cathcart, Bart, of Carlton), is affirmed by the
country people, who still remember the story
with great freshness, to have been the resi-
dence of 'the fause Sir John;' while a tall
rocky eminence called Gamesloup, overhang-
ing the sea about two miles still further south,
and over which the road passes in a style ter-
rible to all travellers, is pointed out as the
place where he was in the habit of drowning
his wives, and where he was finally drowned
himself. The people, who look upon the bal-
lad as a regular and proper record of an un-
questionable fact, farther affirm that May Col-
lean was a daughter of the family of Kennedy
of Colzean," etc. Binyan's (Bunion) Bay, in
D, is, according to Buchan, the old name of
the mouth of the river Ugie.
Far better preserved than the English, and
marked with very ancient and impressive traits,
is the Dutch ballad 'Halevvijn,' which, not
many years ago, was extensively sung in Bra-
bant and Flanders, and is still popular as a
broadside, both oral tradition and printed cop-
ies exhibiting manifold variations. A version
of this ballad (A) was communicated by Wil-
lems to Mone's Anzeiger in 1836, col. 448 ff,
thirty-eight two-line stanzas, and afterwards
appeared in Willems's Oude vlaemsche Lie-
deren (1848), No 49, p. 116, with some changes
in the text and some various readings. Uh-
land, I, 153, 74 D, gave the Anzeiger text,
with one correction. So Hoffmann, Nieder-
liindische Volkslieder, 2d ed., No 9, p. 39, but
substituting for stanzas 19, 20 four stanzas
from the margin of O. v. L., and making other
slighter changes. Baecker, Chants historiques
de la Flandre, No 9, p. 61, repeats Willems's
second text, with one careless omission and
one transposition. Coussemaker, Chants pop-
ulates des Flamands de France, No 45, p. 142,
professes to give the text of Oude vlaemsche
Liederen, and does so nearly. Snellaert, Oude
en nieuwe Liedjes, 3d ed., 1864, No 55, p. 58,
inserts seven stanzas in the place of 33, 34 of
O. v. L., and two after 35, making forty-five
two- (or three-) line stanzas instead of thirty-
eight. These additions are also found in an


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
25
excessively corrupt form of the ballad (B),
Hoffmann, No 10, p. 43, in which the stanzas
have been uniformly extended to three verses,
to suit the air, which required the repetition
of the second line of the original stanza.
Heer Halewijn (A), like the English elf-
knight, sang such a song that those who heard
it longed to be with him. A king's daughter
asked her father if she might go to Halewijn.
No, he said; those who go that way never
come back [sixteen have lost their lives, B].
So said mother and sister, but her brother's
answer was, I care not where you go, so long
as you keep your honor. She dressed herself
splendidly, took the best horse from her fa-
ther's stable, and rode to the wood, where she
found Halewijn waiting for her.* They then
rode on further, till they came to a gallows,
on which many women were hanging. Hale-
wijn says, Since you are the fairest maid,
choose your death [B 20 offers the choice be-
tween hanging and the sword]. She calmly
chooses the sword. "Only take off your coat
first, for a maid's blood spirts a great way,
and it would be a pity to spatter you." His
head was off before his coat, but the tongue
still spake. This dialogue ensues:
'Go yonder into the corn,
And blow upon my horn,
That all my friends you may warn.'
'Into the corn I will not go,
And on your horn I will not blow:
A murderer's bidding J will not do.'
'Go yonder under the gallows-tree,
And fetch a pot of salve for me,
And rub my red neck lustily.'
* According to the variation given by Willems, and
adopted by Hoffmann, Halewijn's son came to meet her,
tied her horse to a tree, and bade her to sit down by him
and loose her hair. For every hair she undid she dropped a
tear. Bnt it will presently be seen not only that the time
has not come for them to sit down, but that Halewyn's bid-
ding her undo her hair (to no purpose) is a perversion of
her offering to " red " his, to get him into her power, an offer
which she makes in the German and Scandinavian ballads,
where also there is good reason for her tears, but none as
yet here.
t J. W. Wolf, Deutsche Marchen u. Sagen, No 29, p. 143,
gives the story according to B, apparently from a ballad like
'Under the gallows I will not go,
Nor will I rub your red neck, no,
A murderer's bidding I will not do.'
She takes the head by the hair and washes
it in a spring, and rides back through the
wood. Half-way through she meets Hale-
wijn's mother, who asks after her son; and
she tells her that he is gone hunting, that he
will never be seen again, that he is dead, and
she has his head in her lap. When she came
to her father's gate, she blew the horn like any
man.
And when the father heard the strain,
He was glad she had come back again.
Thereupon they held a feast,
The head was on the table placed.
Snellaert's copy and the modern three-line
ballad have a meeting with father, brother,
sister, and mother successively. The maid's
answer to each of the first three is that Hale-
wijn is amusing himself with sixteen maids,
or to that effect, but to the mother that he is
dead, and she has his head in her lap. The
mother angrily replies, in B, that if she had
given this information earlier she would not
have got so far on her way home. The maid
retorts, Wicked woman, you are lucky not to
have been served as your son; then rides,
"like Judith wise," straight to her father's
palace, where she blows the horn blithely, and
is received with honor and love by the whole
court.f
Another Flemish version (C) has been late-
ly published under the title, 'Roland,' by
which only, we are informed, is this particular
form known in Bruges and many parts of
Snellaert's. So Luise v. Ploennies, Reiseerinnerungen ans
Belgien, p. 38.
Halewyn makes his appearance again in the Flemish bal-
lad, ' Halewyn en het kleyne Kind,' Coussemaker, No 46, p.
149; Poesies populaires de la France, vol. i. A boy of seven
years has shot one of Halewyn's rabbits, and is for this
condemned to be hanged on the highest tree in the park.
The father makes great offers for his ransom, but in vain.
On the first step of the ladder the child looks back for bis
mother, on the second for his father, on the third for his
brother, on the fourth for his sister, each of whom succes-
sively arrives and is told that delay would have cost him
his life. It will presently be seen that there is a resemblance
here to German ballads (G-X, Z).
4,


26
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
Flanders : * Chants populaires recueillis a
Bruges par Adolphe Lootens et J. M. E. Feys,
No 37, p. 60, 183 vv, in sixty-three stanzas, of
two, three, four, or five lines. This text dates
from the last century, and is given with the
most exact fidelity to tradition. It agrees with
A as to some main points, but differs not a
little as to others. The story sets out thus:
It was a bold Roland,
He loved a lass from England;
He wist not how to get her,
With reading or with writing,
With brawling or with fighting.
Roland has lost Halewyn's art of singing.
Louise asks her father if she may go to Roland,
to the fair, as all her friends do. Her father
refuses: Roland is " een stoute kalant," a bad
fellow that betrays pretty maids; he stands
with a drawn sword in his hand, and all his
soldiers in armor. The daughter says she has
seen Roland more than once, and that the tale
about the drawn sword and soldiers is not true.
This scene is exactly repeated with mother and
brother. Louise then tries her shrift-father.
He is easier, and does not care where she
goes, provided she keeps her honor and does
not shame her parents. She tells father, mother,
and brother that she has leave from her con-
fessor, makes her toilet as in A, takes the finest
horse in the stable, and rides to the wood.
There she successively meets Roland's father,
mother, and brother, each of whom asks her
where she is going, and whether she has any
right to the crown she wears. To all she re-
plies, Whether I have or not, be off; I know
you not. She does not encounter Roland in
the wood, they do not ride together, and there
is no gallows-field. She enters Roland's house,
where he is lying abed. He bids her gather
* "La chanson de Halewyn, telle a pen pres que la donnent
Willems, Snellaert et de Coussemaker, se vend encore sur
le marche de Bruges. Quoiqu'elle porte pour titre Haleicyn,
jamais notre piece n'a eKS connne ici sous ce nom. Le nom
de Halewijn, Alewijn ou Alwin ... est reserve' au he'ros de
la piece suivante" [Mi Add en Hir Alewijn]. Lootens et
Feys, p. 66. "II est a regretter que Willems et de Cous-
semaker n'aient pas juge' a propos de donner cette piece telle
que le peuple l'a conserve'e; on serait sans aucun doute en
possession de variantes remarquables, et les lacunes qui ex-
three rose-wreaths " at his hands " and three at
his feet; but when she approaches the foot of
the bed he rises, and offers her the choice to
lose her honor or kneel before the sword. She
chooses the sword, advises him to spare his
coat, and, while he is taking it off, strikes off
his head, all as in A. The head speaks: Go
under the gallows (of which we have heard
nothing hitherto), fetch a pot of salve, rub
it on my wounds, and they shall straight be
well. She declines to follow a murderer's
rede, or to learn magic. The head bids her
go under the blue stone and fetch a pot of
maidens-grease, which also wilf heal the
wounds. This again she refuses to do, in the
same terms; then seizes the head by the hair,
washes it in a spring, and rides off with it
through the wood, duly meeting Roland's fa-
ther, mother, and brother once more, all of
whom challenge her, and to all of whom she
answers,
Roland your son is long ago dead;
God has his soul and I his head;
For in my lap here I have his head,
And with the blood my apron is red.
When she came back to the city the drums
and the trumpets struck up.f She stuck the
head out of the window, and cried, " Now I
am Roland's bride!" She drew it in, and
cried, " Now I am a heroine!"
Danish. Eleven versions of this ballad are
known in Danish, seven of which are given in
Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, No 183, ' Kvin-
demorderen,' A-G-. Four more, H-L, are fur-
nished by Kristensen, Jydske Folkeviser, I,
Nos 46, 47, 91; n, No 85. . A, in forty-one
two-line stanzas (previously printed in Grundt-
vig's Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 233),
is from a 16th century MS.; B, thirty stanzas,
istent dans notre version n'eussent pas manque' d'etre com
blees. II est bon d'insister sur la remarque faite a la suite
de la chanson, qu'a Bruges et dans beaucoup de locality's de
la Flandre, elle n'est connue que sous le titre de Roland.
Ajoutons que notre texte appartient au dernier siecle." L.
et F., 295.
t So in 'Liebe ohne Stand,' one of the mixed forms of
the German ballad, Wunderhorn, Erk i, 41, Crecelius, i, 36,
Und als es nun kam an den dritten Tag,
Da gingen die Pfeiffen und Trommeln an.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
27
C, twenty-four, D, thirty-seven, from MSS of
the 17th century; E, fifty-seven, from a broad-
side of the end of the 18th; F, thirty, from
one of the beginning of the 19th; and G-L,
thirty-five, twenty-three, thirty-one, twenty-six,
thirty-eight stanzas, from recent oral tradition.
The four older versions, and also E, open
with some lines that occur at the beginning of
other ballads.* In A and E, and, we may add,
G, the maid is allured by the promise of being
taken to a paradise exempt from death and
sorrow; C, D, F promise a train of handmaids
and splendid presents. All the versions agree
very well as to the kernel of the story. A
false knight prevails upon a lady to elope
with him, and they ride to a wood [they sim-
ply meet in a wood, H, K]. He sets to work
digging a grave, which she says is too long
for his [her] dog and too narrow for his [her]
horse [all but F, H]. She is told that the
grave is for her. He has taken away the life
[and honor, B, C, I] of eight maids, and she
shall be the ninth. The eight maids become
nine kings' daughters in E, ten in F, nineteen
in G, and in E and F the hard choice is of-
fered of death by sword, tree, or stream. In
A, E, I, L the knight bids the lady get her
gold together before she sets out with him,
and in D, H, K, L he points out a little knoll
under which he keeps the gold of his previous
victims. The maid now induces the knight
to lie down with his head in her lap, profess-
ing a fond desire to render him the most
homely of services f [not in C, G, I, K]. He
makes an express condition in E, F, G, H,
L that she shall not betray him in his sleep,
and she calls Heaven to witness that she will
not. In G she sings him to sleep. He slept
a sleep that was not sweet. She binds him
hand and foot, then cries, Wake up! I will
not betray you in sleep. J Eight you have
• E. g., the wonderland in A 2-6, and the strict watch
kept over the lady in 7-10 are repeated in ' Kibold og Gnld-
borg, ' Grundtvig, 82, B 2-7, 8-11, and in *Den trofaste Jom-
fru,' ib. 249, A 3-6, 7-10. The watching in A, B, C and
the proffered gifts of C, D, P are found in 'Nakkens Svig,'
Grundtvig, 39, A, B, 12-18. The disguise in A 11-14, the
rest in the wood with the knight's head in the lady's lap, A
16, 27, B 11, 21, D 14, 24, B 11, 21, etc., recur in Ribold,
killed; yourself shall be the ninth. En-
treaties and fair promises and pretences that
he had been in jest, and desire for shrift, are
in vain. Woman-fashion she drew his sword,
but man-fashion she cut him down. She
went home a maid.
E, F, G, however, do not end so simply.
On her way home through the wood [E], she
comes upon a maid who is working gold, and
who says, The last time I saw that horse my
brother rode it. She answers, Your brother is
dead, and will do no more murdering for gold;
then turns her horse, and sets the sister's bower
on fire. Next she encounters seven robbers on
the heath, who recognize the horse as their
master's, and are informed of his death and of
the end of his crimes. They ask about the
fire. She says it is an old pig-sty. She rides
on, and they call to her that she is losing her
horse's gold shoe. But nothing can stop her;
she bids them pick it up and drink it in wine;
and so comes home to her father's. F has
nothing of the sister; in place of seven rob-
bers there are nine of the robber's brothers,
and the maid sets their house on fire. G in-
dulges in absurd extravagances: the heroine
meets the robber's sister with twelve fierce
dogs, and then his twelve swains, and cuts
down both dogs and swains.
The names in the Danish ballads are, A,
Ulver and Vaenelil; B, Olmor, or Oldemor,
and Vindelraad; C, Hollemen and Vendel-
raad; D, Romor, Reimord, or Reimvord, and
the maid unnamed; F, Herr Peder and Liden
Kirsten; H-L, Ribold, Rigbold [I, Rimmelil]
and Guldborg.
Four Swedish versions are known, all from
tradition of this century. A, 'Den Falske
Riddaren,' twenty-three two-line stanzas, Ar-
widsson, 44 B, I, 301. B, 'Rbfvaren Brun,'
fifteen stanzas, Afzelius, 83, m, 97. C, twen-
B 12-14, L 9,10, M 19, 20, N 11, 13, P 12, 13. These re-
semblances, naturally, are not limited to the Danish copies.
t So the princess in Asbjornsen og Moe, N. Folkecventyr,
p. 153. Cf. Campbell's Tales of the West Highlands, in,
209; iv, 282, 283.
} The binding and waking, with these words, are found
also in a made-up text of 'Fraendehasvn,' Grundtvig, No 4,
C 51-53, but certainly borrowed from some copy of' Kvinde-
morderen.'


28
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
ty-seven stanzas, Arwidsson, 44 A, I, 298. D,
'Rbfvaren Rymer,' sixteen stanzas, Afzelius,
82, m, 94. A, B, D have resemblances, at
the beginning, to the Ribold ballads, like the
Danish A, B, E, G, while the beginning of C
is like the Danish C, D, F. A has the grave-
digging; there have been eight maids before;
the knight lays his head in the lady's lap for
the same reason as in most of the Danish
ballads, and under the same assurance that he
shall not be betrayed in sleep; he is bound,
and conscientiously waked before his head is
struck off; and the lady rides home to her fa-
ther's. There have been eight previous victims
in C, and they king's daughters; in B, eleven
(maids); D says not how many, but, accord-
ing to an explanation of the woman that sang
it, there were seven princesses. C, D, like
Danish E, F, G, make the maid encounter
some of the robber's family on the way home.
By a misconception, as we perceive by the
Dutch ballad, she is represented as blowing
the robber's horn. Seven sisters come at the
familiar sound to bury the murdered girl and
share the booty, but find that they have their
brother to bury.
The woman has no name in any of the Swe-
dish ballads. A calls the robber " an outland-
ish man" (en man ifran fremmande land), B,
simple Brun, C, a knight, and D, Riddaren
Rymer, or Herr Rymer.
Of Norwegian versions, but two have been
printed: A, 'Svein NorSmann,' twenty two-
line stanzas, Landstad, 69, p. 567; B, 'Rulle-
mann og Hildeborg,' thirty stanzas, Landstad,
70, p. 571, both from recent recitation. Bugge
has communicated eight others to Grundtvig.
Both A and B have the paradise at the be-
ginning, which is found in Danish A, E, G,
and Swedish D. In both the lady gets her
gold together while the swain is saddling his
horse. They come to a grave already dug,
which in B is said to be made so very wide
because Rulleman has already laid nine maid-
ens in it. The stanza in A which should
give the number is lost, but the reciter or
singer put it at seven or nine. The maid gets
the robber into her power by the usual arti-
fice, with a slight variation in B. According
to A, she rides straight home to her father.
B, like Danish F, has an encounter with her
false lover's [five] brothers. They ask, Where
is Rullemann, thy truelove? She answers,
He is lying down, in the green mead, and
bloody is his bridal bed.
Of the unprinted versions obtained by Pro-
fessor Bugge, two indicate that the murderer's
sleep was induced by a spell, as in English A.
F 9 has,
Long time stood Gullbjor; to herself she thought,
May none of my runes avail me ought?
And H 18, as also a variant to B 20, says it
was a rune-slumber that came over him. Only
G, H, I, K give the number of the murdered
women: in G, H, eight, in I, nine, in K, five.
The names are, in A, Svein NorSmann and
GuSbjorg; B, Rulleman and Hildeborg [or
Signe] ; C, D, E, F, Svein N6rmann and Gull-
bjor [Gunnbjbr] ; G, Rullemann and Kjersti;
H, Rullball and Signelill; I, Alemarken and
Valeros; K, Rulemann and a fair maid.
Such information as has transpired concern-
ing Icelandic versions of this ballad is fur-
nished by Grundtvig, rv, 4. The Icelandic
form, though curtailed and much injured, has
shown tenacity enough to preserve itself in a
series of closely agreeing copies from the 17th
century down. The eldest, from a manuscript
of 1665, runs thus:
1 Asa Tvent along the street, she heard a sweet
sound.
2 Asa went into the house, she saw the villain
bound.
3 'Little Asa, loose me! I will not beguile thee.'
4 'I dare not loose thee, I know not whether
thou 'It beguile me.'
5 'God almighty take note who deceives the
other!'
6 She loosed the bands from his hand, the fetter
from his foot.
7 'Nine lands have I visited, ten women I've
beguiled;


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
29
8 'Thou art now the eleventh, I 'll not let thee
slip.'
A copy, from the beginning of the 18th
century, has, in stanza 2, "Asa went into the
wood," a recent copy, "over the fields ;" and
stanza 3, in the former, with but slight dif-
ferences in all the modern copies, reads,
'Welcome art thou, Asa maid! thou wilt mean to
loose me.'
Some recent copies (there is one in Berggreen,
Danske Folkesange, 2d ed., I, 162) allow the
maid to escape, adding,
9 'Wait for me a little space, whilst I go into the
green wood.'
10 He waited for her a long time, but she never
came back to him.
11 Asa took her white steed, of all women she rode
most.
12 Asa went into a holy cell, never did she harm
to man. ,
This is certainly one of the most important
of the German ballads, and additions are con-
stantly making to a large number of known
versions. Excepting two broadsides of about
1560, and two copies from recitation printed
in 1778, all these, twenty-six in number, have
been obtained from tradition since 1800.*
They are as follows: A a, ' Gert Olbert,'' Die
Morners Sang,' in Low German, as written
down by William Grimm, in the early years
of this century, 61 vv, Reifferscheid, p. 161, n.
A b, "from the Miinster region," communi-
cated to Uhland by the Baroness Annette von
Droste-Hiillshof, 46 vv, Uhland, I, 151, No
74 C; repeated in Mittler, No 79. A c, a
fragment from the same source as the preced-
ing, and written down at the beginning of this
century, 35 vv, Reifferscheid, p. 161, I. B, 'Es
wollt sich ein Markgraf ausreiten,' from Bok-
endorf, Westphalia, as taken down by W.
Grimm, in 1813, 41 vv, Reifferscheid, p. 116.
C a,' Die Gerettete,' " from the Lower Rhine,"
twenty-six two-line stanzas, Zuccalmaglio, No
* All the German versions appear to have been originally
in the two-line stanza.
28, p. 66; Mittler, No 85. C b, eleven two-
line stanzas, Montanus (= Zuccalmaglio) Die
deutschen Volksfeste, p. 45. D, 'Von einem
wackern Magdlein, Odiliageheissen,' etc., from
the Rhine, 34 vv [Longard], No 24, p. 48.
E, 'Schondilie,' Menzenberg and Breitbach,
59 vv, Simrock, No 7, p. 19; Mittler, No 86.
F, * Jungfrau Linnich,' communicated by Zuc-
calmaglio as from the Rhine region, Berg and
Mark, fourteen two-line stanzas, Erlach, rv,
598, and Kretzschmer (nearly), No 92, p. 164;
Mittler, No 87. G a, ' Ulinger,' 120 vv, Nu-
remberg broadside " of about 1555 " (Bbhme)
in Wunderhorn, ed. 1857, rv, 101, Bohme,
No 13a, p. 56. G b c, Basel broadsides, "of
about 1570" (Bohme), and of 1605, in Uh-
land, No 74 A, I, 141; Mittler, No 77. H,
• Adelger,' 120 vv, an Augsburg broadside, " of
about 1560" (Bohme), Uhland, No 74 B, I,
146; Bohme, No 13", p. 58; Mittler, No 76.
I, * Der Brautmb'rder,' in the dialect of the
Kuhliindchen (Northeast Moravia and Aus-
trian Silesia), 87 vv, Meinert, p. 61; Mittler,
No 80. J, 'Annele,' Swabian, from Hirrlin-
gen and Obernau, 80 vv, Meier, Schwabische
V. L., No 168, p. 298. K, another Swabian
version, from Hirrlingen, Immenried, and many
other localities, 80 vv, Scherer, Jungbrunnen,
No 5 B, p. 25. L a, from the Swabian-Wiir-
temberg border, 81 vv, Birlinger, Schwabisch-
Augsburgisches Wb'rterbuch, p. 458. L b,
[Birlinger], Schwabische V. L., p. 159, from
Immenried, nearly word for word the same.
M,' Der falsche Sanger,' 40 vv, Meier, No 167,
p. 296. N, ' Es reitets ein Ritter durch Haber
und Klee,' 43 vv, a fifth Swabian version, from
Hirrlingen, Meier, p. 302. O, 'Alte Ballade
die in Entlebuch noch gesungen wird,' twenty-
three double stanzas, in the local dialeot,
Schweizerblatter von Henne und Reithard,
1833, nr Jahrgang, 210-12. P, 'Das Gug-
gibader-Lied,' twenty-one treble stanzas (23 ?),
in the Aargan dialect, Rochholz, Schweizer-
sagen aus dem Aargau, I, 24. Q, 'Es sitzt
gut Ritter auf und ritt,' a copy taken down in
1815 by J. Grimm, from the recitation of a
lady who had heard it as a child in German
Bohemia, 74 vv, Reifferscheid, p. 162. R, ' Bie
wriie ist auv der rittersman,' in the dialect of


30
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
Gottschee, Carniola, 86 vv, Schroer, Sitzungs-
berichte der Wiener Ak., phil-hist. CI, lx, 462.
S, 'Das Lied von dem falschen Rittersmann,'
60 vv, from Styria, Rosegger and Heuberger,
Volkslieder aus Steiermark, No 19, p. 17. T,
'Ulrich und Annchen,' * 49 vv, Herder's Volks-
lieder, 1778,I, 79; Mittler, No 78. U,'Schon
Ulrich und Roth-Aennchen,' 46 vv, in Tasch-
enbuch fiir Dichter und Dichterfreunde, Abth.
viii, 126, 1778, from Upper Lusatia (slightly
altered by the contributor, Meissner) ; Mittler,
No 84. A copy from Kapsdorf, in Hoffmann
and Richter's Schlesische V. L., No 13, p. 27,
is the same, differing by only three words. V,
'Schon-Aennelein,' 54 vv, from the eastern
part of Brandenburg, Erk u. Irmer, 6th Heft,
p. 64, No 56 (stanzas 4-8 from the preceding).
W, 'Schon Ullerich und Hanselein,' twenty-
nine two-line stanzas, from the neighborhood
of Breslau, in Grater's Idunna und Hermode,
No 35, Aug. 29, 1812, following p. 140. The
same in Schlesische V. L., No 12, p. 23,' Schon
Ulrich u. Rautendelein,' with a stanza (12)
inserted; and Mittler, No 81. X, 'Der Al-
brecht u. der Hanselein,' 42 vv, from Natan-
gen, East Prussia, in Neue preussische Pro-
vinzial-Blatter, 2d series, m, 158, No 8. Y,
'Ulrich u. Annle,' nineteen two-line stanzas,
a second Kuhlandchen version, Meinert, p. 66;
Mittler, No 83. Z a, 'Von einem frechen
Rauber, Herr Ulrich geheissen,' nineteen two-
line stanzas, from the Rhine [Longard], No 23,
p. 46. Z b, 'Ulrich,' as sung on the Lower
Rhine, the same ballad, with unimportant ver-
bal differences, and the insertion of one stanza
(7, the editor's ?), Zuccalmaglio, No 15, p. 39;
Mittler, No 82.
The German ballads, as Grundtvig has
pointed out, divide into three well-marked
classes. The first class, embracing the ver-
sions A-F (6), and coming nearest to English
and Dutch tradition, has been found along
the lower half of the Rhine and in Westpha-
lia, or in Northwest Germany; the second,
including G-S (13), is met with• in Swabia,
Switzerland, Bohemia, Moravia, Styria, Car-
* The copies with this title in Simrock, No 6, p. 15, and
in Scherer's Jungbrunnen, No 5 A, and his Deutsche V. L.,
1851, p. 349, are compounded from various texts.
niola, or in South Germany; the third, T-Z
(7), in East Prussia, the eastern part of Bran-
denburg and of Saxony, Silesia, and, again,
Moravia, or, roughly speaking, in North and
East Germany; but, besides the Moravian,
there is also of this third class one version, in
two copies, from the Rhine.
(I.) A runs thus. She that would ride out
with Gert Olbert must dress in silk and gold.
When fair Helena had so attired herself, she
called from her window, Gert Olbert, come
and fetch the bride. He took her by her
silken gown and swung her on behind him,
and they rode three days and nights. Helena
then said, We must eat and drink; but Gert
Olbert said, We must go on further. They
rode over the green heath, and Helena once
more tenderly asked for refreshment. Under
yon fir [linden], said Gert Olbert, and kept
on till they came to a green spot, where nine
maids were hanging. Then it was, Wilt
thou choose the fir-tree, the running stream,
or the naked sword? She chose the sword,
but begged him to take off his silken coat,
"for a maid's blood spirts far, and I should be
sorry to spatter it." While he was engaged
in drawing off his coat, she cut off his head.
But still the false tongue spoke. It bade, her
blow in his horn ; then she would have com-
pany enough. She was not so simple as to do
this. She rode three days and nights, and
blew the horn when she reached her father's
castle. Then all the murderers came running,
like hounds after a hare. Frau Clara [Jutte]
called out, Where is my son? Under the fir-
tree, sporting with nine maids; he meant me
to be the tenth, said Helena.
B is the same story told of a margrave and
Fair Annie, but some important early stanzas
are lost, and the final ones have suffered in-
jury; for the ballad ends with this conceit,
"She put the horn to her mouth, and blew the
margrave quite out of her heart." Here, by a
transference exceedingly common in tradition,
it is the man, and not the maid, that " would
ride in velvet and silk and red gold."
C a has the names Odilia and Hilsinger,
a trooper (reiter). Odilia was early left an
orphan, and as she grew up "she grew into


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
31
the trooper's bosom." He offered her seven
pounds of gold to be his, and " she thought
seven pounds of gold a good thing." We now
fall into the track of A. Odilia dresses her-
self like a bride, and calls to the trooper to
come and get her. They ride first to a high
hill, where she asks to eat and drink, and then
go on to a linden-tree, on which seven maids
are hanging. The choice of three deaths is
offered, the sword chosen, he is entreated to
spare his coat, she seizes his sword and hews
off his head. The false tongue suggests blow-
ing the horn. Odilia thinks "much biding
or blowing is not good." She rides away, and
presently meets the trooper's " little foot-page"
(bot), who fancies she has Hilsinger's horse
and sword. "He sleeps," she says, "with
seven maids, and thought I was to be the
eighth." This copy concludes with a mani-
festly spurious stanza. C b agrees with C a
for ten stanzas, as to the matter, and so far
seems to be C a improved by Zuccalmaglio,
with such substitutions as a princely castle
for " seven pounds of gold." The last stanza
(11),
Und als die Sternlein am Himmel klar,
Ottilia die achte der Todten war,
was, no doubt, suggested by the last of F, an-
other of Zuccalmaglio's versions, and, if genu-
ine, would belong to a ballad of the third class.
D has the name Odilia for the maid, but the
knight, or trooper, has become expressly a
robber (ritter, reiter, rauber). They ride to
a green heath, where there is a cool spring.
Odilia asks for and gets a draught of water,
and is told that at the linden-tree there will
be eating and drinking for them. And when
they come to the linden, there hang six, seven
maids! All proceeds as before. The talking
head is lost. Odilia meets the robber's mother,
and makes the usual reply.*
* Both D and E have attached to them this final stanza:
'Odilia, why are thy shoes bo red?'
'It is three doves that I shot dead.'
This is a well-known commonplace in tragic ballads; and
Grundtvig suggests that this stanza was the occasion of the
story taking the turn which we find in ballads of the third
class.
E resembles 0 closely. Odilia becomes
Schondilg (Schon Odilie), Rauber returns to
Ritter, or Reiter, and the servant-maid bribe
of seven pounds of gold rises to ten tons.f
Schondilg's toilet, preparatory to going off
(6-8), is described with a minuteness that we
find only in the Dutch ballad (12-16). After
this, there is no important variation. She
meets the trooper's three brothers, and makes
the same replies to them as to the mother
in D.
F. The personages here are Linnich (i. e.,
Nellie) and a knight from England. The first
twelve stanzas do not diverge from C, D, E.
In stanza 13 we find the knight directing the
lady to strip off her silk gown and gold neck-
lace, as in the English C, D, E ; but certainly
this inversion of the procedure which obtains
in German C, D, E is an accident arising
from confused recollection. The 14th and
last stanza similarly misunderstands the maid's
feigned anxiety about the knight's fine coat,
and brings the ballad to a false close, resem-
bling the termination of those of the third
class, still more those of certain mixed forms
to be spoken of presently.
(II.) The second series, G-S, has three or
four traits that are not found in the foregoing
ballads. G, which, as well as H, was in print
more than two hundred years before any other
copy is known to have been taken down, be-
gins, like the Dutch Halewijn, with a knight
(Ulinger) singing so sweetly that a maid
(Fridburg) is filled with desire to go off with
him. He promises to teach her his art. This
magical song is wanting only in R, of class
II, and the promise to teach it only in Q, R.
She attires herself splendidly; he swings her
on to his horse behind him, and they ride to a
wood. When they came to the wood there
was no one there but a white dove on a hazel-
bush, that sang, Listen, Fridburg: Ulinger
t One scarcely knows whether this bribe is an imperfect
reminiscence of splendid promises which the knight makes,
e. g., in the Danish ballads, or a shifting from the maid to
the knight of the gold which the elsewhere opulent or well-
to-do maid gets together while the knight is preparing to set
forth; or simply one of those extravagances which so often
make their appearance in later versions of ballads.


32
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
has hanged eleven * maids; the twelfth is in
his clutches. Fridburg asked what the dove
was saying. Ulinger replied, It takes me for
another; it lies in its red bill; and rode on
till it suited him to alight. He spread his
cloak on the grass, and asked her to sit down:
Er sprach sie solt ihm lausen,
Sein gelbes Haar zerzausen.f
Looking up into her eyes, he saw tears, and
asked why she was weeping. Was it for her
sorry husband? Not for her sorry husband,
she said. But here some stanzas, which be-
long to another ballad, J have crept in, and she
is, with no reason, made to ride further on.
She comes to a lofty fir, and eleven maids
hanging on it. She wrings her hands and tears
her hair, and implores Ulinger to let her be
hanged in her clothes as she is.
'Ask me not that, Fridburg,' he said;
'Ask me not that, thou good young maid;
Thy scarlet mantle and kirtle black
Will well become my young sister's back.'
Then she begs to be allowed three cries.
'So much I may allow thee well,
Thou art so deep within the dell;
So deep within the dell we lie,
No man can ever hear thy cry.'
She cries, "Help, Jesu!" "Help, Mary!"
"Help, dear brother I"
'For if thou come not straight,
For my life't will be too late!'
Her brother seems to hear his sister's voice
"in every sense."
He let his falcon fly,
Rode off with hounds in full cry;
With all the haste he could
He sped to the dusky wood.
* The number eleven is remarkably constant in the Ger-
man ballads, being found in O, H, J-L, N-W; it is also the
number in Swedish B. Eight is the favorite number in the
North, and occurs in Danish A-D, H-L, Swedish A, C,
Norwegian G, H; again in German I. German M, X, Dan-
ish F, have ten; Germau A, B, Danish E, Norwegian I,
have nine; German C, D, seven; Danish G has nineteen.
'What dost thou here, my Ulinger?
What dost thou here, my master dear?'
'Twisting a withe, and that is all,
To make a halter for my foal.'
'Twisting a withe, and that is all,
To make a halter for thy foal!
I swear by my troth thus shall it be,
Thyself shalt be the foal for me.'
• Then this I beg, my Fridburger,
Then this I "beg, my master dear,
That thou wilt let me hang
In my clothes as now I stand.'
'Ask me not that, thou Ulinger,
Ask me not that, false perjurer;
Thy scarlet mantle and jerkin black
Will well become my scullion's back.'
His shield before his breast he slung,
Behind him his fair sister swung,
And so he hied away
Where his father's kingdom lay.
H, the nearly contemporaneous Augsburg
broadside, differs from G in only one impor-
tant particular. The "reuter" is Adelger,
the lady unnamed. A stanza is lost between
6 and 7, which should contain the warning
of the dove, and so is Adelger's version of
what the bird had said. The important fea-
ture in H, not present in G, is that the halt is
made near a spring, about which blood is
streaming, "der war mit blut umbrunnenn."
This adds a horror to this powerful scene
which well suits with it. When the maid be-
gins to weep, Adelger asks whether her tears
are for her father's land, or because she dis-
likes him so much. It is for neither reason,
but because on yon fir she sees eleven maids
hanging. He confirms her fears:
'Ah, thou fair young lady fine,
O palsgravine, O empress mine,
French A, B have fourteen, fifteen, Italian ballads still
higher numbers: A, B, C, thirty-six, D, fifty-two, E, thirty-
three, F, three hundred and three.
t This stroke of realism fails only in M, N, R, of this
second class.
} Apparently to a Ribold ballad, of which no other trace
has been found in German. See further on in this volume.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
33
Adelger's killed his eleven before,
Thou 'It be the twelfth, of that be sure.' *
The last two lines seem, by their form, to
be the dove's warning that has dropped out
between stanzas 6 and 7. The maid's clothes
in H are destined to be the perquisite of Adel-
ger's mother, and the brother says that Adel-
ger's are to go to his shield-bearer. The un-
happy maid cries but twice, to the Virgin and
to her brother. When surprised by the broth-
er, Adelger feigns to be twisting a withe for
his falcon.
I begins, like G, H, with the knight's se-
ductive song. Instead of the dove directly
warning the maid, it upbraids the man:
"Whither now, thou Ollegehr ? f Eight hast
thou murdered already; and now for the
ninth!" The maid asks what the dove means,
and is told to ride on, and not mind the dove,
who takes him for another man. There are
eight maids in the fir. The cries are to Jesus,
Mary, and her brothers, one of whom hastens
to the rescue. He is struck with the beauty
of his sister's attire, — her velvet dress, her
virginal crown, " which you shall wear many
a year yet." So saying, he draws his sword,
and whips off his "brother-in-law's" head,
with this epicedium:
'Lie there, thou head, and bleed,'
Thou never didst good deed.
'Lie there, thou head, and rot,
No man shall mourn thy lot.
'No one shall ever be sorry for thee
But the small birds on the greenwood tree.' t
In J, again, the knight comes riding through
* 13 'Ach du schone junkfraw fein,
Da pfalzgravin, du kaiserin!
Der Adelger hat sich vor|ailf getodt,
Du wirst die zwolft, das sei dir gsait.
15 'So bitt mich nit, du junkfraw fein,
So bitt mich nit, du herzigs ein!'
The liebkosung of this murder-reeking Adelger, o'ersized
with coagulate gore, is admirably horrible.
t Nimmersatt (All-begehrend) as interpreted by Meinert,
not Adelger.
} Verses which recur, nearly, not only in Y 17-19, W
27, 28, but elsewhere, as in a copy of ' Graf Friedrich,' Erk'a
Liederhort, p. 41, No 15, st. 19.
the reeds, and sings such a song that Brown
Annele, lying under the casement, exclaims,
"Could I but sing like him, I would give my
troth and my honor!" There are, by mistake,
two § doves in stanza 4, that warn Annele not
to be beguiled, but this error is set right in the
next stanza. When she asks what the dove
is cooing, the answer is, " It is cooing about
its red foot; it went barefoot all winter." We
have here again, as in H, the spring in the
wood, "mit Blute umrunnen," and the lady
asks again the meaning of the bloody spring.
The knight replies, in a stanza which seems
both corrupted and out of place, "This is
where the eleven pure virgins perished." Then
follow the same incidents as in G-I. He says
she must hang with the eleven in the fir, and
be queen over all. Her cries are for her fa-
ther, for Our Lady, and for her brother, who
is a hunter in the forest. The hunter makes
all haste to his sister, twists a withe, and
hangs the knight without a word between
them, then takes his sister by the hand and
conducts her home, with the advice never
more to trust a knight: for all which she re-
turns her devout thanks. ||
K and L are of the same length and the
same tenor as J. There are no names in L;
in K both Annele and Ulrich, but the latter
is very likely to have been inserted by the
editor. K, L have only one dove, and in
neither does the lady ask the meaning of the
dove's song. The knight simply says, "Be
still; thou liest in thy throat!" Both have
the bloody spring, but out of place, for it is
very improperly spoken of by the knight as
the spot he is making for:
§ There is no sense in two doves. The single dove one
may suppose to be the spirit of the last victim. We shall
find the eleven appearing as doves in Q. There is no occa-
sion to regard the dove here as a Waldminne (Vilmar, Hand-
biichleiu fur Freunde des deutschen Volkslieds, p. 57). Cf.
the nightingale (and two nightingales) in the Danish ' Eed-
selille og Medelvold :' see 'Leesome Brand,' further on in
this volume.
|| This ballad has become, in Tubingen, a children's game,
called 'Bertha im Wald.' The three cries are preserved in
verse, and very nearly as in J, M. The game concludes by
the robber smothering Bertha. Meier, Deutsche Kinder-
Reime, No 439.
*
5


34
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
'WLr wollen ein wenig weiter vorwarts faren,
Bis zu einem kiihlen Waldbrunnen,
Der ist mit Blut iiberronnen.' *
L 26-28,17-19.
The three cries are for father, mother,
brother. In K the brother fights with " Ul-
rich " two hours and a half before he can mas-
ter him, then despatches him with his two-
edged sword, and hangs him in a withe. He
fires his rifle in L, to announce his coming,
and hears his sister's laugh; then stabs the
knight through the heart. The moral of J is
repeated in both: Stay at home, and trust no
knight.
M smacks decidedly of the bankelsanger,
and has an appropriate moral at the tail:
animi index cauda! The characters are a
cavalier and a girl, both nameless, and a
brother. The girl, hearing the knight sing
"ein Liedchen von dreierlei Stimmen," which
should seem to signify a three-part song, says,
"Ah, could I sing like him, I would straight-
way give him my honor." They ride to the
wood, and come upon a hazel-bush with three
doves, one of which informs the maid that
she will be betrayed, the second that she will
die that day, and the third that she will be
buried in the wood. The second and third
doves, as being false prophets, and for other
reasons, may safely be pronounced intruders.
All is now lost till we come to the cries, which
are addressed to father, mother, and brother.
The brother stabs the traitor to the heart, f
N is as short as M, and, like it, has no
names, but has all the principal points: the
* K, or the editor, seeks to avoid the difficulty by taking
the last line from the knight, and reading, " Mit Blut war
er umronnen," an emendation not according with the sim-
plicity of ballads. Another Swabian copy, Meier, p. 301,
note, strophe 6, has:
'Wir mtissen zu selbigem Bronnen
Wo Wasser und Blut heraus ronnen.'
t The last verses are these, and not very much worse than
the rest:
Mein Bruder ist ein Jiigersmann,
Der alle Thierlein schiessen kann;
Er hatt' ein zweiscbneidiges Schwerte,
Und stach es dem Falschen ins Hone.
Ihr Madchen alle insgemein,
Lasst each doch diess zur Warnung sein,
Und geht doch mit keinem so falschen
In einen so finsteren Walde.
fascinating song, the dove on the bush, eleven
maids in the fir, the three cries, and the res-
cue by the huntsman-brother, who cocks his
gun and shoots the knight. The reciter of
this ballad gave the editor to understand that
if the robber had succeeded in his twelfth
murder, he would have attained such powers
that nobody after that could harm him.J
O is a fairly well-preserved ballad, resem-
bling G-J as to the course of the story. An-
neli, lying under the casement, hears the
knight singing as he rides through the reeds.
The elaborate toilet is omitted, as in I, J.
The knight makes haste to the dark wood.
They come to a cold spring, " mit Bluot war
er iiberrunnen;" then to a hazel, behind which
a dove coos ominously. Anneh s»ys, Listen.
The dove coos you are a false man, that will
not spare my life. No, says the knight, that
is not it; the dove is cooing about its blue
foot, for its fate is to freeze in winter. The
cloak is thrown on the grass, the eleven maids
in the fir are descried, and Anneli is told she
must hang highest, and be empress over all.
He concedes her as many cries as she likes, for
only the wood-birds will hear. She calls on
God, the Virgin, and her brother. The brother
thinks he hears his sister's voice, calls to his
groom to saddle, comes upon the knight while
he is twisting a withe for his horse, as he says,
ties him to the end of the withe, and makes
him pay for all he has perpetrated in the
wood. He then swings Anneli behind him,
and rides home with her.
P, the other Swiss ballad, has been re-
My brother is a hunting man,
And all the small game shoot he can;
He had a sword with edges two,
And ran the heart of the false man through
Ye maidens now in general,
Let this be warning to you all;
With man so false you never should
Go to so very dark a wood.
} So in Bochholz, Schweizer Sagen, No 14, i, 23, a man
who had killed eleven maids would, if he could have made
np the number twelve, have been able to pass through walls
and mouseholes. Again, a certain robber in Jutland, who
had devoured eight children's hearts, would have acquired
the power of flying could he but have secured one more.
Grundtvig, D. g. F. iv, 16, note.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
35
touched, and more than retouched in places,
by a modern pen. Still the substance of the
story, and, on the whole, the popular tone, is
preserved. Fair Anneli, in the miller's house,
hears the knight singing as he rides through
the rushes, and runs down-stairs and calls to
him: she would go off with him if she could
sing like that, and her clothes are fit for any
young lady. The knight promises that he
will teach her his song if she will go with
him, and bids her put these fine clothes on.
They ride to the wood. A dove calls from
the hazel, "He will betray thee." Anneli
asks what the dove is saying, and is answered
much as in J and O, that it is talking about
its frost-bitten feet and claws. The knight
tears through the wood, to the great peril of
Anneli's gown and limbs, and when he has
come to the right place, spreads his cloak on
the grass, and makes the usual request. She
weeps when she sees eleven maids in the fir-
tree, and receives the customary consolation:
'Weep not too sore, my Anneli,
T is true thou art doomed the twelfth to be;
Up to the highest tip must thou go,
And a margravine be to all below;
Must be an empress over the rest,
And hang the highest of all as the best.'
The request to be allowed three cries is lost.
The knight tells her to cry as much as she
pleases, he knows no one will come; the wild
birds will not hear, and the doves ape hushed.
She cries to father, mother, and brother. The
brother, who is sitting over his wine at the
inn, hears, saddles his best horse, rides furious-
ly, and comes first to a spring filled with locks
of maid's hair and red with maid's blood;
then to a bush, where the knight (Riideli,
Rudolph) is twisting his withe. He bids his
sister be silent, for the withe is not for her;
the villain is twisting it for his own neck,
and shall be dragged at the tail of his horse.
Q resembles the Swabian ballads, and pre-
sents only these variations from the regular
story. The dove adds to the warning "Fair
maid, be not beguiled," what we find nowhere
else, "Yonder I see a cool spring, around
which blood is running." The knight, to re-
move the maid's anxiety, says, " Let it talk;
it does not know me; I am no such murder-
er." The end is excessively feeble. When the
brother, a hunter as before, reaches his sister,
"a robber runs away," and then the brother
takes her by the hand, conducts her to her fa-
ther's land, and enjoins her to stay at home
and spin silk. There are no names.
There is one feature entirely peculiar to R.
The knight carries off the maid, as before,
but when they come to the hazel bush there
are eleven doves that sing this "new song:"
'Be not beguiled, maiden,
The knight is beguiling thee:
'We are eleven already,
Thou shalt be the twelfth.'
The eleven doves are of course the spirits of
the eleven preceding victims. The maid's
inquiry as to what they mean is lost. The
knight's evasion is not ingenious, but more
likely to allay suspicion than simply saying,
"I am no such murderer." He says, "Fear
not: the doves are singing a song that is com-
mon in these parts." When they come to the
spring " where blood and water are running,"
and the maid asks what strange spring is this,
the knight answers in the same way, and per-
haps could not do better: "Fear not: there is
in these parts a spring that runs blood and
water." This spring is misplaced, for it oc-
curs before they enter the wood. The last
scene in the ballad is incomplete, and goes no
further than the brother's exclamation when
he comes in upon the knight: "Stop, young
knight! Spare my sister's life." The parties
in R are nameless.
So again in S, which also has neither the
knight's enchanting song nor the bloody
spring. There are two doves, as in J, stanza
4. The cries are addressed to mother, father,
brother, as in N, and, as in N, again, the brother
cocks his gun, and shoots the knight down ;*
then calmly leads his sister home, with the
warning against knights.
* What will those who are, so troubled about cork-heeled
shoon in 'Sir Patrick Spens' say to the fire-arms in L, N,
S?


36
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
(III.) T, the first of the third series, has
marked signs of deterioration. Ulrich does
not enchant Annchen by his song, and prom-
ise to teach it to her; he offers to teach her
"bird-song." They walk out together, appar-
ently, and come to a hazel, with no dove;
neither is there any spring. Annie sits down
on the grass; Ulrich lays his head in her lap;
she weeps, and he asks why. It is for eleven
maids in the fir-tree, as so often before. Ul-
rich's style has become much tamer:
'Ah, Annie, Annie, dear to me,
How soon shalt thou the twelfth one be!'
She begs for three cries, and calls to her fa-
ther, to God, to her youngest brother. The
last is sitting over the wine and hears. He
demands of Ulrich where she is, and is told,
Upon yon linden, spinning silk. Then ensues
this dialogue: Why are your shoes blood-red?
Why not? I have shot a dove. That dove
my mother bare under her breast. Annie is
laid in the grave, and angels sing over her;
Ulrich is broken on the wheel, and round him
the ravens cry.
There is no remnant or reminiscence of the
magical singing in U. Scbon Ulrich and Roth
Annchen go on a walk, and come first to a
fir-tree, then a green mead. The next scene
is exactly as in T. Ulrich says the eleven
maids were his wives, and that he had thrust
his sword through their hearts. Annie asks
for three sighs, and directs them to God, to
Jesus, and to her youngest brother. He is
sitting over his wine, when the sigh comes
into the window, and Ulrich simultaneously
in at the door. The remainder is very much
as in T.
V differs from U only in the names, which
are Schon-Heinrich and Schbn-Annelein, and
in the "sighs" returning to cries, which in-
voke God, father, and brother.
W begins with a rivalry between Ulrich
* A variety of W, cited in Schlesische Volkslieder, p. 26,
has,
'Ach Ulbrich, Dlbrich, Halsemann, Halsemann,
Lass du mich nur drei Gale schrei'n!'
Qrundtvig, assuming that the name is Ulbrich Halsemann,
would account for the second and superfluous character here
and Hanselein * for the hand of Rautendelein
(Rautendchen). Ulrich is successful. She
packs up her jewels, and he takes her to a
wood, where she sees eleven maids hanging.
He assures her she shall presently be the
twelfth. It is then they sit down, and she
leans her head on his breast and weeps, "be-
cause," as she says, "I must die." His re-
mark upon this, if there was any, is lost. Hoff-
mann inserts a stanza from another Silesian
copy, in which Ulrich says, Rather than
spare thy life, I will run an iron stake through
thee. She asks for three cries, and he says,
Four, if you want. She prefers four, and calls
to her father, mother, sister, brother. The
brother, as he sits over the wine, hears the
cry, and almost instantly Ulrich comes in at
the door. He pretends to have killed a dove;
the brother knows what dove, and hews off
Ulrich's head, with a speech like that in I.
Still, as Rautendchen is brought to the grave,
with toll of bells, so Ulrich is mounted on the
wheel, where ravens shriek over him.
X. Albrecht and Hanselein woo Alalein.
She is promised to Albrecht, but Hansel gets
her. He takes her to a green mead, spreads
his mantle on the grass, and she sits down.
His lying in her lap and her discovery of the
awful tree are lost. She weeps, and he tells
her she shall be "his eleventh." Her cries
are condensed into one stanza:
'Gott Vater, Sohn, Herr Jesu Christ,
Meih jiingster Bruder, wo Du bist!/
Her brother rides in the direction of the voice,
and meets HiLnselein in the wood, who says
Alalein is sitting with princes and counts.
The conclusion is as in T, U, V.
Y has Ansar Uleraich wooing a king's
daughter, Annle, to the eighth year. He
takes her to a fir-wood, then to a fir, a stump
of a tree, a spring; in each case bidding her
sit down. At the spring he asks her if she
[found also in W] by a divarication of Ulrich Halsemann
into Ulrich and Halsemann (Hanslein). Ansar, "bisher
unverstandlicher Vorname des Hitters Uleraich" in Y (Mei-
nert), would equally well yield Hanslein. Might not Halse-
mann possibly be an equivalent of Halsherr t


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
37
wishes to be drowned, and, upon her saying
no, cuts off her head. He has not walked
half a mile before he meets her brother.
The brother inquires where Ulrich has left
his sister, and the reply is, "By the green
Rhine." The conclusion is as in W. Ulrich
loses his head, and the brother pronounces
the imprecation which is found there and
in I*
Z, which takes ns back from Eastern Ger-
many to the Rhine, combines features from
all the three groups. Ulrich fascinates a
king's daughter by his song. She collects her
gold and jewels, as in W, and goes to a
wood, where a dove warns her that she will
be betrayed. Ulrich appropriates her valua-
bles, and they wander about till they come
to the Rhine. There he takes her into a wood,
and gives her a choice between hanging and
drowning, and, she declining both, says she
shall die by his sword. But first she is al-
lowed three cries, — to God, her parents, her
youngest brother. The youngest brother de-
mands of Ulrich where he has left his sister.
"Look in my pocket, and you shall find four-
teen tongues, and the last cut [reddest] of all
is your sister's." The words were scarcely
out of his mouth before Ulrich's sword had
taken off his head. •
The three classes of the German ballad, it
will be observed, have for their principal dis-
tinction that in I the maid saves her own
life by an artifice, and takes the life of her
treacherous suitor; in II, she is rescued by
her brother, who also kills the traitor; in III,
she dies by the villain's hand, and he by her
brother's, or by a public execution. There
are certain subordinate traits which are con-
stant, or nearly so, in each class. In I, A-F,
a choice of deaths is invariably offered; the
maid gets the advantage of the murderer by
persuading him to take off his coat [distorted
in F, which has lost its conclusion]; and, on
her way home, she falls in with one or more
of the robber's family, mother, brothers, ser-
vant, who interrogate her [except F, which,
as just said, is a fragment]. Class II has sev-
* And in 'Der Mutter Finch,' Meinert, p. 246, a ballad
with which Y agrees in the first two and last four stanzas.
eral marks of its own. All the thirteen bal-
lads [CM3], except the last, represent the
knight as fascinating the maid by his singing;
in all but Q she is warned of her danger by
a dove,f or more than one; in all but the
much-abridged M, N, the knight spreads his
cloak on the grass, they sit down, and, ex-
cepting M, N, R, the unromantic service is
repeated which she undertakes in Danish A,
B, D, E, F, H, L, Swedish A, Norwegian A,
B. The bloody spring occurs in some form,
though often not quite intelligible, in H, J,
K, L, O, P, Q. B (also in D, Y). All but
the much-abridged M, N have the question,
What are you weeping for? your father's land,
humbled pride, lost honor? etc.; but this
question recurs in T, U, V, W. The cries for
help are a feature of both the second and the
third class, and are wanting only in Y. Class
III differs from I, and resembles II, in having
the cries for help, and, in the less impaired
forms, T-W, the knight spreads his cloak, lies
down with his head in the lady's lap, and
asks the cause of her tears. Beyond this, and
the changed catastrophe, the ballads of Class
III are distinguished by what they have lost.
Forms in which the story of this is mixed
with that of some other German ballad remain
to be noticed.
A. A ballad first published in Nicolai's
Almanach, n, 100, No 21 (1778), and since
reprinted, under the titles, ' Liebe ohne Stand,'
'Der Ritter und die Kbnigstochter,' etc., but
never with absolute fidelity, in Wunderhorn
(1819), I, 37 (= Erlach, n, 120), Kretzsch-
mer, No 72, I, 129; Mittler, No 89; Erk,
Neue Sammlung, iii, 18, No 14; also, with a
few changes, by Zuccalmaglio, No. 95, p. 199,
as ' aus Schwaben ;' by Erk, Liederhort, No
28, p. 90, as " corrected from oral tradition ;"
and as " from oral tradition," in Erk's Wun-
derhorn (1857), I, 39. Independent versions
are given by Mittler, No 90, p. 83, from Ober-
hessen; Prohle, Weltliche u. geistliche Volks-
lieder, No 5, p. 10, from the Harz; Reiffer-
scheid, No 18, p. 36, from Bokendorf. Erk
refers to still another copy, five stanzas longer
t There is a dove in Z, but Z, as has been said, presents
traits of all three classes.


38
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
than Nicolai's, from Hesse-Darmstadt, Neue
Sammlung, iii, 19, note.
What other ballad is here combined with
Ulinger, it is impossible to make out. The
substance of the narrative is that a knight
rides singing through the reeds, and is heard
by a king's daughter, who forthwith desires
to go with him. They ride till the horse is
hungry [tired]; he spreads his cloak on the
grass, and makes, sans fapon, his usual re-
quest. The king's daughter sheds many tears,
and he asks why. "Had I followed my fa-
ther's counsel, I might have been empress."
The knight cuts off her head at the word, and
says, Had you held your tongue, you would
have kept your head. He throws the body
behind a tree, with Lie there and rot; my
young heart must mourn [no knight, a knight,
shall mourn over thee]. Another stanza or
two, found in some versions, need not be par-
ticularly noticed.
'Stolz Sieburg,' Simrock, No 8, p. 21, from
the Rhine, Mittler, No 88, is another and some-
what more rational form of the same story.
To the question whether she is weeping for
Gut, Muth, Ehre, the king's daughter answers:
'Ich wein um meine Ehre,
Ich wollt gem wieder Umkehren.'
For this Stolz Sieburg strikes off her head,
with a speech like that which we have just
had, and throws it into a spring; then re-
solves to hang himself.*
A Dutch version of this ballad, Le Jeune,
No 92, p. 292 ; Willems, No 72, p. 186 ; Hoff-
mann, No 29, p. 92, has less of the Halewyn in
it, and more motive than the German, though
less romance. "If you might have been an
empress," says the knight, "I, a margrave's
• 'Da 1 yge, feyns Lybchen, unndt fawle,
Meyn jungk Herze muss trawren.'
Nicolai, vv 35, 36,
'Da liege, du Hauptchen, und faule,
Kein Reuter wild dir nachtrauern.'
Simrock, w 35, 36,
are evidently derived from the apostrophe to the murder-
er's head in I, W, Y.
Stolz Syburg is the hero of a very different ballad, from
the Miinster region, Keifferscheid, No 16, p. 32 (also No 17,
and Simrock, No 9, p. 23, 'Stolz Heinrich'). And from
this the name, in consequence of a remote resemblance in the
son, will marry you to-morrow." "I would
rather lose my head than be your wife," re-
plies the lady; upon which he cuts off her
head and throws it into a fountain, saying,
Lie there, smiling mouth! Many a thousand
pound have you cost me, and many pence of
red gold. Your head is clean cut off.
B. The Ulinger story is also found com-
bined with that of the beautiful ballad,' Was-
sermanns Braut.' f (1.) In a Transylvanian
ballad, 'Brautmorder,' Schuster, Siebenbiir-
gisch-siichsische Volkslieder, p. 57, No 54 A,
38 vv, with variations, and p. 59, B, a fragment
of 10 vv; (A in a translation, Bbhme, No 14, p.
61.) A king from the Rhine sues seven years
for a king's daughter, and does not prevail
till the eighth. She begs her mother not to
consent, for she has seen it in the sun that
she shall not long be her daughter, in the
moon that she shall drown before the year is
out, in the bright stars that her blood shall
be dispersed far and wide. He takes her by
the hand, and leads her through a green wood,
at the end of which a grave is already made.
He pushes her into the grave, and drives a
stake through her heart. The princess' brother
asks what has become of his sister. "I left
her on the Rhine, drinking mead and wine."
"Why are your skirts so bloody?" "I have
shot a turtle-dove." "That turtle-dove was,
mayhap, my sister." They spit him on a red-
hot stake, and roast him like a fish. Lines
1-4 of this ballad correspond to 1-4 of Y
(which last agree with 1-4 of Meinert's ' Was-
sermanns Braut') ; 17,18, to Y 5,6 ; 25-34 to
21-30; and we find in verse 22 the stake
through the heart which Hoffmann has inter-
polated in W, stanza 12.
(2.) A Silesian copy of 'Wassermanns
story, may have been taken up by the Rhine ballad, though
it has contributed nothing more. Margaret, a king's daugh-
ter, is wiled away by a splendid description of Stolz Syburg's
opulence. When they have gone a long way, he tells her
that he has nothing but a barren heath. She stabs herself
at his feet.
t 'Wassermans Braut,' Meinert, p. 77; 'Die ungliickliche
Braut,' Hoffmann u. Rich'ter, Schlesische V. L., p. 6, No. 2;
'Kiinigs Tochterlcin,' Erk u. Irmer, vi, 6, No 4; 'Der Was-
sermann,' Erk's Liederhort, p. 50, No 17. (' Die Nixen-
braut,' "Norddeutschland," Zuccalmaglio, p. 192, No 92,
seems to be Meinert's copy written over.)


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
39
Braut,' cod by ffman contributed to Deutsches
Museum, 1852, n, 164, represents the bride,
after she has fallen into the water and has
been recovered by the nix, as asking for three
cries, and goes on from this point like the Ul-
rich ballad W, the conclusion being that the
sister is drowned before the brother comes to
her aid.*
'Nun schiirz dich, Gredlein,' "Forster's
Frische Liedlein, No 66," Bohme, No 53, Uh-
land, No 256 A, which is of the date 1549, and
therefore older than the Nuremberg and Augs-
burg broadsides, has derived stanzas 7-9 from
an Ulinger ballad, unless this passage is to
be regarded as common property. Some copies
of the ballad commonly called ' Miillertucke'
have also adopted verses from Ulinger, es-
pecially that in Meier's Schwabische Volks-
lieder, No 233, p. 403.
A form of ballad resembling English C-F,
but with some important differences, is ex-
traordinarily diffused in Poland. There is
also a single version of the general type of
English A, or, better, of the first class of the
German ballads. This version, A, Pauli,
Piesni ludu Polskiego w Galicyi, p. 90, No 5,
and Kolberg, Piesni ludu Polskiego, No 5, bbb,
p. 70, runs thus. There was a man who went
about the world wiling away young girls from
father and mother. He had already done this
with eight; he was now carrying off the ninth.
He took her to a frightful wood; then bade
her look in the direction of her house. She
asked, " What is that white thing that I see
on yon fir?" "There are already eight of
them," he said, " and you shall be the ninth;
never shall you go back to your father and
mother. Take off that gown, Maria." Maria
was looking at his sword. "Don't touch,
Maria, for you will wound your pretty little
* The remarkable Norwegian ballad of the' Wassermanns
Braut' group, The Nix and Heiemo, Landstad, No 39, p.
350, has not been unaffected by the one we are now occupied
with. There is even a verbal contact between stanza 19,
'Heiemo tenkte meS sjave seg:
Tro mine sma inivar 'ki hjelper meg?'
and Norwegian P, stanza 9, cited by Grundtvig, iv, 4,
Lengji sto Gullbjor, ho tenkte mse seg:
'Kann inkje mi' runinne hjelpe meg?'
t Eolberg's b, h, k, v, x, bb, cc, hh, kk, 11, nn, zz,
hands." "Don't mind my hands, John," she
replied, " but rather see what a bold heart I
have;" and instantly John's head flew off.
Then follows a single stanza, which seems to
be addressed to John's mother, after the man-
ner of the German A, etc.: " See, dear mother!
I am thy daughter-in-law, who have just put
that traitor out of the world." There is a
moral for conclusion, which is certainly a later
addition.
The other ballads may be arranged as fol-
lows, having regard chiefly to tbe catastrophe.
B, Kolberg, No 5, oo: C, rr: D, ccc : E, dd:
F, uu: G, ww: H, t: I, u: J, gg: K, mm:
L, Waclaw z Oleska, p. 483, 2, Kolberg, p:
L*. Kozlowski, Lud, p. 33, No iv: M, Woj-
cicki, I, 234, Kolberg, r: N, Wojcicki, I, 82,
Kolberg, s: O, Kolberg, d: P, ib. f: Q, pp:
R, Wojcicki, I, 78, Kolberg, e: S, Kolberg,
l: T, ib. n: U, Pauli, Pjes'ni ludu Polskiego
w Galicyi, p. 92, No 6, Kolberg, q: V, Kol-
berg, y: W, Wojcicki, n, 298, "J. Lipinski,
Piesni ludu Wielkopolskiego, p. 34," Kol-
berg, ee; X, Kolberg, a: T, ib. z: Z, aa:
AA, qq: BB, w; CC, ddd: DD, m: EE, o:
FF, o: GG, 11: HH, ss: II, ii: JJ, ff: KK,
tt: LL, i: MM, g*. In B-K the woman comes
off alive from her adventure: in O-CC, she
loses her life: in L-N there is a jumble of
both conclusions: DD-MM are incomplete.f
The story of the larger part of these bal-
lads, conveyed as briefly as possible, is this:
John, who is watering horses, urges Cather-
ine, J who is drawing water, to elope with him.
He bids her take silver and gold enough, that
the horse may have something to carry. Cath-
erine says her mother will not allow her to
enter the new chamber. Tell her that you
have a headache, says John, and she will con-
sent. Catherine feigns a headache, is put into
yy, zz, consist of only one or two initial stanzas, containing
no important variation. His aaa, a fragment of six stanzas,
Pauli, p. 147, No 6, Wojcicki, n, 169, though it begins like
the rest, sounds like a different ballad.
The ballad in Wojcicki, i, 38, is allied with the one we
are engaged with, and the two fragments on p. 36, p. 37
with both this and that.
{ Anne in R, LL, and Eolberg's b: Mary in I, U, II:
Ursula, N: both Catherine and Alice, AA. John is found
in all but N, where there is a nameless seigneur.


40
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
the new chamber, and absconds with John
while her mother is asleep.* At a certain
stage, more commonly at successive stages, —
on the high road, K, P, S, DD, II, LL, in a
dark wood, D, P, T, X, Z, DD, EE, at a spring,
D, K, S, T, V, W, X, Y, Z, EE, II, LL, etc.,
— he bids her take off, or himself takes from
her, her "rich attire," D, P, T, V, W, X, Y,
Z, DD, EE, her satin gown, D, T, X, DD, EE,
her French or Turkish costume, K, P, II,
robes of silver, K, shoes, Z, CC, FF, silk stock-
ings, T, corals, D, X, CC, EE, pearls, T, rings,
K, O-T, X, Z, CC-FF, II, LL. In many of
the ballads he tells her to go back to her
mother, B-G, K, L", M, N, Q, S, U, X, Y,
EE, HH-LL, sometimes after pillaging her,
sometimes without mention of this. Cather-
ine generally replies that she did not come
away to have to go back, B, C, D, G, L*, M,
S, U, X, Y, EE, HH, JJ, KK, LL. John
seizes her by the hands and sides and throws
her into a deep river [pool, water, sea]. Her
apron [tress, AA, II, both apron and tress, O,
petticoat, KK] is caught on a stake or stump
of a tree, B, C, G, H, I, O, P, R, T, U, V, "W,
Y, BB, DD, EE, II, JJ, KK [in a bush D].
John cuts it away with axe or sword, G, I,
O, R, T, BB, n, JJ. She cries to him for
help. He replies, " I did not throw you in to
help you out," f B, C, F, P, U, V, W, X, Z,
EE, II. Catherine is drawn ashore in a fish-
erman's net [swims ashore I, J, GGJ.
Catherine comes out from the water alive
in B-N. The brother who plays so important
a part in the second class of German ballads,
appears also in a few of the Polish versions,
B, C, D, and L*, O, P, Q, X, but is a mere
shadow. In B 21, 22, and 0 16, 17, the
brother, who is "on the mountain," and may
be supposed to hear the girl's cry, slides down
• They are expressly said to go off in a carriage in I, O,
Q, T, BB, DD, FF. Still, in I, John says, "Let the black
horse have something to carry under us." In O, T, FF, the
horses have a presentiment of evil to their mistress, and re-
fuse to stir.
t One version of 'The Two Sisters,' Q, has the same
answer:
'I did not put you in with the design
Just for to pull you out again.'
St. 9.
This might be called a formula in Polish ballads : something
a silken cord, which proves too short, and the
girl " adds her tress "! He asks the fishermen
to throw their nets for her. She is rescued,
goes to church, takes an humble place behind
the door, and, when her eyes fall on the young
girls, melts into tears. Her apron catches in
a bush in D: she plucks a leaf, and sends it
down the stream to her mother's house. The
mother says to the father, " Do you not see
how Catherine is perishing?" The leaf is
next sent down stream to her sister's house,
who says to her brother, "Do you not see
how Catherine is perishing?" He rides up a
high mountain, and slides down his silken
cord. Though one or two stanzas are lost, or
not given, the termination was probably the
same as in B, C. In L* 15, O 12, the brother,
on a high mountain, hears the cry for help,
and slides down to his sister on a silken cord,
but does nothing. X does not account for the
brother's appearance: he informs the fisher-
men of what has happened, and they draw
Catherine out, evidently dead. The brother
hears the cry from the top of a wall in P 21,
22; slides down his cord; the sister adds her
tress; he directs the fishermen to draw her
out; she is dead. Instead of the brother on
the wall, we have a mason in Q 27 [perhaps
"the brother on the wall" in P is a mason].
It is simply said that " he added" a silken
cord: the fishermen drew out Catherine dead.
The conclusion is equally, or more, impotent
in all the versions in which the girl escapes
from drowning. In G, I, J, she seats herself
on a stone, and apostrophizes her hair, saying
[in G, I], " Dry, my locks, dry, for you have
had much pleasure in the river!" She goes to
church, takes an humble place, and weeps, in
E, F, G, as in B, C, D. John goes scot-free
in all these. :£ Not so in the more vigorous
of the kind occurs three times in X, four times in B, five
times in P; in other ballads also. In Q 25, Catherine
clutches the river bank, and John pushes away her hands.
Compare 'The Two Sisters,' F 9, further on in this volume.
{ L, L*, M, N, as already said, confuse the two catas-
trophes. John says, in N, " Do you see that broad river'
I will measure its depth by throwing you in." We may as-
sume that he was as good as his word. But Ursula made
her way home through woods and forests, weeping her eyes
out on the way. Kind souls dug a grave for her. The con-
clusion of M is absurd, but need not be particularized. O


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
41
ballads of tragic termination. Fierce pursuit
is made for him. He is cut to pieces, or torn
to pieces, O, P, S, T, Y; broken on the wheel,
L, U, V, W; cleft in two, BB; broken small
as barley-corns, or quartered, by horses, LT, Z;
committed to a dungeon, to await, as we,may
hope, one of these penalties, Q, R. The bells
toll for Catherine [the organs play for her],
and she is laid in the grave, O-W, Y, Z, L, L*.
There are, besides, in various ballads of this
second class, special resemblances to other
European forms. The man (to whom rank
of any sort is assigned only in N *) comes
from a distant country, or from over the bor-
der, in O, Q, R, T, DD, GG, as in English D,
E. The maid is at a window in M, "W, as in
German G, J, M, O, P, Q, etc. In Q 2, John,
who has come from over the border, persuades
the maid to go with him by telling her that in
his country "the mountains are golden, the
mountains are of gold, the ways of silk," re-
minding us of the wonderland in Danish A,
E, etc. After the pair have stolen away, they
go one hundred and thirty miles, O, DD, FF;
thrice nine miles, Q; nine and a half miles, T;
cross one field and another, M, R; travel all
night, GG; and neither says a word to the
other. We shall find this trait further on in
French B, D, Italian B, C, D, F, G. The
choice of deaths which we find in German A-
F appears in J. Here, after passing through
a silent wood, they arrive at the border of the
(red) sea. She sits down on a stone, he on a
rotten tree. He asks, By which death will
you die: by my right hand, or by drowning
in this river f They come to a dark wood in
A A; he seats himself on a beech-trunk, she
near a stream. He asks, Will you throw your-
self into the river, or go home to your mother?
So H, and R nearly.f She prefers death to
returning. Previous victims are mentioned in
has a passage of the sternest theology. While Catherine is
struggling in the water, her father comes by. She cries to
him to saTe her. He says, " My dear Catherine, yon have
loved pleasure too much. Lord Jesus grant you drown!"
Her mother appears, and makes the same reply to her
danghter's appeal. There are stall-copy terminal morals to
many of the ballads.
* W 1, " A lord came riding from his estate to a neigh-
bor."
T, DD, HH. When she calls from the river
for help, he answers, T 22, You fancy you are
the only one there; six have gone before, and
you are the seventh: HH 16, Swim the river;
go down to the bottom; six maids are there
already, and you shall be the seventh [four,
fifth] : DD 13, Swim, swim away,to the other
side; there you will see my seventh wife. J
Other Slavic forms of this ballad resem-
ble more or less the third German class. A
Wendish version from Upper Lusatia, Haupt
and Schmaler, Part I, No 1, p. 27, makes Hil-
zicka (Lizzie) go out before dawn to cut grass.
Holdrask suddenly appears, and says she must
pay him some forfeit for trespassing in his
wood. She has nothing but her sickle, her
silver finger-ring, and, when these are rejected,
her wreath, and that, she says, he shall not
have if she dies for it. Holdrask, who avows
that he has had a fancy for her seven years
(cf. German Y, and the Transylvanian mixed
form B), gives her her choice, to be cut to
pieces by his sword, or trampled to death by
his horse. Which way pleases him, she says,
only she begs for three cries. All three are
for her brothers. They ride round the wood
twice, seeing nobody; the third time Hol-
drask comes up to them. Then follows the
dialogue about the bloody sword and the dove.
When asked where he has left Hilzicka, Hol-
drask is silent. The elder brother seizes him,
the younger dispatches him with his sword.
Very similar is a Bohemian ballad, trans-
lated in Waldau's Bohmische Granaten, n,
25.§ While Katie is cutting grass, early in
the morning, Indriasch presents himself, and
demands some for his horse. She says, You
must dismount, if your horse is to have grass.
"If I do, I will take away your wreath."
"Then God will not grant you his blessing."
He springs from his horse, and while he gives
t The place is high above the water in R 10, 11, as in
English D 9, 29, C 4.
I BB 6, " My mother said that I had seen you; she will
watch me closely," may be an accidental coincidence with
Danish A 7-9, B 6-8, etc.
§ The second, and more valuable, volume of Waldau's B.
G. I have found it impossible to obtain. Keifferscheid cites
the ballad at p. 166.
6


42
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
it grass -with one hand snatches at the wreath
,with the other. "Will you die, or surrender
your wreath?" Take my life, she says, but
allow me three cries. Two cries reached no
human ear, but the third cry her mother heard,
and called to her sons to saddle, for Katie was
calling in the wood, and was in trouble. They
rode over stock and stone, and came to a brook
where Indriasch was washing his hands. The
same dialogue ensues as in the Wendish bal-
lad. The brothers hewed the murderer into
fragments.
A Servian ballad has fainter but unmistak-
able traces of the same tradition : Vuk, Srpske
Narodne Pjesme, I, 282, No 385, ed. 1841;
translated by Goetze, Serbische V. L., p. 99,
by Talvj, V. L. der Serben, 2d ed., u, 172, by
Kapper, Gesange der Serben, n, 318. Mara
is warned by her mother not to dance with
Thomas. She disobeys. Thomas, while danc-
ing, gives a sign to his servants to bring
horses. The two ride off, and when they
come to the end of a field Thomas says,
Seest thou yon withered maple? There thou
shalt hang, ravens eat out thine eyes, eagles
beat thee with their wings. Mara shrieks,
Ah me! so be it with every girl that does
not take her mother's advice.*
French. This ballad is well known in
France, and is generally found in a form re-
sembling the English ; that is to say, the scene
of the attempted murder is the sea or a river
(as in no other but the Polish), and the lady
delivers herself by an artifice. One French
version nearly approaches Polish O-CC.
A. 'Renauld et ses quatorze Femmes,' 44
vv, Paymaigre, Chants populaires recueillis
dans le pays messin, No 31, I, 140. Renauld
carried off the king's daughter. When they
were gone half-way, she called to him that
she was dying of hunger (cf. German A-F).
Eat your hand, he answered, for you will
never eat bread again. When they had come
to the middle of the wood, she called out that
• A few silly verses follow in the original, in which
Thomas treats what he had said as a jest. These are prop-
erly rejected hy Talvj as a spurious appendage,
t 'De achte de soil Helena sin,
De aohte de most he solwer sin.'
German A b 13.
she was dying of thirst. Drink your blood,
he said, for you will never drink wine again.
When they came to the edge of the wood, he
said, Do you see that river? Fourteen dames
have been drowned there, and you shall be
the fifteenth. When they came to the river-
bank, he bade her put off her cloak, her shift.
It is not for knights, she said, to see ladies
in such plight; they should bandage their
eyes with a handkerchief. This Renauld did,
and the fair one threw him into the river.
He laid hold of a branch; she cut it off with «
his sword (cf. the Polish ballad, where the
catastrophe, and consequently this act, is re-
versed). "What will they say if you go back
without your lover?" "I will tell them that
I did for you what you meant to do for me." f
"Reach me your hand; I will marry you Sun-
day."
"Marry, marry a fish, Renauld,
The fourteen women down below."
B. 'De Dion et de la Fille du Roi,' from
Auvergne, Ampere, Instructions, etc., 40 vv,
p. 40, stanzas 15-24, the first fourteen consti-
tuting another ballad.J The pair went five or
six leagues without exchanging a word ; only
the fair one said, I am so hungry I could
eat my fist. Eat it, replied Dion, for you
never again will eat bread. Then they went
five or six leagues in silence, save• that she
said, I am so thirsty I could drink my blood.
"Drink it, for you never will drink wine.
Over there is a pond in which fifteen ladies
have had a bath, have drowned themselves,
and you will make sixteen." Arrived at the
pond, he orders her to take off her clothes.
She tells him to put his sword under his feet,
his cloak before his face, and turn to the pond;
and, when he has done so, pushes him in.
Here are my keys! he cries. "I don't want
them; I will find locksmiths." "What will
your friends say?" "I will tell them I did
by you as you would have done by me."
C. 'Veux-tu venir, bell' Jeanneton,' 32 vv,
} Another version of this double ballad, but much cor-
rupted in the second part, was known to Gerard de Nerval.
See Les Filles du Feu, GSuvres completes, v, 132.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
43
from Poitou and Aunis, Bujeaud, n, 232.
When they reach the water, the fair one asks
for a drink. The man says, incoherently
enough, Before drinking of this white wine I
mean to drink your blood. The stanza that
should tell how many have been drowned be-
fore is lost. Jeanneton, having been ordered
to strip, pushes the "beau galant" into the
sea, while, at her request, he is pulling off her
stockings. He catches at a branch; she cuts
it off, and will not hear to his entreaties.
D. ' En revenant de la jolie Rochelle,' twelve
two-line stanzas, Gagnon, Chansons populaires
du Canada, p. 155. A cavalier meets three
fair maids, mounts the fairest behind him, and
rides a hundred leagues without speaking to
her, at the end of which she asks to drink.
He takes her to a spring, but when there she
does not care to drink. The rest of the bal-
lad is pointless, and shows that the original
story has been completely forgotten.
E. 'Belle, allons nous epromener,' from the
Lyonnais, 28 vv, Chatnpfleury, Chansons des
Provinces, p. 172, is like C, but still more de-
fective. The pair go to walk by "la mer
courante." There is no order for the lady
to strip: on the contrary, she cries, D6sha-
billez-moi, dechaussez-moi! and, while the
man is drawing off her shoe, " la belle avance
un coup de pied, le beau galant tombe dans
l'eau."
F. 'Allons, mie, nous promener,' 32 vv,
Poesies populaires de la France, MS., m, fol.
84, No 16, is like C. The lady asks the man
to pull off her shoes before he kills her. The
man clutches a branch; the woman cuts it
away.
G. 'Le Traftre Noyd,' Chants pop. du Ve-
lay et du Forez, Romania, X, 199, is like E, F.
H. 'La Fillette et le Chevalier,' Victor
Smith, Chants pop. du Velay et du Forez,
Romania, X, 198, resembles the common Pol-
ish ballad. Pierre rouses his love early in the
morning, to take a ride with him. He mounts
heron his horse, and when they come to a lone-
some wood bids her alight, for it is the last of
her days. He plunges his sword into her heart,
and throws her into a river. Her father and
mother come searching for her, and are in-
formed of her fate by a shepherdess, who had
witnessed the murder. The youngest of her
three brothers plunges into the water, ex-
claiming, Who threw you in? An angel de-
scends, and tells him it was her lover. A less
romantic version, described in a note, treats of
a valet who is tired of an amour with a ser-
vant-girl. He is judicially condemned to be
hanged or burned.
'La Fille de Saint-Martin de l'lle,' Bujeaud,
H, 226, has the conclusion of the third class
of German ballads. A mother incites her son
to make away with his wife. He carries her
off on his horse to a wheat-field [wood], and
kills her with sword and dagger. Returning,
he meets his wife's brother, who asks why his
shoes are covered with blood. He says he has
been killing rabbits. The brother replies, I
see by your paleness that you have been kill-
ing my sister. So Ge*rard de Nerval, Les Filles
du Feu, GSuvres Com., V, 134, and La Boheme
galante (1866), p. 79: 'Rosine,' Chants pop.
du Velay, etc., Romania, x, 197.
The ballad is known over all North Italy,
and always nearly in one shape.
A. ' Monchisa,' sixty-four short verses, Ber-
noni, Canti popolari veneziani, Puntata V, No
2. A count's son asks Monchesa, a knight's
daughter, in marriage in the evening, espouses
her in the morning, and immediately carries
her off. When they are "half-way," she
heaves a sigh, which she says is for father and
mother, whom she shall no more see. The
count points out his castle; he has taken thirty-
six maids there, robbed them of their honor,
and cut off their heads. "So will I do with you
when we are there." The lady says no word
till she is asked why she is silent; then re-
quests the count to lend her his sword; she
wishes to cut a branch to shade her horse.
The moment she gets the sword in her hand,
she plunges it into his heart; then throws the
body into a ditch. On her way back, she
meets her brother, whom she tells that she is
looking after the assassins who have killed her
husband. He fears it was she; this she de-
nies, but afterwards says she must go to Rome
to confess a great sin. There she obtains
prompt absolution.


44
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
B. 'La Figlia del Conte,' Adolf Wolf, Volks-
lieder aus Venetien, No 73, a, 34 vv, b, 48
vv. Here it is the daughter of a count that
marries Malpreso, the son of a knight. He
takes her to France immediately. She goes
sixty miles (b) without speaking. She con-
fesses to her brother what she has done.
C. Righi, Canti popolari veronesi, 58 vv, No
94", p. 30. The count's son marries Mam-
presa, a knight's daughter. For thirty-six
miles she does not speak; after five more she
sighs. She denies to her brother having
killed her husband, but still says she must go
to the pope to confess an old sin; then owns
what she has done.
D. 'La Monferrina,' 48 vv, Nigra, Canzoni
popolari del Piemonte, in Rivista Contempo-
ranea, xxIV, 76. The lady is a Monferrina,
daughter of a knight. After the marriage
they travel fifty miles without speaking to one
another. Fifty-two Monferrine have lost their
heads; the bridegroom does not say why. She
goes to the Pope to confess.
E. 'La Vendicatrice,' an incomplete copy
from Alexandria, 18 v v only, Marcoaldi, Canti
popolari, No 12, p. 166, like D, as far as it
goes. Thirty-three have been beheaded before.
F. 'La Inglese,' 40 vv, Ferraro, Canti po-
polari di Ferrara, Cento e Pontelagoscuro, No
2, p. 14. The count's son marries an English
girl, daughter of a knight. She never speaks
for more than three hundred miles; after two
hundred more she sighs. She denies having
killed her husband; has not a heart of that
kind.
G-. 'La Liberatrice,' 24 vv, Ferraro, Canti
popolari monferrini, No 3, p. 4. Gianfleisa is
the lady's name. When invited to go off, she
says, If you wish me to go, lend me a horse.
Not a word is spoken for five hundred miles.
The man (Gilardu) points out his castle, and
says that no one he has taken there has ever
come back. Gianfleisa goes home without
meeting anybody.
'Laura,' Ferraro, C. p. di Pontelagoscuro,
Rivista di Filologia romanza, n, 197, and C.
p. di Ferrara, etc., p. 86, is a mixture of this
ballad with another. Cf.' La Maledetta,' Fer-
raro, C. p. monferrini, No 27, p. 35.
Several other French and Italian ballads
have common points with Renauld, Monchisa,
etc., and for this have sometimes been improp-
erly grouped with them: e. g., ' La Fille des
Sables,' Bujeaud, n, 177 ff. A girl sitting by
the water-side hears a sailor sing, and asks
him to teach her the song. He says, Come
aboard, and I will. He pushes off, and by
and by she begins to weep.* She says, My
father is calling me to supper. "You will
sup with me." "My mother is calling me to
bed." "You will sleep with me." They go
a hundred leagues, and not a word said, and
at last reach his father's castle. When she is
undressing, her lace gets into a knot. He sug-
gests that his sword would cut it. She plunges
the sword into her heart. So ' Du Beau Ma-
rinier,' Beaurepaire, p. 57 f, and Podsies pop-
ulates de la France, MS., m, fol. 59, No
4; 'L'Epe'e Libdratrice,' V. Smith, Chansons
du Velay, etc., Romania, vn, 69, nearly;
also 'II Corsaro,' Nigra, Rivista Conteinpo-
ranea, xxIV, p. 86 ff. In ' La Monferrina In-
contaminata,' Ferraro, C. p. m., No 2, p. 3, a
French knight invites a girl to go off with
him, and mounts her behind him. They ride
five hundred miles without speaking, then
reach an inn, after which the story is the
same. So Bernoni, Puntata rx, No 2. 'La
Fille du Patissier,' Paymaigre, No 30, p. 93,
has the same conclusion. All these, except
'La Fille des Sables,' make the girl ask for
the sword herself, and in all it is herself that
she kills.
The Spanish preserves this ballad in a sin-
gle form, the earliest printed in any language,
preceding, by a few years, even the German
broadsides G, H.
'Romance de Rico Franco,' 36 vv, " Cancio-
nero de Romances, s. a., fol. 191: Cane, de
Rom., ed. de 1550, fol. 202: ed. de 1555, fol.
296 ;" Wolf and Hofmann, Primavera, No
119, n, 22: Duran, No 296,I, 160: Grimm,
p. 252: Depping and Galiano, 1844, n, 167:
Ochoa, p. 7. The king's huntsmen got no
game, and lost the falcons. They betook them-
• So far there is agreement in 'La Fille du Prince,' Pay-
maigre, No 32, p. 106; Poe'sies pop. de la France, MS., ill,
fol. 133.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
45
selves to the castle of Maynes, where was a
beautiful damsel, sought by seven counts and
three kings. Rico Franco of Aragon carried
her off by force. Nothing is said of a rest in
a wood, or elsewhere; but that something has
dropped out here is shown by the correspond-
ing Portuguese ballad. The lady wept. Rico
Franco comforted her thus: If you are weep-
ing for father and mother, you shall never see
them more; and if for your brothers, I have
killed them all three. I am not weeping for
them, she said, but because I know not what
my fate is to be. Lend me your knife to cut
the fringes from my mantle, for they are no
longer fit to wear. This Rico Franco did, and
the damsel thrust the knife into his breast.
Thus she avenged father, mother, and broth-
ers.
A Portuguese ballad has recently been ob-
tained from tradition in the island of St.
George, Azores, which resembles the Spanish
closely, but is even curter: A, 'Romance de
Dom Franco,' 30 vv; B, 'Dona Inez,' a frag-
ment of 18 vv; Braga, Cantos populares do
Archipelago acoriano, No 48, p. 316, No 49,
p. 317: Hartung's Romanceiro, n, 61, 63.
Dona Inez was so precious in the eyes of her
parents that they gave her neither to duke
nor marquis. A knight who was passing [the
Duke of Turkey, B] took a fancy to her, and
stole her away. When they came to the mid-
dle of the mountain ridge on which Dona Inez
lived, the knight stopped to rest, and she be-
gan to weep. From this point Portuguese A,
and B so far as it is preserved, agree very
nearly with the Spanish.*
Certain Breton ballads have points of con-
tact with the Halewyn-Ulinger class, but, like
the French and Italian ballads mentioned on
the preceding page, have more important di-
vergences, and especially the characteristic dis-
tinction that the woman kills herself to pre-
serve her honor. 1. 'Jeanne Le Roux,' Luzel,
• The Astarian romance communicated in two copies by
Amador de los Rios to Jahrbuch fur rom. u. eng. Literatur,
in, 285, No 2, and the Portuguese 'Romance de Romei-
rinha,' Braga, Romanceiro, No 9, p. 24, 'A Romeira,' Al-
meida-Garrett, in, 11, axe not parallels, though they have
been cited as such.
t Magyar Ne'pkoltesi Gyujtemeny. Uj Folyam, sierkesz-
I, 324 ff, in two versions; Podsies pop. de la
France, MS., nI, fol. 182. The sieur La
Tremblaie attempts the abduction of Jeanne
from the church immediately after her mar-
riage ceremony. As he is about to compel
her to get up on the crupper of his horse, she
asks for a knife to cut her bridal girdle, which
had been drawn too tight. He gives her the
choice of three, and she stabs herself in the
heart. La Tremblaie remarks, I have car-
ried off eighteen young brides, and Jeanne is
the nineteenth, words evidently taken from
the mouth of a Halewyn, and not belonging
here. 2. Le Marquis de Coatredrez, Luzel, I,
336 ff, meets a young girl on the road, going
to the pardon of Gudodet, and forces her on
to his horse. On the way and at his house
she vainly implores help. He takes her to the
garden to gather flowers. She asks for his
knife to shorten the stems, and kills herself.
Early in the morning the door of the ch&teau
is broken in by Kerninon, foster-brother of
the victim, who forces Coatredrez to fight,
and runs him through. 3. 'Rozmelchon,' Lu-
zel, I, 308 ff, in three versions, and, 4, 'La Fil-
leule de du Guesclin,' Villemarqud, Barzaz-
Breiz, 6th ed., 212 ff, are very like 2. The
wicked Rozmelchon is burned in his ch&teau
in Luzel's first copy; the other two do not
bring him to punishment. Villemarque's vil-
lain is an Englishman, and has his head cloven
by du Guesclin. 5. 'Marivonnic,' Luzel, I,
350 ff, a pretty young girl, is carried off by
an English vessel, the captain of which shows
himself not a whit behind the feudal seign-
eurs in ferocity. The young girl throws her-
self into the water.
Magyar. Five versions from recent tradi-
tions, all of them interesting, are given in
Arany and Gyulai's collection of Hungarian
popular poetry, 'Molnar Anna,' I, 137 ff,
Nos l-5.f — A, p. 141, No 3. A man, name-
less here, but called in the other versions
tik es kiadjiik Arany Laszlo es Gyulai Pal. Collection of
Magyar Popular Poetry, New Series, Pest, 1872, 2 vols.
Aigner, has blended Nos 4 and 3 (C, A) in 'Martin und
Aennchen,' Ungarische Volksdichtungen, p. 170, and has
translated No 1 (IS), at p. 120, ' Molnar Anna,' in each case
obscuring or omitting one or two traits which are impor-
tant for a comparative view.


46
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
Martin Ajg6, or Martin Sajgo, invites Anna
Miller to go off with him. She refuses; she
has a young child and a kind husband.
"Come," he says; "I have six palaces, and
will put you in the seventh," and persists so
long that he prevails at last. They went a
long way, till they came to the middle of a
green wood. He asked her to sit down in the
shade of a branchy tree (so all); he would
lie in her lap, and she was to look into his
head (a point found in all the copies). But
look not up into the tree, he said. He went
to sleep (so B, D); she looked up into the
tree, and saw six fair maids hanging there
(so all but E). She thought to herself, He
will make me the seventh! (also B, D). A
tear fell on the face of the " brave sir," and
waked him. You have looked up into the
tree, he said. "No, but three orphans passed,
and I thought of my child." He bade her
go up into the tree. She was not used to go
first, she said. He led the way. She seized
the opportunity, tore his sword from its sheath
(so C), and hewed off his head. She then
wrapped herself in his cloak, sprang upon his
horse, and returned home, where (in all the
copies, as in this) she effected a reconcilement
with her husband. B, p. 138, No 2, agrees
closely with the foregoing. Martin Ajg6 calls
to Anna Miller to come with him a long wa)'
into the wilderness (so D, E). He boasts of
no palaces in this version. He calls Anna a
long time, tempts her a long time, drags her
on to his horse, and carries her off. The scene
under the tree is repeated. Anna pretends
(so D, E) that the tear which drops on Mar-
tin's face is dew from the tree, and he retorts,
How can it be dew from the tree, when the
time is high noon? His sword falls out of
its sheath as he is mounting the tree, and he
asks her to hand it to him. She throws it
up (so E), and it cuts his throat in two.
Rightly served, Martin Ajg6, she says: why
did you lure me from home? C, p. 144,
No 4. Martin Sajg6 tells Anna Miller that
he has six stone castles, and is building a
seventh. It is not said that he goes to sleep.
As in A, Anna pulls his sword from the scab-
bard. D, p. 146, No 5. Here reappears the
very important feature of the wonderland:
"Come, let us go, Anna Miller, a long jour-
ney into the wilderness, to a place that flows
with milk and honey." Anna insists, as be-
fore, that Martin shall go up the tree first.
He puts down his sword; she seizes it, and
strikes off his head with one blow. E, p. 137,
No 1, is somewhat defective, but agrees essen-
tially with the others. Martin Ajg6 calls
Anna; she will not come; he carries her off.
He lets his sword fall as he is climbing, and
asks Anna to hand it up to him. She throws
it up, as in B, and it cuts his back in two.
Neus, in his Ehstnische Volkslieder, main-
tains the affinity of ' Kallewisohnes Tod,' No
2, p. 5, with the Ulinger ballads, and even of
his Holepi with the Dutch Halewyn. The
resemblance is of the most distant, and what
there is must be regarded as casual. The same
of the Finnish 'Kojoins Sohn,' Schroter, Fin-
nische Runen, p. 114, 115; 'Kojosen Poika,'
Lonnrot, Kanteletar, p. 279.
In places where a ballad has once been
known, the story will often be remembered
after the verses have been wholly or partly
forgotten, and the ballad will be resolved into
a prose tale, retaining, perhaps, some scraps of
verse, and not infrequently taking up new
matter, or blending with other traditions. Nat-
urally enough, a ballad and an equivalent tale
sometimes exist side by side. It has already
been mentioned that Jamieson, who had not
found this ballad in Scotland, had often come
upon the story in the form of a tale inter-
spersed with verse. Birlinger at one time (1860)
had not been able to obtain the ballad in the
Swabian Oberland (where it has since been
found in several forms), but only a story
agreeing essentially with the second class of
German ballads. According to this tradition,
a robber, who was at the same time a porten-
tous magician, enticed the twelve daughters
of a miller, one after another, into a wood,
and hanged eleven of them on a tree, but
was arrested by a hunter, the brother of the
twelve, before he could dispatch the last, and
was handed over to justice. The object of
the murders was to obtain blood for magical
purposes. This story had, so to speak, natu-


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
47
ralized itself in the locality, and the place
,where the robber's house had been and that
where the tree had stood were pointed out.
The hunter-brother was by some conceived
of as the Wild Huntsman, and came to the
rescue through the air with a fearful baying
of dogs. (Birlinger in Volksthiimliches aus
Schwaben, I, 368, No 592, and Germania, 1st
Ser., v, 372.)
The story of the German ballad P has at-
tached itself to localities in the neighborhood
of Weissenbach, Aargau, and is told with mod-
ifications that connect it with the history of
the Guggi-, or Schongauer-, bad. A rich man
by lewd living had become a leper. The devil
put it into his head that he could be cured by
bathing in the blood of twelve [seven] pure
maidens. He seized eleven at a swoop, while
they were on their way to church, and hanged
them, and the next day enticed away a miller's
daughter, who was delivered from death as in
the ballad. A medicinal spring rose near the
fatal tree. (Rochholz, I, 22.) No pure version
of this ballad has been obtained in the Harz
region, though a mixed form has already been
spoken of; but' Der Reiter in Seiden,' Prohle,
Marchen fur die Jugend, No 32, p. 136, which
comes from the western Harz, or from some
place further north, on the line between Kyff-
hatiser and Hamburg, is, roughly speaking,
only 'Gert Olbert' turned into prose, with a
verse or two remaining. 'Der betrogene Be-
triiger,' from Miihlbach, Miiller's Siebenbiirg-
ische Sagen, No 418, p. 309, has for its hero
a handsome young man, addicted to women,
who obtains from the devil the power of mak-
ing them follow his piping, on the terms that
every twelfth soul is to be the devil's share.
He had taken eleven to a wood, and hanged
them on a tree after he had satisfied his de-
sire. The brother of a twelfth substituted
himself for his sister, dressed in her clothes,
snatched the rope from the miscreant, and ran
him up on the nearest bough; upon which a
voice was heard in the wind, that cried The
twelfth soul is mine. Grundtvig, in his En-
gelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 249, gives his
recollections of a story that he had heard in
his youth which has a catastrophe resembling
that of English C-F. A charcoal burner had
a way of taking up women beside him on his
wagon, and driving them into a wood, where
he forced them to take off their clothes, then'
killed them, and sunk them with heavy stones
in a deep moss. At last a girl whom he had
carried off in this way got the advantage of
him by inducing him to turn away while she
was undressing, and then pushing him into
the moss. Something similar is found in the
conclusion of a robber story in Grundtvig's
Danske Folkeminder, 1861, No 30, p. 108,
and in a modern Danish ballad cited in Dan-
marks gamle Folkeviser, iv, 24, note.**
Another Transylvanian tale, Schuster, p.
433, has a fountain, a thirsty bride, and doves
(two or three) that sing to her, traits which
have perhaps been derived from some Ulinger
ballad; but the fountain is of an entirely dif-
ferent character, and the doves serve a differ-
ent purpose. The tale is a variety of 'Fitch-
ers Vogel,' Grimms, No 46, and belongs to the
class of stories to which ' Bluebeard,' from its
extensive popularity, has given name. The
magician of 'Fitcher's Vogel' and of 'Blue-
beard' becomes, or remains, a preternatural
being (a hill-man) further north, as in Grundt-
vig's Gamle danske Minder, 1857, No 312, p.
182. There is a manifest affinity between
these three species of tales and our ballad
(also between the German and Danish tales
and the Scandinavian ballad of 'Rosmer'),
but the precise nature of this affinity it is im-
possible to expound. 'Bluebeard,' 'La Barbe
Bleue,' Perrault, Histoires ou Contes du temps
passd, 1697, p. 57 (LefSvre), has a special re-
semblance to the German ballads of the second
class in the four calls to sister Anne, which
represent the cries to father, mother, and broth-
er, and agrees with these ballads as to the
means by which the death of the malefactor
is brought about.
Looking back now over the whole field cov-
ered by this ballad, we observe that the frame-
work of the story is essentially the same in
English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian;
in the first class of the German ballads; in
Polish A; in French, Italian, Spanish, Por-
tuguese, and Magyar. The woman delivers


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
49
the compact is an after-thought, and was in-
serted to qualify the improbability. But the
lady's equivocation is quite of a piece with
Memering's oath in 'Ravengaard and Memer-
ing,' Grundtvig, No 13, and King Dietrich's
in the Dietrichsaga, Unger, c. 222, p. 206.*
English A and all the Danish, Swedish, and
Norwegian ballads employ the stratagem of
lulling the man to sleep, but these are not the
only ballads in which the man lays his head
in the woman's lap. This trait is observed
in nearly all German ballads of the second
and third class, in all the well-preserved ones,
and also in the Magyar ballad. With regard
to the German ballads, however, it is purpose-
less (for it does not advance the action of the
drama in the least), and must be regarded as
a relic of an earlier form.f English B-F and
all the French ballads dispose of the traitor
by a watery death. The scene is shifted from
a wood to a sea-coast, pool, or river bank, per-
haps to suit the locality to which the ballad
had wandered. In English B, where, appar-
ently under the influence of other ballads, J the
lady is forced to wade into water up to her
chin, the knight is pushed off his horse when
bending over to give a last kiss for which he
had been asked; in English C-F and French
A, B, the man is induced to turn his face to
save the woman's modesty; in French C-E he
is made to pull off her stockings or shoes, and
then, while off his guard, pitched into a sea or
river. This expedient is sufficiently trivial;
but still more so, and grazing on the farcical,
is that which is made use of in the Dutch bal-
lad and those of the German first class, the
woman's persuading the man to take off his
fine coat lest it should be spattered with her
blood, and cutting off his head with his own
sword while he is thus, occupied. The Span-
ish and Portuguese ballads make the lady bor-
* Memering was required by his adversary to swear that
he knew not of the sword Adelring, and took his oath that
he knew of nothing but the hilt being above ground, which
was accepted as satisfactory. Presently he pulls Adelring
out of the ground, into which he had thrust the blade, and,
being accused of perjury, triumphantly rejoins that he had
■worn that he knew of nothing but the hilt being above ground.
Dietrich does the same in his duel with Sigurd Swain.
t Magyar A is entirely peculiar. Apparently the man
row the knight's knife to remove some of the
trimming of her dress, and in the Italian she
borrows his sword to cut a bough to shade her
horse; for in Italian the halt in the wood is
completely forgotten, and the last half of the
action takes place on horseback. All these
contrivances plainly have less claim to be re-
garded as primary than that of binding the
murderer after he has been put to sleep.
The knight in English A is called an Elf,
and as sueh is furnished with an enchanting
horn, which is replaced by a harp of similar
properties in B, where, however, the male
personage has neither name nor any kind of
designation. The elf-horn of English A is
again represented by the seductive song of the
Dutch ballad and of German G-R and Z.
Though the lady is not lured away in the
Scandinavian ballads by irresistible music,§
Danish A, E, Norwegian A, B, and Swedish
D present to her the prospect of being taken
to an elf-land, or elysium, and there are traces
of this in Danish G and D also, and in Pol-
ish Q. The tongue that talks after the head
is off, in the Dutch ballad and in German A,
B, C, E, is another mark of an unearthly
being. Halewyn, Ulver, Gert Olbert, like the
English knight, are clearly supernatural,
though of a nondescript type. The elf in
English A is not to be interpreted too strictly,
for the specific elf is not of a sanguinary turn,
as these so conspicuously are. He is compar-
atively innocuous, like the hill-man Young
Akin, in another English ballad, who likewise
entices away a woman by magical music, but
only to make her his wife. But the elf-knight
and the rest seem to delight in bloodshed for
its own sake; for, as Grundtvig has pointed
out, there is no other apparent motive for
murder in English A, B, the Norwegian bal-
lads, Danish A, Swedish A, B, or German
lays his head in the woman's lap that he may know, by the
falling of her tears, when she has disobeyed his command
not to look into the tree. This is like 'Bluebeard,' and
rather subtle for a balkd.
} 'Child Waters,' * The Fair Flower of Northumberland.'
§ The murderer has a horn in Swedish C, D, as also in
the Dutch Halewyn and the German A, B, C, B, and the
horn may be of magical power, but it is not distinctly de-
scribed as such.


50
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
A-E.* This is true again, for one reason or
another, of others of the German ballads, of
the French, of most of the Italian, and of the
Hungarian ballads.
The nearest approach to the Elf-knight,
Halewyn, etc., is perhaps Quintalin, in the
saga of Samson the Fair. He was son of the
miller Galin. Nobody knew who his mother
was, but many were of the mind that Galin
might have had him of a "goddess," an elf
or troll woman, who lived under the mill force.
He was a thief, and lay in the woods; was
versed in many knave's tricks, and had also
acquired agreeable arts. He was a great mas-
ter of the harp, and would decoy women into
the wo6ds with his playing, keep them as
long as he liked, and send them home preg-
nant to their fathers or husbands. A king's
daughter, Valentina, is drawn on by his music
deep into the woods, but is rescued by a
friendly power. Some parts of her dress and
ornaments, which she had laid off in her rapid
following up of the harping, are afterwards
found, with a great quantity of precious things,
in the subaqueous cave of Quintalin's mother,
who is a complete counterpart to Grendel's,
and was probably borrowed from Be6wulf.f
This demi-elf Quintalin is a tame personage
by the side of Grendel or of Halewyn. Hale-
wyn does not devour his victims, like Grendel:
Quintalin does not even murder his. He al-
lures women with his music to make them serve
his lust. We may infer that he would plun-
der them, for he is a notorious thief. Even
two of the oldest Danish ballads, B, C, and
again Danish I and Swedish C, make the
• The scenery of the halting-place in the wood — the
bloody streams in Danish A, B, D, H, L, K, the blood-girt
spring in German H, J, K, L, O, P, Q — is also, to say the
least, suggestive of something horribly uncanny. These are
undoubtedly ancient features, though the spring, as the Dan-
ish editor observes, has no longer any signiticancy in the Ger-
man ballads, because in all of them the previous victims are
said to have been hanged.
t The saga in Bjiirner's Nordiska Kampadater, c. 5-7.
X Danish E, I, L, and even A, make the kuight suggest to
the lady that she should get her gold together while he is
saddling his horse ; but this is a commonplace found in other
cases of elopement, and by itself warrants no conclusion as to
the knight's rapacity. See 'Samson,' Grnndtvig, No 6, C
5; 'Ribold og Guldborg,' No 82, C 13, E 14, etc.; 'R«dse-
treacherous knight as lecherous as bloody, and
so with German J, K, L, O, P, Q, R, S, and
Italian A, B, C, E, F. This trait is wanting
in Danish D, where, though traces of the
originally demonic nature of the knight re-
main, the muckle gold of the maids already
appears as the motive for the murders. In the
later Danish E-H, K, L, and Swedish C, D,
the original elf or demon has sunk to a re-
morseless robber, generally with brothers, sis-
ters, or underlings for accomplices. J This
is preeminently his character in English C-
F, in nearly all the forty Polish ballads, and
in the two principal ballads of the German
second class, G, H, though English D, Ger-
man H, and Polish Q retain a trace of the
supernatural: the first in the charm by means
of which the knight compels the maid to quit
her parents, the second in the bloody spring,
and the last in the golden mountains. There
is nothing that unequivocally marks the rob-
ber in the other German ballads of the second
class and in those of the third. The question
'Weinst du um deines Vaters Gut?' in I-L,
O-S, T-W, is hardly decisive, and only in W
and Z is it expressly said that the maid had
taken valuable things with her (as in Swed-
ish D, Norwegian A, B, English D-F). J-L,
O-S, give us to understand that the lady had
lost her honor,§ but in all the rest, except the
anomalous Z, the motive for murder is insuffi-
cient. ||
The woman in these ballads is for the most
part nameless, or bears a stock name to which
no importance can be attached. Not so with
the names of the knight. Most of these are
lille og Medelvold,' No 271, A 21, B 20 ; 272, Bilag 3, st. 8;
270, 18, etc.
§ So perhaps a Polish ballad in Wojcicki, i, 38, akin to
the other John and Katie ballads.
|[ It is well known that in the Middle Ages the blood of
children or of virgins was reputed a specific for leprosy (see,
e. g., Cassel in the Weimar Jahrbiicher, i, 408.) Some have
thought to find in this fact an explanation of the murders
in these ballads and in the Bluebeard stories, and, according
to Kochholz, this theory has been adopted into popular tra-
dition in the Aargau. So far as this cycle of ballads is con-
cerned, there is as much ground for holding that the blood
was wanted to cure leprosy as for believing that the gold was
wanted for aurum potabile.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
51
peculiar, and the Northern ones, though su-
perficially of some variety, have yet likeness
enough to tempt one to seek for a common
original. Grundtvig, with considerable diffi-
dence, suggests Oldemor as a possible ground-
form. He conceives that the R of some of the
Scandinavian names may be a relic of a fore-
going Herr. The initial H would easily come
or go. Given such a name as Hollemen (Dan-
ish 0), we might expect it .to give place to
Halewyn, which is both a family and a local
name in Flanders, if the ballad should pass
into the Low Countries from Denmark, a der-
ivation that Grundtvig is far from asserting.
So Ulinger, a local appellation, might be sub-
stituted for the Ulver of Danish A. Grundt-
vig, it must be borne in mind, declines to be
responsible for the historical correctness of
this genealogy, and would be still less willing
to undertake an explanation of the name Ol-
demor.
In place of Oldemor, Professor Sophus
Bugge, in a recent article, marked by his char-
acteristic sharp-sightedness and ingenuity, has
proposed Hollevern, Holevern, or Olevern as
the base-form of all the Northern names for
the bloody knight, and he finds in this name
a main support for the entirely novel and
somewhat startling hypothesis that the ballad
we are dealing with is a wild shoot from the
story of Judith and Holofernes.* His argu-
ment, given as briefly as possible, is as follows.
That the Bible story was generally known
in the Middle Ages no one would question. It
was treated in a literary way by an Anglo-
Saxon poet, who was acquainted with the
scriptural narrative, and in a popular way by
poets who had no direct acquaintance with
the original.f The source of the story in the
ballad must in any case be a tradition many
• Det philologisk-historiske Samfunds Mindeskrift i Air
ledning af dets femogtyveaarige Virksomhed, 1854-79, Bi-
drag til den nordiske Balladedigtnings Historic, p. 75 fE.
t Bugge cites the Old-German Judith, Mullenhoff u.
Scherer, DenkmaUer, 2d ed., No 37, p. 105, to show how the
Bible story became modified under a popular treatment.
, Holefern might doubtless pass into Halewyn, but there
is not the slightest need of Holefern to account for Halewyn.
Halewyn, besides being a well-known local and family ap-
pellation, is found in two other Dutch ballads, one of which
times removed from the biblical story; that
much should be changed, much dropped, and
much added is only what would be expected.
Beginning the comparison with 'Judith'
with this caution, it is first submitted that
Holofernes can be recognized in most of the
Scandinavian and German names of the
knight. The v of the proposed base-form is
preserved in Ulver, Halewyn, and probably in
the English Elf-knight. It is easy to explain
a v's passing over to g, as in Ulinger, Adelger,
and especially under the influence of the very
common names in -ger. Again, v might easily
become b, as in Olbert, or m, as in Hollemen,
Olmor; and the initial R of Rulleman, Ro-
mor, etc., may have been carried over from a
prefixed Herr. J
The original name of the heroine has been
lost, and yet it is to be noticed that Gert Ol-
bert's mother, in German A, is called Fru
Jutte.
The heroine in this same ballad is named
Helena (Linnich in F); in others (German
C, D, E), Odilia. These are names of saints,
and this circumstance may tend to show that
the woman in the ballad was originally con-
ceived of as rather a saint than a secular char-
acter, though in the course of time the story
has so changed that the devout widow who
sought out her country's enemy in his own
camp has been transformed into a young maid
who is enticed from home by a treacherous
suitor.
It is an original trait in the ballad that the
murderer, as is expressly said in many copies,
is from a foreign land. According to an Eng-
lish version (E), he comes from the north, as
Holofernes does, "venit Assur ex montibus
ab aquilone" (Jud. xvi, 5).
The germ of this outlandish knight's blood-
(Looters and Feys, p. 66, No 38; Hoffmann, p. 46, No 11)
has no kind of connection with the present, and is no more
likely to have derived the name from this than this from
that. It shall not be denied that Adelger, Hilsinger, Rulle-
mann, Reimvord might have sprung from or have been sug-
gested by Holofern, under the influence of familiar termina-
tions, but it may be remarked that Hildebrand, Ravengaard,
Valdemar, Rosmer, if they had occurred in any version,
would have occasioned no greater difficulty.


52
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
thirstiness is found in tbe truculent part that
Holofernes plays in the Bible, his threats and
devastations. That the false suitor appears
without companions is in keeping with the
ballad style of representation; yet we might
find suggestions of the Assyrian's army in the
swains, the brothers, the stable-boy, whom the
maid falls in with on her way home.
The splendid promises made in many of the
ballads might have been developed from the
passage where Holofernes, whose bed is de-
scribed as wrought with purple, gold, and
precious stones, says to Judith, Thou shalt be
great in the house of Nebuchadnezzar, and
thy name shall be named in all the earth (xi,
21).
In many forms of the ballad, especially the
Dutch and the German, the maid adorns her-
self splendidly, as Judith does: she even wears
some sort of crown in Dutch A 16, German
D 8, as Judith does in x, 3, xvi, 10 (mit-
ram).
In the English D, E, F, the oldest Danish,
A, and the Polish versions, the maid, like
Judith, leaves her home in the night.
The Piedmontese castd, Italian E 1 [there
is a castle in nearly all the Italian ballads, and
also in Dutch B], may remind us of Holo-
fernes' castra.
The knight's carrying off the maid, lifting
her on to his horse in many copies, may well
come from a misunderstanding of elevaverunt
in Judith x, 20: Et cum in faciem ejus inten-
disset, adoravit eum, prosternens se super ter-
ram. Et elevaverunt eam servi Holofernis,
jubente domino suo.*
In German A Gert Olbert and Helena are
said to ride three days and nights, and in
Danish D the ride is for three days; and we
may remember that Judith killed Holofernes
the fourth day after her arrival in his camp.
The place in which the pair alight is, ac-
cording to German G 20, a deep dale, and
this agrees with the site of Holofernes' camp
in the valley of Bethulia. There is a spring or
stream in many of the ballads, and also a
• The Old German poem makes Holofernes kindle with
desire for Judith the moment he sees her, and he bids his
men bring her to his tent. They lift her up and bring her in.
spring in the camp, in which Judith bathes
(xii, 7).
Most forms of the ballad make the knight,
after the halt, inform the maid that she is to
die, as many maids have before her in the
same place; e. g., German G 7:
'Der Ulinger hat eylff Jungfrawen gehangen,
Die zwolfft hat er gefangen.' f
This corresponds with the passage in Judith's
song (xvi, 6), Dixit se . . . infantes meos
dare in praedam etvirgenes incaptiv-
i t a t e m: but it is reasonable to suppose that
the ballad follows some version of the Bible
words that varied much from the original.
The incident of the maid's lousing and tous-
ing her betrayer's hair, while he lies with his
head in her lap, may have come from Judith
seizing Holofernes by the hair before she kills
him, but the story of Samson and Delilah may
have had influence here.
According to many German versions, the
murderer grants the maid three cries before
she dies. She invokes Jesus, Mary, and her
brother. Or she utters three sighs, the first to
God the Father, the second to Jesus, the third
to her brother. These cries or sighs seem to
take the place of Judith's prayer, Confirma
me, Domine Deus Israel (xiii, 7), and it may
also be well to remember that Holofernes
granted Judith, on her request, permission to
go out in the night to pray.
The Dutch, Low-German, Scandinavian, and
other versions agree in making the woman kill
the knight with his own sword, as in Judith.
The Dutch and Low-German [also Danish F,
Swedish A] have preserved an original trait
in making the maid hew off the murderer's
head. English and French versions dispose of
the knight differently: the maid pushes him
into sea or river. Perhaps, in some older
form of the story, after the head was cut off,
the trunk was pushed into the water: cf. Ju-
dith xiii, 10: Abscidit caput ejus et . . . evol-
vit corpus ejus truncum. The words appre-
hendit comam capitis ejus (xiii, 9) have their
t It should be observed that these words are from the
dove's warning.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
53
parallel in Dutch A, 33: "Zy nam bet hoofd
al by het haer." The Dutch ballad makes the
maid carry the head with her.
"Singing and ringing" she rode through
the wood: Judith sings a song of praise to the
Lord after her return home.
In English C-F, May Colven comes home
before dawn, as Judith does. The Dutch A
says, When to her father's gate she came, she
blew the horn like a man. Compare Judith
xiii, 13: Et dixit Judith a longe custodibus
murorum, Aperite portas!
The Dutch text goes on to say that when
the father heard the horn he was delighted at
his daughter's return: and Judith v, 14, Et
factum est, cum audissent viri vocem ejus, vo-
caverunt presbyteros civitatis.
The conclusion of Dutch A is that there was
a banquet held, and the head was set on the
table. So Judith causes Holofernes' head to
be hung up on the city wall, and after the
enemy have been driven off, the Jews hold a
feast.
The Icelandic version, though elsewhere
much mutilated, has a concluding stanza which
certainly belongs to the ballad:
Asa went into a holy cell,
Never did she harm to man.
This agrees with the view taken of the hero-
ine of the ballad as a saint, and with the Bible
account that Judith lived a chaste widow
after her husband's demise.
Danish D is unique in one point. The rob-
ber has shown the maid a little knoll, in which
the "much gold" of the women he has mur-
dered lies. When she has killed him, the
maid says," I shall have the much gold," and
takes as much as she can carry off. Compare
with this Holofernes putting Judith into his
treasury (xii, 1),* her carrying off the cono-
poeum (xiii, 10), and her receiving from the
people all Holofernes' gold, silver, clothes,
jewels, and furniture, as her share of the plun-
der of the Assyrian camp (xv, 14). It is,
* Simply because he had no other apartment at his dis-
position. Shall we add, the Polish mother putting her
perhaps, a perversion of this circumstance that
the robber in German G, H, is refused per-
mission to keep his costly clothes.
English D seems also to have preserved a
portion of the primitive story, when it makes
the maid tell her parents in the morning all
that has happened, whereupon they go with
her to the sea-shore to find the robber's body.
The foundation for this is surely the Bible
account that Judith makes known her act to
the elders of the city, and that the Jews go
out in the morning and fall on the enemy's
camp, in which Holofernes' body is lying. In
Swedish C the robber's sisters mourn over his
body, and in Judith xiv, 18 the Assyrians
break out into loud cries when they learn of
Holofernes' death.
In all this it is simply contended that the
story of Judith is the remote source of the
ballad, and it is conceded that many of the
correspondences which have been cited may
be accidental. Neither the Latin text of Ju-
dith nor any other written treatment of the
story of Judith is supposed to have been
known to the author of the ballad. The
knowledge of its biblical origin being lost, the
story would develop itself in its own way, ac-
cording to the fashion of oral tradition. And
so the pious widow into whose hands God gave
over his enemies is converted into a fair maid
who is enticed by a false knight into a wood,
and who kills him in defence of her own life.
A similar transformation can be shown else-
where in popular poetry. The little Katie of
certain northern ballads (see Grundtvig, No
101) is a maid among other maids who pre-
fers death to dishonor; but was originally
Saint Catherine, daughter of the king of
Egypt, who suffered martyrdom for the faith
under the Emperor Maxentius. All the ver-
sions of the Halewyn ballad which we possess,
even the purest, may be far removed from
the primitive, both as to story and as to met-
rical form. New features would be taken up,
and old ones would disappear. One copy has
daughter into the "new room," in which she kept her valu-
ables 3


54
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
preserved genuine particulars, which another
has lost, but Dutch tradition has kept the
capital features best of all.*
Professor Bugge's argument has been given
with an approach to fulness out of a desire
to do entire justice to the distinguished au-
thor's case, though most of the correspondences
adduced by him fail to produce any effect upon
my mind.
The case is materially strengthened by the
Dutch text C (' Roland'), which was not ac-
cessible at the time Bugge's paper was writ-
ten. The name Roland is not so close to Hol-
ofern as Halewyn, but is still within the range
of conceivable metamorphosis. The points of
coincidence between Dutch C and the story of
Judith are these: The woman, first making an
elaborate toilet,f goes out to seek the man,
who is spoken of as surrounded with soldiers;
she is challenged on the way; finds Roland
lying on his bed, which he proposes she shall
share (or lose her life) ; J she cuts off his head,
which, after her return home, she exposes from
her window.§
If this was the original form of the Dutch
ballad, and the Dutch ballad is the source from
which all the other ballads have come, by
processes of dropping, taking up, and trans-
forming, then we may feel compelled to admit
that this ballad might be a wild shoot from
the story of Judith. Any one who bears in
mind the strange changes which stories un-
dergo will hesitate to pronounce this impossi-
* Bugge holds that the ballad was derived by the Scandi-
navians from the Germans, more precisely by the Danes
from a Low German form. This, he says, would follow from
what he has maintained above, and he finds support for his
view in many particular traits of Norse copies. Thus, one of
the Norwegian names for the murderer is Alemarken. The
first three syllables are very near to the Danish Oldemor;
but -ken seems to be the German diminutive suffix, and can
only be explained by the ballad having come from Germany.
t This toilet derives importance solely from the agreement
with Judith x, 3: for the rest it is entirely in the ballad
style. Compare the toilets in ' Hafsfrun,' Afzelius, No 92,
in, 148, Arwidsson, No 150, n,320, Wigstriim, Folkdiktniug,
No 2, p. 11, Landstad, No 55, p. 494: 'Guldsmedens Dat-
ter,' Grundtvig, No. 245, iv, 481 ff, Wigstriim, ib., No 18, p.
37, Landstad, No 43, p. 437: Torkilds Riim, Lyngbye, Far-
eiske Qvseder, 534, 535, Afzelius, in, 202: * Stolts Karin,'
Arwidsson, No 63, i, 388: 'Liti Kerstis hevn,' Landstad, No
67, p. 559 = 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet': in many of
which there is a gold crown. There is a man's toilet in
Grundtvig, No 207, iv, 201.
ble. What poor Ophelia says of us human
creatures is even truer of ballads: "We know
what we are, but know not what we may
be."
But when we consider how much would have
to be dropped, how much to be taken up, and
how much to be transformed, before the He-
brew "gest" could be converted into the
European ballad, we naturally look for a less
difficult hypothesis. It is a supposition at-
tended with less difficulty that an indepen-
dent European tradition existed of a half-
human, half-demonic being, who possessed an
irresistible power of decoying away young
maids, and was wont to kill them after he got
them into his hands, but who at last found
one who was more than his match, and lost
his own life through her craft and courage.
A modification of this story is afforded by the
large class of Bluebeard tales. The Quin-
talin story seems to be another variety, with
a substitution of lust for bloodthirst. The
Dutch ballad may have been affected by some
lost ballad of Holofern, and may have taken
up some of its features, at least that of carry-
ing home Halewyn's [Roland's] head, which
is found in no other version. ||
A a is translated by Grundtvig in Engelske
og skotske Folkeviser, No 37, p. 230: B b in
the same, No 36, p. 227: C a, b, D a, b,
blended, No 35, p. 221. A, by Rosa Warrens,
Schottische V. L. der Vorzeit, No 1, p. 1:
Gerhard, p. 15. C b, by Rosa Warrens, No
} Bugge would naturally have seen the Assyrian scouts
that Judith falls in with (x, 11) in Roland's father, mother,
and brother, all of whom hail the maid as she is making
for Roland's quarters (C 30-38); still more " Holofernes ja-
cebat in lecto" (xiii, 4), in " Roland die op zijn bedde log,"
C 39.
§ Judith xiv, 1: "Suspendite caput hoc super muros
nostros." The cutting off and bringing home of the head, as
need hardly be said, is not of itself remarkable, being found
everywhere from David to Beowulf, and from Beowulf to
'Sir Andrew Barton.'
|| Dutch B, which, as before said, has been completely re-
written, makes the comparison with Holofernes:
34 'Ik heb van't leven hem beroofd,
in mynen schoot heb ik zyn hoofd,
hy is als Holofernes gelooft.'
37 Zy reed dan voort als Judith wys,
zoo regt nae haer vaders paleis,
daer zy wierd ingehaeld met eer en prys.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
55
34, p. 148: Wolf, Halle der Volker, I, 38, ham, p. 244, by Knortz, Lied. u. Rom. Alt-
Hausschatz, 225. C, D, etc., as in Alling- Englands, No 4, p. 14.
A
a. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, i, 22. b.
Motherwell's MS., p. 563.
1 Fair lady Isabel sits in her bower sewing,
Aye as the gowans grow gay
There she heard an elf-knight blawing his horn.
The first morning in May
2 'If I had yon horn that I hear blawing,
And yon elf-knight to sleep in my bosom.'
3 This maiden had scarcely these words spoken,
Till in at her window the elf-knight has luppen.
4 'It's a very strange matter, fair maiden,' said
he,
'I canna blaw my horn but ye call on me.
5 'But will ye go to yon greenwood side?
If ye canna gang, I will cause you to ride.'
6 He leapt on a horse, and she on another,
And they rode on to the greenwood together.
7 'Light down, light down, lady Isabel,' said he,
'We are come to the place where ye are to
die.'
8 'Hae mercy, hae mercy, kind sir, on me,
Till ance my dear father and mother I see.'
9 'Seven king's-daughters here hae I slain,
And ye shall be the eight o them.'
10 'O sit down a while, lay your head on my
knee,
That we may hae some rest before that I die.'
11 She stroakd him sae fast, the nearer he did
creep,
Wi a sma charm she lulld him fast asleep.
12 Wi his ain sword-belt sae fast as she ban him,
Wi his ain dag-durk sae sair as she dang him.
13 'If seven king's-daughters here ye hae slain,
Lye ye here, a husband to them a'.'
B
a. Buchan's MSS, ir, fol. 80. b. Buchan's Ballads of
the North of Scotland, n, 201. c. Motherwell's MS., p. 561.
d. Harris MS., No 19.
1 Theke came a bird out o a bush,
On water for to dine,
An sighing sair, says the king's daughter,
'O wae's this heart o mine!'
2 He's taen a harp into his hand,
He's harped them all asleep,
Except it was the king's daughter,
Who one wink couldna get.
3 He's luppen on his berry-brown steed,
Taen 'er on behind himsell,
Then baith rede down to that water
That they ca Wearie's Well.
4 'Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,
No harm shall thee befall;
Oft times I've watered my steed
Wi the waters o Wearie's Well.'
5 The first step that she stepped in,
She stepped to the knee;
And sighend says this lady fair,
'This water's nae for me.'
6 'Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,
No harm shall thee befall;
Oft times I've watered my steed
Wi the water o Wearie's Well.'
7 The next step that she stepped in,
She stepped to the middle;
'O,' sighend says this lady fair,
I've wat my gowden girdle.'


56
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
8 'Wide in, wide in, my lady fair,
No harm shall thee befall;
Oft times have I watered my steed
Wi the water o Wearie's Well.'
9 The next step that she stepped in,
She stepped to the chin;
'O,' sighend says this lady fair,
'They sud gar twa loves twin.'
10 'Seven king's-daughters I've drownd there,
In the water o Wearie's Well,
And I 'll make you the eight o them,
And ring the common bell.'
11 'Since I am standing here,' she says,
'This dowie death to die,
One kiss o your comely mouth
I'm sure wad comfort me.'
12 He louted him oer his saddle bow,
To kiss her cheek and chin;
She's taen him in her arms twa,
An thrown him headlong in.
13 'Since seven king's daughters ye've drowned
there,
In the water o Wearie's Well,
I'll make you bridegroom to them a',
An ring the bell mysell.'
14 And aye she warsled, and aye she swam,
And she swam to dry lan;
She thanked God most cheerfully
The dangers she oercame.
o
a. Herd's MSS, i, 166. b. Herd's Ancient and Modern
Scottish Songs, 1776, i, 93. c. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p.
67, =b "collated with a copy obtained from recitation."
1 False Sir John a wooing came
To a maid of beauty fair;
May Colven was this lady's name,
Her father's only heir.
2 He wood her butt, he wood her ben,
He wood her in the ha,
Until he got this lady's consent
To mount and ride awa.
3 He went down to her father's bower,
Where all the steeds did stand,
And he's taken one of the best steeds
That was in her father's land.
4 He's got on and she's got on,
And fast as they could flee,
Until they came to a lonesome part,
A rock by the side of the sea.
5 'Loup off the steed,' says false Sir John,
'Your bridal bed you see;
For I have drowned seven young ladies,
The eight one you shall be.
6 'Cast off, cast off, my May Colven,
All and your silken gown,
For it's oer good and oer costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.
7 'Cast off, cast off, my May Colven,
All and your embroiderd shoen,
For they 're oer good and oer costly
To rot in the salt sea foam.'
8 'O turn you about, O false Sir John,
And look to the leaf of the tree,
For it never became a gentleman
A naked woman to see.'
9 He turnd himself straight round about,
To look to the leaf of the tree;
So swift as May Colven was
To throw him in the sea.
10 'O help, O help, my May Colven,
O help, or else I 'll drowji;
I 'll take you home to your father's bower,
And set you down safe and sound.'
11 'No help, no help, O false Sir John,
No help, nor pity thee;
Tho seven king's-daughters you have drownd,
But the eight shall not be me.'
12 So she went on her father's steed,
As swift as she could flee,
And she came home to her father's bower
Before it was break of day.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
13 Up then and spoke the pretty parrot:
'May Colven, where have you been?
What has become of false Sir John,
That woo'd you so late the streen?
14 'He woo'd you butt, he woo'd you ben,
He woo'd you in the ha,
Until he got your own consent
For to mount and gang awa.'
15 'O hold your tongue, my pretty parrot,
Lay not the blame upon me;
Your cup shall be of the flowered gold,
Your cage of the root of the tree.'
16 Up then spake the king himself,
In the bed-chamber where he lay:
'What ails the pretty parrot,
That prattles so long or day?'
17 'There came a cat to my cage door,
It almost a worried me,
And I was calling on May Colven
To take the cat from me.'
a. Sharpe's Ballad Book (1823), No 17, p. 45. b. Bu-
chan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, n,45. c. Mother-
well's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. 21, No. xxiv, one stanza.
1 O heard ye of a bloody knight,
Lived in the south country?
For he has betrayed eight ladies fair
And drowned them in the sea.
2 Then next he went to May Collin,
She was her father's heir,
The greatest beauty in the land,
I solemnly declare.
3 'I am a knight of wealth and might,
Of townlands twenty-three;
And you 'll be lady of them all,
If you will go with me.'
4 'Excuse me, then, Sir John,' she says;
'To wed I am too young;
Without I have my parents' leave,
With you I darena gang.'
5 'Your parents' leave you soon shall have,
In that they will agree;
For I have made a solemn vow
This night you'll go with me.'
6 From below his arm he pulled a charm,
And stuck it in her sleeve,
And he has made her go with him,
Without her parents' leave.
7 Of gold and silver she has got
With her twelve hundred pound,
And the swiftest steed her father had
She has taen to ride upon.
8 So privily they went along,
They made no stop or stay,
Till they came to the fatal place
That they call Bunion Bay.
9 It being in a lonely place,
And no house there was nigh,
The fatal rocks were long and steep,
And none could hear her cry.
10 'Light down,' he said, 'fair May Collin,
Light down and speak with me,
For here I've drowned eight ladies fair,
And the ninth one you shall be.'
11 'Is this your bowers and lofty towers,
So beautiful and gay?
Or is it for my gold,' she said,
'You take my life away?'
12 'Strip off,' he says, ' thy jewels fine,
So costly and so brave,
For they are too costly and too fine
To throw in the sea wave.'
13 'Take all I have my life to save,
O good Sir John, I pray;
Let it neer be said you killed a maid
Upon her wedding day.'
14 'Strip off,' he says, ' thy Holland smock,
That's bordered with the lawn,
For it's too costly and too fine
To rot in the sea sand.'
8


58
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
15 'O turn about, Sir John,' she said,
'Your back about to me,
For it never was comely for a man
A naked woman to see.'
16 But as he turned him round about,
She threw him in the sea,
Saying, ' Lie you there, you false Sir John,
Where you thought to lay me.
17 'O lie you there, you traitor false,
Where you thought to lay me,
For though you stripped me to the skin,
Your clothes you've got with thee.'
18 Her jewels fine she did put on,
So costly, rich and brave,
And then with speed she mounts his steed,
So well she did behave.
19 That lady fair being void of fear,
Her steed being swift and free,
And she has reached her father's gate
Before the clock struck three.
20 Then first she called the stable groom,
He was her waiting man;
Soon as he heard his lady's voice
He stood with cap in hand.
21 'Where have you been, fair May Collin?
Who owns this dapple grey?'
'It is a found one,' she replied,
'That I got on the way.'
22 Then out bespoke the wily parrot
Unto fair May Collin:
'What have you done with false Sir John,
That went with you yestreen?'
23 'O hold your tongue, my pretty parrot,
And talk no more to me,
And where you had a meal a day
O now you shall have three.'
24 Then up bespoke her father dear,
From his chamber where he lay:
'What aileth thee, my pretty Poll,
That you chat so long or day?'
25 'The cat she came to my cage-door,
The thief I could not see,
And I called to fair May Collin,
To take the cat from me.'
26 Then first she told her father dear
The deed that she had done,
And next she told her mother dear
Concerning false Sir John.
27 'If this be true, fair May Collin,
That you have told to me,
Before I either eat or drink
This false Sir John I 'll see.'
28 Away they went with one consent,
At dawning of the day,
Until they came to Carline Sands,
And there his body lay.
29 His body tall, by that great fall,
By the waves tossed to and fro,
The diamond ring that he had on
Was broke in pieces two.
30 And they have taken up his corpse
To yonder pleasant green,
And there they have buried false Sir John,
For fear he should be seen.
E
J. H. Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the
Peasantry of England, p. 74.
1 An outlandish knight came from the north
lands,
And he came a-wooing to me;
He told me he'd take me unto the north lands,
And there he would marry me.
2 'Come, fetch me some of your father's gold,
And some of your mother's fee,
And two of the best nags out of the stable,
Where they stand thirty and three.'
3 She fetched him some of her father's gold,
And some of her mother's fee,
And two of the best nags out of the stable,
Where they stood thirty and three.


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
59
4 She mounted her on her milk-white steed,
He on the dapple grey;
They rode till they came unto the sea-side,
Three hours before it was day.
5 'Light off, light off thy milk-white steed,
And deliver it unto me;
Six pretty maids have I drowned here,
And thou the seventh shalt be.
6 'Pull off, pull off thy silken gown,
And deliver it unto me;
Methinks it looks too rich and too gay
To rot in the salt sea.
7 'Pull off, pull off thy silken stays,
And deliver them unto me;
Methinks they are too fine and gay
To rot in the salt sea.
8 'Pull off, pull off thy Holland smock,
And deliver it unto me;
Methinks it looks too rich and gay
To rot in the salt sea.'
9 'If I must pull off my Holland smock,
Pray turn thy back unto me;
For it is not fitting that such a ruffian
A naked woman should see.'
10 He turned his back towards her
And viewed the leaves so green;
She catched him round the middle so small,
And tumbled him into the stream.
11 He dropped high and he dropped low,
Until he came to the side;
'Catch hold of my hand, my pretty maiden,
And I will make you my bride.'
12 'Lie there, lie there, you false-hearted man,
Lie there instead of me;
Six pretty maids have you drowned here,
And the seventh has drowned thee.'
13 She mounted on her milk-white steed,
And led the dapple grey;
She rode till she came to her own father's hall,
Three hours before it was day.
14 The parrot being in the window so high,
Hearing the lady, did say,
'I'm afraid that some ruffian has led you
astray,
That you have tarried so long away.'
15 'Don't prittle nor prattle, my pretty parrot,
Nor tell no tales of me;
Thy cage shall be made of the glittering gold,
Although it is made of a tree.'
16 The king being in the chamber so high,
And hearing the parrot, did say,
'What ails you, what ails you, my pretty parrot,
That you prattle so long before day?'
17 'It's no laughing matter,' the parrot did say,
'That so loudly I call unto thee,
For the cats have got into the window so high,
And I'm afraid they will have me.'
18 'Well turned, well turned, my pretty parrot,
Well turned, well turned for me;
Thy cage shall be made of the glittering gold,
And the door of the best ivory.'
P
Roxburghe Ballads, m, 449.
1 'Go fetch me some of your father's gold,
And some of your mother's fee,
And I 'll carry you into the north land,
And there I 'll marry thee.'
2 She fetchd him some of her father's gold,
And some of her mother's fee;
She carried him into the stable,
Where horses stood thirty and three.
3 She leapd on a milk-white steed,
And he on a dapple-grey;
They rode til they came to a fair river's
side,
Three hours before it was day.
4 'O light, O light, you lady gay,
O light with speed, I say,
For six knight's daughters have I drowned
here,
And you the seventh must be.'


60
4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
5 'Go fetch the sickle, to crop the nettle
That grows so near the brim,
For fear it should tangle my golden locks,
Or freckle my milk-white skin.'
6 He fetchd the sickle, to crop the nettle
That grows so near the brim,
And with all the strength that pretty Polly had
She pushd the false knight in.
7 'Swim on, swim on, thou false knight,
And there bewail thy doom,
For I don't think thy cloathing too good
To lie in a watry tomb.'
8 She leaped on her milk-white steed,
She led the dapple grey;
She rid till she came to her father's house,
Three hours before it was day.
A. Burden. Song xix of Forbes's ' Cantus,' Aber-
deen, 1682, 3d ed., has, as pointed out by
Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p. Ix, nearly the same
burden: The gowans are gay, The first morn-
ing of May. And again, a song in the Tea
Table Miscellany, as remarked by Buchan,
There gowans are gay, The first morning of
May: p. 404 of the 12th ed., London, 1763.
b. No doubt furnished to Motlierwell by Buchan,
as a considerable number of ballads in this
part of his MS. seem to ha ve been.
32. Then in. 81. kind sir, said she.
102. That we may some rest before I die.
II1. the near. 132. to them ilk ane.
1 is given by Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p. Ix,
but apparently to improve metre and secure
rhyme, thus:
Lady Isabel sits in her bouir sewing,
She heard an elf-knight his horn blowing.
B b. Buchan's printed copy differs from the man-
uscript very slightly, except in spelling.
4", 6'. Aft times hae I.
5'. And sighing sair says. 7*, 9s. And sigh-
ing says.
142. Till she swam. 14*. Then thanked. 144.
she'd.
9 'Who knocked so loudly at the ring?'
The parrot he did say;
'O where have you been, my pretty Polly,
All this long summer's day?'
10 'O hold your tongue, parrot,
Tell you no tales of me;
Your cage shall be made of beaten gold,
Which is now made of a tree.'
11 O then bespoke her father dear,
As he on his bed did lay:
'O what is the matter, my parrot,
That you speak before it is day?'
12 'The cat's at my cage, master,
And sorely frighted me,
And I calld down my Polly
To take the cat away.'
c. Like A b, derived by Motherwell from Buchan.
41, 61, 81. wade in, wade in.
14*. And thanked.
Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of An-
cient Ballads, p. 63, printing B from the man-
uscript, makes one or two trivial changes.
d is only this fragment.
4* Mony a time I rade wi my brown foal
The water o Wearie's Wells.
'Leave aff, leave aff your gey mantle,
It's a' gowd but the hem;
Leave aff, leave [aff], it's far owre gude
To weet i the saut see faem.'
5 She wade in, an he rade in,
Till it took her to the knee;
Wi sighin said that lady gay
'Sic wadin's no for me.'
# # * *
9 He rade in, and she wade in,
Till it took her to the chin;
Wi sighin said that ladie gay
'I 'll wade nae farer in.'
10* 'Sax king's dochters I hae drowned,
An the seventh you sall be.'
# * * *


4. LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF-KNIGHT
61
13 'Lie you there, you fause young man,
Where you thought to lay me.'
b. The printed copy follows the manuscript with
only very trifling variations: Colvin for Col-
Yen; 131, up then spak; 164, ere day; 172, al-
most worried.
21,2. he's courted. 2s. Till once he got.
Between 2 and 3 is inserted:
She's gane to her father's coffers,
Where all his money lay,
And she's taken the red, and she's left
the white,
And so lightly as she tripped away.
31 She's gane down to her father's stable,
* And she's taken the best, and she's left
the warst.
4 He rode on, and she rode on,
They rode a long summer's day,
Until they came to a broad river,
An arm of a lonesome sea.
5** 'For it's seven king's daughters I have
drowned here,
And the eighth I 'll out make with
thee.'
61** 'Cast off, cast off your silks so fine,
And lay them on a stone.'
71A' 'Cast off, cast off your holland smock,
And lay it on this stone,
For it 's too fine.' . .
9W She's twined her arms about his waist,
And thrown him into
101,2 'O hold a grip of me, May Colvin,
For fear that I should'
* father's gates 4 and safely I 'll set you
down.
11 'O lie you there, thou false Sir John,
O lie you there,' said she,
'For you lie not in a caulder bed
Than the ane you intended for me.'
12s. father's gates. *. At the breaking of the
day.
13*. yestreen.
Between 13 and 14 is inserted:
Up then spake the pretty parrot,
In the bonnie cage where it lay:
'O what hae ye done with the false Sir
John,
That he behind you does stay?'
151.' 'Your cage will be made of the beaten
gold,
And the spakes of ivorie.'
171.2 'It was a cat cam . . .
I thought't would have' . . .
D a. 21. Colin.
b. Buchan's copy makes many slight changes
which are not noticed here.
I2. west countrie.
After 1 is inserted:
All ladies of a gude account
As ever yet were known;
This traitor was a baron knight,
They calld him fause Sir John.
After 2:
'Thou art'the darling of my heart,
I say, fair May Colvin,
So far excells thy beauties great
That ever I hae seen.'
32. Hae towers, towns twenty three.
72. five hunder. 7s. The best an steed.
8*. fatal end. 8*. Binyan's Bay.
122. rich and rare. 12*. sea ware.
After 12:
Then aff she's taen her jewels fine,
And thus she made her moan:
'Hae mercy on a virgin young,
I pray you, gude Sir John.'
'Cast aff, cast aff, fair May Colvin,
Your gown and petticoat,
For they 're too costly and too fine
To rot by the sea rock.'
134. Before her. 144. to toss. 18s. her steed.
23*. What hast thou made o fause.
28s. Charlestown sands. Sharpe thinks Car-


62
5. GIL BRENTON
line Sands means Carlinseugh Sands on the
coast of Forfarshire.
After 30:
Ye ladies a', wherever you be.
That read this mournful song,
I pray you mind on May Colvin,
And think on fause Sir John.
Aff they've taen his jewels fine,
To keep in memory;
And sae I end my mournful sang
And fatal tragedy.
o. Motherwell's one stanza is:
O heard ye eer o a bloody knight
That livd in the west countrie?
For he has stown seven ladies fair,
And drownd them a' in the sea.
E. 3s. of the. 17s. But so.
GIL BRENTON
A. a. 'Gil Brenton,' Jamieson Brown MS., fol. 34.
b. ' Chil Brenton,' William Tytler Brown MS., No 3.
B. 'Cospatrick,' Scott's Minstrelsy, n, 117 (1802).
C. 'We were sisters, we were seven,' Cromek's Re-
mains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, p. 207.
D. 'Lord Dingwall,' Buchan's Ballads of the North
of Scotland, i, 204.
E. Elizabeth Cochrane's song-book, No 112.
F. a. 'Lord Brangwill,' Motherwell's MSS, p. 219.
b. 'Lord Bengwill,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ap-
pendix, p. xvi.
G. 'Bothwcll,' Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots
Songs, p. 244.
H. Kinloch MSS, v, 335.
Eight copies of this ballad are extant, four
of them hitherto unpublished. A a, No 16 in
the Jamieson-Brown MS., is one of twenty bal-
lads written down from the recitation of Mrs
Brown of Falkland, by her nephew, Robert
Scott, in 1783, or shortly before. From these
twenty thirteen were selected, and, having
first been revised by Mrs. Brown, were sent,
with two others, to William Tytler in the year
just mentioned. William Tytler's MS. has
disappeared, but a list of the ballads which it
contained, with the first stanza of each, is given
by Dr Anderson, in Nichols's Illustrations of
the Literary History of the Eighteenth Cent-
ury, vn, 176. B is the 'Cospatrick' of the
Border Minstrelsy, described by Scott as taken
down from the recitation of a lady (known to
be Miss Christian Rutherford, his mother's
sister) "with some stanzas transferred from
Herd's copy, and some readings adopted from
a copy in Mrs Brown's manuscript under the
title of Child Brenton," that is, from A b.
C purports to be one of a considerable num-
ber of pieces, "copied from the recital of a
peasant-woman of Galloway, upwards of ninety
years of age." Though overlaid with verses of
Cunningham's making (of which forty or fifty
may be excided in one mass) and though re-
touched almost everywhere, both the ground-
work of the story and some genuine lines
remain unimpaired. The omission of most of
the passage referred to, and the restoration of.
the stanza form, will give us, perhaps, a tiling
of shreds and patches, but still a ballad as
near to genuine as some in Percy's Reliques
or even Scott's Minstrelsy. D and F are
(the former presumably, the second certainly)
from recitation of the first quarter of this


5. GIL BRENTON
63
century. E is one of the few ballads in Eliz-
abeth Cochrane's song-book, and probably of
the first half of the last century. G, the ear-
liest printed form of the ballad, appeared in
Herd's first collection, in the year 1769. H
was taken down from recitation by the late
Dr Hill Burton in his youth.
A, B, and C agree in these points: A bride,
not being a maid, looks forward with alarm
to her wedding night, and induces her bower-
woman to take her place for the nonce. The
imposture is detected by the bridegroom,
through the agency of magical blankets,
sheets, and pillows, A; or of blankets, bed,
sheet, and sword, B; or simply of the Billie
Blin, C. (The sword is probably an edi-
torial insertion; and Jamieson, Illustrations
of Northern Antiquities, p. 343, doubts, but
without sufficient reason, the Billie Blin.)
The bridegroom has recourse to his mother,
who demands an explanation of the bride,
and elicits a confession that she had once upon
a time encountered a young man in a wood,
who subjected her to violence. Before they
parted, he gave her certain tokens, which he
enjoined her to be very careful of, a lock
of his hair, a string of beads, a gold ring, and
a knife. B omits the knife, and C the beads.
The mother goes back to her son, and asks
what he bad done with the tokens she had
charged him never to part with. He owns
that he had presented them to a lady, one
whom he would now give all his possessions to
have for his wife. The lady of the greenwood
is identified by the tokens.
A, C, and D make the mother set a golden
chair for the bride, in which none but a maid
can sit, D [no leal maid will sit till bidden,
C]. In D the chair is declined; in C, taken
without bidding; in A the'significance of the
• In his note-book, p. 117, Motherwell writes, with less than
.his usual discretion : " The ballad of Bothwell, Cospatric, or
Gil Brenton, appears to be copied from an account of the
birth of Makbcth given by Wintown." The substance of
this account is, that Macbeth's mother had a habit of re-
pairing to the woods for wholesome air, and that, during one
of her rambles, she fell in with a fair man, really the
Devil, who passed the day with her, and got on her a son.
"And of that dede in taknyng
He gave his lemman thare a rvng,
chair has been lost. E, F, G employ no kind of
test of maidenhood, — the bride frankly avows
that she is with child to another man; and D,
as well as E, F, G, omits the substitution of
the chambermaid. The tokens in D are a
chain, a ring, and three locks of hair; in E,
gloves and a ring; in F, G, green gloves, a
ring, and three locks [plaits] of hair. Only
the ring remains in H.
"This ballad," says Motherwell (1827), " is
very popular, and is known to reciters under a
variety of names. I have heard it called Lord
Bangwell, Bengwill, Dingwall, Brengwill, etc.,
and The Seven Sisters, or the Leaves of Liud."
He adds: "There is an unedited ballad in
Scotland, which is a nearer approximation to
the Danish song, inasmuch as the substitu-
tion of the maiden sister for the real bride
constitutes a prominent feature of the tale." *
(Minstrelsy, Introduction, lxix 21 and xc.)
Scott remarks that Cospatrickf "was the
designation of the Earl of Dunbar, in the
days of Wallace and Bruce." Mr Mac math
informs me that it is in use at the present
day in the families of the Earl of Home and
of Dunbar of Mochrum, Bart, who, among
others, claim descent from the ancient earls of
Dunbar and March. The story of the ballad
might, of course, attach itself to any person
prominent in the region where the ballad was
known.
Swedish. Three Swedish versions of this
ballad were given by Afzelius: A, 'Riddar
Olle' in 50 two-line stanzas, n, 217; B, 19
two-line stanzas, n, 59; C, 19 two-line stan-
zas, n, 56: No 33, I, 175-182 of Bergstrom's
edition. Besides these, there are two frag-
ments in Cavallius and Stephens's unprinted
collection: D, 6 stanzas; E, 7 stanzas, the
latter printed in Grundtvig, v, 307.J All
And bad hyr that scho suld kepe that wele,
And bald for hys luve that jwele."
Cronykil, Book VI, ch. xviii, 57-90.
t Scott says: "Cospatrick, Comes Patricius;" but Cos-
(Gos-)patrick is apparently Servant of Patrick, like Gil-pat-
rick (Kil-patrick). Mr Macmath suggests to me that Gil
Brenton may have originally been Gil-brandon, which seems
very likely. See Notes and Queries, 5th S., x, 443.
} A fragment in Rancken's 'Nagra Prof af Folksang,' p.
14 f, belongs not to 'Riddar Olle, ' as there said, but to


64
5. GIL BRENTON
these were obtained from recitation in the
present century. A comes nearest to our A,
B. Like Scottish B, it seems to have been
compounded from several copies. Sir Olof
betrothed Ingalilla, and carried her home for
the spousal, wearing a red gold crown and a
wan cheek. Ingalilla gave birth to twin-boys.
Olof had a maid who resembled Ingalilla com-
pletely, and who, upon Ingalilla's entreaty,
consented to play the part of bride on the
morrow. Dressed in Ingalilla's clothes, blue
kirtle, green jacket, etc., and wearing five
gold rings and a gold crown, the maid rode
to church, with Ingalilla at her back, and her
beauty was admired by all as she came and
went. But outside of the church were a good
many musicians; and one of these piped out,
"God-a-mercy, Ingalilla, no maid art thou!"
Ingalilla threw into the piper's hand some-
thing which made him change his tune. He
was an old drunken fellow, and no one need
mind what he sang. After five days of drink-
ing, they took the bride to her chamber, not
without force. Ingalilla bore the light before
her, and helped put her to bed ; then lay down
herself. Olof had over him a fur rug, which
could talk as well as he, and it called out,
'Hear me, Sir Olof, hear what I say;
Thou hast taken a strumpet, and missed a may.'
And Olof,
'Hear, little Inga, sweetheart,' he said;
'What didst thou get for thy maidenhead ?' *
Inga explained. Her father was a strange
sort of man, and built her bower by the sea-
strand, where all the king's courtiers took
ship. Nine had broken in, and one had robbed
her of her honor. He had given her an em-
broidered sark, a blue kirtle, green jacket,
black mantle, gloves, five gold rings, a red gold
crown, a golden harp, and a silver-mounted
knife, which she now wishes in the youngster's
'Herr Aster och Froken Sissa,' though the burden is ' Rid-
dar Olof.' Other verses, at p. 16, might belong to either.
'Riddar Ola,' E. Wigstrom's Folkdiktning, p. 37, No 18,
belongs with the Danish ' Guldsmedens Datter,' Grundtvig,
No 245.
* The inquiry seems to refer to the morning gift. "Die
body. The conclusion is abruptly told in two
stanzas. Olof bids Inga not to talk so, for he
is father of her children. He embraces her
and gives her a queen's crown and name. B
has the same story, omitting the incident of
the musician. C has preserved this circum-
stance, but has lost both the substitution of
the waiting-woman for the bride and the mag-
ical coverlet. D has also lost these important
features of the original story; E has retained
them.
Danish. 'Brud ikke Ma,' Grundtvig, No
274, v, 304. There are two old versions
(more properly only one, so close is the agree-
ment), and a third from recent tradition. This
last, Grundtvig's C, from Jutland, 1856, seems
to be of Swedish origin, and, like Swedish C,
D, wants the talking coverlet, though it has
kept the other material feature, that of the
substitution. A is found in two manuscripts,
one of the sixteenth and the other of the sev-
enteenth century. B is the well-known 'In-
gefred og Gudrune,' or 'Herr Samsings Nat-
tergale,' Syv, rv, No 62, Danske Viser, No
194, translated in Jamieson's Illustrations, p.
340, and by Prior, in, 347. A later form of
B, from recent recitation, 1868, is given in
Kristensen's Jydske Folkeviser, I, No 53.
The story in A runs thus: Salverlad and
Vendelrod [Ingefred and Gudrune] were sit-
ting together, and Vendelrod wept sorely. SaI-
verlad asked her sister the reason, and was
told there was cause. Would she be bride one
night? Vendelrod would give her wedding
clothes and all her outfit. But Salverlad
asked for bridegroom too, and Vendelrod would
not give up her bridegroom, happen what
might. She went to church and was married
to Samsing. On the way from church they
met a spaeman [B, shepherd], who warned
Vendelrod that Samsing had some nightin-
gales that could tell him whether he had mar-
ried a maid or no. The sisters turned aside
Morgengabe ist ein Geschenk des Mannes als Zeichen der
Liebe (in signum amoris), fur die Uebergabe der vollen
Schonheit (in honore pulchritudinis) und der Jungfriiulich-
keit (pretium virginitatis)." Weinhold, Die deutschen Frauen
in dem Mittelalter, S. 270.


5. GIL BRENTON
65
and changed clothes, but could not change
cheeks! Salverlad was conducted to Sam-
sing's house and placed on the bride bench.
An unlucky jester called out, "Methinks this
is not Vendelrod!" but a gold ring adroitly
thrown into his bosom opened his eyes still
wider, and made him pretend he had meant
nothing. The supposed bride is put to bed.
Samsing invokes his nightingales: "Have I
a maid or no?" They reply, it is a maid
that lies in the bed, but Vendelrod stands
on the floor. Samsing asks Vendelrod why
she avoided her bed, and she answers: her
father lived on the strand; her bower was
broken into by a large company of men, and
one of them robbed her of her honor. In this
case there are no tokens for evidence. Sam-
sing owns immediately that he and his men
had broken into the bower, and Vendelrod's
agony is over.
Some of the usual tokens, gold harp, sark,
shoes, and silver-mounted knife, are found in
the later C. Danish D is but a single initial
stanza.
Besides Salverlad and Vendelrod, there is
a considerable number of Danish ballads char-
acterized by the feature that a bride is not a
maid, and most or all of these have similari-
ties to ' Gil Brenton.' 'Hr. Find og Vendel-
rod,' Grundtvig, No 275, has even the talking
blanket (sometimes misunderstood to be a
hed-board). In this piece there is no substi-
tution. Vendelrod gives birth to children,
and the news makes Find jump over the table.
Still he puts the question mildly, who is the
father, and recognizes that he is the man, upon
hearing the story of the bower on the strand,
and seeing half a gold ring which Vendelrod
had received " for her honor."
In 'Ingelilles Bryllup,' Grundtvig, No 276,
Blidelild is induced to take Ingelild's place by
the promise that she shall marry Ingelild's
brother. Hr. Magnus asks her why she is so
sad, and says he knows she is not a maid.
Blidelild says, "Since you know so much, I
will tell you more," and relates Ingelild's ad-
venture,— how she had gone out to the river,
and nine knights came riding by, etc. [so A;
in B and C we have the bower on the strand,
as before]. Hr. Magnus avows that he was
the ninth, who stayed when eight rode away.
Blidelild begs that he will allow her to go
and look for some lost rings, and uses the
opportunity to send back Ingelild in her
stead.
Various other Scandinavian ballads have
more or less of the story of those which have
been mentioned. In the Danish 'Brud i
Vaande,' Grundtvig, No 277, a bride is taken
with untimely pains while being "brought
home." The question asked in several of the
Scottish ballads, whether the saddle is uncom-
fortable, occurs in A, B; the bower that was
forced by eight swains and a knight in A, C,
D, F; the gifts in A, B, F; and an express
acknowledgment of the act of violence by the
bridegroom in A, B, D. We find all of these
traits except the first in the corresponding
Swedish ballad ' Herr Aster och Froken Sissa,'
Afzelius, No 38, new ed., No 32,1; the saddle
and broken bower in Swedish D, Grundtvig,
No 277, Bilag 1; only the saddle in Swedish
F, Grundtvig, No. 277, Bilag 3, and 0, Ar-
widsson, No 132; the saddle and gifts in Ice-
landic A, B, C, D, E, Grundtvig, No 277, Bilag
5, 6, 7, 8.
'Peder og Malfred,' Grundtvig, No 278, in
four versions, the oldest from a manuscript of
1630, represents Sir Peter as riding away from
home about a month after his marriage, and
meeting a woman who informs him that there
is a birth in his house. He returns, and asks
who is the' father. Sir Peter satisfies himself
that he is the man by identifying the gifts, in
A, B, C, D; and in A, B we have also the
bower by the strand.
In 'Oluf og Ellinsborg,' Grundtvig, No
279, A, B, C, one of the queen's ladies is ha-
bitually sad, and is pressed by her lover to ac-
count for this. She endeavors to put him off
with fictitious reasons, but finally nerves her-
self to tell the truth : she was walking by her-
self in her orchard, when five knights came
riding by, and one was the cause of her grief.
Oluf owns it was all his doing. A Swedish
ballad, remarkably close to the Danish, from
a manuscript of the date 1572 (the oldest
Danish version is also from a manuscript of


66
5. GIL BEENTON
the 16th century), is 'Riddar Lage och Stolts
Elensborg,' Arwidsson, No 56.
'Iver Hr. Jonsan,' Grundtvig, No 280, in
five versions, the oldest of the 16th century,
exhibits a lady as fearing the arrival of her
lover's ship, and sending her mother to meet
him, while she takes to her bed. Immediately
upon her betrothed's entering her chamber,
she abruptly discloses the cause of her trou-
ble. Eight men had broken into her bower
on the strand, and the ninth deprived her of
her honor. Iver Hr. Jonsan, with as little
delay, confesses that he was the culprit, and
makes prompt arrangements for the wedding.
There is another series of ballads, repre-
sented by 'Leesome Brand' in English, and
by ' Redselille og Medelvold ' in Danish, which
describe a young woman, who is on the point
of becoming a mother, as compelled to go off
on horseback with her lover, and suffering
from the ride. We find the question, whether
the saddle is too narrow or the way too long,
in the Danish ' Bolde Hr. Nilaus' Lan,' Grundt-
vig, 270, 'Redselille og Medelvold,' Grundt-
vig, 271 C, D, E, I, K, L, M, P, Q, V, Y, and
the Norwegian versions, A, D, E, F, of ' San-
nens Sorg,' Grundtvig, 272, Bilag 1, 4, 5, 6 *
The gifts also occur in Grundtvig's 271 A, Z,
and Norwegian D, Bilag 9.
Perhaps no set of incidents is repeated so
often in northern ballads as the forcing of the
bower on the strand, the giving of keepsakes,
the self-identification of the ravisher through
these, and his full and hearty reparation. All
or some of these traits are found in many bal-
lads besides those belonging to the groups
here spoken of: as ' Hildebrand og Hilde,' E,
I, Grundtvig, No 83, and Norwegian A, m, 857;
'Guldsmedens Datter,' Grundtvig, 245, and
its Swedish counterpart at p. 481 of the pref-
ace to the- same, and in Eva Wigstrom's Folk-
diktning, p. 37, No 18; 'Liden Kirstins Dans,'
Grundtvig, 263 (translated by Prior, 112),
and Norwegian B, C, Bilag 2, 3; 'Jomfruens
Harpesleet,' Grundtvig, 265 (translated by
Jamieson, 'Illustrations,' p. 382, Prior, 123,
Buchanan, p. 6), and Swedish D, Bilag 2,
• And again, " Is it the saddle, your horse, or your true-
love "" almost exactly as in our B, B, F, Grundtvig, 40 C,
Swedish A, Afzelius, 81. So Landstad, 42,
45; Arwidsson, 141; Grundtvig, 37 G; 38 A,
D; Kristensen, I, No 95, n, No 28 A, C.
A very pretty Norwegian tale has for the
talisman a stepping-stone at the side of the
bed : Asbjarnsen og Moe, No 29, 'Vesle Aase
Gaasepige,' Dasent, 2d ed., p. 478. An Eng-
lish prince had pictures taken of all the hand-
somest princesses, to pick his bride by. When
the chosen one arrived, Aase the goose-girl
informed her that the stone at the bedside
knew everything and told the prince; so if she
felt uneasy on any account, she must not step
on it. The princess begged Aase to take her
place till the prince was fast asleep, and then
they would change. When Aase came and
put her foot on the stone, the prince asked,
"Who is it that is stepping into my bed?"
"A maid clean and pure," answered the
stone. By and by the princess came and took
Aase's place. When they were getting up in
the morning, the prince asked again, " Who
is it stepping out of my bed?" "One that
has had three children," said the stone. The
prince sent his first choice away, and tried a
second. Aase faithfully warned her, and she
had cause for heeding the advice. When Aase
stepped in, the stone said it was a maid clean
and pure; when* the princess stepped out, the
stone said it was one that had had six children.
The prince was longer in hitting on a third
choice. Aase took the bride's place once more,
but this time the prince put a ring on her fin-
ger, which was so tight that she could not get it
off, for he saw that all was not right. In the
morning, when he asked, " Who is stepping
out of my bed?" the stone answered, " One
that has had nine children." Then the prince
asked the stone to clear up the mystery, and
it revealed how the princesses had put little
Aase in their place. The prince went straight
to Aase to see if she had the ring. She had
tied a rag over her finger, pretending she had
cut it; but the prince soon had the rag off,
recognized his ring, and Aase got the prince,
for the good reason that so it was to be.
The arti6ce of substituting waiting-woman
E, F, Afzelius, 91, Landstad, 45, 52. So the Scottish ballsfd,
'The Cruel Brother,'B 15 f.


5. GIL BRENTON
67
for bride has been thought to be derived from
the romance of Tristan, in which Brangwain
[Brengain, Brangaene] sacrifices herself for
Isold : Scott's ' Sir Tristrem,' ii, 54 ; Gottfried
v. Strassburg, xviii, ed. Bechstein. Grundt-
vig truly remarks that a borrowing by the ro-
mance from the popular ballad is as probable
a supposition as the converse; and that, even
should we grant the name of the hero of the
ballad to be a reminiscence of that of Isold's
attendant (e. g. Brangwill of Brangwain),
nothing follows as to the priority of the ro-
mance in respect to this passage. A similar
artifice is employed in the ballad of 'Torkild
Trundeson,' Danske Viser, 200 (translated by
Prior, 100); Afzelius, n, 86, from the Danish;
Arwidsson, 36. The resemblance is close to
'Ingelilles Bryllup,' C, Grundtvig, 276. See
also, further on, ' The Twa Knights.'
The Billie Blin presents himself in at least
four Scottish ballads: ' Gil Brenton,' C; 'Wil-
lie's Lady;' one version of 'Young Beichan;'
two of 'The Knight and Shepherd's Daugh-
ter ;' and also in the English ballad of ' King
Arthur and the King of Cornwall,' here under
the slightly disfigured name of Barlow Beanie.*
In all he is a serviceable household demon;
of a decidedly benignant disposition in the
first four, and, though a loathly fiend with
seven heads in the last, very obedient and
useful when once thoroughly subdued. He
is clearly of the same nature as the Dutch
belewitte and German bilwiz, characterized by
Grimm as a friendly domestic genius, penas,
ffuote holde; and the names are actually asso-
ciated in a passage cited by Grimm from
Voet: " De illis quos nostrates appellant beeld-
wit et blinde belien, a quibus nocturna visa
videri atque ex iis arcana revelari putant." f
Though the etymology of these words is not
unencumbered with difficulty, bil seems to
• The auld belly-blind man in 'Earl Ricbard,' 443, 451,
Kin loch's A. S. Ballads, p. 15, retains the bare name; and
Belly Blind, or Billie Blin, is the Scotch name for the game
of Blindman's-buff.
t Gisbertns Voetius, De Miraculis, Disput., n, 1018. Cited
point to a just and kindly-tempered being.
Bilvis, in the seventh book of Saxo Grammat-
icus, is an aged counsellor whose bent is to
make pence, while his brother Bolvfs, a blind
man, is a strife-breeder and mischief-maker.J
The same opposition of Bil and Bol apparently
occurs in the Edda, Grfmnismal, 47*, where
Bil-eygr and Bol-eygr (Bal-eygr) are. appel-
latives of Odin, which may signify mild-eyed
and evil-eyed. Bolvfs is found again in the
HrQmund's saga, under the description of
'Blind the Bad,' and 'the Carl Blind whose
name was Bavfs.' But much of this saga is
taken from the story of Helgi Hundingslayer;
and Blind the Bad in the saga is only Sae-
mund's Blindr inn bolvfsi, — the blind man
whose baleful wit sees through the disguise of
Helgi, and all but betrays the rash hero to his
enemies; that is, Odin in his malicious mood
(Bblverkr), who will presently be seen in the
ballad of 'Earl Brand' masking as Old Carl
Hood, "aye for ill and never for good." Orig-
inally and properly, perhaps, only the bad
member of this mythical pair is blind; but it
would not be at all strange that later tradi-
tion, which confuses and degrades so much in
the old mythology, should transfer blindness
to the good-natured one, and give rise to the
anomalous Billie Blind. See Grimm, Deutsche
Mythologie, 1879,I, 391 ff; Uhland, Zur Ge-
schichte der Dichtung u. Sage, m, 132 ff, vn,
229; Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbuch, n,
1037 ff, ed. 1877 ; Van den Bergh, Woorden-
boek der nederlandsche Mythologie, 12.
It has been suggested to me that "the
Haleigh throw " in E 6 is a corruption of the
High Leith Row, a street in Edinburgh. I
have not as yet been able to obtain informa-
tion of such a street.
D is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, No 40, p. 262.
also by Schmeller, Bayerisches Worterbnch, from J. Prav
torius's Alectryomantia, p. 3.
X Merlin, in Layamon, v. 17130 ff (as pointed ont by
Grundtvig, i, 274), says that his mind is balewiae, " mi gnat
is bseliwis," and that be is not disposed to gladness, mirth,
or good words.


68
5. GIL BRENTON
A
a. Jamieson-Brown MS., No 16, fol. 34. b. William Tyt-
ler's Brown MS., No 3. From the recitation of Mrs Brown
of Falkland, 1783, Aberdeenshire.
1 Gil Brenton has sent oer the fame,
He's woo'd a wife an brought her hame.
2 Full sevenscore o ships came her wi,
The lady by the greenwood tree.
3 There was twal an twal wi beer an wine,
An twal an twal wi muskadine:
4 An twall an twall wi bouted flowr,
An twall an twall wi paramour:
5 An twall an twall wi baken bread,
An twall an twall wi the goud sae red.
6 Sweet Willy was a widow's son,
An at her stirrup-foot he did run.
7 An she was dressd i the finest pa,
But ay she loot the tears down fa.
8 An she was deckd wi the fairest flowrs,
But ay she loot the tears down pour.
9 'O is there water i your shee?
Or does the win blaw i your glee?
10 'Or are you mourning i your meed
That eer you left your mither gueede?
11 'Or are ye mourning i your tide
That ever ye was Gil Brenton's bride?'
12 'The[re] is nae water i my shee,
Nor does the win blaw i my glee:
13 'Nor am I mourning i my tide
That eer I was Gil Brenton's bride:
14 'But I am mourning i my meed
That ever I left my mither gueede.
15 'But, bonny boy, tell to me
What is the customs o your country.'
16 'The customs o't, my dame,' he says,
'Will ill a gentle lady please.
17 'Seven king's daughters has our king wedded,
An seven king's daughters has our king bedded.
18 'But he's cutted the paps frae their breast-bane,
An sent them mourning hame again.
19 'But whan you come to the palace yate,
His mither a golden chair will set.
20 'An be you maid or be you nane,
O sit you there till the day be dane.
21 'An gin you 're sure that you are a maid,
Ye may gang safely to his bed.
22 'But gin o that you be na sure,
Then hire some woman o youre bowr.'
23 O whan she came to the palace yate,
His mither a golden chair did set.
24 An was she maid or was she nane,
She sat in it till the day was dane.
25 An she's calld on her bowr woman,
That waiting was her bowr within.
26 'Five hundred pound, maid, I 'll gi to the,
An sleep this night wi the king for me.'
27 Whan bells was rung, an mass was sung,
An a' man unto bed was gone,
28 Gil Brenton an the bonny maid
Intill ae chamber they were laid.
29 'O speak to me, blankets, an speak to me, sheets,
An speak to me, cods, that under me sleeps;
30 'Is this a maid that I ha wedded?
Is this a maid that I ha bedded?'
31 'It's nae a maid that you ha wedded,
But it's a maid that you ha bedded.
32 'Your lady's in her bigly bowr,
An for you she drees mony sharp showr.'
33 O he has taen him thro the ha,
And on his mither he did ca.
34 'I am the most unhappy man
That ever was in christend lan.


5. GIL BEENTON
35 'I woo'd a maiden meek an mild,
An I've marryed a woman great wi child.'
36 'O stay, my son, intill this ha,
An sport you wi your merry men a'.
37 'An I 'll gang to yon painted howr,
An see how't fares wi yon base whore.'
38 The auld queen she was stark an strang;
She gard the door flee aff the ban.
39 The auld queen she was stark an steer;
She gard the door lye i the fleer.
40 'O is your bairn to laird or loon?
Or is it to your father's groom?'
41 'My bairn's na to laird or loon,
Nor is it to my father's groom.
42 'But hear me, mither, on my knee,
An my hard wierd I 'll tell to thee.
43 'O we were sisters, sisters seven,
We was the fairest under heaven.
44 'We had nae mair for our seven years wark
But to shape an sue the king's son a sark.
45 'O it fell on a Saturday's afternoon,
Whan a' our langsome wark was dane,
46 'We keist the cavils us amang,
To see which shoud to the greenwood gang.
47 'Ohone, alas! for I was youngest,
An ay my wierd it was the hardest.
48 'The cavil it did on me fa,
Which was the cause of a' my wae.
49 'For to the greenwood I must gae,
To pu the nut but an the slae;
50 'To pu the red rose an the thyme,
To strew my mother's bowr and mine.
51 'I had na pu'd a flowr but ane,
• Till by there came a jelly hind greeme,
52 'Wi high-colld hose an laigh-colld shoone,
An he 'peard to be some kingis son.
53 'An be I maid or be I nane,
He kept me there till the day was dane.
54 'An be I maid or be I nae,
He kept me there till the close of day.
55 'He gae me a lock of yallow hair,
An bade me keep it for ever mair.
56 'He gae me a carket o gude black beads,
An bade me keep them against my needs.
57 'He gae to me a gay gold ring,
An bade me ke[e]p it aboon a' thing.
58 'He gae to me a little pen-kniffe,
An bade me keep it as my life.'
59 'What did you wi these tokens rare
That ye got frae that young man there?'
60 'O bring that coffer hear to me,
And a' the tokens ye sal see.'
61 An ay she ranked, an ay she flang,
Till a' the tokens came till her han.
62 'O stay here, daughter, your bowr within,
Till I gae parley wi my son.'
63 O she has taen her thro the ha,
An on her son began to ca.
64 'What did you wi that gay gold ring
I bade you keep aboon a' thing?
65 'What did you wi that little pen-kniffe
I bade you keep while you had life?
66 'What did you wi that yallow hair
I bade you keep for ever mair?
67 'What did you wi that good black beeds
I bade you keep against your needs?'
68 'I gae them to a lady gay
I met i the greenwood on a day.
69 'An I would gi a' my father's lan,
I had that lady my yates within.
70 'I would gi a' my ha's an towrs,
I had that bright burd i my bowrs.'


5. GIL BRENTON
27 'I am the most unhappy man
That ever was in christen land!
28 'I courted a maiden meik and mild,
And I hae gotten naething hut a woman wi
child.'
29 'O stay, my son, into this ha,
And sport ye wi your merrymen a';
30 'And I will to the secret hour,
To see how it fares wi your paramour.'
31 The carline she was stark and sture;
She aff the hinges dang the dure.
32 'O is your bairn to laird or loun?
Or is it to your father's groom?'
33 'O hear me, mother, on my knee,
Till my sad story I tell to thee.
34 'O we were sisters, sisters seven,
We were the fairest under heaven.
35 'It fell on a summer's afternoon,
When a' our toilsome task was done,
36 'We cast the kavils us amang,
To see which suld to the grene-wood gang.
37 'O hon, alas! for I was youngest,
And aye my wierd it was the hardest.
38 'The kavil it on me did fa,
Whilk was the cause of a' my woe.
39 'For to the grene-wood I maun gae,
To pu the red rose and the slae;
40 'To pu the red rose and the thyme,
To deck my mother's hour and mine.
41 'I hadna pu'd a flower but ane,
When by there came a gallant hende,
42 'Wi high-colld hose and laigh-colld shoon,
And he seemd to be sum king's son.
43 'And be I maid or be I nae,
He kept me there till the close o day.
44 'And be I maid or be I nane,
He kept me there till the day was done.
45 'He gae me a lock o his yellow hair,
And bade me keep it ever mair.
46 'He gae me a carknet o bonny beads,
And bade me keep it against my needs.
47 'He gae to me a gay gold ring,
And bade me keep it abune a' thing.'
48 'What did ye wi the tokens rare
That ye gat frae that gallant there?'
49 'O bring that coffer unto me,
And a' the tokens ye sall see.'
50 'Now stay, daughter, your hour within,
While I gae parley wi my son.'
51 O she has taen her thro the ha,
And on her son began to ca.
52 'What did you wi the bonny beads
I bade ye keep against your needs?
53 'What did you wi the gay gowd ring
I bade ye keep abune a' thing?'
54 'I gae them a' to a ladye gay
I met in grene-wood on a day.
55 'But I wad gie a' my halls and tours,
I had that ladye within my hours.
56 'But I wad gie my very life,
I had that ladye to my wife.'
57 'Now keep, my son, your ha's and tours;
Ye have that bright burd in your hours.
58 'And keep, my son, your very life;
Ye have that ladye to your wife.'
59 Now or a month was cum and gane,
The ladye bore a bonny son.
60 And't was weel written on his breast-bane,
'Cospatrick is my father's name.'
61 'O rowe my ladye in satin and silk,
And wash my son in the morning milk.'


72
5. GIL BEENTON
0
Cromek'a Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, p.
207. "From the recital of a peasant-woman of Galloway,
upwards of ninety years of age."
1 We were sisters, we were seven,
We were the fairest under heaven.
2 And it was a' our seven years wark
To sew our father's seven sarks.
3 And whan our seven years wark was done,
We laid it out upo the green.
4 We coost the lotties us amang,
Wha wad to the greenwood gang,
5 To pu the lily hut and the rose,
To strew witha' our sisters' bowers.
6 I was youngest,
my weer was hardest.
7 And to the greenwood I bud gae,
8 There I met a handsome childe,
9 High-coled stockings and laigh-coled shoon,
He bore him like a king's son.
10 An was I weel, or was I wae,
He keepit me a' the simmer day.
11 An though I for my hame-gaun sich[t],
He keepit me a' the simmer night.
12 He gae to me a gay gold ring,
And bade me keep it aboon a' thing.
13 He gae to me a cuttie knife,
And bade me keep it as my life:
14 Three lauchters o his yellow hair,
For fear we wad neer meet mair.
* * # #
15 Next there came shippes three,
To carry a' my bridal fee.
16 Gowd were the beaks, the sails were silk,
Wrought wi maids' hands like milk.
17 They came toom and light to me,
But heavie went they waie frae me.
18 They were fu o baken bread,
They were fu of wine sae red.
19 My dowry went a' by the sea,
But I gaed by the grenewode tree.
20 An I sighed and made great mane,
As thro the grenewode we rade our lane.
21 An I ay siched an wiped my ee,
That eer the grenewode I did see.
22 'Is there water in your glove,
Or win into your shoe?
O[r] am I oer low a foot-page
To rin by you, ladie?'
23 'O there's nae water in my glove,
Nor win into my shoe;
But I am maning for my mither
Wha's far awa frae me.'
* * * » *
24 'Gin ye be a maiden fair,
Meikle gude ye will get there.
25 'If ye be a maiden but,
Meikle sorrow will ye get.
26 'For seven king's daughters he hath wedded,
But never wi ane o them has bedded.
27 'He cuts the breasts frae their breast-bane,
An sends them back unto their dame.
28 'He sets their backs unto the saddle,
An sends them back unto their father.
29 'But be ye maiden or be ye nane,
To the gowden chair ye draw right soon.
30 'But be ye leman or be ye maiden,
Sit nae down till ye be bidden.'
31 Was she maiden or was she nane,
To the gowden chair she drew right soon.
32 Was she leman or was she maiden,
She sat down ere she was bidden.


5. GIL BEENTON
73
33 Out then spake the lord's mother;
Says, 'This is not a maiden fair.
34 'In that chair nae leal maiden
Eer sits down till they be bidden.'
35 The Billie Blin then outspake he,
As he stood by the fair ladie.
36 'The bonnie may is tired wi riding,
Gaurd her sit down ere she was bidden.'
* * # # #
37 But on her waiting-maid she ca'd:
'Fair ladie, what's your will wi me?'
'0 ye maun gie yere maidenheid
This night to an unco lord for me.'
38 'I hae been east, I hae been west,
I hae been far beyond the sea,
But ay, by grenewode or by bower,
I hae keepit my virginitie.
39 'But will it for my ladie plead,
I 'll gie't this night to an unco lord.'
* # # # #
40 When bells were rung an vespers sung,
An men in sleep were locked soun,
41 Childe Branton and the waiting-maid
Into the bridal bed were laid.
42 'O lie thee down, my fair ladie,
Here are a' things meet for thee;
43 'Here's a bolster for yere head,
Here is sheets an comelie weids.'
* # * *
44 'Now tell to me, ye Billie Blin,
If this fair dame be a leal maiden.'
45 'I wat she is as leal a wight
As the moon shines on in a simmer night.
46 'I wat she is as leal a may
As the sun shines on in a simmer day.
47 'But your bonnie bride's in her bower,
Dreeing the mither's trying hour.'
48 Then out o his bridal bed he sprang,
An into his mither's bower he ran.
10
49 'O mither kind, O mither dear,
This is nae a maiden fair.
50 'The maiden I took to my bride
Has a bairn atween her sides.
51 'The maiden I took to my bower
Is dreeing the mither's trying hour.'
52 Then to the chamber his mother flew,
And to the wa the door she threw.
53 She stapt at neither bolt nor ban,
Till to that ladie's bed she wan.
54 Says, ' Ladie fair, sae meek an mild,
Wha is the father o yere child?'
55 'O mither dear,' said that ladie,
'I canna tell gif I sud die.
56 'We were sisters, we were seven,
We were the fairest under heaven.
57 'And it was a' our seven years wark
To sew our father's seven sarks.
58 'And whan our seven years wark was done,
We laid it out upon the green.
59 'We coost the lotties us amang,
Wha wad to the greenwode gang;
60 'To pu the lily but an the rose,
To strew witha' our sisters' bowers.
61 'I was youngest,
my weer was hardest.
62 'And to the greenwode I bu[d] gae.
63 'There I met a handsome childe,
64 'Wi laigh-coled stockings and high-coled shoon,
He seemed to be some king's son.
65 'And was I weel or was I wae,
He keepit me a' the simmer day.
66 'Though for my hame-gaun I oft sicht,
He keepit me a' the simmer night.


74
5. GIL BRENTON
67 'He gae to me a gay gold ring,
An bade me keep it aboon a' thing;
68 'Three lauchters o his yellow hair,
For fear that we suld neer meet mair.
69 'O mither, if ye 'll believe nae me,
Break up the coffer, an there ye 'll see.'
70 An ay she coost, an ay she flang,
Till her ain gowd ring came in her hand.
71 And scarce aught i the coffer she left,
Till she gat the knife wi the siller heft,
72 Three lauchters o his yellow hair,
Knotted wi ribbons dink and rare.
76 'I wad gie a' my lands and rents,
I had that ladie within my brents.
77 'I wad gie a' my lands an towers,
I had that ladie within my bowers.'
78 'Keep still yere lands, keep still yere rents;
Ye hae that ladie within yere brents.
79 'Keep still yere lands, keep still yere towers;
Ye hae that lady within your bowers.'
80 Then to his ladie fast ran he,
An low he kneeled on his knee.
81 'O tauk ye up my son,' said he,
'An, mither, tent my fair ladie.
73 She cried to her son, 'Where is the ring
Your father gave me at our wooing,
An I gae you at your hunting?
74 'What did ye wi the cuttie knife,
I bade ye keep it as yere life?'
75 'O haud yere tongue, my mither dear;
I gae them to a lady fair.
82 'O wash him purely i the milk,
And lay him saftly in the silk.
83 'An ye maun bed her very soft,
For I maun kiss her wondrous oft.'
84 It was weel written on his breast-bane
Childe Branton was the father's name.
85 It was weel written on his right hand
He was the heir o his daddie's land.
Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scot-
land, i, 204.
1 We were sisters, sisters seven,
Bowing down, bowing down
The fairest women under heaven.
And aye the birks a-bowing
,
2 They kiest kevels them amang,
Wha woud to the grenewood gang.
3 The kevels they gied thro the ha,
And on the youngest it did fa.
4 Now she must to the grenewood gang,
To pu the nuts in grenewood hang.
5 She hadna tarried an hour but ane
Till she met wi a highlan groom.
6 He keeped her sae late and lang
Till the evening set and birds they sang.
7 He gae to her at their parting
A chain o gold and gay gold ring;
8 And three locks o his yellow hair;
Bade her keep them for evermair.
9 When six lang months were come and gane.
A courtier to this lady came.
10 Lord Dingwall courted this lady gay,
And so he set their wedding-day.
11 A little boy to the ha was sent,
To bring her horse was his intent.
12 As she was riding the way along,
She began to make a heavy moan.


5. GIL BRENTON
13 'What ails you, lady,' the boy said,
'That ye seem sae dissatisfied?
14 'Are the bridle reins for you too strong?
Or the stirrups for you too long?'
15 'But, little boy, will ye tell me
The fashions that are in your countrie?'
16 'The fashions in our ha I '11 tell,
And o them a' I 'll warn you well.
17 'When ye come in upon the floor,
His mither will meet you wi a golden chair.
18 'But be ye maid or be ye nane,
Unto the high seat make ye boun.
19 'Lord Dingwall aft has been beguild
By girls whom young men hae defiled.
20 'He's cutted the paps f rae their breast-bane,
And sent them back to their am hame.'
21 When she came in upon the floor,
His mother met her wi a golden chair.
22 But to the high seat she made her boun:
She knew that maiden she was nane.
23 When night was come, they went to bed,
And ower her breast his arm he laid.
24 He quickly jumped upon the floor,
And said, ' I've got a vile rank whore.'
25 Unto his mother he made his moan,
Says, 'Mother dear, I am undone.
26 'Ye've aft tald, when I brought them hame,
Whether they were maid or nane.
27 'I thought I'd gotten a maiden bright;
I've gotten but a waefu wight.
28 'I thought I'd gotten a maiden clear,
But gotten but a vile rank whore.'
29 'When she came in upon the floor,
I met her wi a gofden chair.
30 'But to the high seat she made her boun,
Because a maiden she was nane.'
31 'I wonder wha's tauld that gay ladie
The fashion into our countrie.'
32 'It is your little boy I blame,
Whom ye did send to bring her hame.'
33 Then to the lady she did go,
And said, 'O Lady, let me know
34 'Who has defiled your fair bodie:
Ye 're the first that has beguiled me.'
35 'O we were sisters, sisters seven,
The fairest women under heaven.
36 'And we kiest kevels us amang,
Wha woud to the grenewood gang;
37 'For to pu the finest flowers,
To put around our summer bowers.
38 'I was the youngest o them a';
The hardest fortune did me befa.
39 'Unto the grenewood I did gang,
And pu'd the nuts as they down hang.
40 'I hadna stayd an hour but ane
Till I met wi a highlan groom.
41 'He keeped me sae late and lang
Till the evening set and birds they sang.
42 'He gae to me at our parting
A chain of gold and gay gold ring;
43 'And three locks o his yellow hair;
Bade me keep them for evermair.
44 » Then for to show I make nae lie,
Look ye my trunk, and ye will see.'
45 Unto the trunk then she did go,
To see if that were true or no.
46 And aye she sought, and aye she flang,
Till these four things came to her hand.
47 Then she did to her ain son go,
And said, ' My son, ye 'll let me know,
48 'Ye will tell to me this thing:
What did you wi my wedding-ring?'


70
5. OIL BKENTON
49 'Mother dear, I 'll tell nae lie: 53 Now when nine months were come and gane,
I gave it to a gay ladie. The lady she Drought hame a son.
50 'I would gie a' my ha's and towers, 54 It was written on his breast-bane
I had this bird within my bowers.' Lord Dingwall was his father's name.
51 'Keep well, keep well your lands and strands; 55 He's taen his young son in his arms,
Ye hae that bird within your hands. And aye he praisd his lovely charms.
52 'Now, my son, to your bower ye 'll go: 56 And he has gien him kisses three,
Comfort your ladie, she's full o woe.' And doubled them ower to his ladie.
E
Elizabeth Cochrane's Song-Book, p. 146, No 112.
1 Lord Benwall he's a hunting gone;
Hey down, etc.
He's taken with him all his merry men.
Hey, etc.
2 As he was walking late alone,
He spyed a lady both brisk and young.
3 He keeped her so long and long,
From the evening late till the morning came.
4 All that he gave her at their parting
Was a pair of gloves and a gay gold ring.
5 Lord Benwall he's a wooing gone,
And he's taken with him all his merry men.
6 As he was walking the Haleigh throw,
He spy'd seven ladyes all in a row.
7 He cast a lot among them all;
Upon the youngest the lot did fall.
8 He wedded her and brought her home,
And by the way she made great moan.
9 'What aileth my dearest and dayly flower?
What ails my dear, to make such moan?
10 'Does the steed carry you too high?
Or does thy pillow sit awry?
11 'Or does the wind blow in thy glove?
Or is thy heart after another love?'
12 'The steed does not cany me too high,
Nor does.my pillow sit awry.
13 'Nor does the wind blow in my glove,
Nor is my heart after another love.'
14 When they were doun to supper set,
The weary pain took her by the back.
15 'What ails my dearest and dayly flower?
What ails my dearest, to make such moan?'
16 'I am with child, and it's not to thee,
And oh and alas, what shall I doe!'
17 'I thought I had got a maid so mild;
But I have got a woman big with child.
18 'I thought I bad got a dayly flower;
I have gotten but a common whore.'
* # * * #
19 'Rise up, Lord Benwall, go to your hall,
And cherrish up your merry men all.'
* * # # *
20 'As I was walking once late alone,
I spy'd a lord, both brisk and young.
21 'He keeped me so long and long.
From the evening late till the morning came.
22 'All that he gave me at our parting
Was a pair of gloves and a gay gold ring.
23 'If you will not believe what I tell to thee,
There's the key of my ?offer, you may go and
see.'


5. GIL BEENTON
77
24 His mother went, and threw and flang,
Till to her hand the ring it came.
25 « Lord Benwall, wilt thou tell to me
Where is the ring I gave to thee?'
26 'Now I would give all my lands and tower,
To have that lady in my bower.
27 'I would give all my lands and rents,
To have that lady in my tents.'
28 'You need not give all your lands and tower,
For you have that lady in your power.
29 'You need not give all your lands and rents,
For you have that lady in your tents.'
30 Now it was written on the child's breast-bone
Lord Benwall's sirname and his name.
31 It was written on the child's right hand
That he should be heir of Lord Benwall's land.
32 'Canst cloath my lady in the silk,
And feed my young son with the milk.'
P
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 219. From the recitation of Mrs
Thomson, February, 1825. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ap-
pendix, p. xvi, the first stanza only.
1 There were three sisters in a bouir,
Eh down and Oh down
And the youngest o them was the fairest flour.
Eh down and O down
2 And we began our seven years wark,
To sew our brither John a sark.
3 When seven years was come and gane,
There was nae a sleeve in it but ane.
4 But we coost kevils us amang
Wha wud td the green-wood gang.
5 But tho we had coosten neer sae lang,
The lot it fell on me aye to gang.
6 I was the youngest, and I was the fairest,
And alace! my wierd it was aye the sairest.
7
Till I had to the woods to gae.
8 To pull the cherrie and the slae,
And to seek our ae brither, we had nae mae.
9 But as I was walking the leas o Lyne,
I met a youth gallant and fine;
10 Wi milk white stockings and coal black shoon;
He seemed to be some gay lord's son.
11 But he keepit me there sae lang, sae lang,
Till the maids in the morning were singing
their sang.
12 Would I wee or would I way,
He keepit me the lang simmer day.
13 Would I way or would I wight.
He keepit me the simmer night.
14 But guess what was at our parting?
A pair o grass green gloves and a gay gold
ring.
15 He gave me three plaits o his yellow hair,
In token that we might meet mair.
16 But when nine months were come and gane,
This gallant lord cam back again.
17 He's wed this lady, and taen her wi him;
But as they were riding the leas o Lyne,
18 This lady was not able to ride,
19 'O does thy saddle set thee aside?
Or does thy steed ony wrang way ride?
20 'Or thinkst thou me too low a groom?
21 'Or hast thou musing in thy mind
For the leaving of thy mother kind?'


78
5. GIL BRENTON
22 'My saddle it sets not me aside,
Nor does my steed ony wrang way ride.
23 'Nor think I thee too low a groom
24 'But I hae musing in my mind
For the leaving of my mother kind.'
25 'I 'll bring thee to a mother of mine,
As good a mother as eer was thine.'
26 'A better mother she may be,
But an unco woman she 'll prove to me.'
27 But when lords and ladies at supper sat,
Her pains they struck her in the back.
28 When lords and ladies were laid in bed,
Her pains they struck her in the side.
29 'Rise up, rise up, now, Lord Brangwill,
For I'mwi child and you do not know V
30 He took up his foot and gave her sic a bang
Till owre the bed the red blood sprang.
31 He is up to his mother's ha,
Calling her as hard as he could ca.
39 'With milk-white stockings and coal-black
shoon;
He seemd to be sum gay lord's son.
40, 'He keepit me sae lang, sae lang,
Till the maids in the morning were singing
their sang.
41 'Would I wee or would I way,
He keepit me the lang simmer day.
42 'Would I way or would I wight,
He keepit me the simmer night.
43 'But guess ye what was at our parting?
A pair of grass green gloves and a gay gold
ring.
44 'He gave me three plaits o his yellow hair,
In token that we might meet mair.'
45 'O dochter dear, will ye show me
These tokens that he gave to thee?'
46 'Altho my back should break in three,
Unto my coffer I must be.'
47 'Thy back it shall not break in three,
For I 'll bring thy coffer to thy knee.'
32 'I went through moss and I went through 48 Aye she coost, and aye she Hang,
Thinking to get some lily flouir.
33
'But to my house I have brocht a hure.
34 'I thocht to have got a lady baith meek and
mild,
But I've got a woman that's big wi child.'
t
35 'O rest you here, Lord Brangwill,' she said,
'Till I relieve your lady that lyes so low.'
36 'O daughter dear, will you tell to me
Who is the father of your babie?'
37 * Yes, mother dear, I will tell thee
Who is the father of my babie.
38 'As I was walking the leas o Lyne,
I met a youth gallant and fine;
Till these three tokens came to her hand.
49 Then she is up to her son's ha,
Calling him hard as she could ca.
50 '0 son, O son, will you tell me
51 'What ye did wi the grass green gloves and
gay gold ring
That ye gat at your own birth-een?'
52 'I gave them to as pretty a may
As ever I saw in a simmer day.
53 'I wud rather than a' my lands sae broad
That I had her as sure as eer I had.
54 'I would rather than a' my lands sae free
I had her here this night wi me.'


5. GIL BRENTON
79
55 'I wish you good o your lands sae broad, 57 'Gar wash my auld son in the milk,
For ye have her as sure as eer ye had. Gar deck my lady's bed wi silk.'
56 'I wish ye good o your lands sae free, 58 He gave his auld son kisses three,
For ye have her here this night wi thee.' But he doubled them a' to his gay ladye.
Q
Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 244; ed.
1776, i, 83.
1 As Bothwell was walking in the lowlands alane,
Hey down and a down
He met six ladies sae gallant and fine.
Hey down and a down
2 He cast his lot amang them a',
And on the youngest his lot did fa.
3 He 'a brought her frae her mother's bower,
Unto his strongest castle and tower.
4 But ay she cried and made great moan,
And ay the tear came trickling down.
5 'Come up, come up,' said the foremost man,
'I think our bride comes slowly on.'
6 'O lady, sits your saddle awry,
Or is your steed for you owre high?'
7 'My saddle is not set awry,
Nor carries me my steed owre high;
8 'But I am weary of my life,
Since I maun be Lord Bothwell's wife.' •
9 He's blawn his horn sae sharp and shrill,
Up start the deer on evry hill.
10 He's blawn his horn sae lang and loud,
Up start the deer in gude green-wood.
11 His lady mother lookit owre the castle wa,
And she saw them riding ane and a'.
12 She's calld upon her maids by seven,
To mak his bed baith saft and even.
13 She's calld upon her cooks by nine,
To make their dinner fair and fine.
14 When day was gane, and night was come,
'What ails my love on me to frown?
15 'Or does the wind blow in your glove?
Or runs your mind on another love?'
16 'Nor blows the wind within my glove,
Nor runs my mind on another love;
17 'But I nor maid nor maiden am,
For I'm wi bairn to another man.'
18 'I thought I'd a maiden sae meek and sae
mild,
But I've nought but a woman wi child.'
19 His mother's taen her up to a tower,
And lockit her in her secret bower.
20 'Now, doughter mine, come tell to me,
Wha's bairn this is that you are wi.'
21"' O mother dear, I canna learn
Wha is the faither of my bairn,
i
22 'But as I walkd in the lowlands my lane,
I met a gentleman gallant and fine.
23 'He keepit me there sae late and sae lang,
Frae the evning late till the morning dawn.
24 'And a' that he gied me to my propine
Was a pair of green gloves and a gay gold
ring;
25 'Three lauchters of his yellow hair,
In case that we shoud meet nae mair.'
26 His lady mother went down the stair:
27 'Now son, now son, come tell to me,
Where's the green gloves I gave to thee?'


80
5. GIL BRENTON
28 'I gied to a lady sae fair and so fine
The green gloves and a gay gold ring.
29 'But I wad gie my castles and towers,
I had that lady within my bowers.
30 'But I wad gie my very life,
I had that lady to be my wife.'
31 'Now keep, now keep your castles and towers,
You have that lady within your bowers.
32 'Now keep, now keep your very life,
You have that lady to be your wife.'
33 'O row my lady in sattin and silk,
And wash my son in the morning milk.'
Kinloch MSS, v, 335, in the handwriting of Dr John Hill
Burton.
1 We were seven sisters in a bower,
Adown adown, and adown and adown
The flower of a' fair Scotland ower.
Adown adown, and adown and adown
2 We were sisters, sisters seven,
The fairest women under heaven.
3 There fell a dispute us amang,
Wha would to the greenwood gang.
4 They kiest the kevels them amang,
O wha would to the greenwood gang.
5 The kevels they gied thro the ha,
And on the youngest it did fa.
6 The kevel fell into her hand,
To greenwood she was forced to gang.
7 She hedna pued a flower but ane,
When by there came an earl's son.
8 'And was he well or was he wae,
He keepet me that summer's day.'
9 And was he weel or was he weight,
He keepet her that summer's night.
10 And he gave her a gay goud ring
His mother got at her wedding.
• • # * *
11 'Oh is yer stirrup set too high?
Or is your saddle set awry?
12 'Oh is yer stirrup set too side?
Or what's the reason ye canna ride?'
* * * *
13 When all were at the table set,
Then not a bit could this lady eat.
14 When all made merry at the feast.
This lady wished she were at her rest.
*****
A. a. In the MS. two lines are written contin-
uously, and two of these double lines numbered
as one stanza.
191, 231, 692, 712, perhaps gate, gates in MS.
541, MS. be a nae. 56.' casket in MS.?
b. 1.
Chil Brenton has sent oer the faem,
Chil Brenton's brought his lady hame.
B. Printed by Scott in four-line stanzas.
7, 55, 56, 58, 61, seem to be the stanza* trans-
ferred from Herd, but only the last without
change.
C. TJie stanzas are not divided in Cromek. Be-
tween 14 and 15 the following nineteen
couplets ha ve been omitted.
First blew the sweet, the simmer wind,
Then autumn wi her breath sae kind,
Before that eer the guid knight came
The tokens of his luve to claim.
Then fell the brown an yellow leaf
Afore the knight o luve thawed prief;
Three morns the winter's rime did fa,
When loud at our yett my luve did ca.
'Ye hae daughters, ye hae seven,
Ye hae the fairest under heaven.


6. WILLIE'S LADY
81
I am the lord o lands wide,
Ane o them maun be my bride.
I am lord of a baronie,
Ane o them maun lie wi me.
0 cherry lips are sweet to pree,
A rosie cheek's meet for the ee;
Lang brown locks a heart can bind,
Bonny black een in lure are kind;
Sma white arms for clasping's meet,
Whan laid atween the bridal-sheets;
A kindlie heart is best of a',
An debonnairest in the ha.
Ane by ane thae things are sweet,
Ane by ane in luve they 're meet;
But when they a' in ae maid bide,
She is fittest for a bride.
Sae be it weel or be it wae,
The youngest maun be my ladie;
Sae be it gude, sae be it meet,
She maun warm my bridal-sheet.
Little kend he, whan aff he rode,
1 was his tokend luve in the wood;
Or when he gied me the wedding-token,
He was sealing the vows he thought were broken.
First came a page on a milk-white steed,
Wi golden trappings on his head:
A' gowden was the saddle lap,
And gowden was the page's cap.
15-21 have been allowed to stand principally
on account of 18.
There is small risk in pronouncing 24, 25, 42,
43, 80, 81 spurious, and Cunningham sur-
passes his usual mawkishness in 83. ,
E is written in four-line stanzas.
19. mother, in the margin.
20. lady, in the margin.
F. a. 72. MS. Till [Still?].
V and 8,17 and 181, 20l and 21, 231 and 24,
32 and 332, 501 and 51, are respectively
written as a stanza in the MS.
121, 411. Motherwell conjectures
Would I wait, or would I away.
131, 421. Motherwell conjectures
Would I away, or would I wait.
142, 432. MS. green sleeves: but see 511, and
also E 221, G 24", 282.
29s, above you do not know't is written know
not who till, apparently a conjecture of Moth-
erwell's.
302, sometimes recited
Till owre the bed this lady he flang.
531. MS. abroad.
b. 1. Seven ladies livd in a bower,
Hey down and ho down
And aye the youngest was the flower.
Hey down and ho down
G. The stanzas are not divided in Herd.
H. 4 is crossed through in the MS., but no reason
given.
6
WILLIE'S LADY
a. • Willie's Lady,' Fraser-Tytler MS. b. 'Sweet Willy,' Jamieson-Brown MS., No 15, fol.
38.
a, ' Willie's Lady,' was No 1 in the manu-
script of fifteen ballads furnished William Tyt-
ler by Mrs Brown in 1783, and having been
written down a little later than b may be re-
garded as a revised copy. This manuscript,
as remarked under No 5, is not now in the
u
possession of the Fraser-Tytler family, having
often been most liberally lent,' and, probably,
at last not returned. But a transcript had
been made by the grandfather of the present
family of two of the pieces contained in it,
and ' Willie's Lady' is one of these two.


82
6. WILLIE'S LADY
Lewis had access to William Tytler's copy,
and, having regulated the rhymes, filled out
a gap, dropped the passage about the girdle,
and made other changes to his taste, printed
the ballad in 1801 as No 56 of his Tales of
Wonder. The next year Scott gave the " an-
cient copy, never before published," " in its
native simplicity, as taken from Mrs Brown of
Falkland's MS.," — William Tytler's,—in
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, n, 27, but
not with literal accuracy. Jamieson, in 1806,
gave ' Sweet Willy,' almost exactly according
to the text of his Brown manuscript, in an
appendix to the second volume of his collec-
tion, p. 367, and at p. 175 of the same volume,
a reconstruction of the ballad which might
have been spared.
b lacks altogether the passage which makes
proffer of the cup, a, stanzas 5-11, and substi-
tutes at that place the girdle of a 21-28. The
woodbine in a 36, 41, is also wanting, and the
concluding stanza. A deficiency both in mat-
ter and rhyme at a 32 is supplied by b 25,
26, but not happily:
'An do you to your mither then,
An bid her come to your boy's christnen;
'For dear's the boy he's been to you:
Then notice well what she shall do.'
Again, the transition in a, from st. 33 to
st. 34, is abrupt even for a ballad, and b in-
troduces h.ere four stanzas narrating the ex-
ecution of the Billy Blind's injunctions, and
ending,
And notic'd well what she did say,
whereby we are prepared for the witch's ex-
clamations.*
Danish versions of this ballad are numerous:
A-I,'Hustru og Mands Moder' [' Fostermoder,'
'Stif moder'], Grundtvig, No 84, n, 404 ff:
J-T, 'Hustru og Mands Moder,' Kristensen,
II, 111 ff, No 35: U-X,'Barselkvinden,' Kris-
* The Jamieson-Brown copy contains seventy-eight
verses; Scott's and the Tytler copy, eighty-eight. Dr An-
derson's, Nichols's Illustrations, vn, 176, counts seventy-six
instead of eighty-eight; but, judging by the description which
Anderson has given of the Alexander-Fraser-Tytler-Brown
tensen, I, 201 ff, No 74: Y, ' Hustru og Sleg-
fred,' Grundtvig, No 85, n, 448 ff: in all
twenty-five, but many of Kristensen's copies
are fragments. Grundtvig's 84 A, B, and 85 a
are from manuscripts of the sixteenth century.
84 F-I and several repetitions of 85 are of the
seventeenth. Grundtvig's 84 C, D, E, and all
Kristensen's versions, are from recent oral tra-
dition. Some of these, though taken down
since 1870, are wonderfully well preserved.
The Danish ballads divide into two classes,
principally distinguished by their employing
or not employing of the artifice of wax chil-
dren. (There is but one of these in N, R,
Kristensen's E, I, n, 116,122, and in the oldest
Swedish ballad, as in the Scottish: but chil-
dren in Scandinavian ballads are mostly born
in pairs.) Of the former class, to which our
only known copy belongs, are F-I, N-T, X
(Grundtvig, 84 F-I, Kristensen, n, No 35, E-
L, I, No 74 D). N and I furnish, perhaps, the
most consistent story, which, in the former,
runs thus: Sir Peter married Ellen (else-
where Mettelille, Kirstin, Tidelil, Ingerlil),
and gave her in charge to his mother, a for-
midable witch, and, as appears from F, vio-
lently opposed to the match. The first night
of her marriage Ellen conceived twins. She
wrapped up her head in her cloak and paid a
visit to her mother-in-law, to ask how long
women go with child. The answer was,
'Forty weeks went Mary with Christ,
And so each Danish woman must.
'Forty weeks I went with mine,
But eight years shalt thou go with thine.'
The forty weeks had passed, and Ellen be-
gan to long for relief. Sir Peter besought aid
of his sister Ingerlin. If I help your young
bride, she said, I must be traitor to my mother.
Sir Peter insisted, and Ingerlin moulded a fine
child of wax,f wrapped it in linen, and exhib-
ited it to her mother, who, supposing that her
MS., at p. 179, he is not exact. Still, so large a discrepancy
is hard to explain.
t The sister does this in P-I and S : in O, P, the husband
"has " it done.


6. WILLIE'S LADY
83
arts had been baffled, burst out into exclama-
tions of astonishment. She had thought she
could twist a rope out of flying sand, lay sun
and moon flat on the earth with a single word,
turn the whole world round about! She had
thought all the house was spell-bound, except
the spot where the young wife's chest stood,
the chest of red rowan, which nothing can be-
witch! The chest was instantly taken away,
and Ellen's bed moved to the place it had
occupied; and no sooner was this done than
Ellen gave birth to two children.
In the ballads of the other class, the young
wife, grown desperate after eight years of suf-
fering, asks to be taken back to her maiden
home. Her husband's mother raises objec-
tions: the horses are in the meadow, the
coachman is in bed. Then, she says, I will go
on my bare feet. The moment her husband
learns her wish, the carriage is at the door, but
by the arts of the mother it goes to pieces on
the way, and the journey has to be finished on
horseback. The joy of her parents at seeing
their daughter approaching was quenched on
a nearer view: she looked more dead than
quick. She called her family about her and
distributed her effects. A great wail went up
in the house when two sons were cut from the
mother's side. (C, J, K, L, W: Grundtvig,
84 C; Kristensen, n, No 35 A, B, C; I, No
74 C.)
The first son stood up and brushed his hair:
'Most surely am I in my ninth year.'
The second stood up both fair and red:
'Most sure we 'll avenge our dear mother dead.' *
Several of the most important ballads of
the first class have taken up a part of the story
of those of the second class, to the detriment
of consistency. F, G, H, O, P (Grundtvig, 84
F, G, H, Kristensen, n, No 35 F, G), make
the wife quit her husband's house for her fa-
ther's, not only without reason, but against
reason. If the woman is to die, it is natural
enough that she should wish to die with the
friends of her early days, and away from her
• Grundtvig, 84 D, B; Kristensen, i, No 74 A, B, C;
n, No 35 A, B, C.
uncongenial mother-in-law; but there is no
kind of occasion for transferring the scene of
the trick with the wax children to her father's
house; and, on the other hand, it is altogether
strange that her husband's mother and the
rowan-tree chest (which sometimes appears
to be the property of the mother, sometimes
that of the wife) should go with her.
Y, 'Hustru og Slegfred,^ Grundtvig, 85,
agrees with the second class up to the point
when the wife is put to bed at her mother's
house, but with the important variation that
the spell is the work of a former mistress of
the husband ; instead of his mother, as in most
of the ballads, or of the wife's foster-mother,
as in C, D, J, K, M (Grundtvig, 84 C, D, Kris-
tensen, iI, No 35 A, B, D), or of the wife's
step-mother as in A only. The conclusion of
'Hustru og Slegfred' is rather flat. The
wife, as she lies in bed, bids all her household
hold up their hands and pray for her relief,
which occurs on the same day. The news is
sent to her husband, who rejoins his wife, is
shown his children, praises God, and burns his
mistress. Burning is also the fate of the
mother-in-law in B, I, O, P, whereas in F she
dies of chagrin, and in G bursts into a hun-
dred flinders (flentsteene).
This ballad, in the mixed form of O, P
(Kristensen, n, 35 F, G), has been resolved
into a tale in Denmark, a few lines of verse
being retained. Recourse is had by the spell-
bound wife to a cunning woman in the vil-
lage, who informs her that in her house there
is a place in which a rowan-tree chest has
stood, and that she can get relief there. The
cunning woman subsequently pointing out the
exact spot, two boys are born, who are seven
years old, and can both walk and talk. Word
is sent the witch that her son's wife has been
delivered of two sons, and that she herself
shall be burned the day following. The witch
says, " I have been able to twine a string out
of running water. If I have not succeeded
in bewitching the woman, she must have found
the place where the damned rowan chest
stood." (Grundtvig, m, 858, No 84 b.)
Three Swedish versions of the ballad have
been printed. A, B, from tradition of this


84
6. WILLIE'S LADY
century, are given by Arwidsson, n, 252 ff,
'Liten Keratins Fortrollning,' No 134. These
resemble the Danish ballads of the second
class closely. Liten Keratin goes to her moth-
er's house, gives birth to two children, and
dies. In A the children are a son and daughter.
The son stands up, combs his hair, and says,
"I am forty weeks on in my ninth year."
He can run errands in the village, and the
daughter sew red silk. In B both children
are boys. One combs his hair, andaays, " Our
grandmother shall be put on two wheels."
The other draws his sword, and says, " Our
mother is dead, our grandmother to blame.
I hope our mother is with God. Our grand-
mother shall be laid on seven wheels." The
other copy, C, mentioned by Grundtvig as
being in Cavallius and Stephens' manuscript
collection, has been printed in the Svenska
Fornminneaforeningens Tidskrift, vol. ii, p.
72 ff, 1873-74. It dates from the close of the
sixteenth century, and resembles the mixed
ballads of the Danish first class, combining
the flitting to the father's house with the ar-
tifice of the wax children. The conclusion of
this ballad has suffered greatly. After the
two sons are born, we are told that Kirstin,
before unmentioned, goes to the chest and
makes a wax child. If the chest were moved,
Elin would be free of her child. And then the
boy stands up and brushes his hair, and says
he has come to his eighth year.
Three stanzas and some of the incidents of
a Norwegian version of this ballad have been
communicated to Grundtvig, nI, 858 f, No
84 o, by Professor Sophus Bugge. The only
place which was unaffected by a spell was
where Signelfti's bride-chest stood, and the
chest being removed, the birth took place.
The witch was a step-mother, as in Danish A.
There are two familiar cases of malicious
arrest of childbirth in classic mythology, —
those of Latona and Alcmene. The wrath of
Juno was the cause in both, and perhaps the
myth of Alcmene is only a repetition of an
older story, with change of name. The pangs
* Eadem amatoris sui axorem, quod in earn dicacule pro-
brum dixerat, jam in sarcina praegnationis, obssepto utero
et repigrato fetu, perpetna praegnatione damnaTit,_et, ut
of Latona were prolonged through nine days
and nights, at the end of which time Ilithyia
came to her relief, induced by a bribe. (Hymn
to the Delian Apollo, 91 ff.) Homer, II. xix,
119, says only that Hera stopped the delivery
of Alcmene and kept back Ilithyia. Anto-
ninus Liberalis, in the second century of our
era, in one of his abstracts from the Meta-
morphoses of Nicander, a poem of the second
century B. c, or earlier, has this account:
that when Alcmene was going with Hercules,
the Fates and Ilithyia, to please Juno, kept
her in her pains by sitting down and folding
their hands; and that Galinthias, a playmate
and companion of Alcmene, fearing that the
suffering would drive her mad, ran out and
announced the birth of a boy, upon which the
Fates were seized with such consternation that
they let go their hands, and Hercules imme-
diately came into the world. (Antoninus Lib.,
Metam. c. xxix.) Ovid, Metamorphoses, ix,
281-315, is more circumstantial. After seven
days and nights of torture, Lucina came, but,
being bribed by Juno, instead of giving the aid
for which she was invoked, sat down on the al-
tar before Alcmene's door, with the right knee
crossed over the left, and fingers interlocked,
mumbling charms which checked the processes
of birth. Galanthis, a servant girl media de
plebe, was shrewd enough to suspect that Juno
had some part in this mischief; and besides, as
she went in and out of the house, she always
saw Lucina sitting on the altar, with her hands
clasped over her knees. At last, by a happy
thought, she called out, " Whoever you are,
wish my mistress joy; she is lighter, and has
her wish." Lucina jumped up and unclasped
her hands, and the birth followed instantly.
Pausanias, ix, 11, tells a similar but briefer
story, in which Historis, daughter of Tiresias,
takes the place of Galanthis. See, for the
whole matter, 'Ilithyia oder die Hexe,' in
C. A. Bottiger's Kleine Schriften, I, 76 ff.
Apuleius, in his Metamorphoses, mentions
a case of suspended childbirth, which, curiously
enough, had lasted eight years,* as in the Dan-
cnncti numerant, jam octo annorum onere misella ilia velut
elephantum paritura distenditur. i, 9.


6. WILLIE'S LADY
85
ish and Swedish ballads. The witch is a mis-
tress of her victim's husband, as in Grundtvig,
85, and as in a story cited by Scott from Hey-
wood's 'Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels,' p.
474. "There is a curious tale about a Count of
Westeravia [Vestravia, in diocesi Argentora-
tensi], whom a deserted concubine bewitched
upon his marriage, so as to preclude all hopes
of his becoming a father. The spell continued
to operate for three years, till one day, the
count happening to meet with his former mis-
tress, she maliciously asked him about the in-
crease of his family. The count, conceiving
some suspicion from her manner, craftily an-
swered that God had blessed him with three
fine children; on which she exclaimed, like
Willie's mother in the ballad, ' May Heaven
confound the old hag by whose counsel I
threw an enchanted pitcher into the draw-well
of your palace!' The spell being found and
destroyed, the count became the father of a
numerous family."
A story like that of the ballad is told as a
fact that took place in Arran within this cent-
ury. A young man forsook his sweetheart
and married another girl. When the wife's
time came, she suffered excessively. A pack-
man who was passing suspected the cause,
went straight to the old love, and told her
that a fine child was born; when up she
sprang, and pulled out a large nail from the
beam of the roof, calling out to her mother,
"Muckle good your craft has done!" The
wife was forthwith delivered. (Napier, in
The Folklore Record, n, 117.)
In the Sicilian tales, collected by Laura
Gonzenbach, Nos 12 and 15, we have the spell
of folded hands placed between the knees to
prevent birth, and in No 54 hands raised to
the head.* In all these examples the spell is
finally broken by telling the witch a piece of
false news, which causes her to forget herself
* We may suppose with dosed fingers, or clasping the
head, though this is not said. Antique vases depict one or
two Dithyias as standing by with hands elevated and open,
and take away her hands. (Sicilianische Mar-
chen aua dem Volksmund gesammelt, Leip-
rig, 1870.)
We find in a Roumanian tale, contributed
to Das Ausland for 1857, p. 1029, by F. Obert,
and epitomized by Grundtvig, m, 859, No
84 d, a wife condemned by her offended hus-
band to go with child till he lays his hand
upon her. It is twenty years before she ob-
tains grace, and the son whom she then bears
immediately slays his father. A Wallachian
form of thia story (Walachische Marchen von
Arthur u. Albert Schott, No 23) omits the re-
venge by the new-born child, and ends hap-
With respect to the knots in st. 34, it is to
be observed that the tying of knots (as also
the fastening of locks), either during the mar-
riage ceremony or at the approach of partu-
rition was, and is still, believed to be effectual
for preventing conception or childbirth. The
minister of Logierait, Perthshire, testifies,
about the year 1793, that immediately be-
fore the celebration of a marriage it is the
custom to loosen carefully every knot about
bride and bridegroom, — garters, shoe-strings,
etc. The knots are tied again before they
leave the church. (Statistical Account of Scot-
land, v, 83.) So among the Laps and Nor-
wegians, when a child is to be born, all the
knots in the woman's clothes, or even all the
knots in the house, must be untied, because
of their impeding delivery. (Liebrecht, Zur
Volkskunde, p. 322, who also cites the Statis-
tical Account of Scotland.)
Willie's Lady is translated by Schubart, p.
74, Talvj, p. 555, and by Gerhard, p. 139.
Grundtvig, 84 H (= Syv, 90, Danske Viser,
43), is translated by Jamieson, Illustrations of
Northern Antiquities, p. 344, and by Prior,
No 89.
during the birth of Athene from the head of Zeus. Welcker,
Kleine Schriften, m, 191, note 12.


86
6. WILLIE'S LADY
A
4
a. A copy, by Miss Mary Fraser Tytler, of a transcript
made by her grandfather from William Tytler"s manuscript,
b. Jamieson-Brown MS., No 15, fol. 33.
1 Willie has taen him oer the fame,
He's woo'd a wife and brought her hame.
2 He's woo'd her for her yellow hair,
But his mother wrought her mickle care.
3 And mickle dolour gard her dree,
For lighter she can never be.
4 But in her bower she sits wi pain,
And Willie mourns oer her in vain.
5 And to his mother he has gone,
That vile rank witch of vilest kind.
6 He says: 'My ladie has a cup,
Wi gowd and silver set about.
7 'This goodlie gift shall be your ain,
And let her be lighter o her young bairn.'
8 'Of her young bairn she 'll neer be lighter,
Nor in her bower to shine the brighter.
9 'But she shall die and turn to clay,
And you shall wed another may.'
10 'Another may I 'll never wed,
Another may I 'll neer bring home.'
11 But sighing says that weary wight,
'I wish my life were at an end.'
12 'Ye doe [ye] unto your mother again,
That vile rank witch of vilest kind.
13 'And say your ladie has a steed,
The like o'm's no in the lands of Leed.
14 'For he [i]s golden shod before,
And he [i]s golden shod behind.
15 'And at ilka tet of that horse's main,
There's a golden chess and a bell ringing.
16 'This goodlie gift shall be your ain,
And let me be lighter of my young bairn.'
17 'O her young bairn she 'll neer be lighter,
Nor in her bower to shine the brighter.
18 'But she shall die and turn to clay,
And ye shall wed another may.'
19 'Another may I ['ll] never wed,
Another may I ['ll] neer bring hame.'
20 But sighing said that weary wight,
'I wish my life were at an end.'
21 'Ye doe [ye] unto your mother again,
That vile rank witch of vilest kind.
22 'And say your ladie has a girdle,
It's red gowd unto the middle.
23 'And ay at every silver hem,
Hangs fifty silver bells and ten.
24 'That goodlie gift has be her ain,
And let me be lighter of my young bairn.'
25 'O her young bairn she's neer be lighter,
Nor in her bower to shine the brighter.
26 'But she shall die and turn to clay,
And you shall wed another may.'
27 'Another may I 'll never wed,
Another may I 'll neer bring hame.'
28 But sighing says that weary wight,
'I wish my life were at an end.'
29 Then out and spake the Belly Blind;
He spake aye in good time.
30 'Ye doe ye to the market place,
And there ye buy a loaf o wax.
31 'Ye shape it bairn and bairnly like,
And in twa glassen een ye pit;
32 'And bid her come to your boy's christening;
Then notice weel what she shall do.
33 'And do you stand a little fore bye,
And listen weel what she shall say-'


6. WILLIE'S LADY
87
34 'Oh wha has loosed the nine witch knots
That was amo that ladie's locks?
35 'And wha has taen out the kaims of care
That hangs amo that ladie's hair?
36 'And wha's taen down the bush o woodbine
That hang atween her bower and mine?
37 'And wha has killd the master kid
That ran beneath that ladie's bed?
38 'And wha has loosed her left-foot shee,
And lotten that ladie lighter be?'
39 O Willie has loosed the nine witch knots
'That was amo that ladie's locks.
40 And Willie's taen out the kaims o care
That hang amo that ladie's hair.
41 And Willie's taen down the bush o woodbine
That hang atween her bower and thine.
42 And Willie has killed the master kid
That ran beneath that ladie's bed.
43 And Willie has loosed her left-foot shee,
And letten his ladie lighter be.
44 And now he's gotten a bonny young son,
And mickle grace be him upon.
a. The stanzas are not regularly divided in the
MS., nor were they so divided by Scott.
412. hung (?) beneath: but see 362.
Scott's principal variations are:
121. Yetgaeye.
141. For he is silver shod.
15. At every tuft of that horse main
There's a golden chess and a bell to ring.
211. Yet gae ye. 2. o rankest kind.
222. It's a' red gowd to.
241. This gudely gift sall be.
261. For she.
282. my days.
301. Yet gae ye. 2. there do buy.
311. Do shape. 2. you 'll put.
32l. And bid her your boy's christening to.
331. a little away. 2. To notice weel what she
may saye.
352. That were amang.
382. And let
391. Syne Willie.
402. That were into.
41\ 421, 431. And he.
412. Hung atween her bour and the witch car-
line.
442. a bonny son.
b. Divided in Jamieson's MS. into stanzas of four
verses, two verses being written in one line:
but Jamieson's 8 = a 14-16.
I1. Sweet Willy's taen.
5-11, wanting. Instead of the cup, the girdle
occurs here: — a 21-28.
12\ He did him till. 2. wilest kin.
131. An said, My lady.
141,2. he is.
162. An lat her be lighter o her young bairn.
181. go to clay.
a 211 = b 51. Now to his mither he has gane.
2. kin.
a 221 = b 61. He say[s] my lady. 2 It's a'
red.
a 231 = b 7,. at ilka. 2. Hings.
a 241 = b 81. gift sall be your ain. 2. lat her
. . . o her.
a 29 = b 22. Then out it spake the belly blin;
She spake ay in a good time,
a 32 = b 25, 26.
An do you to your mither then, An bid her
come to your boy's christnen;
For dear's the boy he's been to you : Then no-
tice well what she shall do.
Between a 33 and a 34 occurs in b (28-31):
He did him" to the market place, An there he
bought a loaf o wax.
He shap'd it bairn and bairnly like, An in't twa
glazen een he pat
He did him till his mither then, An bade him
(sic) to his boy's christnen.
An he did stan a little forebye, An notic'd well
what she did say.


88
7. EARL BRAND
a 352 = b 332. hang amo.
36. wanting in b.
372. aneath.
392 = b 362. hang amo his.
401. kemb o care. 2. his lady's.
41. wanting in b.
422 = b 382. ran aneath his.
44. wanting in b.
b 222 makes the Billy Blind feminine. This
is not so in a, or in any other ballad, and
may be only an error of the transcriber, who
has not always written carefully.
7
EARL BRAND
A. a. b. 'Earl Bran,' Mr Robert White's papers,
o.' The Brave Earl Brand and the King of England's
Daughter,' Bell, Ancient Poems, etc., p. 122. d.
Fragmentary verses remembered by Mr R. White's
sister.
B. 'The Douglas Tragedy,' Scott's Minstrelsy, in, 246,
ed. 1808.
C. 'Lord Douglas,' Motherwell's MS., p. 502.
D. 'Lady Margaret,' Kinloch MSS, r, 327.
E. 'The Douglas Tragedy,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
p. 180.
P. 'The Child of El!,'Percy MS., p. 57; Hales and
Furnivall, i, 138.
'Earl Brand,' first given to the world by
Mr Robert Bell in 1857, has preserved most
of the incidents of a very ancient story with a
faithfulness unequalled by any ballad that has
been recovered from English oral tradition.
Before the publication of ' Earl Brand,' A o,
our known inheritance in this particular was
limited to the beautiful but very imperfect
fragment called by Scott' The Douglas Trag-
edy,' B; half a dozen stanzas of another ver-
sion of the same in Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
E ; so much of Percy's ' Child of Elle' as was
genuine, which, upon the printing of his man-
uscript, turned out to be one fifth, F; and
two versions of Erlinton, A, C* What
now can be added is but little: two tran-
scripts of 'Earl Brand,' one of which, A a,
has suffered less from literary revision than
the only copy hitherto printed, A c; a third
version of 'The Douglas Tragedy,' from Moth-
erwell's manuscript, C; a fourth from Kin-
loch's manuscripts, D; and another of 'Er-
* 'Erlinton,' though not existing in a two-line stanza,
follows immediately after ' Earl Brand.' The copy of 'The
Douglas Tragedy' in Smith's Scottish Minstrel, in, 86, is
merely Scott's, with changes to facilitate singing.
linton,' B. Even • Earl Brand' has lost a
circumstance that forms the turning-point in
Scandinavian ballads, and this capital defect
attends all our other versions, though traces
which remain in 'Erlinton' make it nearly
certain that our ballads originally agreed in
all important particulars with those which are
to this day recited in the north of Europe.
The corresponding Scandinavian ballad
is 'Ribold and Guldborg,' and it is a jewel
that any clime might envy. Up to the time
of Grundtvig's edition, in Danmarks gamle
Folkeviser, No 82, though four versions had
been printed, the only current copy for a hun-
dred and fifty years had been Syv's No 88,
based on a broadside of the date 1648, but
compounded from several sources; and it was
in this form that the ballad became known
to the English through Jamieson's translation.
Grundtvig has now published twenty-seven
versions of 'Ribold og Guldborg' (n, 347 ff,
nineteen; 675 ff, four; m, 849 ff, four:f
t B*, in, 853, a fragment of five stanzas, has been
dropped by Grundtvig from No 82, and assigned to No 249.
See D. g. F. iv, 494.


1. EARL BRAND
89
of all which only two are fragments), and nine
of 'Hildebrand og Hilde,' No 83, which is
the same story set in a dramatic frame-work
(n, 393 ff, seven; 680 f, one; m, 857, one, a
fragment). Three more Danish versions of
« Ribold og Guldborg' are furnished by Kris-
tensen, Gamle jydske Folkeviser, I, No 37, n,
No 84 A, B (C, D*, E*). To these we may
add the last half, sts 15-30, of 'Den farlige
Jomfru,' Grundtvig, 184 G. Of Grundtvig's
texts, 82 A is of the sixteenth century; B-H
are of the seventeenth; the remainder and
Kristensen's three from recent tradition.. Six
versions of 'Hildebrand og Hilde,' A-F, are
of the seventeenth century; one is of the
eighteenth, G; and the remaining two are
from oral tradition of our day.
The first six of Grundtvig's versions of ' Ri-
bold and Guldborg,' A-F, are all from manu-
scripts, and all of a pure traditional char-
acter, untampered with by " collators." G and
H are mixed texts: they have F for their
basis, but have admitted stanzas from other
sources. Most of the versions from recitation
are wonderful examples and proofs of the
fidelity with which simple people " report and
hold" old tales: for, as the editor has shown,
verses which never had been printed, but
which are found in old manuscripts, are now
met with in recited copies; and these recited
copies, again, have verses that occur in no Dan-
ish print or manuscript, but which neverthe-
less are found in Norwegian and Swedish reci-
tations, and, what is more striking, in Ice-
landic tradition of two hundred years' stand-
ing.
The story in the older Danish ballads runs
thus. Ribold, a king's son, sought Guldborg's
love in secret. He said he would carry her
to a land where death and sorrow came not;
where all the birds were cuckoos, and all the
grass was leeks, and all the streams ran wine.
Guldborg, not indisposed, asked how she
should evade the watch kept over her by all
her family and by her betrothed. Ribold dis-
guised her in his cloak and armor, B, E, F,
and rode off, with Guldborg behind him. On
the heath they meet a rich earl [a crafty man,
C; her betrothed, DJ, who asks, Whither away,
with your stolen maid? [little page, B, F.]
Ribold replies that it is his youngest sister,
whom he has taken from a cloister, A, E [sick
sister, C; brother, B, F ; page, D]. This shift
avails nothing; no more does a bribe which
he offers for keeping his secret. Report is at
once made to her father that Guldborg has
eloped with Ribold. Guldborg perceives that
they are pursued, and is alarmed. Ribold re-
assures her, and prepares to meet his foes.
He bids Guldborg hold his horse, B, C, E, and,
whatever may happen, not to call him by
name: "Though thou see me bleed, name me
not to death; though thou see me fall, name
me not at all!" Ribold cuts down six or
seven of her brothers and her father, besides
others of her kin; the youngest brother only
is left, and Guldborg in an agony calls upon
Ribold to spare him, to carry tidings to her
mother. No sooner was his name pronounced
than Ribold received a mortal wound. He
sheathed his sword, and said, Come, wilt
thou ride with me? Wilt thou go home to
thy mother again, or wilt thou follow so sad
a swain? And she answered, I will not
go home to my mother again; I will follow
thee, my heart's dearest man. They rode
through the wood, and not a word came from
the mouth of either. Guldborg asked, Why
art thou not as glad as before? And Ribold
answered, Thy brother's sword has been in
my heart. They reached his house. He
called to one to take his horse, to another to
bring a priest, and said his brother should
have Guldborg. But she would not give her
faith to two brothers. Ribold died that night,
C. Three dead came from Ribold's bower:
Ribold and his lief, and his mother, who died
of grief! In A Guldborg slays herself, and
dies in her lover's arms.
'Hildebrand and Hilde,' A, B, C, D, opens
with the heroine in a queen's service, sewing
her seam wildly, putting silk for gold and gold
for silk. The queen calls her to account.
Hilde begs her mistress to listen to her tale
of sorrow. She was a king's daughter. Twelve
knights had been appointed to be her guard,
and one had beguiled her, Hildebrand, son of
the king of England. They went off together,


90
7. EARL BRAND
and were surprised by her brothers [father, B,
C, D]. Hildebrand bade her be of good
cheer; but she must not call him by name if
she saw him bleed or fall, A, B, D. A heap
of knights soon lay at his feet. Hilde forgot
herself, and called out, Hildebrand, spare
my youngest brother! Hildebrand that in-
stant received a mortal wound, and fell. The
younger brother tied her to his horse, and
dragged her home. They shut her up at first
in a strong tower, built for the purpose, A,
B [Swedish A, a dark house], and afterwards
sold her into servitude for a church bell. Her
mother's heart broke at the bell's first stroke,
and Hilde, with the last word of her tale, fell
dead in the queen's arms.
The most important deviation of the later
versions from the old is exhibited by S and T,
and would probably be observed in Q, R, as
well, were these complete. S, T are either a
mixture of ' Ribold and Guldborg ' with 'Hil-
debrand and Hilde,' or forms transitional be-
tween the two. In these Ribold does not live
to reach his home, and Guldborg, unable to
return to hers, offers herself to a queen, to
spin silk and weave gold [braid hair and work
gold]. But she cannot sew for grief. The
queen smacks her on the cheek for neglecting
her needle. Poor Guldborg utters a protest,
but gives no explanation, and the next morn-
ing is found dead. Singularly enough, the
name of the hero in Q, R, S, T, is also an in-
termediate form. Ribold is the name in all
the old Danish copies except C, and that has
Ride-bolt. Danish I, K, X, Z, all the Ice-
landic copies, and Swedish D, have either Ri-
bold or some unimportant variation. Q, R, S,
have Ride-brand-[T, Rederbrand]. All copies
of Grundtvig 83, except Danish G, Swedish
C, which do not give the hero's name, have
Hilde-brand; so also 82 N, O, P, V, and Kris-
tensen, I, No 37. The name of the woman
is nearly constant both in 82 and 83.
The paradise promised Guldborg in all the
old versions of 82* disappears from the re-
* Though the paradise has not been transmitted in any
known copy of 'Earl Brand,' it appears very distinctly in
the opening stanza of ' Lcesome Brand ' A. This last has
several stanzas towards the close (33-35) which seem to be-
cited copies, except K, M. It certainly did
not originally belong to 'Ribold and Guld-
borg,' or to another Danish ballad in which it
occurs (' Den trofaste Jomfru,' Grundtvig, 249
A), but rather to ballads like ' Kvindemorde-
ren,' Grundtvig, 183 A, or ' Lfti Kersti,' Land-
stad, 44, where a supernatural being, a demon
or a hillman, seeks to entice away a mor-
tal maid. See No 4, p. 27. In 82 L, N, U,
V, Y, JE, 0, and Kristensen's copies, the lov-
ers are not encountered by anybody who re-
ports their flight. Most of the later versions,
K, Iv, M, N, P, U, V, Y, M, 0, and Kris-
tensen's three, make them halt in a wood,
where Ribold goes to sleep in Guldborg's lap,
and is roused by her when she perceives that
they are pursued. So Norwegian B, Swed-
ish A, B, C, and 'Hildebraud and Hilde' B.
M, Q, R, S, T, Z, have not a specific prohi-
bition of dead-naming, but even these enjoin
silence. 83 C is the only ballad in which
there is a fight and no prohibition of either
kind, but it is clear from the course of the
story that the stanza containing the usual in-
junction has simply dropped out. P is distin-
guished from all other forms of the story by
the heroine's killing herself before her dying
lover reaches his house.
The four first copies of • Hildebrand and
Hilde,' as has been seen, have the story of
Ribold and Guldborg with some slight dif-
ferences and some abridgment. There is no
elopement in B: the lovers are surprised in
the princess' bower. When Hilde has fin-
ished her tale, in A, the queen declares that
Hildebrand was her son. In B she interrupts
the narrative by announcing her discovery
that Hildebrand was her brother. C and D
have nothing of the sort. There is no fight
in E-H. E has taken up the commonplace
of the bower on the strand which was forced
by nine men.f Hildebrand is again the son of
the queen, and, coming in just as Hilde has
expired, exclaims that he will have no other
love, sets his sword against a stone, and runs
long to ' Karl Brand,' and perhaps derived these, the " unco
land," and even its name, by the familiar process of iu;er-
mixture of traditions.
t See No 5, pp. 64, 65, 66.


7. EARL BRAND
91
upon it. H has the same catastrophe. F
represents the father as simply showing great
indignation and cruelty on finding out that
one of the guardian knights had beguiled his
daughter, and presently selling her for a new
church bell. The knight turns out here again
to be the queen's son; the queen says he
shall betroth Hille, and Hille faints for joy.
G agrees with B as to the surprise in the
bower. The knight's head is hewn off on the
spot. The queen gives Hilde her youngest
son for a husband, and Hilde avows that she
is consoled. I agrees with E so far as it goes,
but is a short fragment.
There are three Icelandic versions of this
ballad, ' Ribbalds kvaeSi,' fslenzk Fornkvaeoi,
No 16, all of the seventeenth century. They
all come reasonably close to the Danish as to
the story, and particularly A. Ribbald, with
no prologue, invites Gullbrun " to ride." He
sets her on a white horse; of all women she
rode best. They have gone but a little way,
when they see a pilgrim riding towards them,
who hails Ribbald with, Welcome, with thy
stolen maid! Ribbald pretends that the maid
is his sister, but the pilgrim knows very well
it is Gullbrun." She offers her cloak to him
not to tell her father, but the pilgrim goes
straight to the king, and says, Thy daugh-
ter is off! The king orders his harp to be
brought, for no purpose but to dash it on the
floor once and twice, and break out the strings.
He then orders his horse. Gullbrun sees her
father come riding under a hill-side, then her
eleven brothers, then seven brothers-in-law.
She begs Ribbald to spare her youngest broth-
er's life, that he may carry the news to her
mother. He replies, I will tie my horse by
the reins; you take up your sewing! then
three times forbids her to name him during
the fight. He slew her father first, next the
eleven brothers, then the other seven, all which
filled her with compunction, and she cried
out, Ribbald, still thy brand! On the in-
stant Ribbald received many wounds. He
wiped his bloody sword, saying, This is what
you deserve, Gullbrun, but love is your shield;
then set her on her horse, and rode to his
brother's door. He called out, Here is a wife
for you! But Gullbrun said, Never will I be
given to two brothers. Soon after Ribbald
gave up the ghost. There was more mourn-
ing than mirth; three bodies went to the
grave in one coffin, Ribbald, his lady, and his
mother, who died of grief.
B and C have lost something at the begin-
ning, C starting at the same point as our
'Douglas Tragedy.' The king pursues Rib-
bald by water. Gullbrun (B) stands in a
tower and sees him land. Ribbald gives Gull-
brun to his brother, as in A: she lives in sor-
row, and dies a maid.
Norwegian. (' Ribold and Guldborg.') A,
'Rikeball og stolt GuSbjorg,' Landstad, 33;
B, ' Veneros og stolt Olleber,' Landstad, 34;
C, D, E, F, in part described and cited, with
six other copies, Grundtvig, m, p. 853 f. The
last half of Landstad No 23, stanzas 17-34, and
stanzas 18-25 of Landstad 28 B, also belong
here. A agrees with the older Danish ver-
sions, even to the extent of the paradise. B
has been greatly injured. Upon the lady's
warning Veneros of the approach of her fa-
ther, he puts her up in an oak-tree for safety.
He warns her not to call him by name, and
she says she will rather die first; but her firm-
ness is not put to the test in this ballad, some
verses having dropped out just at this point.
Veneros is advised to surrender, but dispatches
his assailants by eighteen thousands (like Lil-
le br6r, in Landstad, 23), and by way of con-
clusion hews the false Pal greive, who had re-
ported his elopement to Olleber's father, into
as many pieces. He then takes Olleber on
his horse, they ride away and are married.
Such peculiarities in the other copies as are
important to us will be noticed further on.
(' Hildebrand and Hilde.') A, one of two
Norwegian copies communicated by Professor
Bugge to Grundtvig, nI, 857 f, agrees well
with Danish E, but has the happy conclusion
of Danish F, G, I. The heroine is sold for
nine bells. B, the other, omits the bower-
breaking of A and Danish E, and ends with
marriage.
The Swedish forms of 'Ribold and Guld-
borg' are: A, ' Hillebrand,' Afzelius, No 2;
B, ' Herr Redebold,' and C, ' Kung Vallemo,'


92
7. EARL BRAND
Afzelius, No 80; new ed., No 2, l, 2, 3; D,
'Ribbolt,' Arwidsson, No 78; E, ' Herr Rede-
bold' F, 'Herting Liljebrand,' and G, 'Herr
Balder,' in Cavallius and Stephens' manu-
script collection; H, 'Kung Walmon,' E.
Wigstrom's Folkdiktning, No 15, p. 33. A,
B, C, H, are not markedly different from the
ordinary Danish ballad, and this is true also,
says Grundtvig, ol the unprinted versions, E,
F, G. D and G are of the seventeenth cent-
ury, the others from recent tradition. Ribold
is pictured in D as a bold prince, equally versed
in runes and arts as in manly exercises. He
visits Giotha by night: they slumber sweet,
but wake in blood. She binds up his wounds
with rich kerchiefs. He rides home to his fa-
ther's, and sits down on a bench. The king
bids his servants see what is the matter, and
adds, Be he sick or be he hurt, he got it at
Gib'tha-Lilla's. They report the prince stabbed
with sharp pikes within, and bound with silk
kerchiefs without. Ribold bids them bury
him in the mould, and not blame Giotha-Lilla;
"for my horse was fleet, and I was late, and
he hurtled me 'gainst an apple-tree" (so
Hillebrand in A). E represents the heroine
as surviving her lover, and united to a young
king, but always grieving for Redebold.
'Hildebrand and Hilde' exists in Swedish in
three versions : A, a broadside of the last part
of the seventeenth century, now printed in the
new edition of Afzelius, p. 142 ff of the notes
(the last nine stanzas before, in Danske Viser,
in, 438 f) ; B, Afzelius, No 32, new ed. No 26,
C, Arwidsson, No 107, both taken down in this
century. In A and B Hillebrand, son of the
king of England, carries off Hilla; they halt
in a grove; she wakes him from his sleep
when she hears her father and seven brothers
coming; he enjoins her not to call him by
name, which still she does upon her father's
being slain [or when only her youngest brother
is left], and Hillebrand thereupon receives
mortal wounds. He wipes his sword, saying,
This is what you would deserve, were you
not Hilla. The youngest brother ties Hilla
to his horse, drags her home, and confines her
in a dark house, which swarms with snakes
and dragons (A only). They sell her for a
new church bell, and her mother's heart breaks
at the first sound. Hilla falls dead at the
queen's knee. C has lost the dead-naming,
and ends with the queen's promising to be
Hilla's best friend.
A detailed comparison of the English bal-
lads, and especially of ' Earl Brand,' with the
Scandinavian (such as Grundtvig has made,
m, 855 f) shows an unusual and very inter-
esting agreement. The name Earl Brand, to
begin with, is in all probability a modification
of the Hildebrand found in Danish 82 N, O,
P, V, C*, in all versions of Danish 83, and in
the corresponding Swedish A. Ell, too, in
Percy's fragment, which may have been Elle
earlier, points to Hilde, or something like it,
and Erl-inton might easily be corrupted from
such a form as the Alibrand of Norwegian B
(Grundtvig, m, 858). Hildebrand is the son
of the king of England in Danish 83 A-E, and
the lady in ' Earl Brand' is the same king's
daughter, an interchange such as is constantly
occurring in tradition. Stanza 2 can hardly be
the rightful property of ' Earl Brand.' Some-
thing very similar is met with in 'Leesome
Brand,' and is not much in place there. For
'old Carl Hood,' of whom more presently,
Danish 82 X and Norwegian A, C have an
old man, Danish C a crafty man, T a false
younker, and Norwegian B and three others
"false Pal greive." The lady's urging Earl
Brand to slay the old carl, and the answer,
that it would be sair to kill a gray-haired man,
sts 8, 9, are almost literally repeated in Nor-
wegian A, Landstad, No 33. The knight does
slay the old man in Danish X and Norwegian
C, and slays the court page in Danish Z, and
false Pal greive in Norwegian B, — in this last
after the battle. The question," Where have
ye stolen this lady away?" in st. 11, occurs
in Danish 82 A, D, E, K, P, R, S, T, Z, in
Norwegian B and Icelandic B, and something
very similar in many other copies. The re-
ply, "She is my sick sister, whom I have
brought from Winchester" [nunnery], is found
almost literally in Danish C, X, Z : "It is my
sick sister; I took her yesterday from the
cloister." [Danish E, it is my youngest sister
from the cloister; she is sick: Danish A,


7- EARL BRAND
93
youngest sister from cloister: Danish R and
Norwegian B, sister from cloister: Danish S,
T, sister's daughter from cloister: Norwegian
F, sister from Holstein: Danish P, Icelandic
A, Norwegian A, sister.] The old man, crafty
man, rich earl, in the Scandinavian ballads,
commonly answers that he knows Guldborg
very well; but in Danish D, where Ribold says
it is a court page he has hired, we have some-
thing like sts 14, 15: "Why has he such silk-
braided hair?" On finding themselves dis-
covered, the lovers, in the Scandinavian bal-
lad, attempt to purchase silence with a bribe:
Danish A-I, M, Icelandic and Norwegian A,
B. This is not expressly done in 'Earl Brand,'
but the same seems to be meant in st. 10 by
"I 'll gie him a pound." St. 17 is fairly par-
alleled by Danish S, 18, 19: ""Where is Guld-
borg, thy daughter? Walking in the garden,
gathering roses ;" and st. 18, by Norwegian
B, 15: " You may search without and search
within, and see whether Olleber you can find."
The announcement in st. 19 is made in al-
most all the Scandinavian ballads, in words
equivalent to "Ribold is off with thy daugh-
ter," and then follows the arming for the pur-
suit. The lady looks over her shoulder and
sees her father coming, as in st. 21, in Danish
82 A, F, H, L, Q, R, T, X, Z, and Norwe-
gian A.
The scene of the fight is better preserved
in the Scottish ballads than in 'Earl Brand,'
though none of these have the cardinal inci-
dent of the death-naming. All the Scottish
versions, B-F, and also ' Erlinton,' A, B, make
j;he lady hold the knight's horse: so Danish
82 B, C, E, I, M, D\ Icelandic C, Norwegian
and Swedish A, and Danish 83 D. Of the
knight's injunction, " Name me not to death,
though thou see me bleed," which, as has been
noted, is kept by nearly every Danish ballad
(and by the Icelandic, the Norwegian, and by
Swedish 'Ribold and Guldborg,' A, B, C, H,
Swedish ' Hildebrand and Hilde,' A, B), there
is left in English only this faint trace, in
'Erlinton,' A, B: "See ye dinna change your
cheer until ye see my body bleed." It is the
wish to save the life of her youngest brother
that causes the lady to call her lover by name
in the larger number of Scandinavian ballads,
and she adds, "that he may carry the tidings
to my mother," in Danish 82 A, B, C, E, F,
G, H, M, X, 83 B, C, D. Grief for her fa-
ther's death is the impulse in Danish 82 I, N,
O, Q, R, S, Y, Z, M, 0, A*, C*, D', E\ Swed-
ish A, B, C, H. English A says nothing of
father or brother; but in B, C, D, E, it is
the father's death that causes the exclama-
tion. All the assailants are slain in * Erlinton'
A, B, except an aged knight [the auldest
man], and he is spared to carry the tidings
home. 'Erlinton ' C, however, agrees with the
oldest Danish copies in making the youngest
brother the motive of the lady's intervention.
It is the fifteenth, and last, of the assailants
that gives Earl Brand his death-wound; in
Danish H, the youngest brother, whom he has
been entreated to spare; and so, apparently,
in Danish C and Norwegian A.
The question, "Will you go with me or re-
turn to your mother?" which we find in Eng-
lish B, C, D, is met with also in many Dan-
ish versions, 82 B, H, K, L, M, N, P, U, Z,
tt, 0, C*, and Swedish A, B, C. The dying
man asks to have his bed made in English B,'
C, as in Danish 82 B, C, K, L, N, U, X, tt,
0, C*, D', Norwegian A, Swedish A, B, C, H,
and desires that the lady may marry his brother
in English A, as in nearly all the Danish ver-
sions, Icelandic A, B, C, Norwegian C, D, E,
Swedish C. He declares her a maiden true in
• Earl Brand,' A o 33, and affirms the same
with more particularity in Danish 82 B, C,
E, F, G, M, 0, Icelandic B, C, Norwegian
A, C, E, Swedish C. The growth of the rose
and brier [bush and brier] from the lovers'
grave in English B, C, is not met with in any
version of 'Ribold and Guldborg' proper, but
'Den farlige Jomfru ' G, Grundtvig, 184, the
last half of which, as already remarked, is a
fragment of a Ribold ballad, has a linden in
place of the rose and brier.
No complete ballad of the Ribold class is
known to have survived in German, but a
few verses have been interpolated by tradition
in the earliest copy of the Ulinger ballad
(vv. 47-56), which may almost with certainty
be assigned to one of the other description.


94
7. EARL BRAND
They disturb the narrative where they are,
and a ready occasion for their slipping in was
afforded by the scene being exactly the same
in both ballads: a knight and a lady, with
whom he had eloped, resting in a wood.* See
No 4, p. 32 of this volume.
We find in a pretty Neapolitan-Albanian
ballad, which, with others, is regarded by the
editors as a fragment of a connected poem,
several of the features of these northern ones.
A youth asks a damsel in marriage, but is not
favored by her mother, father, or brother.
He wins over first the mother and then the
father by handsome presents, but his gifts,
though accepted, do not conciliate the brother.
He carries off the lady on horseback, and is
attacked by the brother, four uncles, and seven
cousins. He is killed and falls from his horse;
with him the lady falls dead also, and both are
covered up with stones. In the spring the
youth comes up a cypress, the damsel comes
up a vine, and encloses the cypress in her arms.
(Rapsodie d'un poema albanese raccolte nelle
colonie del Napoletano, de Rada and de' Co-
ronei, Florence, 1866, lib. ii., canto viii.)
These ballads would seem to belong among
the numerous ramifications of the Hilde saga.
Of these, the second lay of Helgi Hunding-
slayer, in Saemund's Edda, and 'Waltharius,'
the beautiful poem of Ekkehard, are most like
the ballads.f Leaving 'Waltharius' till we
come to 'Erlinton,' we may notice that Sigriin,
in the Helgi lay, though promised by her father
* Compare vv 49-56, " Wilt thou ride to them, or wilt
thou fight with them, or wilt thou stand by thy love, sword
in hand?" "I will not ride to them, I will not fight with
them [i. e., begin the fight], but I will stand by my love,
sword in hand," with Norwegian A, 29, 30: "Shall we
ride to the wood, or shall we bide like men 1" "We will
not ride to the wood, but we will bide like men." And also
with Danish JE, sts 14, 15.
t The chief branches, besides the Helgi lay and Walter,
are the saga in Snorri's Edda, Skaldskaparmal, § 50 j that in
Saxo Grammaticus, Stephanius, ed. 1644, pp. 88-90; Sorla
pattr, in Fornaldar Sogur, i, 391 ff; the Shetland ballad
printed in Low's Tour through the Islands of Orkney and
Shetland, 108 ff, and in Barry's History of the Orkney
Islands, 2d ed., 489 ff, and paraphrased in Hibbert's Descrip-
tion of the Shetland Islands, 561 ff; the Thidrik saga, §§ 233-
239, Unger; Gudrun, v-viii. The names of father, daughter,
and lover in these are : (1) Hogni, —, Hogni, Hogin-, Hogni,
—, [Artus], Hagen ; (2) [Sigrun], Hilde-gunde, Hildr, Hilda,
Hildr, Hildina, Hildr, Hilde; (3) Helgi, [Walter], Hedin,
Hithin-, Hedin, —, [Herburt], Hetel. Hagan, in ' Waltha.
to another man, Hodbrodd, son of Granmar,
preferred Helgi. She sought him out, and told
him frankly her predicament: she feared, she
said, the wrath of her friends, for breaking her
father's promise. Helgi accepted her affec-
tion, and bade her not care for the displeasure
of her relatives. A great battle ensued be-
tween Helgi and the sons of Granmar, who were
aided by Sigrun's father and brothers. All her
kinsmen were slain except one brother, Dag.
He bound himself to peace with Helgi, but,
notwithstanding, made sacrifices to Odin to
obtain the loan of his spear, and with it slew
Helgi. We have, therefore, in so much of
the lay of Helgi Hundingslayer, the ground-
work of the story of the ballads: a woman,
who, as in many of the Ribold ballads, has
been betrothed to a man she does not care for,
gives herself to another; there is a fight, in
which a great number of her kinsmen fall;
one brother survives, who is the death of the
man she loves. The lay of Helgi Hiorvard's
son, whose story has much in common with
that of his namesake, affords two resemblances
of detail not found in the lay of the Hun-
dingslayer. Helgi Hiorvard's son, while his
life-blood is ebbing, expresses himself in al-
most the words of the dying Ribold: "The
sword has come very near my heart." He
then, like Ribold and Earl Brand, declares his
wish that his wife should marry his brother,
and she, like Guldborg, declines a second
union. J
rius,' may be said to take the place of the rather, who is want-
ing; and this is in a measure true also of Hedin, Helgi's half-
brother, in the lay of Helgi Hiorvard's son. See the excellent-
discussion of the saga by Klee, Zur Hildesage, Leipzig,
1873.
The Swedish ballad,' Hcrr Hjelmer,' A, Arwidsson, i, 155,
No 21; B, C, Afzelius, n, 178, 226, No 74 (Helmer); D,
E. Wigstriim, Folkdiktning, p. 25, No 10 (Hjelman), has
several points of agreement with Ribold and the Hilde saga.
The hero kills six of seven brothers [also the father, in A],
spares the seventh on oath of fidelity, and is treacherously
slain by him. The youngest brother carries her lover's head
to his sister, is invited to drink by her (in three of the four
copies), and slain while so engaged; reminding us of Hil-
dina in the Shetland ballad. Danish ' Herr Hjselm,' Grundt-
vig, Danskc Folkeminder, 1861, p. 81, agrees with the Swed-
ish, except that there are only three brothers.
} HelgakviSa HjorvarSssonar, ed. Grundtvig, 42-44, Ribold
og Guldborg, A 33, 34, B 46, D 46, 47, E 42, Q 24. The
observation is Professor Bugge's.


7. EARL BRAND
95
There is also a passage in the earlier his-
tory of Helgi Hundingslayer of which traces
appear to be preserved in ballads, and be-
fore all in the English ballad 'Earl Brand,'
A. Hunding and Helgi's family were at feud.
Helgi introduced himself into Hunding's court
as a spy, and when he was retiring sent word
to Hunding's son that he had been there dis-
guised as a son of Hagal, Helgi's foster-father.
Hunding sent men to take him, and Helgi, to
escape them, was forced to assume woman's
clothes and grind at the mill. While Hun-
ding's men are making search, a mysterious
blind man, surnamed the bale-wise, or evil-
witted (Blindr inn bolvfsi), calls out, Sharp
are the eyes of Hagal's maid; it is no churl's
blood that stands at the mill; the stones are
riving, the meal-trough is springing; a hard
lot has befallen a war-king when a chieftain
must grind strange barley ; fitter for that hand
is the sword-hilt than the mill-handle. Ha-
gal pretends that the fierce-eyed maid is a
virago whom Helgi had taken captive, and in
the end Helgi escapes. This malicious person-
age reappears in the HrSmund saga as " Blind
the Bad " and " the Carl Blind, surnamed Ba-
vfs," and is found elsewhere. His likeness to
"old Carl Hood," who "comes for ill, but
never for good," and who gives information
of Earl Brand's flight with the king's daugh-
ter, does not require to be insisted on. Both
are identical, we can scarcely doubt, with the
blind [one-eyed] old man of many tales, who
goes about in various disguises, sometimes as
beggar, with his hood or hat slouched over his
face, — that is Odin, the SfShottr or Deep-
hood of Sfemund, who in the saga of Half and
his champions is called simple Hood, as here,
and expressly said to be Odin.* Odin, though
• Hottr, er OSinn Tar reyndar, Hood, who was Odin really,
Fornaldar Sogur, n, p. 25. Klee observes, p. 10 f, that
Hogni [Hagen] is the evil genius of the Hildesage. Some-
times he is the heroine's father; in ' Waltharius,' strangely
enough, the hero's old friend (and even there a one-eyed
man.) Klee treats the introdnction of a rival lover (as in the
Shetland ballad and Gudrun) as a departure from the older
story. But we have the rival in Helgi Hundingslayer. The
proper marplot in this lay is Blind the Ill-witted (Odin),
whose part is sustained in ' Earl Brand' by the malicious
Hood, in several Norwegian ballads by a very enigmatical
"false Pal greive," in two other Norwegian ballads and one
not a thoroughly malignant divinity, had his
dark side, and one of his titles in Saemund's
Edda is Bolverkr, maleficus. He first caused
war by casting his spear among men, and Dag,
after he has killed Helgi, says Odin was the
author of all the mischief, for he brought
strife among kinsmen.f
The disastrous effects of "naming" in a
great emergency appear in other northern tra-
ditions, though not so frequently as one would
expect. A diverting Swedish saga, which has
been much quoted, relates how St. Olof bar-
gained with a troll for the building of a huge
church, the pay to be the sun and moon, or
St. Olof himself. The holy man was equally
amazed and embarrassed at seeing the build-
ing run up by the troll with great rapidity,
but during a ramble among the hills had the
good luck to discover that the troll's name was
Wind and Weather, after which all was easy.
For while the troll was on the roof of the
church, Olof called out to him,
'Wind and Weather, hi!
Tou've set the spire awry ;'
and the troll, thus called by his name, lost his
strength, fell off, and was dashed into a hun-
dred pieces, all flint stones. (Iduna, Part 3,
p. 60 f, note. Other forms of the same story
in Afzelius, Sago-Hafder, m, 100 f; Faye,
Norske Folke-Sagn, p. 14, 2d ed.; Hofberg,
Nerikes Gamla Minnen, p. 234.)
It is a Norwegian belief that when a nix
assumes the human shape in order to carry
some one off, it will be his death if the se-
lected victim recognizes him and names him,
and in this way a woman escaped in a ballad.
She called out, So you are the Nix, that pes-
tilent beast, and the nix " disappeared in red
Danish by an old man, and, what is most remarkable, in the
Shetland ballad by the rejected lover of Hildina (the Sir
Nilaus of Danish D, Hertug Nilssdn of some Norwegian
copies), who bears the name Hilnge, interpreted with great
probability by Conrad Hofmann (Munich Sitzungsberichte,
1867, ii, 209, note), Ulhugi, der Bossinnige, evil-minded
(Icelandic fllhugaor, flhiSigr.)
t Inimicitias Othinus serit, Saxo, p. 142, ed. 1644. See
Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, i, 120, note 8, in, 56, new ed.,
for Odin's bad points, though some of Grimm's interpreta-
tions might now be objected to.


96
7. EARL BRAND
blood." (Faye, as above, p. 49, note.) A nix
is baffled in the same way in a Faeroe and an
Icelandic ballad cited by Grundtvig, n, 57.
The marvellous horse Blak agrees to carry
Waldemar [Hildebrand] over a great piece of
water for the rescue of his daughter [sister],
stipulating, however, that his name shall not
be uttered. The rider forgets himself in a
panic, calls to the horse by his name, and is
thrown off into the water. The horse, whose
powers had been supernatural, and who had
been running over the water as if it were land,
has now only ordinary strength, and is forced
to swim. He brings the lady back on the
same terms, which she keeps, but when he
reaches the land he is bleeding at every hair,
and falls dead. (Landstad, 58; Grundtvig, 62;
Afzelius, 59, preface; Kristensen, I, No 66.)
Klaufi, a berserker, while under the opera-
tion of his peculiar fury, loses his strength,
and can no longer wield the weapon he was
fighting with, upon Grfss's crying out," Klaufi,
Klaufi, be not so mad!" (Svarfdaela Saga, p.
147, and again p. 156 f.) So the blood-thirst
of the avenger's sword in the magnificent
Danish ballad 'Haevnersvasrdet' is restrained
by naming. (Grundtvig, No 25, st. 35.) Again,
men engaged in hamfarir, that is in roving
about in the shape of beasts, their proper
bodies remaining lifeless the while, must not
be called by name, for this might compel them
to return at once to their own shape, or pos-
sibly prevent their ever doing so. (Kristni
Saga, ed. 1773, p. 149. R. T. King, in Notes
and Queries, 2d Ser., n, 506.) Grundtvig re-
marks that this belief is akin to what is re-
lated in Fafnismal (prose interpolation after
st. 1), that Sigurd concealed his name by rea-
son of a belief in old times that a dying man's
word had great power, if he cursed his foe
by name. (D. g. F., n, 340.)
The beautiful fancy of plants springing from
the graves of star-crossed lovers, and signify-
ing by the intertwining of stems or leaves,
or in other analogous ways, that an earthly
passion has not been extinguished by death,
presents itself, as is well known, very fre-
quently in popular poetry. Though the graves
be made far apart, even on opposite sides of
the church, or one to the north and one to
the south outside of the church, or one with-
out kirk wall and one in the choir, however
separated, the vines or trees seek one another
out, and mingle their branches or their fo-
liage:
"Even from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
Even in our ashes live their wonted fires!"
The principal ballads which exhibit this
conception in one or another form are the fol-
lowing:
In English, ' The Douglas Tragedy,' 'Fair
Margaret and Sweet William,'' Lord Thomas
and Fair Annet,'' Fair Janet,'' Prince Robert,'
'Lord Lovel.' The plants in all these are either
a brier and a rose, or a brier and a birk.
Swedish. Arwidsson, No 73: the graves
are made east and west of the church, a lin-
den grows from each, the trees meet over the
church roof. So E. Wigstrom, Folkdiktning,
No 20, p. 42. Arwidsson 74 A: Rosea Lilla
and the duke are buried south and north in
the church-yard. A rose from her grave cov-
ers his with its leaves. The duke is then laid
in her grave, from which a linden springs.
74 B: the rose as before, and a linden from the
duke's grave. Arwidsson, 72, 68, Afzelius,
No 19 (new ed., 18), 23 (new ed., 21, l, 2):
a common grave, with a linden, two trees, or
lilies, and, in the last, roses also growing from
the mouths of both lovers. In one version
the linden leaves bear the inscription, My
father shall answer to me at doomsday.
Norwegian. Landstad, 65: the lovers are
laid north and south of the church ; lilies grow
over the church roof.
Danish. Danske Viser, 124,153, two roses.
Kristensen, n, No 60, two lilies, interlocking
over church wall and ridge. 61 B, C (= Af-
zelius, 19), separate graves; B, a lily from
each grave; C, a flower from each breast.
Grundtvig, 184 G, 271 N, a linden; Danske
Folkeminder, 1861, p. 81, two lilies.
German. 'Der Ritter u. die Maid,' (1)
Nicolai, I, No 2, = Kretzschmer, I, 54; (2)
Uhland, 97 A, Simrock, 12; (3) Erk's Lied-
erhort, 26; Hoffmann u. Richter, 4: the lov-
ers are buried together, and there grow from


7. EABL BEAND
97
their grave (1) three pinks, (2) three lilies,
(3) two lilies. Wunderhorn, 1857,i, 53, Mit-
tler, No 91: the maid is buried in the church-
yard, the knight under the gallows. A lily
grows from his grave, with an inscription, Beid
waren beisammen im Himmel. Ditfurth, n,
7: two lilies spring from her (or their) grave,
bearing a similar inscription. In Haupt and
Schmaler, Volkslieder der Wenden, I, 136,
from the German, rue is planted on the maid's
grave, in accordance with the last words of
the knight, and the same inscription appears
on one of the leaves.
'Graf Friedrich,' Uhland, 122, Wunder-
horn, n, 293, Mittler, 103, Erk's Lieder-
hort, 15 a: Graf Friedrich's bride is by ac-
cident mortally wounded while he is bring-
ing her home. Her father kills him, and he
is dragged at a horse's heels. Three lilies
spring from his grave, with an inscription,
Er war bei Gott geblieben. He is then
buried with his bride, the transfer being at-
tended with other miraculous manifestations.
Other versions, Hoffmann u. Richter, 19, =
Mittler, 112, = Liederhort, 15; Mittler, 113,
114; also Meinert, 23, = Mittler, 109, etc.:
the lilies in most of these growing from the
bride''s grave, with words attesting the knight's
innocence.
Lilies with inscriptions also in Wunder-
horn, n, p. 251, = Mittler, 128, 'Alle bei
Gott die sich lieben;' Mittler, 130; Ditfurth,
II, 4, 9; Scherer, Jungbrunnen, 9 A, 25; Po-
gatschnigg und Hermann, 1458. Three lilies
from a maid's grave: 'Die schwazbraune
Hexe' (' Es blies ein Jager'), Nicolai, I, 8;
Wunderhorn, I, 36; Grater's Bragur, I, 280;
Uhland, 103; Liederhort, 9; Simrock, 93;
Fiedler, p. 158; Ditfurth, n, 33, 34; Reiffer-
scheid, 15, etc. Three roses, Hoffmann u.
Richter, 171, p. 194; three pinks, ib,, 172;
rose, pink, lily, Alemannia, rv, 35. Three
lilies from a man's grave: 'Der Todwunde :'
Schade, Bergreien, 10, = Uhland, 93 A, =
Liederhort, 34 g, = Mittler, 47, etc.
Portuguese. 'Conde Nillo,' ' Conde Nino,'
Almeida-Garrett, m, No 18, at p. 21; Braga,
Rom. GeraL, No 14, at p. 38, = Hartung, I,
217: the infanta is buried at the foot of the
high altar, Conde Nillo near the church door;
a cypress and an orange [pines]. Almeida-
Garrett, nI, No 20, at p. 38: a sombre clump
of pines over the knight, reeds from the prin-
cess's grave, which, though cut down, shoot
again, and are heard sighing in the night.
Braga, Archip. A§or., 'Filha Maria,' 'Dom
Doardos,' ' A Ermida no Mar,' Nos 32, 33,
34, Hartung, I, 220-224; Estacio da Veiga,
'Dom Diniz,' p. 64-67, = Hartung, I, 217, 2:
tree and pines, olive and pines, clove-tree and
pine, roses and canes: in all, new miracles fol-
low the cutting down. So also Almeida-Gar-
rett, No 6, I, 167.
Roumanian. Alecsandri, 7, Stanley, p. 16,
'Ring and Handkerchief,' translated by Stan-
ley, p. 193, Murray, p. 56: a fir and a vine,
which meet over the church.
French. Beaurepaire, Podsie pop. en Nor-
mandie, p. 51: a thorn and an olive are planted
over the graves ; the thorn embraces the olive.
Romaic. Passow, Nos 414, 415, 456, 469;
Zambelios, p. 754, No 41; Tommaseo, Canti
Popolari, m, 135; Chasiotis, p. 103, No 22:
a cypress from the man's grave, a reed from
the maid's (or from a common tomb); re-
versed in Passow, Nos 418, 470, and Schmidt,
Griechische Marchen, u. s. w., No 59, p. 203.
Sakellarios, p. 25, No 9, cypress and apple-
tree; p. 38, No 13, cypress and lemon-tree.
(F. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, pp. 166, 168,
182, 183.)
Servian. Talvj, V. L. der Serben, n, p.
85: a fir and a rose; the rose twines round
the fir.
Wend. Haupt and Schmaler, V. L. der
Wenden, n, No 48: a maid, who kills her-
self on account of the death of her lover, or-
ders two grape vines to be planted over their
graves: the vines intertwine.
Breton. Luzel, I, p. 423: a fleur-de-lis
springs from a common tomb, and is always
in flower, however often it is plucked.
Italo-Albanian. De Rada, Rapsodie d'un
poema albanese, etc., p. 47: the youth comes
up (nacque) a cypress; the maid a white vine,
which clings around the tree. Camarda, Ap-
pendice al saggio di grammatologia comparata,
'Angelina,' p. 112, the same; but inappropri-


98
7. EARL BRAND
ately, as Liebrecht has remarked, fidelity in
love being wanting in this case.
Magyar. The lovers are buried before and
behind the altar; white and red lilies spring
from the tombs; mother or father destroys
or attempts to destroy the plants: Aigner,
Ungarische Volksdichtungen, 2d ed., at p. 92,
p. 138, 131 f. Again, at p: 160, of the ' Two
Princes' (Hero and Leander): here a white
and a red tulip are planted over the graves, in
a garden, and it is expressly said that the souls
of the enamored pair passed into the tulips.
In the first piece the miracle occurs twice.
The lovers had thrown themselves into a deep
lake; plants rose above the surface of the
water and intertwined (p. 91); the bodies
were brought up by divers and buried in the
church, where the marvel was repeated.
Afghan. Audam and Doorkhaunee, a poem
"read, repeated, and sung, through all parts
of the country," Elphinstone's Account of the
Kingdom of Caubul, 1815, p. 185 f: two trees
spring from their remains, and the branches
mingle over their tomb. First cited by Talvj,
Versuch, p. 140.
Kurd. Mem and Zin, a poem of Ahmdd
Xani, died 1652-3: two rose bushes spring
from their graves and interlock. Bulletin de
la classe des sciences historiques, etc., de l'acad.
impdr. des sciences de St. Pdt., tome XV, No
11, p. 170.
The idea of the love-animated plants has
been thought to be derived from the romance
of Tristan, where it also occurs; agreeably to a
general principle, somewhat hastily assumed,
that when romances and popular ballads have
anything in common, priority belongs to the
romances. The question as to precedence in
this instance is an open one, for the fundamen-
tal conception is not less a favorite with an-
cient Greek than with mediaeval imagination.
Tristan and Isolde had unwittingly drunk
of a magical potion which had the power to
induce an indestructible and ever-increasing
love. Tristan died of a wound received in one
* Et de la tombe de monseigneur Tristan yssoit une ronce
belle et verte et bien feuillene, qui alloit par desstis la cha-
pelle, et descendoit le bout de la ronce sur la tombe de la
royne Yseult, et entroit dedans. La virent les gens du pays
of his adventures, and Isolde of a broken
heart, because, though summoned to his aid,
she arrived too late for him to profit by her
medical skill. They were buried in the same
church. According to the French prose ro-
mance, a green brier issued from Tristan's
tomb, mounted to the roof, and, descending
to Isolde's tomb, made its way within. King
Marc caused the brier to be cut down three
several times, but the morning after it was as
flourishing as before.*
Eilhart von Oberge, vv. 9509-21 (ed. Lich-
tenstein, Quellen u. Forschungen, xix, 429)
and the German prose romance (Busching u.
von der Hagen, Buch der Liebe, c. 60), Ul-
rich von Thurheim, vv. 3546-50, and Heinrich
von Freiberg, vv. 6819-41 (in von der Hagen's
ed. of G. v. Strassburg's Tristan) make King
Marc plant, the first two a grape-vine over
Tristan and a rose over Isolde, the others,
wrongly, the rose over Tristan and the vine
over Isolde. These plants, according to Hein-
rich, struck their roots into the hearts of the
lovers below, while their branches embraced
above. Icelandic ballads and an Icelandic saga
represent Tristan's wife as forbidding the lov-
ers to be buried in the same grave, and order-
ing them to be buried on opposite sides of the
church. Trees spring from their bodies and
meet over the church roof, (fslenzk Forn-
kvaeSi, 23 A, B, C, D; Saga af Tristram ok
Isond, Brynjulfson, p. 199 ; Tristrams Saga ok
fsondar, Kolbing, p. 112). The later Titurel
imitates the conclusion of Tristan. (Der jiin-
gere Titurel, ed. Hahn, sts 5789, 5790.)
Among the miracles of the Virgin there are
several which are closely akin to the prodigies
already noted. A lily is found growing from
the mouth of a clerk, who, though not leading
an exemplary life, had every day said his ave
before the image of Mary: Unger, Mariu Saga,
No 50; Berceo, No 3; Miracles de N.-D. de
Chartres, p. lxiii, No 29, and p. 239; Ma-
rien-legenden (Stuttgart, 1846), No xi and
p. 269. A rose springs from the grave and
et la compterent au roy Marc. Le roy la fist couper par
troys foys, et quant il l'avoit le jour fait couper, le lendeinain
estoit aussi belle comme avoit aultre fois este. Fol. cxxiv,
as cited by Braga, Rom. Ger., p. 185.


7. EARL BRAND
99
roots in the heart of a knight who had spared
the honor of a maid because her name was
Mary: Unger, No clvi, Hagen's Gesammt-
abenteuer, lxxiii. Roses inscribed Maria grow
from the mouth, eyes, and ears of a monk:
Unger, cxxxvii; and a lily grows over a monk's
grave, springing from his mouth, every leaf
of which bears Ave Maria in golden letters:
Unger, cxxxviii; Gesammtabenteuer, lxxxviii;
Libro de Exenplos, Romania, 1878, p. 509, 43,
44; etc., etc.
No one can fail to be reminded of the pur-
ple, lily-shaped flower, inscribed with the
mournful AI A I, that rose from the blood of
Hyacinthus, and of the other from the blood
of Ajax, with the same letters, " his name and
eke his plaint," haec nominis, illa querellae.
(Ovid, Met. x, 210 ff; xiii, 394 ff.) The
northern lindens have their counterpart in the
elms from the grave of Protesilaus, and in the
trees into which Philemon and Baucis were
transformed. See, upon the whole subject, the
essay of Koberstein in the Weimar Jahrbuch,
i, 73ff, with Kohler's supplement, p. 479ff;
Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, n, 689 f, and
m, 246.
« The ballad of the 'Douglas Tragedy,'"
says Scott, " is one of the few to which pop-
ular tradition has ascribed complete locality.
The farm of Blackhouse, in Selkirkshire, is
said to have been the scene of this melancholy
event. There are the remains of a very an-
A
a, b, from the papers of the late Robert White, Esq., of
Newcastle-on-Tyne: o, R. Bell, Ancient Poems, Ballads, etc.
(1857), p. 122: d, fragmentary lines as remembered by Mrs
Andrews, Mr White's sister, from her mother's singing.
1 Oh did ye ever hear o brave Earl Bran?
Ay lally, o lilly lally
He courted the king's daughter of fair Eng-
land.
All i the night sae early
2 She was scarcely fifteen years of age
Till sae boldly she came to his bedside.
cient tower, adjacent to the farm-house, in a
wild and solitary glen, upon a torrent named
Douglas burn, which joins the Yarrow after
passing a craggy rock called the Douglas
craig. . . . From this ancient tower Lady
Margaret is said to have been carried by her
lover. Seven large stones, erected upon the
neighboring heights of Blackhouse, are shown,
as marking the spot where the seven brethren
were slain; and the Douglas burn is averred
to have been the stream at which the lovers
stopped to drink: so minute is tradition in
ascertaining the scene of a tragical tale, which,
considering the rude state of former times,
had probably foundation in some real event."
The localities of the Danish story were as-
certained, to her entire satisfaction, by Anne
Krabbe in 1605-6, and are given again in Re-
sen's Atlas Danicus, 1677. See Grundtvig,
n, 342 f.
B, Scott's 'Douglas Tragedy,' is translated
by Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folke-
viser, No 11; Afzelius, m, 86; Schubart, p.
159 ; Talvj, p. 565 ; Wolff, Halle, I, 76, Haus-
schatz, p. 201; Rosa Warrens, No 23; Ger-
hard, p. 28; Loeve Veimars, p. 292.
'Ribold og Guldborg,' Danish B, is translated
by Buchanan, p. 16 (loosely); G by Jamie-
son, Illustrations, p. 317, and Prior, n, 400;
T by Prior, n, 407; Swedish A, For. Quart.
Rev., xxv, 41. 'Hildebrand og Hilde,' Dan-
ish A, B, F, H, by Prior, n, 411-20.
3 'O Earl Bran, fain wad I see
A pack of hounds let loose on the lea.'
4 'O lady, I have no steeds but one,
And thou shalt ride, and I will run.'
5 'O Earl Bran, my father has two,
And thou shall have the best o them a.'
6 They have ridden oer moss and moor,
And they met neither rich nor poor.
7 Until they met with old Carl Hood;
He comes for ill, but never for good.


100
7. EARL BRAND
8 'Earl Bran, if ye love me,
Seize this old carl, and gar him die.'
9 'O lady fair, it wad be sair,
To slay an old man that has grey hair.
10 'O lady fair, I 'll no do sae;
I 'll gie him a pound, and let him gae.'
11 'O where hae ye ridden this lee lang day?
Or where hae ye stolen this lady away?'
12 'I have not ridden this lee lang day,
Nor yet have I stolen this lady away.
13 'She is my only, my sick sister,
Whom I have brought from Winchester.'
14 'If she be sick, and like to dead,
Why wears she the ribbon sae red?
15 'If she be sick, and like to die,
Then why wears she the gold on high?'
16 When he came to this lady's gate,
Sae rudely as he rapped at it.
17 'O where's the lady o this ha?'
'She's out with her maids to play at the ba.'
18
19
20 The father armed fifteen of his best men,
To bring his daughter back again.
B
Scott's Minstrelsy, in, 246, ed. 1803; nl, 6, ed. 1833: the
copy principally used supplied by Mr Sharpe, the three last
stanzas from a penny pamphlet and from tradition.
1 'Rise up, rise up, now, Lord Douglas,' she says,
'And put on your armour so bright;
Let it never be said that a daughter of thine
Was married to a lord under night.
2 'Rise up, rise up, my seven bold sons,
And put on your armour so bright,
21 Oer her left shoulder the lady looked then:
'O Earl Bran, we both are tane.'
22 'If they come on me ane by ane,
Te may stand by and see them slain.
23 'But if they come on me one and all,
Ye may stand by and see me fall.'
24 They have come on him ane by ane,
And he has killed them all but ane.
25 And that ane came behind his back,
And he's gien him a deadly whack.
26 But for a' sae wounded as Earl Bran was,
He has set his lady on her horse.
27 They rode till they came to the water o Doune,
And then he alighted to wash his wounds.
28 'O Earl Bran, I see your heart's blood!'
'T is but the gleat o my scarlet hood.'
29 They rode till they came to his mother's gate,
And sae rudely as he rapped at it.
30 'O my son's slain, my son's put down,
And a' for the sake of an English loun.'
'O say not sae, my dear mother,
But marry her to my youngest brother.
*****
'This has not been the death o ane,
But it's been that of fair seventeen.'
*****
!
And take better care of your youngest sister,
For your eldest's awa the last night.'
3 He's mounted her on a milk-white steed,
And himself on a dapple grey,
With a bugelet horn hung down by his side,
And lightly they rode away.
4 Lord William lookit oer his left shoulder,
To see what he could see,
And there he spy'd her seven brethren bold,
Come riding over the lee.
'Ha, ha, ha! ye are a' mistaen: 31
Gae count your maidens oer again.
'I saw her far beyond the moor,
Away to be the Earl o Bran's whore.' 32


102
7. EARL BRAND
Till I fight your father and seven brethren,
In yonder pleasant mead?'
4 She stood and held his milk-white steed,
She stood trembling with fear,
Until she saw her seven brethren fall,
And her father that loved her dear.
5 'Hold your hand, Earl Douglas,' she says,
'Your strokes are wonderous sair;
I may get sweethearts again enew,
But a father I 'll ne'er get mair.'
6 She took out a handkerchief
Was made o' the cambrick fine,
And aye she wiped her father's bloody wounds,
And the blood sprung up like wine.
7 'Will ye go, fair Margaret ?' he said,
'Will ye now go, or bide?'
'Yes, I 'll go, sweet William,' she said,
'For ye've left me never a guide.
8 'If I were to go to my mother's house,
A welcome guest I would be;
But for the bloody deed that's done this day
I 'll rather go with thee.'
9 He lifted her on a milk-white steed
And himself on a dapple gray;
They drew their hats out over their face,
And they both went weeping away.
10 They rode, they rode, and they better rode,
Till they came to yon water wan;
They lighted down to gie their horse a drink
Out of the running stream.
11 'I am afraid, Earl Douglas.' she said,
'I am afraid ye are slain ;'
D
Kinloch MSS, i, 327.
1 'Sleepst thou or wakst thou, Lord Montgom-
erie,
Sleepst thou or wakst thou, I say?
Rise up, make a match for your eldest daugh-
ter,
For the youngest I carry away.'
2 'Rise up, rise up, my seven bold sons,
Dress yourselves in the armour sae fine;
I think I see your bonny heart's blood
Running down the water wan.'
12 'Oh no, oh no, fair Margaret,' he said,
'Oh no, I am not slain;
It is but the scad of my scarlet cloak
Runs down the water wan.'
13 He mounted her on a milk-white steed
And himself on a dapple gray,
And they have reached Earl Douglas' gates
Before the break of day.
14 'O rise, dear mother, and make my bed,
And make it braid and wide,
And lay me down to take my rest,
And at my back my bride.'
15 She has risen and made his bed,
She made it brajd and wide;
She laid him down to take his rest,
And at his back his bride.
10 Lord William died ere it was day,
Lady Margaret on the morrow;
Lord William died through loss of blood and
wounds,
Fair Margaret died with sorrow.
17 The one was buried in Mary's kirk,
The other in Mary's quire;
The one sprung up a bonnie bush,
And the other a bonny brier.
18 These twa grew, and these twa threw,
Till they came to the top,
And when they could na farther gae,
They coost the lovers' knot.
For it ne'er shall be said that a churlish knight
Eer married a daughter of mine.'
*****
3 'Loup aff, loup aff, Lady Margaret,' he said,
'And hold my steed in your hand,
And I will go fight your seven brethren,
And your father, where they stand.'
4 Sometimes she gaed, sometimes she stood,
But never dropt a tear,
Until she saw her brethren all slain,
And her father who lovd her so dear.


7. EARL BRAND
103
5 'Hold thy hand, sweet William,' she says,
'Thy hlows are wondrous sore;
Sweethearts I may have many a one,
But a father I 'll never have more.'
6 O she's taken her napkin frae her pocket,
Was made o the holland fine,
And ay as she dichted her father's hloody
wounds,
They sprang as red as the wine.
7 'Two chooses, two chooses, Lady Margret,'
he says,
'Two chooses I 'll make thee;
Whether to go hack to your mother again,
Or go along with me.'
8 'For to go home to my mother again,
An unwelcome guest I'd be;
But since my fate has ordered it so,
I 'll go along with thee.'
9 He has mounted her on a milk-white steed,
Himself on the dapple gray,
And blawn his horn baith loud and shill,
And it sounded far on their way.
10 They rode oer hill, they rode oer dale,
They rode oer mountains so high,
Until they came to that beautiful place
Where Sir William's mother did lie.
11 'Rise up, rise up, lady mother,' he said,
'Rise up, and make much o your own;
Rise up, rise up, lady mother,' he said,
'For his bride's just new come home.'
12 Sir William he died in the middle o the night,
Lady Margaret died on the morrow;
Sir William he died of pure pure love,
Lady Margaret of grief and sorrow.
E
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 180. From recitation.
1 He has lookit over his left shoulder,
And through his bonnie bridle rein,
And he spy'd her father and her seven bold
brethren,
Come riding down the glen.
2 'O hold my horse, Lady Margret,' he said,
O hold my horse by the bonnie bridle rein,
Till I fight your father and seven bold breth-
ren,
As they come riding down the glen.'
3 Some time she rade, and some time she gaed,
Till she that place did near,
And there she spy'd her seven bold brethren
slain,
And her father who loved her so dear.
4 'O hold your hand, sweet William,' she said,
'Your bull baits are wondrous sair;
Sweet-hearts I may get many a one,
But a father I will never get mair.'
5 She has taken a napkin from off her neck,
That was of the cambrick so fine,
And aye as she wiped her father's bloody
wounds,
The blood ran red as the wine.
# # * # *
6 He set her upon the milk-white steed,
Himself upon the brown;
He took a horn out of his pocket,
And they both went weeping along.
P
Percy MS., p. 57; ed. Hales and Furnivall, i, 133.
1
Sayes ' Christ thee sane, good Child of Ell!
Christ saue thee and thy steede!
2 'My father sayes he will [eat] noe meate,
Nor his drinke shall doe him noe good,
Till he haue slaine the Child of Ell,
And haue seene his harts blood.'
3 'I wold I were in my sadle sett,
And a mile out of the towne;


104
7. EARL BRAND
I did not care fop yowr father
And all his merry men!
4 'I wold I were in my sadle sett,
And a little space him froe;
I did not care for yowr father
And all that long him to!'
5 He leaned ore his saddle bow
To kisse this lady good;
The teares that went thein two betweene
Were blend water and blood.
6 He sett himselfe on one good steed,
This lady on a palfray,
And sett his litle home to his mouth,
And roundlie he rode away.
7 He had not ridden past a mile,
A mile out of the towne,
8 Her father was readye with her seuen brether,
He said, 'Sett thou my daughter downe!
For it ill beseemes thee, thou false churles
sonne,
To carry her forth of this towne!'
9 'But lowd thou lyest, Sir Iohn the knight,
Thou now doest lye of me;
A knight me gott, and a lady me bore;
Soe neuer did none by thee.
10 'But light now downe, my lady gay,
Light downe and hold my horsse,
Whilest I and yowr father and yowr brether
Doe play vs at this crosse.
11 'But light now downe, my owne trew loue,
And meeklye hold my steede,
Whilest yowr father [and your seuen brether]
bold
# # * * *
A. a, b. Obtained from recitation "many years
ago," wrote Mr White in 1873, by James Tel-
fer, of Laughtree Liddesdale, in some part of
the neighboring country: the copy has the date
1818. o is said by the editor to have been taken
down from the recitation of an old fiddler in
Northumberland, but when and by whom he
does not tell us. The three are clearly more
or less "corrected" copies of the same original,
c having suffered most from arbitrary changes.
Alterations for rhyme's sake, or for propriety's,
that are written above the lines or in the mar-
gin o/ a 2, 5, 8,19, are adopted in o without
advertisement.
Burden, b. I the brave night sae early: c. I
the brave nights so early: d. I (or 0) the
life o the one, the randy.
I1. c. Brand, and always in c. Is. a. daugh-
ters, b. He's courted.
21. C. years that tide; that tide is written
over of age in a. 22. c. When sae.
42. o. But thou.
52. b. best o these, c. best of tho. of tho
is written over o them a in a.
6*. b, o. have met.
71. o. Till at last they met. 72. c. He's aye for
ill and never.
81. b. O Earl Bran. c. Now Earl Brand. Now
in the margin of a. 82. b, c. Slay this.
92. b. man that wears, o. carl that wears, carl
. . wears written over man . . has in a.
10. b. O lady fair, I 'll no do that,
I 'll pay him penny, let him be jobbing
at.
o. My own lady fair, I 'll not do that,
I 'll pay him his fee
ll2. b. where have stoln this fair. o. And
where have ye stown this fair.
13. b. She is my sick sister,
Which I newly brought from Winches-
ter.
c. For she is, I trow, my sick sister,
Whom I have been bringing fra Win-
chester.
141. o. nigh to dead. 2. b, c. What makes her
wear.
IS1, c. If she's been. s. b, O. What makes her
wear the gold sae high.
161. c. When came the carl to the lady's yett.
2. b. rapped at. c. He rudely, rudely rapped
thereat.
17 s. b. maids playen. c. a playing, d. She's
out with the fair maids playing at the ball.


7. EARL BRAND
105
181. b. mistkane ( ?): 2. b, c. Ye may count.
b2. young Earl.
19. o. I met her far beyond the lea
With the young Earl Brand, his leman
to be:
In a lea is written over moor, and
"With the young, etc., stands as a
"correction."
20. b. Her father, etc.,
And they have riden after them,
o. Her father of his best men armed fif-
teen,
And they 're ridden after them bi-
dene.
211. b, c. The lady looket [looked] over
[owre] her left shoulder then.
221. b, C. If they come on me one by one,
2 b. Te may stand by and see them fall,
o. You may stand by till the fights be
done.
d. Then I will slay them every one.
231. b. all in all. d. all and all.
2. d. Then you will see me the sooner fall.
24s. b. has slain.
24. C. They came upon him one by one,
Till fourteen battles he has won.
And fourteen men he has them slain,
Each after each upon the plain.
25. c. But the fifteenth man behind stole
round,
And dealt him a deep and a deadly
wound.
26. o. Though he was wounded to the deid,
He set his lady on her steed.
271. o. river Doune: 2. b. And he lighted
down. C. And there they lighted to wash
his wound.
282. b. It's but the glent.
c. It's nothing but the glent and my scar-
let hood.
291. c. yett.
292. b. Sae ruddly as he rappet at.
c. So faint and feebly he rapped thereat.
301. b. O my son's slain and cut down.
c. O my son's slain, he is falling to swoon.
U
32. b. . . . death of only one,
But it's been the death of fair seventeen.
Instead of 32, c has:
To a maiden true he 'll give his hand,
To the king's daughter o fair England,
To a prize that was won by a slain brother's
brand.
B. 3. A stanza resembling this is found in Beau-
mont and Fletcher's 'Knight of the Burning
Pestle' (1611), Dyce, n, 172, but mag belong
to some other ballad, as ' The Knight and Shep-
herd's Daughter:'
He set her on a milk-white steed,
And himself upon a grey;
He never turned his face again,
But he bore her quite away.
84. ware. 181. Marie. 204. flang'd.
C. 12s. MS. scad.
D. 10. The following stanza, superscribed "Mrs
Lindores, Kelso," was found among Mr Kin-
lock's papers, and was inserted at i, 331, of
the Kinlock MSS. It may be a first recollec-
tion of D 10, but is more likely to be anotlter
version:
'We raid over hill and we raid over dale,
And we raid over mountains sae high,
Until we cam in sicht o yon bonnie castle
bowr
Whare Sir William Arthur did lie.'
E. 5-6. "Two stanzas are here omitted, in which
Lord William offers her the choice of return-
ing to her mother, or of accompanying him;
and the ballad concludes with this [the &th"]
stanza, which is twice repeated in singing."
Motherwell's preface.
F. 3*. MS. merrymen.
6s. of one palfray.
7, 8 are written in one stanza. Half a page,
or about nine stanzas, is gone after st. 11.


106
8. ERLINTON
8
ERLINTON
A. 'Erlinton,' Scott's Minstrelsy, in, 235, ed. 1808. C. 'Robin Hood and the Tanner's Daughter,' Gutch's
Robin Hood, n, 345.
B. 'True Tammas,' Mr R. White's papers.
'ErlInton ' (A) first appeared in the Min-
strelsy of the Scottish Border, the text formed
"from the collation of two copies obtained
from recitation." B is a manuscript copy,
furnished by the late Mr Robert White of
Newcastle, and was probably taken down from
recitation by Mr James Telfer early in the
century. C, in which Robin Hood has taken
the place of a hero who had at least connec-
tions out of Great Britain, was first printed
in Gutch's Robin Hood, from a manuscript of
Mr Payne Collier, supposed to have been
written about 1650.
This ballad has only with much hesitation
been separated from the foregoing. In this as
in that, a man induces a maid to go off with
him; he is set upon by a party of fifteen in
A, B, as in 7 A; and he spares the life of one
of his assailants [an old man, A, B, the younger
brother, C]. Some agreements as to details
with Scandinavian Ribold ballads have already
been noticed, and it has been observed that
while there is no vestige of the dead-naming
in 'Earl Brand,' there is an obvious trace of
it in 'Erlinton ' A, B. 'Erlinton' A, B has
also one other correspondence not found in
'Earl Brand,' — the strict watch kept over
the lady (st. 2). Even the bigly bower, ex-
pressly built to confine her in, is very likely a
reminiscence or a displacement of the tower
in which Hilde is shut up, after her elope-
ment, in some of the Scandinavian ballads
(Danish 83 A, B; Swedish A, dark house).
But notwithstanding these resemblances to
the Ribold story, there is a difference in the
larger part of the details, and all the 'Erlin-
ton ' ballads have a fortunate conclusion, which
also does not seem forced, as it does in Arwids-
son, 107, the only instance, perhaps, in which
a fortunate conclusion in a Ribold ballad is of
the least account; for Grundtvig's F, G are
manifestly copies that have been tampered
with, and Landstad 34 is greatly confused at
the close. It may be an absolute accident,
but' Erlinton' A, B has at least one point of
contact with the story of Walter of Aqui-
tania which is not found in 'Earl Brand.'
This story requires to be given in brief on ac-
count of its kinship to both.
Walter, with his betrothed Hildegunde, fly
from the court of Attila, at which they have
both lived as hostages since their childhood,
taking with them two boxes of jewels. Gun-
ther, king of Worms, learns that a knight and
lady, with a richly-laden horse, have passed the
Rhine, and sets out in pursuit, with twelve of
his best fighting men, resolved to capture the
treasure. The fugitives, after a very long
ride, make a halt in a forest, and Walter
goes to sleep with his head on Hildegunde's
knees. The lady meanwhile keeps watch, and
rouses her lover when she perceives by the
dust they raise that horsemen are approach-
ing. Gunther sends one of his knights with a
message demanding the surrender of the treas-
ure. Walter scornfully refuses, but expresses
a willingness to m;tke the king a present of a
hundred bracelets, or rings, of red gold, in
token of his respect. The messenger is sent
back with directions to take the treasure by
force, if it should be refused again. Walter,
having vainly offered a present of two hundred
bracelets to avoid a conflict, is attacked by the
knight, whom he slays. Ten others go the
way of this first, and only the king and one of
his troop, Hagen, a very distinguished knight
and an old comrade of Walter, remain.
These now attack Walter; the combat is long


8. ERLINTON
107
and fierce; all three are seriously wounded,
and finally so exhausted as to be forced to
cease fighting. Walter and Hagen enter into
a friendly talk 'while refreshing themselves
with wine, and in the end Gunther * is put on
a horse and conducted home by Hagen, while
Walter and Hildegunde continue their jour-
ney to Aquitania. There they were married
and ruled thirty happy years. (' Waltharius,'
ed. R. Peiper, 1873.)
The particular resemblances of 'Erlinton'
A, B to 'Walter' are that the assailants are
"bold knights," or " bravest outlaws," not the
lady's kinsmen; that there are two parleys
before the fight; and that the hero survives
the fight and goes off with his love. The ut-
most that could be insisted oh is that some
features of the story of Walter have been
blended in the course of tradition with the
kindred story of Ribold. 'Erlinton' C is much
less like ' Walter,' and more like ' Ribold.'
The 'Sultan's Fair Daughter,' translated
by Aigner, Ungarische Volksdichtungen, p.
93, 2d ed., has perhaps derived something
from the Walter story. Two Magyars escape
from the Sultan's prison by the aid of his
daughter, under promise of taking her to Hun-
gary. She often looks backwards, fearing pur-
suit. At last a large band overtake them.
One of the Magyars guards the lady; the other
assaults the Turks, of whom he leaves only
one alive, to carry back information. One of
the two has a love at home; the other takes
the Sultan's daughter.
'Erlinton ' is translated by Rosa Warrens,
Schottische Volkslieder, No 24, and by Karl
Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 12.
A
Scott's Minstrelsy, in, 235, ed. 1803; ed. 1833, n, 353.
Made up from two copies obtained from recitation.
1 Erlinton had a fair daughter;
I wat he weird her in a great sin;
For he has built a bigly bower,
An a' to put that lady in.
2 An he has warnd her sisters six,
An sae has he her brethren se'en,
Outher to watch her a' the night,
Or else to seek her morn an een.
3 She hadna been i that bigly bower
Na not a night but barely ane,
Till there was Willie, her ain true love,
Chappd at the door, cryin ' Peace within!'
4 'O whae is this at my bower door,
That chaps sae late, nor kens the gin?'
'O it is Willie, your ain true love,
I pray you rise an let me in!'
5 'But in my bower there is a wake,
An at the wake there is a wane;
But I 'll come to the green-wood the morn,
Whar blooms the brier, by mornin dawn.'
6 Then she's gane to her bed again,
Where she has layen till the cock crew
thrice,
Then she said to her sisters a',
'Maidens, 't is time for us to rise.'
7 She pat on her back her silken gown,
An on her breast a siller pin,
An she 'a tane a sister in ilka hand,
An to the green-wood she is gane.
8 She hadna walkd in the green-wood
Na not a mile but barely ane,
Till there was Willie, her ain true love,
Whae frae her sisters has her taen.
9 He took her sisters by the hand,
He kissd them baith, an sent them hame,
* Gunther, as well remarked by Klee, 'Zur Hildesage,' p. Arinoldus, whom Walter slays. Rischkn, Verhaltuiss dcr
19, cannot have belonged originally to the Hildegunde saga, polnischen Sage von Walgicrz Wdaly zu den deutschen
No sufficient motive is furnished for introducing him. In Sagen von W. v. Aqnitanien, p. 8 ff.
the Polish version of the story there is only one pursuer,


108
8. ERLINTON
An he's taen his true love him behind,
And through the green-wood they are gane.
10 They hadna ridden in the bonnie green-wood
Na not a mile but barely ane,
When there came fifteen o the boldest knights
That ever bare flesh, blood, or bane.
11 The foremost was an aged knight,
He wore the grey hair on his chin:
Says, 'Yield to me thy lady bright,
An thou shalt walk the woods within.'
12 'For me to yield my lady bright
To such an aged knight as thee,
People wad think I war gane mad,
Or a' the courage flown frae me.'
13 But up then spake the second knight,
I wat he spake right boustouslie:
'Yield me thy life, or thy lady bright,
Or here the tane of us shall die.'
14 'My lady is my warld's meed;
My life I winna yield to nane;
But if ye be men of your manhead,
Ye 'll only fight me ane by ane.'
15 He lighted aff his milk-white steed,
An gae his lady him by the head,
Sayn, ' See ye dinna change your cheer,
Untill ye see my body bleed.'
16 He set his back unto an aik,
He set his feet against a stane,
An he has fought these fifteen men,
An killd them a' but barely ane.
17
For he has left that aged knight,
An a' to carry the tidings hame.
18 When he gaed to his lady fair,
I wat he kissd her tenderlie:
'Thou art mine ain love, I have thee
bought;
Now we shall walk the green-wood
free.'
B
MS. of Robert White, Esq., of Newcastle, from James
Telfer's collection.
1 There was a knight, an he had a daughter,
An he wad wed her, wi muckle sin;
Sae he has biggit a bonnie bower, love,
An a' to keep his fair daughter in.
2 But she hadna been in the bonnie bower,
love,
And no twa hours but barely ane,
Till up started Tammas, her ain true lover,
And O sae fain as he wad been in.
3 'For a' sae weel as I like ye, Tammas,
An for a' sae weel as I like the gin,
I wadna for ten thousand pounds, love,
Na no this night wad I let thee in.
4 'But yonder is a bonnie greenwud,
An in the greenwud there is a wauk,
An I 'll be there an sune the morn, love,
It's a' for my true love's sake.
5 'On my right hand I 'll have a glove, love,
An on my left ane I 'll have nane;
I 'll have wi' me my sisters six, love,
An we will wauk the wuds our lane.'
6 They hadna waukd in the bonnie greenwud, •
Na no an hour but barely ane,
Till up start Tammas, her ain true lover,
He's taen her sisters her frae mang.
7 An he has kissed her sisters six, love,
An he has sent them hame again,
But he has keepit his ain true lover,
Saying, ' We will wauk the wuds our lane.'
8 They hadna waukd in the bonnie greenwud
Na no an hour but barely ane,
Till up start fifteen o the bravest outlaws
That ever bure either breath or bane.
9 An up.bespake the foremost man, love,
An O but he spake angrily:
'Either your life — or your lady fair, sir,
This night shall wauk the wuds wi me.'


8. ERLINTON
109
10 'My lady fair, O I like her weel, sir,
An O my life, but it lies me near!
But before I lose my lady fair, sir,
I 'll rather lose my life sae dear.'
11 Then up bespak the second man, love,
An aye he spake mair angrily,
Saying, 'Baith your life, and your lady fair,
sir,
This night shall wauk the wuds wi me.'
12 'My lady fair, O I like her weel, sir,
An 0 my life, but it lies me near!
But before I lose my lady fair, sir,
I 'll rather lose my life sae dear.
13 'But if ye 'll be men to your manhood,
As that I will be unto mine,
I 'll fight ye every ane man by man,
Till the last drop's blude I hae be slain.
14 'O sit ye down, my dearest dearie,
Sit down and hold my noble steed,
And see that ye never change your cheer
Until ye see my body bleed.'
15 He's feughten a' the fifteen outlaws,
The fifteen outlaws every ane,
He's left naething but the auldest man
To go and carry the tidings hame.
16 An he has gane to his dearest dear,
An he has kissed her, cheek and chin,
Saying, 'Thou art mine ain, I have bought
thee dear, •
An we will wauk the wuds our lane.'
0
Gatch's Kobin Hood, n, 345, from a MS. of Mr. Payne
Collier's, supposed to have been written about 1650.
1 As Robin Hood sat by a tree,
He espied a prettie may,
And when she chanced him to see,
She turnd her head away.
2 'O feare me not, thou prettie mayde,
And doe not flie from mee;
I am the kindest man,' he said,
'That ever eye did see.'
3 Then to her he did doffe his cap,
And to her lowted low;
'To meete with thee I hold it good hap,
If thou wilt not say noe.'
4 Then he put his hand around her waste,
Soe small, so tight, and trim,
And after sought her lip to taste,
And she to kissed him.
5 'Where dost thou dwell, my prettie maide?
I prithee tell to me ;'
'I am a tanner's daughter,' she said,
'John Hobbes of Barneslee.'
6 'And whither goest thou, pretty maide?
Shall I be thy true love?'
'If thou art not afeard,' she said,
'My true love thou s1ialt prove.'
7 'What should I feare ?' then he replied;
'I am thy true love now ;'
'I have two brethren, and their pride
Would scorn such one as thou.'
8 'That will we try,' quoth Robin Hood;
'I was not made their scorne;
JQe shed my blood to doe the[e] good,
As sure as they were borne.'
9 'My brothers are proude and fierce and strong;'
'I am,' said he, 'the same,
And if they offer thee to wrong,
Theyle finde He play their game.
10 'Through the free forrest I can run,
The king may not controll;
They are but barking tanners' sons,
To me they shall pay toll.
11 'And if not mine be sheepe and kine,
I have cattle on my land;
On venison eche day I may dine,
Whiles they have none in hand.'
12 These wordes had Robin Hood scarce spoke,
When they two men did see,
Come riding till their horses smoke:
'My brothers both,' cried shee.


110
8. EllLINTON
13 Each had a good sword hy his side,
And furiouslie they rode
To where they Robin Hood espied,
That with the maiden stood.
14 'Flee hence, flee hence, away with speede!'
Cried she to Robin Hood,
'For if thou stay, thoult surely bleede;
I could not see thy blood.'
15 'With us, false maiden, come away,
And leave that outlawe bolde;
Why fledst thou from thy home this day,
And left thy father olde?'
16 Robin stept backe but paces five,
Unto a sturdie tree;
'He fight whiles I am left alive;
Stay thou, sweete maide, with mee.'
17 He stood before, she stoode behinde,
The brothers two drewe nie;
'Our sister now to us resign,
Or thou full sure shalt die.'
18 Then cried the maide, ' My brethren deare,
With ye He freely wend,
But harm not this young forrester,
Noe ill doth he pretend.'
19 'Stande up, sweete maide, I plight my troth;
Fall thou not on thy knee;
He force thy cruell brothers both
To bend the knee to thee.
20 'Stand thou behinde this sturdie oke,
I soone will quell their pride;
Thoult see my sword with furie smoke,
And in their hearts' blood died.'
21 He set his backe against a tree,
His f oote against a stone;
The first blow that he gave so free
Cleft one man to the bone.
22 The tanners bold they fought right well,
And it was one to two;
But Robin did them both retell,
All in the damsell's viewe.
23 The red blood ran from Robins brow,
All downe unto his knee;
'O holde your handes, my brethren now,
I will goe backe with yee.'
24 'Stand backe, stand backe, my pretty maide,
Stand backe and let me fight;
By sweete St. James be no[t] afraide
But I will it requite.'
25 Then Robin did his sword uplift,
And let it fall againe;
The oldest brothers head it cleft,
Right through unto his braine.
26 'O hold thy hand, bolde forrester,
Or ill may thee betide;
Slay not my youngest brother here,
He is my father's pride.'
27 'Away, for I would scorne to owe,
My life to the[e], false maide!'
The youngest cried, and aimd a blow
That lit on Robin's head.
28 Then Robin leand against the tree,
His life nie gone did seeme;
His eyes did swim, he could not see
The maiden start betweene.
29 It was not long ere Robin Hood
Could welde his sword so bright;
Upon his feete he firmly stood,
And did renew the fight.
30 Untill the tanner scarce could heave
His weapon in the aire;
But Robin would not him bereave
Of life, and left him there.
31 Then to the greenewood did he fly,
And with him went the maide;
For him she vowd that she would dye,
He'd live for her, he said.
A. 4s. Ed. 1833 has or kens. wad wed her. One of the two is a singular
B. I2. If A l2 be right, gross injustice is done the corruption.
father by changing I wat he weird her into he There is another copy of B among Mr White's


9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
111
papers, with the title 'Sir Thamas,' which
I have no doubt has been " revised," whether
by Telfer, or by Mr White himself, it is im-
possible to say. Thex principal variations
are here given, that others may be satisfied.
I2. wed her mang his ain kin. I4. this fair.
2*. Till up cam Thamas her only true love.
3*. O tirl nae langer at the pin. 3*. I wadna
for a hundred pounds, love. 3*. can I.
4*. fu soon. 44. And by oursels we twa can
talk.
51,2. I 'll hae a glove on my right hand, love,
And on my left I shall hae nane.
6*"*. Beyond an hour, or scarcely twa,
When up rode Thamas, her only true love,
And he has tane her frae mang them a'.
71. He kissed her sisters, a' the six, love. 7s.
his winsome true love. 74. That they might
walk.
81. didna walk.
8". Beyond two hours, or barely three,
Till up cam seven * stalwart outlaws,
The bauldest fellows that ane could see.
* "The original ballad had fifteen. Seven would do as
well, and the latter number would seem more nearly to re-
semble the truth."
9s. We 'll take your life, for this lady fair, sir.
101. My lady's fair, I like her weel, sir.
II2,*. And he spak still mair furiously;
'Flee, or we 'll kill ye, because your lady.
12. 'My lady fair, I shall part ha frae thee,
And for my life, I did never fear;
Sae before I lose my winsome lady,
My life I 'll venture for ane sae dear.
13. ' But if ye 're a' true to your manhood,
As I shall try to be true to mine,
I 'll fight ye a', come man by man then,
Till the last drop o my bloud I tine.'
142. my bridled steed. 14*. And mind ye never
change your colour.
15. He fought against the seven outlaws,
And he has beat them a' himsel;
But he left the auldest man amang them
That he might gae and the tidings tell.
16. Then he has gane to his dearest dearie,
And he has kissed her oer and oer;
'Though thou art mine, I hae bought thee
dearly,
Now we shall sunder never more.'
C. I1. Robinhood, and so always.
31. After this: Finis, T. Fleming.
9
THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
A. a. Deloney's ' Jack of Newbury,' reprint of 1859,
p. 61. b. 'The Ungrateful Knight and the Fair
Flower of Northumberland,' Ritson's Ancient Songs,
1790, p: 169.
B. a. Kinloch MSS, v, 49. b. 'The Provost's Doeh-
ter,' Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 131.
C. 'The Betrayed Lady.' a. Buchan's MSS, n, 166.
b. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, n,
208.
D. Motherwell's MS., p. 102.
E. 'The Flower of Northumberland,' Mr Robert White's
papers.
The earliest copy of this ballad is intro-
duced as ' The Maidens' Song,' f in Deloney's
Pleasant History of John Winchcomb, in his
younger yeares called Jacke of Newberie, a
book written as early as 1597. Mr Halliwell
reprinted the " 9th " edition, of the date 1633, J
t "Two of them singing the dittie," says Deloney, "and
all the rest bearing the burden."
in 1859, and the ballad is found at p. 61 of the
reprint (A). The copy in Ritson's Ancient
Songs, 1790, p. 169, has a few variations,
which are probably to be explained by Rit-
son having used some other edition of De-
loney. Ritson's text is used in The Border-
J The earliest edition now known to exist is of 1619.


112
9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
er's Table Book, VI, 25, and was taken thence
into Sheldon's Minstrelsy of the English Bor-
der, with some arbitrary alterations. The
ballad was formerly popular in Scotland. Kin-
loch and Buchan printed B and C with some
slight changes; the texts are now given as they
stand in the manuscripts. E, a traditional
version from the English border, has unfortu-
nately been improved by some literary pen.
An English lady is prevailed upon to release
a Scot from prison, and to fly with him, on
the promise of being made his wife, and (A)
lady of castles and towers. She takes much
gold with her (A), and a swift steed (two, A).
According to A they come to a rough river;
the lady is alarmed, but swims it, and is wet
from top to toe. On coming within sight of
Edinburgh, the faithless knight bids her choose
whether she will be his paramour or go back:
he has wife and children. She begs him to
draw his sword and end her shame: he takes
her horse away, and leaves her. Two English
knights come by, who restore her to her fa-
ther. The dismissal takes place at the Scottish
cross and moor in B ; at a moor and a moss, C;
at Scotland bridge, D ; at a fair Scottish cross,
E. She offers to be servant in his kitchen
rather than go back, B, C, E; begs him to
throw her into the water, D; from his castle
wall, E. He fees an old man to take her
home on an old horse, B, E.
We do not find the whole of this story re-
peated among other European nations, but
there are interesting agreements in parts with
Scandinavian, Polish, and German ballads.
There is some resemblance in the first half
to a pretty ballad of the northern nations
which treats in a brief way the theme of our
exquisite romance of 'The Nutbrown Maid:'
Danish, 'Den Trofaste Jomfru,' Grundtvig,
No 249, IV, 494, nine copies, A-I, the first
three from 16th or 17th century manuscripts,
the others from tradition of this century, as are
* Some of these ballads begin with stanzas which are
found also in Kvindemorderen and Ribold ballads (our No
4, No 7), where also a young woman is carried off furtively
by a man. This is only what is to be expected.
t By mistake, most probably. But in one of the Polish
ballads, cited a little further on, Q (Kolbcrg, P. L Pol-
also the following : K-M,' Den Fredlase,' Kris-
tensen, n, 191, No 57: Swedish,' De sju Gull-
bergen,' A, Afzelius, No 79, m, 71, new ed.,
No 64, I, 322; B, C, Grundtvig, iv, 507 f:
Norwegian A, 'Herre Per og stolt Margit,'
Landstad, No 74, p. 590; B, 'Herr' Nikelus,'
Landstad, No 75, p. 594.* All tell very much
the same tale. A knight carries off a maid
on his horse, making her magnificent promises,
among which are eight gold castles, Dan. C, D,
E, H, I; one, K, L, M; eight, Norw. A ; nine,
Norw. B; seven, Swed. B; seven gold moun-
tains, Swed. A, perhaps, by mistake of ber^ren
for bor^ar.f She gets her gold together while
he is saddling his horse, Dan. A, C, D, F, H,
M; Swed. A; Norw. A, B. They come to a
sea-strand or other water, it is many miles to
the nearest land, Dan. B, D, Swed. A, C;
the lady wishes she were at home, Dan. E, F,
Swed. B, C. He swims the horse across, Dan.
A, B, D, E, F, H, K, L, M; Swed. A, B, C
[part of the way, having started in a boat,
Norw. A, B]. The maid wrings her clothes,
Dan. A, D, K, L; Swed. A; Norw. A, B.
She asks, Where are the gold castles which
you promised? Dan. C 7, D 14, K 9, L 7,
M 8 ; Norw. A 22, B 16.J He tells her that
he has no gold castle but this green turf,
Dan. C 8; he needs none but the black ground
and thick wood, Dan. K 10: he is a penni-
less, banished man. She offers him her gold
to buy him a charter of peace. In all, except
Dan. A, B, C, and the incomplete Dan. I,
Norw. B, he goes on to say that he has plighted
faith to another woman, and she meekly re-
plies, Then I will be your servant. He con-
tinues the trial no further, reveals himself
as of wealth and rank, says that she shall have
ladies to wait on her, and makes her his queen.
The knight is king of England in Dan. B, H,
King Henry, simply, in Dan. F. The gold
castles prove to be realities: there is in Dan.
E even one more than was promised. §
skiego, 5 pp), the maid is told, "In my country the moun-
tains are golden, the mountains are of gold."
1 So 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,' D 11:
'Is this your bowers and lofty towers?'
§ There is a similarity, which is perhaps not accidental,
between these Scandinavian ballads and 'Child Waters.'


9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
113
The Polish ballads of the class of 'Lady
Isabel and the Elf Knight' (see p. 39 f) have
thus much in common with ' The Fair Flower
of Northumberland :' a maid is induced to go
off with a man on horseback, and takes gold
with her; after going a certain distance, he
bids her return home; in AA, H, R, he gives
her her choice whether to return or to jump
into the river; she prefers death (cf. D 3, 5,
p. 116) ; in all they finally come to a river, or
other water, into which he throws her.*
There is a German ballad which has some
slight connection with all the foregoing, and
a very slight story it is altogether: 'Stolz
Heinrich,' Simrock, No 9, p. 23, 'Stolz Sy-
burg,' Reiffenberg, No 16, p. 32, No 17, p. 34,
from the Lower Rhine and Miinster; made
over, in Kretzschmer, I, 187, No 106. Hein-
rich, or Syburg, wooes a king's daughter in
a distant land. He asks her to go with him,
and says he has seven mills in his country.
"Tell me what they grind," says Margaret,
"and I will go with you." The mills grind
sugar and cinnamon, mace and cloves. They
come to a green heath. Margaret thinks she
sees the mills gleaming: he tells her that a
green heath is all he has. "Then God have
mercy that I have come so far," she says;
draws a sword, kneels before him, and stabs
herself.
The ballad of 'Young Andrew,' further
on, has points in common with • The Fair
Flower of Northumberland.'
C is translated by Rosa Warrens, Schot-
tische Lieder der Vorzeit, No 31, p. 137.
A
a. Deloney's Pleasant History of John Wincheomb, 9th
ed., London, 1633, reprinted by Halliwell, p. 61. b. Bitson'i
Ancient Songs, 1790, p. 169.
1 It was a knight in Scotland borne
Follow, my love, come over the strand
Was taken prisoner, and left forlorne,
Even by the good Earle of Northumber-
land.
2 Then was he cast in prison strong,
Where he could not walke nor lie along,
Even by the goode Earle of Northumber-
land.
3 And as in sorrow thus he lay,
The Earle's sweete daughter walkt that way,
And she the faire flower of Northumber-
land.
4 And passing by, like an angell bright,
The prisoner had of her a sight,
And she the faire flower of Northumber-
land.
5 And loud to her this knight did crie,
The salt teares standing in his eye,
And she the faire flower of Northumberland.
6 'Faire lady,' he said, 'take pity on me,
And let me not in prison dye,
And you the faire flower of Northumber-
land.'
7 'Faire Sir, how should I take pity on thee,
Thou being a foe to our countrey,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.'
8 'Faire lady, I am no foe,' he said,
'Through thy sweet love heere was I stayd,
For thee, the faire flower of Northumber-
land.'
9 'Why shouldst thou come heere for love of me,
Having wife and children in thy countrie?
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.'
10 'I sweare by the blessed Trinitie,
I have no wife nor children, I,
Nor dwelling at home in merrie Scotland.
Child Waters makes Ellen swim a piece of water, shows her She is thrown in from a bridge in V, W, the bridge of Cra-
his hall — " of red gold shines the tower " — where the fair- cow in C: cf. Scotland bridge, D 2 of this ballad. By a
est lady is his paramour, subjects her to menial services, and curious accident, it is at a wayside crucifix that the man be-
finally, her patience withstanding all trials, marries her. gins his change of demeanor in Polish CC 2 (Kolberg,
• They pass the water in Q only, and that in a boat. ddd), as in B 5, E 7, of this ballad, it is at a Scottish cross.


114
9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
11 'If curteously you will set me free,
I vow that I will marrie thee,
So soone as I come in faire Scotland.
12 'Thou shalt be a lady of castles and towers,
And sit like a queene in princely bowers,
When I am at home in faire Scotland.'
13 Then parted hence this lady gay,
And got her father's ring away,
To helpe this sad knight into faire Scot-
land.
14 Likewise much gold she got by sleight,
And all to helpe this forlorne knight
To wend from her father to faire Scotland.
15 Two gallant steedes, both good and able,
She likewise tooke out of the stable.
To ride with this knight into faire Scotland.
16 And to the jaylor she sent this ring,
The knight from prison forth to bring,
To wend with her into faire Scotland.
17 This token set the prisoner free,
Who straight went to this faire lady,
To wend with her into faire Scotland.
18 A gallant steede he did bestride,
And with the lady away did ride,
And she the faire flower of Northumber-
land.
19 They rode till they came to a water cleare:
'Good Sir, how should I follow you heere,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland?
20 'The water is rough and wonderfull deepe,
An[d] on my saddle I shall not keepe,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.'
21 'Feare not the foord, faire lady,' quoth he,
'For long I cannot stay for thee,
And thou the faire flower of Northumber-
land.'
22 The lady prickt her wanton steed,
And over the river sworn with speede,
And she the faire flower of Northumber-
land.
23 From top to toe all wet was shee:
'This have I done for love of thee,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.'
24 Thus rode she all one winter's night,
Till Edenborow they saw in sight,
The chiefest towne in all Scotland.
25 'Now chuse,' quoth he, ' thou wanton flower,
Whe'r thou wilt be my paramour,
Or get thee home to Northumberland.
26 'For I have wife, and children five,
In Edenborow they be alive;
Then get thee home to faire England.
27 'This favour shalt thou have to boote,
He have thy horse, go thou on foote,
Go, get thee home to Northumberland.'
28 'O false and faithlesse knight,' quoth shee,
'And canst thou deale so bad with me,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland?
29 'Dishonour not a ladie's name,
But draw thy sword and end my shame,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.'
30 He tooke her from her stately steed,
And left her there in extreme need,
And she the faire flower of Northumberland.
31 Then sate she downe full heavily;
At length two knights came riding by,
Two gallant knights of faire England.
32 She fell downe humbly on her knee.
Saying, 'Courteous knights, take pittie on me,
And I the faire flower of Northumberland.
33 'I have offended my father deere,
And by a false knight that brought me heere,
From the good Earle of Northumberland.'
34 They tooke her up behind them then,
And brought her to her father's againe,
And he the good Earle of Northumberland.
35 All you faire maidens be warned by me,
Scots were never true, nor never will be,
To lord, nor lady, nor faire England.


9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND.
115
B
a. Kinloch MSS, v, 49, in the handwriting of J. Beattie.
b. Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 134, from the reci-
tation of Miss E. Beattie.
1 The provost's daughter went out a walking,
A may's love whiles is easy won
She heard a poor prisoner making his moan,
And she was the fair flower of Northumber-
land.
2 'If any lady would borrow me
Out into the prison strong,
I would make her a lady of high degree,
For I am a great lord in fair Scotland.'
3 She's done her to her father's bed-stock,
A may's love whiles is easy won
She's stolen the keys o many braw lock,
And she's loosd him out o the prison strong.
4 She's done her to her father's stable,
A may's love whiles is easy won
She's taen out a steed that was both swift and
able,
To carry them both to fair Scotland.
5 O when they came to the Scottish cross,
A may's love whiles is easy won
'Ye brazen-faced whore, light off o my horse,
And go get you back to Northumberland 1'
6 O when they came to the Scottish moor,
A may's love whiles is easy won
'Get off o my horse, you 're a brazen-faced
whore,
So go get you back to Northumberland!'
7 'O pity on me, O pity,' said she,
'O that my love was so easy won!
Have pity on me as I had upon thee,
When I loosd you out of the prison strong.'
8 'O how can I have pity on thee?
O why was your love so easy won!
When I have a wife and children three
More worthy than a' Northumberland.'
9 'Cook in your kitchen I will be,
O that my love was so easy won!
And serve your lady most reverently,
For I darena go back to Northumberland.'
10 'Cook in my kitchen you shall not be,
Why was your love so easy won!
For I will have no such servants as thee,
So get you back to Northumberland.'
11 But laith was he the lassie to tyne,
A may's love whiles is easy won
He's hired an old horse and feed an old man,
To carry her back to Northumberland.
12 O when she came her father before,
A may's love whiles is easy won
She fell down on her knees so low
For she was the fair flower of Northumber-
land.
13 'O daughter, O daughter, why was ye so bold,
Or why was your love so easy won,
To be a Scottish whore in your fifteen year old?
And you the fair flower of Northumberland!'
14 Her- mother she gently on her did smile,
0 that her love was so easy won!
'She is not the first that the Scotts have beguild,
But she's still the fair flower of Northum-
berland.
15 'She shanna want gold, she shanna want fee,
Altho that her love was so easy won,
She shanna want gold to gain a man wi,
And she's still the fair flower of Northum-
berland.'
a. Buchan's MSS, n, 166.
North of Scotland, n, 208.
b. Buchan's Ballads of the
1 As I went by a jail-house door,
Maid's love whiles is easy won
I saw a prisoner standing there,
'I wish I were home in fair Scotland.
2 'Fair maid, will you pity me?
Ye 'll steal the keys, let me gae free:
I 'll make you my lady in fair Scotland.
3 'I'm sure you have no need of me,
For ye have a wife and bairns three,
That lives at home in fair Scotland.'


116
9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
4 He swore by him that was crownd with
thorn,
That he never had a wife since the day he was
born,
But livd a free lord in fair Scotland.
5 She went unto her father's bed-head,
She 's stown the key o mony a lock,
She's let him out o prison strong.
6 She's went to her father's stable,
She's stown a steed baith wight and able,
To carry them oh to fair Scotland.
7 They rode till they came to a muir,
He bade her light aff, they'd call her a
whore,
If she didna return to Northumberland.
8 They rode till they came to a moss,
He bade her light aff her father's best horse,
And return her again to Northumberland.
9 'I'm sure I have no need of thee.
When I have a wife and bairns three,
That lives at home in fair Scotland.'
10 'I 'll be cook in your kitehen,
And serve your lady handsomelie,
For I darena gae back to Northumberland.'
11 'Ye cannot be cook in my kitchen,
My lady cannot fa sic servants as thee,
So ye 'll return again to Northumberland.'
12 "When she went thro her father's ha,
She looted her low amongst them a',
She was the fair flower o Northumberland.
13 Out spake her father, he spake bold,
'How could ye be a whore in fifteen years old,
And you the flower of Northumberland?'
14 Out spake her mother, she spake wi a smile,
'She's nae the first his coat did beguile,
Ye 're welcome again to Northumberland.'
D
Motherwell's MS., p. J02.
1 She's gane down to her father's stable,
O my dear, and my love that she wan
She's taen out a black steed baith sturdy and
able,
And she's away to fair Scotland.
2 When they came to Scotland bridge,
'Light off, you whore, from my black steed,
And go your ways back to Northumber-
land.'
3 'O take me by the body so meek,
And throw me in the water so deep,
For I daurna gae back to Northumberland.'
4 'I 'll no take thee by the body so meek,
'Nor throw thee in the water so deep;
Thou may go thy ways back to Northumber-
land.'
5 'Take me by the body so small,
And throw me in yon bonny mill-dam,
For I daurna gae back to Northumberland.'
E
"Written down from memory by Robert Hutton, Shep-
herd, Peel, Liddesdale." Mr R. White's papers.
1 A bailiff's fair daughter, she lived by the Aln,
A young maid's love is easily won
She heard a poor prisoner making his moan,
And she was the flower of Northumberland.
2 'If ye could love me, as I do love thee,
A young maid's love is hard to win
I 'll make you a lady of high degree,
When once we go down to fair Scotland.'
3 To think of the prisoner her heart was sore,
A young maid's love is easily won
Her love it was much, but her pity was more,
And she, etc.
4 She stole from her father's pillow the key,
And out of the dungeon she soon set him free,
And she, etc.


9. THE FAIR FLOWER OF NORTHUMBERLAND
117
5 She led him into her father's stable,
And they've taken a steed both gallant and
able,
To carry them down to fair Scotland.
6 When they first took the way, it was darling
and dear;
As forward they fared, all changed was his
cheer,
And she, etc.
7 They rode till they came to a fair Scottish
corse;
Says he, ' Now, pray madam, dismount from
my horse,
And go get you back to Northumberland.
8 'It befits not to ride with a leman light,
When awaits my returning my own lady
bright,
My own wedded wife in fair Scotland.'
9 The words that he said on her fond heart
smote,
She knew not in sooth if she lived or not,
And she, etc.
10 She looked to his face, and it kythed so unkind
That her fast coming tears soon rendered her
blind,
And she, etc.
11 'Have pity on me as I had it on thee,
O why was my love so easily won!
A slave in your kitchen I'm willing to be,
But I may not go back to Northumberland.
12 'Or carry me up by the middle sae sma,
O why was my love so easily won!
And fling me headlong from your high castle wa,
For I dare not go back to Northumberland.'
13 Her wailing, her woe, for nothing they went,
A young maid's love is easily won
His bosom was stone and he would not relent,
And she, etc.
14 He turned him around and he thought of a plan,
He bought an old horse and he hired an old man,
To carry her back to Northumberland.
15 A heavy heart makes a weary way,
She reached her home in the evening gray,,
And she, etc.
16 And all as she stood at her father's tower-gate,
More loud beat her heart than her knock thereat,
And she, etc.
17 Down came her step-dame, so rugged and
doure,
O why was your love so easily won!
'In Scotland go back to your false paramour,
For you shall not stay here in Northumber-
land.'
18 Down came her father, he saw her and smiled,
A young maid's love is easily won
'You are not the first that false Scots have be-
guiled,
And ye 're aye welcome back to Northum-
berland.
19 'You shall not want houses, you shall not want
land,
You shall not want gold for to gain a husband,
And ye 're aye welcome back to Northum-
berland.'
A. a. 2. HaUiweWs Deloney, in the first line of
the burden, has leape over, but not elsewhere.
92. in the. 252. Where,
b. 3*. walks. 34. she is.
51. aloud.
13*. omits sad.
15s. the knight.
16'. forth did.
24*. The fairest.
271. thou shalt.
323. knight.
352. never were.
B. b. 22. this prison.
4*. omits that was.
6s. ye brazen-fac'd.
11*. He hired.
12s. fell at his feet.
131. omits so.
14l. mother on her sae gentlie smild, etc.
C. a. , 82. Her bade. 8*. return him.
b. 51. into.
132. at fifteen.
t


118
10. THE TWA SISTERS
D. 2. Thus in Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appen-
dix, p. xv:
When they came to Scotland brig,
0 my dear, my love that she wan!
'Light off, ye hure, from my black steed,
And hie ye awa to Northumberland.'
E. "The Flower of Northumberland. Written
down from memory by Robert Hutton, Shep-
perd, Peel, Liddesdale, and sent by James
Telfor to his friend Robert White, Newcastle
on Tyne. 20 copies printed." Mr White's
note.
10
THE TWA SISTERS
A. a. 'The Miller and the King's Daughter,' broadside
of 1656, Notes and Queries, 1st S., v, 591. b. Wit
Restor'd, 1658," p. 51," in the reprint of 1817, p. 153.
C. 'The Miller and the King's Daughters,' Wit and
Drollery, ed. 1682, p. 87. d. 'The Miller and the
King's Daughter,' Jamieson's Popular Ballads, i,
315.
B. a. 'The Twa Sisters,' Jamieson-Brown MS., fol.
39. b. 'The Cruel Sister,' Win. Tytler's Brown
MS., No 15. o. 'The Cruel Sister,'Abbotsford MS.,
"Scottish Songs," fol. 21. .d. 'The Twa Sisters,'
Jamieson's Popular Ballads, i, 48.
C. 'The Cruel Sister,' Scott's Minstrelsy, n, 143
(1802).
D. 'The Bonnie Milldams of Binnorie,' Kinloch MSS,
n, 49.
E. 'The Twa Sisters,' Sharpe's Ballad Book, No x, p.
30.
P. 'The Bonny Bows o London,' Motherwell's MS.,
p. 883.
G. Motherwell's MS., p. 104.
H. Motherwell's MS., p. 147.
I. 'Bonnie Milldams o Binnorie,' Kinloch MSS, v, 425.
J. 'The Miller's Melody,' Notes and Queries, 4th S.,
v, 23.
K. 'Binnorie,' Kinloch's papers.
L. a. 'The Miller's Melody,' Notes and Queries, 1st S.,
v, 316. b. 'The Drowned Lady,' The Scouring of
the White Horse, p. 161.
M. 'Binorie, O an Binorie,' Murison MS., p. 79.
N. 'Binnorie,' [Pinkerton's] Scottish Tragic Ballads,
p. 72.
O. 'The Bonny Bows o London.' a. Buchan's Ballads
of the North of Scotland, n, 128. b. Christie's Tra-
ditional Ballad Airs, i, 42.
P. a. 'The Twa Sisters,' Motherwell's MS., p. 245. b.
'The Swan swims bonnie O,' Motherwell's Minstrel-
sy, Appendix, p. xx.
Q. ' The Twa Sisters,' communicated by J. F. Camp-
bell, Esq.
R. a. 'The Three Sisters,' Notes and Q., 1st S., vi,
102. b. 'Bodown,' communicated by J. F. Camp-
bell, Esq. c. 'The Barkshire Tragedy,' The Scour-
ing of the White Horse, p. 158.
S. Kinloch MSS, vi, 89.
T. ' Sister, dear Sister,' Allingham's Ballad Book, p.
xxxiii.
TJ. From Long Island, N. Y., communicated by Mr W.
W. Newell.
This is one of the very few old ballads
which are not extinct as tradition in the Brit-
ish Isles. Even drawing-room versions are
spoken of as current, "generally traced to
some old nurse, who sang them to the young
ladies." * It has been found in England, Scot-
• Campbell's Popular Tales of the West Highlands, iv,
126, 1862.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
119
land, Wales, and Ireland, and was very early
in print. Dr Rimbault possessed and pub-
lished a broadside of the date 1656* (A a),
and the same copy is included in the miscel-
lany called Wit Restor'd, 1658. Both of
these name " Mr Smith " as the author; that
is, Dr James Smith, a well-known writer of
humorous verses, to whom the larger part of
the pieces in Wit Restor'd has been attrib-
uted. If the ballad were ever in Smith's hands,
he might possibly have inserted the three bur-
lesque stanzas, 11-13; but similar verses are
found in another copy (L a), and might easily
be extemporized by any singer of sufficiently
bad taste. Wit and Drollery, the edition of
1682, has an almost identical copy of the bal-
lad, and this is repeated in Dryden's Miscel-
lany, edition of 1716, Part m, p. 316. In 1781
Pinkerton inserted in his Tragic Ballads one
with the title 'Binnorie,' purporting to be
from Scottish tradition. Of twenty-eight coup-
lets, barely seven are genuine. Scott printed
in 1802 a copy (C) compounded from one " in
Mrs Brown's MS." (B b) and a fragment of
fourteen stanzas which had been transcribed
from recitation by Miss Charlotte Brooke,
adopting a burden found in neither.^ Jamie-
son followed, four years after, with a tolera-
bly faithful, though not, as he says, verbatim,
publication of his copy of Mrs Brown's ballad,
somewhat marred, too, by acknowledged in-
terpolations. This text of Mrs Brown's is
now correctly given, with the whole or frag-
ments of eleven others, hitherto unpublished.
The ballad is as popular with the Scandi-
navians as with their Saxon cousins. Grundt-
vig, 'Den talende Strengeleg,' No 95, gives
nine Danish versions and one stanza of a tenth;
seven, A-E, in n, 507 ff, the remainder, H-K,
* Jamieson, in his Popular Ballads, n, 815, prints the bal-
lad, with five inconsiderable variations from the broadside,
as from Musarum Deliciae, 2d edition, 1656. The careful
re'print of this book, and of the same edition, in "Facetia?,"
etc., 1817, does not contain this piece, and the first edition,
of 1655, differed in no respect as to contents, according to
the editor of "Facetiae." Still it is hardly credible that
Jamieson has blundered, and we may suppose that copies,
ostensibly of the same edition, varied as to contents, a thing
common enough with old books.
t Cunningham has re-written Scott's version, Songs of
Scotland, n, 109, * The Two Fair Sisters.' lie says, "I
in m, 875 ff. One more, L, is added by Kris-
tensen, No 96, I, 253. Of these, only E had
been previously printed. All are from tra-
dition of this century.
There are two Icelandic versions, A from
the 17th, B from the 19th, century, printed
in*tslenzk FornkvaeSi, No 13, ' Hb'rpu kvaeSi.'
Of twelve Norwegian versions, A, by Moe,
"is printed in Norske Universitets og Skole-
Annaler for 1850, p. 287," and in Moe's Sam-
lede Skrifter, n, 118, ' Dae bur ein Mann hter
utmaa Aa ;' B, by Lindeman, Annaler, as be-
fore, "p.496," and in his Norske Fjeldmelodier,
vol. I, Tekst-Bilag, p. 4, No 14, 'Dei tvae Sys-
ta;' C, by Landstad, ' Dei tvo systar,' No 53,
p. 480 ; D-L are described by Professor Bugge
in Grundtvig, m, 877 f; M " is printed in Il-
lustreret Nyhedsblads Nytaarsgave for 1860,
p. 77, Christiania."
Four Faroe versions are known : A,' Hb'rpu-
rima,' "in Svabo's MS., No 16, I, 291," incor-
rectly printed by Afzelius, I, 86, and accu-
rately, from a copy furnished by Grundtvig,
in Bergstrom's edition of Afzelius, n, 69; B,
a compound of two versions taken down by
Pastor Lyngbye and by Pastor Schroter, in
Nyeste Skilderie af Kjabenhavn, 1821, col.
997 ff ; C, a transcript from recitation by Ham-
mershaimb (Grundtvig); D, "in Fugloyjar-
b6k, No 31."
Swedish versions are: A, ' Den underbara
Harpan,' Afzelius, No 17, I, 81, new ed., No
16, l, I, 72: B, ' De tva Systrarne,' Afzelius,
No 69, m, 16, new ed., No 16, 2, I, 74: C,
D, E, imprinted copies in Cavallius and Ste-
phens's collection: F,' De tva Systrarne,' Ar-
widsson, No 99, n, 139: G, 'Systermordet,'
E. Wigstrb'm, Skanska Visor, p. 4, and the
same, Folkdiktning, etc., No 7, p. 19: H,
was once deeply touched with the singing of this romantic
and mournful song. ... I have ventured to print it in the
manner I heard it sung." There is, to be sure, no reason
why he should not have heard his own song sung, once, and
still less why he should not have been deeply touched with
his own pathos. Cunningham adds one genuine stanza,
resembling the first of G, J, P:
Two fair sisters lived in a bower,
Hey ho my nonnie O
There came a knight to be their wooer.
While the swan swims bonnie O


120
10. THE TWA SISTERS
Rancken, Nagra Prof af Folksang, No 3, p.
10. Afzelius, moreover, gives variations from
four other copies which he had collected, III,
20 ff, new ed., n, 74 ft'; and Rancken from
three others. Both of the editors of the new
Afzelius have recently obtained excellent copies
from singers. The ballad has also been found
in Finnish, Bergstrom's Afzelius, II, 79.
There is a remarkable agreement between
the Norse and English ballads till we ap-
proach the conclusion of the story, with a
natural diversity as to some of the minuter
details.
The sisters are king's daughters in English
A, B, C, H, O (?), P, Q, R a, and in Swed-
ish B and two others of Afzelius's versions.
They are an earl's daughters in Swedish F,
and sink to farmer's daughters in English
R b, c,* Swedish A, G, Norwegian C.
It is a thing made much of in most of the
Norse ballads that the younger sister is fair
and the older dark; the younger is bright as
the sun, as white as ermine or as milk, the elder
black as soot, black as the earth, Icelandic
A, Swedish A, B, G, Danish A, D, etc.; and
this difference is often made the ground for
very unhandsome taunts, which qualify our
compassion for the younger; such as Wash
all day, and you will be no whiter than God
made you, Wash a3 white as you please, you
will never get a lover, Faroe A, B, Nor-
wegian A, C, etc. This contrast may possibly
be implied in "the youngest was the fairest
flower," English F, G, Q [" sweetest," D], but
is expressed only in M, " Ye was fair and I
was din" (dun), and in P a, " The old was
black and the young ane fair."
The scene of action is a seashore in Ice-
landic and Fiiroe A, B, Norwegian A, Swedish
A, B, G, H, and in all the Danish complete
copies: a seashore, or a place where ships
come in, in English A, B a, D-I, Q, R a, T, but
in all save the last of these (the last is only
one stanza) we have the absurdity of a body
* English M is confused on this point. The sisters live
in a hall. The burden in st. 1 makes them love a miller-lad;
but in 14,15, calls the drowned girl " the bonnie miller's-lass
o Binorie."
t The sisters, D, I, walk by, up, a linn; G, go to a sand
[strand] ; Q, go to the stream; R a, walk on the bryn.
drowned in navigable water being discovered
floating down a mill-stream.f B c has "the
deep mill-dam ;" C "the river-strand," per-
haps one of Scott's changes ; M, "the dams ;"
L, O, P, R b c, a river, Tweed mill-dam,
or the water of Tweed. Norwegian B has a
river.
The pretence for the older sister's taking
the younger down to the water is in Eng-
lish A-E, G, H, I, O, Q, to see their father's
ships come in; in Icelandic B to wash their
silks ; J in most of the Norse ballads to wash
themselves, so that, as the elder says, *' we
may be alike white," Danish C-H, Norwegian
A, C, Swedish F, G, Faroe A, B. Malice pre-
pense is attributed to the elder in Swedish B,
F, Norwegian C, Danish E, F, G: but in Fa-
roe A, B, Norwegian A, B, and perhaps some
other cases, a previous evil intent is not cer-
tain, and the provocations of the younger sister
may excuse the elder so far.
The younger is pushed from a stone upon
which she sits, stands, or steps, in English B,
C, E-H, M, O, Q, Icelandic A, B, Faroe A
,
B, Norwegian A, B, C, Danish A-E, H, L,
Swedish G, H, and Rancken's other copies.
The drowning scene is the same in all the
ballads, except as to one point. The younger
sister, to save her life, offers or consents to
renounce her lover in the larger number, as
English B-E, G, H, I, M, P, Q, Danish A-D,
F, G, I, Swedish A-D, G, H ; and in Icelandic
B and "all the Faroe" ballads she finally
yields, after first saying that her lover must
dispose of himself. But Swedish F, with
more spirit, makes the girl, after promising
everything else, reply:
'Help then who can, help God above!
But ne'er shalt thou get my dear true-love.'
In this refusal concur Icelandic A, Danish
E, H, L, and all the Norwegian versions ex-
cept L. t
Swedish A, G, and Rancken's versions (or
} Swedish H begins, " Dear sister, come follow me to the
clappingxstone :" "Nay, I have no foul clothes." So F 6, 7,
G 4, 5, Faroe A 6, nearly; and then follows the suggestion
that they should wash themselves. Another of Rancken's
copies begins, " Two sisters went to the bucking-stone, to back
their clothes snow-white," H; and so Rancken's S nearly.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
121
two of them) make the younger sister, when
she sees that she must drown, send greetings
to her father, mother, true-love [also brother,
sister, Rancken], and add in each case that
she is drinking, or dancing, her bridal in the
flood, that her bridal-bed is made on the white-
sand, etc.
The body of the drowned girl is discovered,
in nearly all the English ballads, by some
member of the miller's household, and ia
taken out of the water by the miller. In L b,
which, however, is imperfect at the beginning,
a harper finds the body. In the Icelandic bal-
lads it is found on the seashore by the lover;
in all the Norwegian but M by two fishermen,
as also in Swedish D [fishermen in Swedish
B]; in all the Faroe versions and Norwegian
M by two "pilgrims ;" * in Danish A-F, L,
and Swedish C by two musicians, Danish H,
Swedish A, G, one. Danish G, which is cor-
rupted at the close, has three musicians, but
these simply witness and report the drowning.
According to all complete and uncorrupted
forms of the ballad, either some part of the
body of the drowned girl is taken to furnish
a musical instrument, a harp or a viol,f or
the instrument is wholly made from the body.
This is done in the Norse ballads by those who
first find the body, save in Swedish B, where
fishermen draw the body ashore, and a passing
"speleman" makes the instrument. In Eng-
lish it is done by the miller, A; by a harper,
B, C, G, L b (the king's harper in B); by a
fiddler, D, E, I, L a (?), O, P (the king's
fiddler, O (?), P) ; by both a fiddler and the
king's harper, H; in F by the father's herds-
man, who happens to be a fiddler.
Perhaps the original conception was the
simple and beautiful one which we find in
English B and both the Icelandic ballads, that
* There are, besides the two fishermen, in Norwegian A,
two " twaddere," i. e., landloupers, possibly (Bugge) a cor-
ruption of the word rendered pilgrims, Faroe vallarar, Swed-
ish vallare. The vallarar in these ballads are perhaps more
respectable than those whose acquaintance we shall make
through the Norse versions of 'Babylon,' and may be al-
lowed to be harmless vagrants, but scarcely better, seeing
that they are ranked with "staff-carls" in Norges Gamle
Love, cited by Cleasby and Vigf usson at'vallari.'
t A harp in the Icelandic and Norwegian ballads, Faroe
A, B, C, Swedish A, B, D, G, H; a harp in English B,
the king's harper, or the girl's lover, takes
three locks of her yellow hair to string his
harp with. So we find three tets of hair in D,
E, I, and three links in F, P, used, or directed
to be used, to string the fiddle or the fiddle-
bow, and the same, apparently, with Danish A.
Infelicitous additions were, perhaps, succes-
sively made; as a harp-frame from the breast-
bone in English C, and fiddle-pins formed of
the finger-joints, English F, O, Danish B, C,
E, F, L. Then we have all three: the frame
of the instrument formed from the breast (or
trunk), the screws from the finger-joints, the
strings from the hair, Swedish A, B, G, Nor-
wegian A, C, M. And so one thing and another
is added, or substituted, as fiddle-bows of the
arms or legs, Swedish C, D, Danish H, Eng-
lish J-J ft £ ft harp-frame from the arms, Nor-
wegian B, Faroe A; a fiddle-frame from the
skull, Swedish C, or from the back-bone, Eng-
lish L b; a plectrum from the arm, Faroe B;
strings from the veins, English A; a bridge
from the nose, English A, L a ; "harpanota"
from the teeth, Norwegian B; till we end
with the buffoonery of English A and L a.
Swedish H has nothing about the finding
of the body. Music is wanted for the bri-
dal, and a man from another village, who un-
dertakes to furnish it, looks three days for a
proper tree to make a harp of. The singer
of this version supplied the information, lost
from the ballad, that the drowned sister had
floated ashore and grown up into a linden, and
that this was the very tree which was chosen
for the harp. (See, further on, a Lithuanian,
a Slovak, and an Esthonian ballad.)
All the Norse ballads make the harp or fid-
dle to be taken to a wedding, which chances
to be that of the elder sister with the drowned
girl's betrothed.}: Unfortunately, many of the
C, Or, J. A harp is not named in any of the Danish ver-
sions, but a fiddle is mentioned in C, E, H, is plainly meant
in A, and may always be intended; or perhaps two fiddles in
all but H (which has only one fiddler), and the corrupted G-.
D begins with two fiddlers, but concludes with only one.
We have a fiddle in Swedish C, and in English A, D, E,
F, I, J, K, L, O, P; both harp and fiddle in H.
} Some of the unprinted Norwegian ballads are not com-
pletely described, but a departure from the rule of the major
part would probably have been alluded to.


122
10. THE TWA SISTERS
English versions are so injured towards the
close that the full story cannot be made out.
There is no wedding-feast preserved in any
of them. The instrument, in A, B, C, H, is
taken into the king's presence. The viol in
A and the harp in H are expressly said to
speak. The harp is laid upon a stone in C,
J, and plays "its lone;" the fiddle plays of
itself in L b.* B makes the harper play, and
D, F, K, O, which say the fiddle played,
probably mean that there was a fiddler, and
so perhaps with all the Norse versions; but
this is not very material, since in either case
the instrument speaks " with most miraculous
organ."
There are three strings made from the girl's
hair in Icelandic A, B, English B [veins,
English A], and the three tets or links in
English D, E, F, I, P were no doubt taken
to make three strings originally. Correspond-
ing to this are three enunciations of the in-
strument in English A, B, C, Icelandic A,
Faroe A,f B, Swedish A, B, C, E, G, H,
Danish A, D, F, I. These are reduced to
two in Icelandic B, Danish B, C, H, L, Swed-
ish D, and even to one in English D, F, I,
K, O, but some of these have suffered injury
towards the conclusion. The number is in-
creased to four in Norwegian B, to five in
Norwegian A, D, and even to six in Norwegian
C, K, M. The increase is, of course, a later
exaggeration, and very detrimental to the
effect. In those English copies in which the
instrument speaks but once, J D, F, K, O, and
we may add P, it expresses a desire for ven-
geance: Hang my sister, D, F, K; Ye 'll
drown my sister, as she's dune me, O ; Tell
him to burn my sister, P. This is found in
no Norse ballad, neither is it found in the
earliest English versions. These, and the bet-
ter forms of the Norse, reveal the awful se-
cret, directly or indirectly, and, in the latter
case, sometimes note the effect on the bride.
Thus, in Icelandic B, the first string sounds,
* The stanza, 9, in which this is said is no doubt as to its
form entirely modern, but not so the idea. I has " the first
spring that he playd, it said," etc.
t The fourth string is said to speak in Faroe A 30, but
no utterance is recorded, and this is likely to be a mistake.
The bride is our sister; the second, The bride
is our murderer. In Danish B the first fiddle
plays, The bride is my sister ; the second, The
bridegroom is my true-love; in C, H, the first
strain is, The bride has drowned her sister,
the second, Thy sister is driven [blown] to
land. Faroe A, B, have: (1) The bride was
my sister; (2) The bride was my murderer;
(3) The bridegroom was my true-love. The
bride then says that the harp disturbs her
much, and that she lists to hear it no more.
Most impressive of all, with its terse, short
lines, is Icelandic A:
The first string made response:
'The bride was my sister once.'
The bride on the bench, she spake:
'The harp much trouble doth make.'
The second string answered the other:
'She is parting me and my lover.'
Answered the bride, red as gore:
'The harp is vexing us sore.'
The canny third string replied:
'I owe my death to the bride.'
He made all the harp-strings clang;
The bride's heart burst with the pang.
This is the wicked sister's end in both of
the Icelandic ballads and in Faroe A, B. In
Swedish A, G, at the first stroke on the harp
she laughs; at the second she grows pale [has
to be undressed] ; upon the third she lay dead
in her bed [falls dead on the floor]. She is
burned in Danish A, B, C, F, G, Swedish B,
Norwegian A, B, C, I, M. In Norwegian K,
L, the younger sister (who is restored to life)
begs that the elder may not be burned, but
sent out of the country (cf. English R b c);
nevertheless, she is buried alive in L, which
is her fate also in E, and in other imprinted
versions. A prose comment upon Danish I
has her stabbed by the bridegroom.
In many of the versions, and in this, after the strings have
spoken individually, they unite in a powerful but inarticu-
late concord.
J I has lost the terminal stanzas.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
123
Norwegian B 21 makes the bride, in her
confusion at the revelations of the harp, ask
the bridegroom to drive the fiddler out of the
house. So far from complying, the bride-
groom orders him mead and wine, and the
bride to the pile. In Norwegian C the bride
treads on the harper's foot, then orders the
playing to stop; but the bridegroom springs
from the table, and cries, Let the harp have its
song out, pays no regard to the lady's alleging
that she has so bad a head that she cannot bear
it, and finally sends her to the pile. So, near-
ly, Norwegian A. In Danish A, C, D, H, L,
vainly in the first two, the bride tries to hush
the fiddler with a bribe. He endeavors to take
back what he has said in D, L, declaring him-
self a drunken fool (the passage is borrowed
from another ballad): still in L, though suc-
cessful for the nonce, she comes to the stake
and wheel some months after. In H the fid-
dler dashes the instrument against a stone,
seemingly to earn his bribe, but this trait be-
longs to versions which take the turn of the
Norwegian. In C 15 the bride springs from
the table, and says, Give the fiddlers a trifle,
and let them go. This explains the last
stanza of English A (cf., Norwegian B 21):
Now pay the miller for his payne,
And let him bee gone in the divel's name.
Swedish F has an entirely perverted and
feeble conclusion. "A good man " takes the
younger sister from the water, carries her to
his house, revives her, and nurses her till the
morrow, and then restores her to her father,
who asks why she is so pale, and why she
had not come back with her sister. She ex-
plains that she had been pushed into the wa-
ter, "and we may thank this good man that
I came home at all." The father tells the
elder that she is a disgrace to her country,
and condemns her to the " blue tower." But
her sister intercedes, and a cheerful and hand-
some wedding follows.
Swedish C and nearly all the Norwegian
• Not M, and apparently not D, which ends:
When he kissed the harp upon the mouth, his heart broke.
t So the traitor John pushes away Catherine's hands in
ballads* restore the drowned girl to life, but
not by those processes of the Humane Society
which are successfully adopted by the "arlig
man" in Swedish F. The harp is dashed
against a stone, or upon the floor, and the girl
stands forth "as good as ever." As Landstad
conceives the matter (484, note 7), the elder
sister is a witch, and is in the end burned as
such. The white body of the younger is made
to take on the appearance of a crooked log,
which the fishermen (who, by the way, are
angels in C, E) innocently shape into a harp,
and the music, vibrating from her hair
"through all her limbs, marrow and bone,"
acts as a disenchantment. However this may
be, the restoration of the younger sister, like
all good endings foisted on tragedies, emas-
culates the story.
English F 9 has the peculiarity, not noticed
elsewhere, that the drowning girl catches at a
broom-root, and the elder sister forces her to
let go her hold.f In Swedish G she is simply
said to swim to an alder-root. In English G 8
the elder drives the younger from the land
with a switch, in I 8 pushes her off with a sil-
ver wand.
English O introduces the ghost of the drowned
sister as instructing her father's fiddler to make
a string of her hair and a peg of her little
finger bone, which done, the first spring the
fiddle plays, it says,
'Ye 'll drown my sister as she's dune me.'
P, which is disordered at the end, seems to
have agreed with O. In Q the ghost sends,
by the medium of the miller and his daugh-
ter, respects to father, mother, and true-love,
adding a lock of yellow hair for the last. The
ghost is found in N, Pinkerton's copy, as
well, but there appears to the lover at dead of
night, two days after the drowning. It in-
forms him of the murder, and he makes search
for the body. This is a wide departure from
the original story, and plainly a modern per-
version. Another variation, entirely wanting
•Lady Isabel and the ElfxKnight,' Polish Q 25 (see p. 40).
In the French versions A, C, E of the same, the knight
catches at a branch to save himself, and the lady cuts it off
with his sword.


124
10. THE TWA SISTERS
in ancient authority, appears in R, S. The
girl is not dead when she has floated down
to the mill-dam, and, being drawn out of the
water by the miller, offers him a handsome
reward to take her back to her father [S,
to throw her in again!]. The miller takes
the reward, and pushes the girl in again, for
which he is hanged.*
Q has a burden partly Gaelic,
.... ohone and aree (alack and O Lord),
On the banks of the Banna (White River),
ohone and aree,
which may raise a question whether the Scotch
burden Binnorie (pronounced Binnorie, as well
as Binnorie) is corrupted from it, or the cor-
ruption is on the other side. Mr Campbell
notices as quaint the reply in stanza 9:
'I did not put you in with the design
Just for to pull you out again.'
We have had a similar reply, made under like
circumstances, in Polish versions of No 4: see
p. 40, note.
All the Norse versions of this ballad are in
two-line stanzas, and all the English, except
L b and in part L a.
Some of the traits of the English and Norse
story are presented by an Esthonian ballad,
'The Harp,' Neus, Ehstnische Volkslieder, No
13, p. 56. Another version is given in Ro-
senplanter's Beitrage zur genauern Kenntniss
der ehstnischen Sprache, Heft 4, 142, and a
third, says Neus, in Ch. H. J. Schlegel's Reisen
in mehrere russische Gouvernements, v, 140.
A young woman, who tells her own story, is
murdered by her sisters-in-law and buried in
a moor. She comes up as a birch, from which,
with the jaw-bone of a salmon, the teeth of a
pike, and her own hair (the account is some-
what confused) a harp is made. The harp is
taken to the hall by the murdered girl's broth-
er% and responds to his playing with tones of
sorrow like those of the bride who leaves fa-
ther and mother for the house of a husband.f
* The miller begins to lose character in H:
14 He dragged her ont unto the shore,
And stripped her of all she wore,
t Neus also refers to an Esthonian saga of Rogutaja's
A Slovak ballad often translated (Talvj,
Historical View, etc., p. 392; Wenzig's Sla-
wische Volkslieder, p. 110, Westslawischer
Marchenschatz, 273, and Bibliothek Slavischer
Poesien, p. 134; Lewestam, Polnische Volk-
sagen und Marchen, p. 151) comes nearer in
some respects. A daughter is cursed by her
mother for not succeeding in drawing water in
frosty weather. Her bucket turns to stone,
but she to a maple. Two fiddlers come by,
and, seeing a remarkably fine tree, propose to
make of it fiddles and fiddle-sticks. When
they cut into the tree, blood spirts out. The
tree bids them go on, and when they have
done, play before the mother's door, and sing,
Here is your daughter, that you cursed to
stone. At the first notes the mother runs
to the window, and begs them to desist, for she
has suffered much since she lost her daughter.
The soul of a dead girl speaks through a tree,
again, in a Lithuanian ballad, Nesselmann,
Littauische Volkslieder, No 378, p. 320. The
girl is drowned while attempting to cross a
stream, carried down to the sea, and finally
thrown ashore, where she grows up a linden.
Her brother makes a pipe from a branch, and
the pipe gives out sweet, sad tones. The
mother says, That tone comes not from the
linden; it is thy sister's soul, that hovers over
the water. A like idea is met with in another
Lithuanian ballad, Rhesa, Dainos, ed. Kur-
schat, No 85, p. 231. A sister plucks a bud
from a rose-bush growing over the grave of
her brother, who had died from disappointed
love. How fragrant! she exclaims. But her
mother answers, with tears, It is not the rose-
bud, but the soul of the youth that died of
grief.
Though the range of the ballad proper is
somewhat limited, popular tales equivalent as
to the characteristic circumstances are very
widely diffused.
A Polish popular tale, which is, indeed, half
song, Wojcicki, Klechdy, ed. 1851, n, 15
(Lewestam, p. 105), Kolberg, Piesni ludu
wife, and to 'Die Pfeiferin,' a tale, in Das Inland, 1846, No
48,Beilage, col. 1246 ff, 1851, No 14, col. 230 ff; and to a
Slovenian ballad in Tielemann, Livona, ein historisch-po-
etisches Taschenbuch, 1812, p. 187.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
125
Polskiego, p. 292, No 40 a, b, o, approaches
very close to the English-Norse ballad. There
were three sisters, all pretty, but the youngest
far surpassing the others. A young man from
the far-off Ukraine fell in with them while
they were making garlands. The youngest
pleased him best, and he chose her for his
wife. This excited the jealousy of the eldest,
and a few days after, when they were gather-
ing berries in a wood, she killed the youngest,
notwithstanding the resistance of the second
sister, buried her, and gave out that she had
been torn to pieces by wolves. When the
youth came to ask after his love, the mur-
deress told him this tale, and so won him by
her devoted consolations that he offered her
his hand. A willow grew out of the grave of
the youngest, and a herdsman made a pipe
from one of its boughs. Blow as he would,
he could get no sound from the pipe but this:
'Blow on, herdsman, blow! God shall bless thee
s0.
The eldest was my slayer, the second tried to stay
her.'
The herdsman took the pipe to the house of
the murdered girl. The mother, the father,
and the second sister successively tried it,
and the pipe always sang a like song, Blow,
mother, blow, etc. The father then put the
pipe into the eldest sister's hands. She had
hardly touched it, when blood spattered her
cheeks, and the pipe sang:
'Blow on, sister, blow: God shall wreak me now.
Thou, sister, 't was didst slay me, the younger tried
to stay thee,' etc.
The murderess was torn by wild horses.
Professor Bugge reports a Norwegian tale,
Grundtvig, m, 878, which resembles the bal-
lad at the beginning. There were in a fam-
ily two daughters and a son. One sister was
wasteful, the other saving. The second com-
plained of the first to her parents, and was
killed and buried by the other. Foliage cov-
ered the grave, so that it could not be seen,
but on the trees under which the body lay,
there grew " strings." These the brother cut
off and adapted to his fiddle, and when he
played, the fiddle said, My sister is killed.
The father, having heard the fiddle's revela-
tion, brought his daughter to confess her act.
There is a series of tales which represent a
king, or other personage, as being afflicted
with a severe malady, and as promising that
whichever of his children, commonly three
sons, should bring him something necessary
for his cure or comfort should be his heir:
(1) 'La Flor del Lilila,' Fernan Caballero,
Lagrimas, cap. 4; (2) 'La cafia del riu de
arenas,' Mila, Observaciones sobre la poesia
popular, p. 178, No 3; (3) 'Es kommt doch
einmal an den Tag,' Miillenhof, Sagen, u. s.
w., p. 495, No 49; (4) 'Vom singenden Du-
delsack,' Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Marchen,
I, 329, No 51. Or the inheritance is promised
to whichever of the children finds something
lost, or rich and rare, a griffin's feather, a
golden branch, a flower: (5) 'Die Greifen-
feder,' Schneller, Marchen und Sagen aus
Walschtirol, p. 143, No 51; (6) 'La Flauuto,'
Bladd, Contes et proverbes populaires re-
cueillis en Armagnac, p. 3, No 1; (7) Wack-
ernagel, in Haupt's Zeitschrift, in, 35, No
3, = ' Das Todtebeindli,' Colshorn, C. u.
Th., Marchen u. Sagen, p. 193, No 71,= Su-
termeister, Kinder-u.-Hausmarchen aus der
Schweiz, p. 119, No 39. Or a king promises
his daughter to the man who shall capture a
dangerous wild beast, and the exploit is un-
dertaken by three brothers [or two]: (8)
'Der singende Knochen,' Grimms, K. u. H.
marchen, I, 149, No 28 (1857); (9) 'Die
drei Briider,' Curtze, Volksiiberlieferungen
aus dem Furstenthum Waldeck, p. 53, No
11; (10) 'Der Rohrstengel,' Haltrich, Deutsche
Volksmarchen aus dem Sachsenlande, u. s. w.,
p. 225, No 42. With these we may group,
though divergent in some respects, (11) 'Der
goldene Apfel,' Toeppen, Aberglauben aus
Masuren, p. 139.* In all these tales the young-
est child is successful, and is killed, out of
envy, by the eldest or by the two elder.
[There are only two children in (6), (7),
(8); in (4) the second is innocent, as in the
Polish tale.J Reeds grow over the spot where
the body is buried (1), (2), (10), (11), or an
* All these are cited in Kohler's note, Gonzenbach, n,
235.


126
10. THE TWA SISTERS
elder bush (3), out of which a herdsman makes
a pipe or flute; or a white bone is found by a
herdsman, and he makes a pipe or horn of it
(5-9) ; or a bag-pipe is made of the bones and
skin of the murdered youth (4). The instru-
ment, whenever it is played, attests the mur-
der.
Among the tales of the South African Bech-
uana, there is one of a younger brother, who
has been killed by an older, immediately ap-
pearing as a bird, and announcing what has oc-
curred. The bird is twice killed, and the last
time burnt and its ashes scattered to the winds,
but still reappears, and proclaims that his body
lies by a spring in the desert. Grimms, K.
u. H. in. nI, 361. Liebrecht has noted that
the fundamental idea is found in a Chinese
drama, ' The Talking Dish,' said to be based
on a popular tale. An innkeeper and his wife
kill one of their guests for his money, and
burn the body. The innkeeper collects the
ashes and pounds the bones, and makes a sort
of mortar and a dish. This dish speaks very
distinctly, and denounces the murderers. Jour-
nal Asiatique, 1851, 4th Series, vol. 18, p.
523.
Danish A, E are translated by Prior, I, 381,
384. English B, with use of C, is translated by
Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folkeviser,
p. 104, No 15 ; C, by Afzelius, m, 22. C, by
Talvj, Versuch, u. s. w., p. 532; by Schubart,
p. 133; by Gerhard, p. 143; by Doenniges,
p. 81; Arndt, p. 238. C, with use of Ay-
toun's compounded version, by R. Warrens,
Schottische V. L. der Vorzeit, p. 65; Alling-
ham's version by Knortz, Lieder u. Romanzen
Alt-Englands, p. 180.
A
A. a. Broadside "printed for Francis Grove, 1656," re-
printed in Notes and Queries, 1st S., v, 591. b. Wit Re-
stor'd, 1658, "p. 51," p. 153 of the reprint of 1817. c. Wit
and Drollery, ed. 1682, p. 87, = Dryden's Miscellany, Part
3, p. 316, ed. 1716. d. Jamieson's Popular Ballads, i, 315.
1 There were two sisters, they went playing,
With a hie downe downe a downe-a
To see their father's ships come sayling in.
With a hy downe downe a downe-a
2 And when they came unto the sea-brym,
The elder did push the younger in.
3 'O sister, O sister, take me by the gowne,
And drawe me up upon the dry ground.'
4 'O sister, O sister, that may not bee,
Till salt and oatmeale grow both of a tree.'
5 Somtymes she sanke, somtymes she swam,
Until she came unto the mill-dam.
6 The miller runne hastily downe the cliffe,
And up he betook her withouten her life.
7 What did he doe with her brest-bone?
He made him a violl to play thereupon.
8 What did he doe with her fingers so small?
He made him peggs to his violl withall.
9 What did he doe with her nose-ridge?
Unto his violl he made him a bridge.
10 What did he doe with her veynes so blew?
He made him strings to his violl thereto.
11 What did he doe with her eyes so bright?
Upon his violl he played at first sight.
12 What did he doe with her tongue so rough?
Unto the violl it spake enough.
13 What did he doe with her two shinnes?
Unto the violl they dane'd Moll Syms.
14 Then bespake the treble string,
'O yonder is my father the king.'
15 Then bespake the second string,
'O yonder sitts my mother the queen.'
16 And then bespake the strings all three,
'O yonder is my sister that drowned mee.'
17 'Now pay the miller for his payne,
And let him bee gone in the divel's name.'


128
10. THE TWA SISTERS
Scott's Minstrelsy, 1802, n, 143. Compounded from B b
and a fragment of fourteen stanzas transcribed from the
recitation of an old woman by Miss Charlotte Brooke.
1 Theke were two sisters sat in a bour;
Binnorie, 0 Binnorie
There came a knight to be their wooer.
By the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie
14 'Your cherry cheeks and your yellow hair
Garrd me gang maiden evermair.'
15 Sometimes she sunk, and sometimes she swam,
Until she came to the miller's dam.
16 'O father, father, draw your dam,
There's either a mermaid or a milk-white
2 He courted the eldest with glove and ring,
But he loed the youngest aboon a' thing.
3 He courted the eldest with broach and knife,
But he loed the youngest aboon his life.
4 The eldest she was vexed sair,
And sore envied her sister fair.
17 The miller hasted and drew his dam,
And there he found a drowned woman.
18 You could not see her yellow hair,
For gowd and pearls that were sae rare.
19 You could na see her middle sma,
Her gowden girdle was sae bra.
5 The eldest said to the youngest ane,
'Will ye go and see our father's ships come
in?'
6 She's taen her by the lilly hand,
And led her down to the river strand.
7 The youngest stude upon a stane,
The eldest came and pushed her in.
8 She took her by the middle sma,
And dashed her bonnie back to the jaw.
9 'O sister, sister, reach your hand,
And ye shall be heir of half my land.'
10 'O sister, I 'll not reach my hand,
And I 'll be heir of all your land.
11 'Shame fa the hand that I should take,
It's twin'd me and my world's make.'
12 'O sister, reach me but your glove,
And sweet William shall be your love.'
13 'Sink on, nor hope for hand or glove,
And sweet William shall better be my love.
20 A famous harper passing by,
The sweet pale face he chanced to spy.
21 And when he looked that ladye on,
He sighed and made a heavy moan.
22 He made a harp of her breast-bone,
Whose sounds would melt a heart of stone.
23 The strings he framed of her yellow hair,
Whose notes made sad the listening ear.
24 He brought it to her father's hall,
And there was the court assembled all.
25 He laid this harp upon a stone,
And straight it began to play alone.
26 'O yonder sits my father, the king,
And yonder sits my mother, the queen.
27 'And yonder stands my brother Hugh,
And by him my William, sweet and true.'
28 But the last tune that the harp playd then,
Was ' Woe to my sister, false Helen!'


10. THE TWA SISTERS
129
D
Kinloch's MSS, n, 49. From the recitation of MrsJohn-
ston, a North-country lady.
1 There lived three sisters in a bouer,
Edinbruch, Edinbruch
There lived three sisters in a bouer,
Stirling for aye
There lived three sisters in a bouer,
The youngest was the sweetest flowr.
Bonnie St Johnston stands upon Tay
2 There cam a knicht to see them a',
And on the youngest his love did fa.
3 He brought the eldest ring and glove,
But the youngest was his ain true-love.
4 He brought the second sheath and knife,
But the youngest was to be his wife.
5 The eldest sister said to the youngest ane,
'Will ye go and see our father's ships come
in?'
6 And as they walked by the linn,
The eldest dang the youngest in.
7 'O sister, sister, tak my hand,
And ye 'll be heir to a' my land.'
8 'Foul fa the hand that I wad take,
To twin me o my warld's make.'
9 'O sister, sister, tak my glove,
And yese get Willie, my true-love.'
10 'Sister, sister, I 'll na tak your glove,
For I 'll get Willie, your true-love.'
11 Aye she swittert, and aye she swam,
Till she cam to yon bonnie mill-dam.
12 The miller's dochter cam out wi speed,
It was for water, to bake her bread.
13 'O father, father, gae slack your dam;
There's in't a lady or a milk-white swan.'
*****
14 They could na see her coal-black eyes
For her yellow locks hang oure her brees.
15 They could na see her weel-made middle
For her braid gowden girdle.
*****
16 And by there cam an auld blind fiddler,
And took three tets o her bonnie yellow
hair.
*****
17 The first spring that the bonnie fiddle playd,
'Hang my cruel sister, Alison,' it said.
E
Sharpe's Ballad Book, No 10, p. 30.
1 There livd twa sisters in a bower,
Hey Edinbruch, how Edinbruch!
There lived twa sisters in a bower,
Stirling for aye!
The youngest o them O she was a flower!
Bonny Sanct Johnstoune that stands upon
Tay!
2 There cam a squire frae the west,
He loed them baith, but the youngest best.
3 He gied the eldest a gay gold ring,
But he loed the youngest aboon a' thing.
4 'O sister, sister, will ye go to the sea?
Our father's ships sail bonnilie.'
5 The youngest sat down upon a stane;
The eldest shot the youngest in.
6 'O sister, sister, lend me your hand,
And you shall hae my gouden fan.
7 'O sister, sister, save my life,
And ye shall be the squire's wife.'
8 First she sank, and then she swam,
Untill she cam to Tweed mill-dam.
9 The millar's daughter was baking bread,
She went for water, as she had need.
10 'O father, father, in our mill-dam
There's either a lady, or a milk-white swan.'
17


130
10. THE TWA SISTEliS
11 They could nae see her fingers small, 13 They could nae see her filly feet,
Wi diamond rings they were coverd all. Her gowden fringes war sae deep.
12 They could nae see her yellow hair, 14 Bye there cam a fiddler fair,
Sae mony knots and platts were there. And he's taen three taite o her yellow hair.
P
Motherwell's MS., p. 383. From the recitation of Agnes
Lyle, Kilbarehan, 27 th July, 1825.
1 There was two ladies livd in a bower,
Hey with a gay and a grinding O
The youngest o them was the fairest flower
About a' the bonny bows o London.
2 There was two ladies livd in a bower,
An wooer unto the youngest did go.
3 The oldest one to the youngest did say,
'Will ye take a walk with me today,
And we 'll view the bonny bows o Lon-
don.
4 'Thou 'll set thy foot whare I set mine,
Thou 'll set thy foot upon this stane.'
5 'I 'll set my foot where thou sets thine :'
The old sister dang the youngest in,
At, etc.
6 'O sister dear, come tak my hand,
Take my life safe to dry land,'
At, etc.
7 'It's neer by my hand thy hand sall come in,
It's neer by my hand thy hand sall come in,
At, etc.
8 'It's thy cherry cheeks and thy white briest
bane
Gars me set a maid owre lang at hame.'
9 She clasped her hand[s] about a brume rute,
But her cruel sister she lowsed them out.
10 Sometimes she sank, and sometimes she swam,
Till she cam to the miller's dam.
11 The miller's bairns has muckle need,
They were bearing in water to bake some
breid.
12 Says, 'Father, dear father, in our mill-dam,
It 'a either a fair maid or a milk-white swan.'
13 The miller he's spared nae his hose nor his
shoon
Till he brocht this lady till dry land.
14 I wad he saw na a bit o her feet,
Her silver slippers were made so neat.
15 I wad he saw na a bit o her skin,
For ribbons there was mony a ane.
16 He laid her on a brume buss to dry,
To see wha was the first wad pass her by.
17 Her ain father's herd was the first man
That by this lady gay did gang.
18 He's taen three links of her yellow hair,
And made it a string to his fiddle there.
19 He's cut her fingers long and small
To be fiddle-pins that neer might fail.
20 The very first spring that the fiddle did play,
'Hang my auld sister,' I wad it did say.
21 'For she drowned me in yonder sea,
God neer let her rest till she shall die,'
At the bonny bows o London.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
131
G
Motherwell's MS., p. 104. From Mrs King, Kilbarchan.
1 There were three sisters lived in a bouir,
Hech, hey, my Nannie O
And the youngest was the fairest flouir.
And the swan swims bonnie O
2 'O sister, sister, gang down to yon sand,
And see your father's ships coming to dry
land.'
3 O they have gane down to yonder sand,
To see their father's ships coming to dry land.
4 'Gae set your fit on yonder stane,
Till I tye up your silken goun.'
5 She set her fit on yonder stane,
And the auldest drave the youngest in.
6 'O sister, sister, tak me by the hand,
And ye 'll get a' my father's land.
7 'O sister, sister, tak me by the gluve,
An ye 'll get Willy, my true luve.'
8 She had a switch into her hand.
And ay she drave her frae the land.
9 O whiles she sunk, and whiles she swam,
Until she swam to the miller's dam.
10 The miller's daughter gade doun to Tweed,
To carry water to bake her bread.
11 'O father, O father, what's yon in the dam?
It "s either a maid or a milk-white swan.'
12 They have tane her out till yonder thorn,
And she has lain till Monday morn.
13 She hadna, hadna twa days lain,
Till by there came a harper fine.
14 He made a harp o her breast-bane,
That he might play forever thereon.
H
Motherwell's MS., p. 147. From L Goldic, March, 1825.
1 There were three sisters lived in a hall,
Hey with the gay and the grandeur O
And there came a lord to court them all.
At the bonnie bows o London town
2 He courted the eldest with a penknife,
And he vowed that he would take her life.
3 He courted the youngest with a glove,
And he said that he'd be her true love.
4 'O sister, O sister, will you go and take a walk,
And see our father's ships how they float I
5 'O lean your foot upon the stone,
And wash your hand in that sea-foam.'
6 She leaned her foot upon the stone,
But her eldest sister has tumbled her down.
7 'O sister, sister, give me your hand,
And I 'll make you lady of all my land.'
8 'O I 'll not lend to you my hand,
But I 'll be lady of your land.'
9 'O sister, sister, give me your glove,
And I 'll make you lady of my true love.'
10 'It's I '1 1 not lend to you my glove,
But I 'll be lady of your true love.'
11 Sometimes she sank, and sometimes she swam,
Until she came to a miller's dam.
12 The miller's daughter was coming out wi
speed,
For water for to bake some bread.
13 'O father, father, stop the dam,
For it's either a lady or a milk-white swan.'
14 He dragged her out unto the shore,
And stripped her of all she wore.
15 By cam a fiddler, and he was fair,
And he buskit his bow in her bonnie yellow
hair.


132
10. THE TWA SISTERS
16 By cam her father's harper, and he was fine, 18 'O God bless my father the king,
And he made a harp o her bonny breast-bone. And I wish the same to my mother the queen.
17 When they came to her father's court, 19 'My sister Jane she tumbled me in,
The harp [and fiddle these words] spoke: .....
I
Kinloch MSS, v, 425. From the recitation of M. Kin-
near, 23d August, 1826.
1 There war twa sisters lived in a bouer,
Binnorie and Binnorie
There cam a squire to court them baith.
At the bonnie mill-streams o Binnorie
2 He courted the eldest with jewels and rings,
But he lovd the youngest the best of all
things.
3 He courted the eldest with a penknife,
He lovd the youngest as dear as his life.
4 It fell ance upon a day
That these twa sisters hae gane astray.
5 It was for to meet their father's ships that had
come in.
6 As they walked up the linn,
The eldest dang the youngest in.
7 'O sister, sister, tak my hand,
And ye 'll hae Lud John and aw his land.'
8 With a silver wand she pushd her in,
9 'O sister, sister, tak my glove,
And ye sall hae my ain true love.'
10 The miller's dochter cam out wi speed.
It was for a water to bake her bread.
11 'O father, father, gae slack your dam;
There's either a white fish or a swan.'
*****
12 Bye cam a blind fiddler that way, •
And he took three tets o her bonnie yellow hair.
13 And the first spring that he playd,
It said, ' It was my sister threw me in.'
J
Notes and Queries, 4th S., v, 23, from the north of Ire-
land.
1 There were two ladies playing ball,
Hey, ho, my Nannie O
A great lord came to court them all.
The swan she does swim bonnie O
2 He gave to the first a golden ring,
He gave to the second a far better thing.
*****
3 He made a harp of her breast-bone
4 He set it down upon a stone,
And it began to "play its lone.
Mr G. R. Kinloch's papers, Kinloch MSS, n, 59. From
Mrs Lindores.
1 'O sister, sister, gie me your hand,
Binnorie and Binnorie
And I 'll give the half of my fallow-land,
By the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie.'
*****
2 The first time the bonnie fiddle played,
'Hang my sister, Alison,' it said,
'At the bonnie mill-dams of Binnorie.'


10. THE TWA SISTERS
133
L
a. From oral tradition, Notes and Queries, 1st S., v, 316.
b. The Scouring of the White Horse, p. 161. From North
Wales.
1 O was it eke a pheasant cock,
Or eke a pheasant hen,
Or was it the bodye of a fair ladye,
Come swimming down the stream?
2 O it was not a pheasant cock,
Nor eke a pheasant hen.
But it was the bodye of a fair ladye
Came swimming down the stream.
*****
3 And what did he do with her fair bodye?
Fal the lal the lal laral lody
He made it a case for bis melodye.
Fal, etc.
M
Taken down from recitation at Old Deir, 1876, by Mrs
A. F. Murison. MS., p. 79.
1 There lived twa sisters in yonder ha,
Bin6rie O an Bin6rie
They hadna but ae lad atween them twa,
He's the bonnie miller lad o Bintfrie.
2 It fell oot upon a day,
The auldest ane to the youngest did say,
At the bonnie mill-dams o Bindrie,
3 'O sister, O sister, will ye go to the dams,
To hear the "blackbird thrashin oer his songs?
At the,' etc.
4 'O sister, 0 sister, will ye go to the dams,
To see oor father's fish-boats come safe to dry
lan?
An the bonnie miller lad o Binorie.'
5 They hadna been an oor at the dams,
Till they heard the blackbird thrashin oer his
tune,
At the, etc.
6 They hadna been an oor at the dams
Till they saw their father's fish-boats come safe
to dry lan,
Bat they sawna the bonnie miller laddie.
4 And what did he do with her legs so strong?
He made them a stand for his violon.
5 And what did he do with her hair so fine?
He made of it strings for his violine.
6 And what did he do with her arms so long?
He made them bows for his violon.
7 And what did he do with her nose so thin?
He made it a bridge for his violin.
8 And what did he do with her eyes so bright?
He made them spectacles to put to his sight.
9 And what did he do with her petty toes?
He made them a nosegay to put to his
nose.
7 They stood baith up upon a stane,
An the eldest ane dang the youngest in,
I the, etc.
8 She swam up, an she swam doon,
An she swam back to her sister again,
I the, etc.
9 'O sister, O sister, len me your han,
An yes be heir to my true love,
He's the bonnie miller lad o Binorie.'
10 'It was not for that love at I dang you in,
But ye was fair and I was din,
And yes droon i the dams o Binorie.'
11 The miller's daughter she cam oot,
For water to wash her father's hans,
Frae the, etc.
12 'O father, O father, ye will fish your dams,
An ye 'll get a white fish or a swan,
I the,' etc.
13 They fished up and they fished doon,
But they got nothing but a droonet woman,
I the, etc.
14 Some o them kent by her skin sae fair,
But weel kent he by her bonnie yallow hair
She's the bonnie miller's lass o Binorie.


134
10. THE TWA SISTERS
15 Some o them kent by her goons o silk, 16 Mony ane was at her oot-takin,
But weel kent he by her middle sae jimp, But mony ane mair at her green grave makin,
She's the bonnie miller's lass o Binorie. At the bonny mill-dams o Binorie.
N
[Pinkcrton's] Scottish Tragic Ballads, p. 72.
1 There were twa sisters livd in a bouir,
Binnorie, O Binnorie
Their father was a baron of pouir.
By the bonnie mildams of Binnorie
2 The youngest was meek, and fair as the may
Whan she springs in the east wi the gowden day.
3 The eldest aasterne as the winter cauld,
Ferce was her saul, and her seiming was bauld.
4 A gallant squire cam sweet Isabel to wooe;
Her sister had naething to luve I trow.
5 But filld was she wi dolour and ire,
To see that to her the combe squire
6 Preferd the debonair Isabel:
Their hevin of luve of spyte was her hell.
7 Till ae ein she to her sister can say,
'Sweit sister, cum let us wauk and play.'
8 They wanked up, and they wauked down,
Sweit sang the birdis in the vallie loun.
9 Whan they cam to the roaring lin,
She drave unweiting Isabel in.
10 'O sister, sister, tak my hand,
And ye sall hae my silver fan.
11 'O sister, sister, tak my middle,
And ye sail hae my gowden girdle.'
12 Sumtimes she sank, sumtimes she swam,
Till she cam to the miller's dam.
13 The miller's dochtor was out that ein,
And saw her rowing down the streim.
14 'O father deir, in your mil-dam
There is either a lady or a milk-white swan!'
15 Twa days were gane, whan to her deir
Her wraith at deid of nicht cold appeir.
16 'My luve, my deir, how can ye sleip,
Whan your Isabel lyes in the deip!
17 'My deir, how can ye sleip bot pain
Whan she by her cruel sister is slain!'
18 Up raise he sunc, in frichtfu mude:
'Busk ye, my mciny, and seik the flude.'
19 They socht her up and they socht her doun,
And spyd at last her glistcrin gown.
20 They raisd her wi richt meikle care;
Pale was her cheik and grein was her hair.
a. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, n, 128.
b. Traditional Ballad Airs, edited by W. Christie, i, 42.
1 There were twa sisters in a bower,
Hey wi the gay and the grinding
And ae king's son has courted them baith.
At the bonny bonny bows o London
2 He courted the youngest wi broach and ring,
He courted the eldest wi some other thing.
4 'Will ye gae to yon Tweed mill-dam,
And see our father's ships come to land?'
5 They baith stood up upon a stane,
The eldest dang the youngest in.
6 She swimmed up, sae did she down,
Till she came to the Tweed mill-dam.
7 The miller's servant he came out,
And saw the lady floating about
3 It fell ance upon a day
The eldest to the youngest did say,
8 'O master, master, set your mill,
There is a fish, or a milk-white swan."


10. THE TWA SISTERS
135
9 They could not ken her yellow hair,
[For] the scales o gowd that were laid there.
10 They could not ken her fingers sae white,
The rings o gowd they were sae bright.
11 They could not ken her middle sae jimp,
The stays o gowd were so well laced.
12 They could not ken her foot sae fair,
The shoes o gowd they were so rare.
13 Her father's fiddler he came by,
Upstarted her ghaist before his eye.
14 'Ye 'll take a lock o my yellow hair,
Ye 'll make a string to your fiddle there.
15 'Ye 'll take a lith o my little finger bane,
And ye 'll make a pin to your fiddle then.'
16 He 's taen a lock o her yellow hair,
And made a string to his fiddle there.
17 He's taen a lith o her little finger bane,
And he's made a pin to his fiddle then.
18 The firstand spring the fiddle did play,
Said, 'Ye 'll drown my sister, as she's dune
me.'
P
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 245. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy
Appendix, p. xx, xx.
1 There were twa ladies in a bower,
Hey my bonnie Nannie O
The old was black and the young ane fair.
And the swan swims bonnie O
2 Once it happened on a day
The auld ane to the young did say,
3 The auld ane to the young did say,
'Will you gae to the green and play?'
4 'O sister, sister, I daurna gang,
For fear I file my silver shoon.'
5 It was not to the green they gaed,
But it was to the water of Tweed.
6 She bowed her back and she's taen her on,
And she's tumbled her in Tweed mill-dam.
7 'O sister, O sister, O tak my hand,
And I 'll mak you heir of a' my land.'
8 'O sister, O sister, I 'll no take your hand,
And I 'll be heir of a' your land.'
9 'O sister, O sister, O tak my thumb,
And I 'll give you my true-love John.'
10 'O sister, O sister, I 'll no tak your thumb,
And I will get your true-love John.'
11 Aye she swattered and aye she swam,
Until she came to the mouth of the dam.
12 The miller's daughter went out to Tweed,
To get some water to bake her bread.
13 In again she quickly ran:
'Here's a lady or a swan in our mill-dam.'
14 Out went the miller and his man
And took the lady out of the dam.
15 They laid her on the brae to dry;
Her father's fiddler then rode by.
16 When he this lady did come near,
Her ghost to him then did appear.
17 'When you go to my father the king,
You 'll tell him to burn my sister Jean.
18 'When you go to my father's gate,
You 'll play a spring for fair Ellen's sake.
19 'You 'll tak three links of my yellow hair,
And play a spring for evermair.'


136
10. THE TWA SISTERS
Q
Copied Oct. 26, 1861, by J. F. Campbell, Esq., from a col-
lection made by Lady Caroline Murray ; traced by her to an
old nurse, and beyond the beginning of this century.
1 Theke dwelt twa sisters in a bower,
•Oh and ohone, and ohone and aree!
And the youngest she was the fairest flower.
On the banks of the Banna, ohone and
aree!
2 There cam a knight to court the twa,
But on the youngest his love did fa.
3 He courted the eldest with ring and wi glove,
But he gave the youngest all his love.
4 He courted the eldest with brooch and wi
knife,
But he loved the youngest as his life.
5 'O sister, O sister, will ye come to the stream,
To see our father's ships come in?'
6 The youngest stood upon a stane,
Her sister came and pusht her in.
7 '0 sister, O sister, come reach me your hand,
And ye shall hae all our father's land.
8 'O sister, O sister, come reach me your glove,
And you shall hae William to be your true
love.'
9 'I did not put you in with the design
Just for to pull you out again.'
10 Some time she sank, some time she swam,
Until she came to a miller's dam.
11 The miller's daughter dwelt on the Tweed,
She went for water to bake her bread.
12 'O faither, faither, come drag me your dam,
For there's aither a lady in't, or a milk-white
swan.'
13 The miller went, and he dragd his dam,
And he brought her fair body to lan.
14 They couldna see her waist sae sma
For the goud and silk about it a'.
15 They couldna see her yallow hair
For the pearls and jewels that were there.
16 Then up and spak her ghaist sae green,
'Do ye no ken the king's dochter Jean?
17 'Tak my respects to my father the king,
And likewise to my mother the queen.
18 'Tak my respects to my true love William,
Tell him I deid for the love of him.
19 'Carry him a lock of my yallow hair,
To bind his heart for evermair.'
R
a. Notes and Queries, 1st S., vi, 102, from Lancashire,
b. Written down for J. F. Campbell, Esq., Nov. 7, 1861, at
Wishaw House, Lancashire, by Lady Louisa Primrose, o.
'The Scouring of the White Horse, ' p. 158, from Berk-
shire, as heard by Mr Hughes from his father.
1 There was a king of the north countree,
Bow down, bow down, bow down
There was a king of the north countree,
And he had daughters one, two, three.
I 'll be true to my love, and my love 'll be
true to me
2 To the eldest he gave a beaver hat,
And the youngest she thought much of that.
3 To the youngest he gave a gay gold chain,
And the eldest she thought much of the same.
4 These sisters were walking on the bryn,
And the elder pushed the younger in.
5 'Oh sister, oh sister, oh lend me your hand,
And I will give you both houses and land.'
6 'I 'll neither give you my hand nor glove,
Unless you give me your true love.'
7 Away she sank, away she swam,
Until she came to a miller's dam.
8 The miller and daughter stood at the door,
And watched her floating down the shore.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
137
9 'Oh father, oh father, I see a white swan,
Or else it is a fair woman.'
10 The miller he took up his long crook,
And the maiden up from the stream he took.
11 'I 'll give to thee this gay gold chain,
If you 'll take me back to my father again.'
12 The miller he took the gay gold chain,
And he pushed her into the water again.
13 The miller was hanged on his high gate
For drowning our poor sister Kate.
14 The cat's behind the buttery shelf,
If you want any more, you may sing it your-
self. e
S
Kinloch MSS, Ti, 89, in Kinloch's hand.
* * # # *
1 'O father, father, swims a swan,'
This story I 'll vent to thee
'O father, father, swims a swan,
Unless it be some dead woman.'
I 'll prove true to my true love,
If my love prove true to me
2 The miller he held out his long fish hook,
And hooked this fair maid from the brook.
3 She offered the miller a gold ring stane
To throw her into the river again.
4 Down she sunk, and away she swam,
Until she came to her father's brook.
5 The miller was hung at his mill-gate,
For drowning of my sister Kate.
T Cold blows the wind, and the wind blows
low
Allingham's Ballad Book, p. xxxiii. From Ireland. 'W(J shaR gQ ^ ^ ^ sea>s brim-.
'Sister, dear sister, where shall we go play?' And the wmd blows cheerily around us, high
ho
Communicated by Mr W. W. Newell, as repeated by an
ignorant woman in her dotage, who learned it at Hunting-
ton, Long Island, N. Y.
1 There was a man lived in the mist,
Bow down, bow down
He loved his youngest daughter best.
The bow is bent to me,
So you be true to your own true love,
And I 'll be true to thee.
2 These two sisters went out to swim;
The oldest pushed the youngest in.
3 First she sank and then she swam,
First she sank and then she swam.
4 The miller, with his rake and hook,
He caught her by the petticoat.
A. b. I1. went a-playing. 42. Till oat-meal and salt grow both on a
Burden2, a downe-o. tree.
o. I1. went a-playing. 61. ran hastily down the clift.
Burden 2. With a hey down, down, a down, 62. And up he took her without any life,
down-a. 132. Moll Symns.
18


10. THE TWA SISTERS
14l, 151. Then he bespake.
172. And let him go i the devil's name,
d. I1. went a-playing. l2. ships sailing in.
21. into.
3'. me up on.
6s. withouten life.
a. 26, 27, 28. An it has been written in as a
conjectural emendation by Jamieson, he did it
play, f playd; and it is adopted by Jamie-
he )
son in his printed copy: see below, d 26, 27,28.
b. The first stanza only, agreeing with a 1, is
given by Anderson, Nichols's Illustrations,
vn, 178.
o. Evidently a copy of Mrs Brown's version,
and in Scotfs MS. it has the air, as all the
Tytler-Brown ballads had. Still it has but
twenty-three stanzas, whereas Dr Anderson
gives fifty-eight lines as the extent of the Tyt-
ler-Brown copy of lThe Cruel Sister' (Nichols,
IUus. Lit. Hist., vn, 178). This, counting
the first stanza, with the burden, as four lines,
according to the arrangement in Scott's MS.,
would tally exactly with the Jamieson-Brown
MS., B a.
It would seem that B c had been altered by
somebody in order to remove the absurd com-
bination of sea and mill-dam; the invitation
to go see the ships come to land., B a 7, is
omitted, and " the deep mill-dam " substituted,
in 8, for "yon sea-stran." Stanza 17 of o,
"They raisd her," etc., cited below, occurs in
Pinkerton, N 20, and is more likely to be his
than anybody's.
21. brooch and ring. 2s. abune a' thing.
31. wooed . . . with glove and knife.
3*. looed the second.
52. she well nigh brist.
7. wanting.
82. led her to the deep mill-dam.
92. Her cruel sister pushd her in.
11s. And Ise mak ye.
12. wanting.
141. Shame fa the hand that I shall tak.
151. gowden hair. 16*. gar . . . maiden
ever mair.
16. wanting.
171. Then out and cam. 17s. swimming
down.
181. O father, haste and draw.
191. his dam. 192. And then. (?)
Instead of 20-22:
They raisd her wi meikle dule and care,
Pale was her cheek and green was her hair.
241. that corpse upon.
252. he's strung.
26\ 271, 281, for tune, line, if the copy be
right.
271. The next. 281. The last. 282. fause
Ellen.
"Note by Ritson. 'The fragment of a very
different copy of this ballad has been com-
municated to J. R. by a friend at Dub-
lin.'" {J. C. Walker, no doubt.]
d. Jamieson, Popular Ballads and Songs, i,
48, says that he gives his text verbatim as it
was taken from the recitation of the lady in
Fifeshire (Mrs Brown), to whom both he and
Scott were so much indebted. That this is
not to be understood with absolute strictness
will appear from the variations which are sub-
joined. Jamieson adds that he had received
another copy from MrsArrott of Aberbrothiek,
"but as it furnished no readings by which the
text could have been materially improved," it
was not used. Both Jamieson and Scott sub-
stitute the "Binnorie" burden, "the most com-
mon and popular," says Scott, for the one given
by Mrs Brown, with which Mrs Arrott's
agreed. It may be added that Jamieson's in-
terpolations are stanzas 20, 21, 27, etc., and
not, as he says (i, 49), 19, 20, 27, etc. These
interpolations also occur as such in the manu-
script.
I1. sisters livd.
22. aboon.
32. he loved.
42. and sair envied.
5l. Intill her bower she coudna.
52. maistly brast.
ll2. mak ye.
142. me o.
161. omits an.
162. came to the mouth o yon mill-dam.
182. There's.
20s. that was.
222. that were.
261. it did.
271. it playd seen.
281. thirden tune that it.
A copy in Motherwell's MS., p. 239, is de-
rived from Jamieson's printed edition. It
omits the interpolated stanzas, and makes a
few very slight changes.


10. THE TWA SISTERS
139
C. Scott's account of his edition is as follows (//,
143, later ed., in, 287):
"It is compiled from a copy in Mrs Brown's
MS., intermixed with a beautiful fragment,
of fourteen verses, transmitted to the editor
by J. C. Walker, Esq., the ingenious his-
torian of the Irish bards. Mr Walker, at
the same time, favored the editor with the
following note: 'I am indebted to my de-
parted friend, Miss Brooke, for the foregoing
pathetic fragment. Her account of it was as
follows: This song was transcribed, several
years ago, from the memory of an old woman,
who had no recollection of the concluding
verses; probably the beginning may also be
lost, as it seems to commence abruptly.' The
first verse and burden of the fragment run
thus:
"' O sister, sister, reach thy hand!
Hey ho, my Nanny, O
And you shall be heir of all my land.
While the swan swims bonny, O '"
Out of this stanza, or the corresponding
one in Mrs Brown's copy, Scott seems to
have made his 9, 10.
E. "My mother used to sing this song." Sharpe's
Ballad Book, ed. of 1880, note, p. 129.
F. 2s. An wooer.
G. 21. strand, with sand written above: sand in 31.
I. Is. var. in MS. There was a knicht and he
loved them bath.
7. The following stanza was subsequently writ-
ten on an opposite blank page, —perhaps de-
rived from D 8:
Foul fa the hand that I wad take,
To twin me and my warld's make.
102. a was, perhaps, meant to be expunged,
but is only a little blotted.
11s. var. a lady or a milk-white swan.
12, 13 were written in later than the rest; at
the same time, apparently, as the stanza
above (7).
K. Found among Mr Kinloch's papers by Mr
Macmath, and inserted by him as a note on
p. 59, vol. u, of Kinloch's MSS. The order
of the stanzas is there, wrongly, inverted.
l2. var. I wad give you.
L. a. These fragments were communicated to
Notes and Queries, April 3, 1852, by "G. A.
C.," who had heard 'The Miller's Melody'
sung by an old lady in his childhood, and who
represents himself as probably the last sur-
vivor of those who had enjoyed the privilege
of listening to her ballads. We may, there-
fore, assign this version to the latter part of
the 18<A century. The two four-line stanzas
were sung to "a slow, quaint strain." Two
others which followed were not remembered,
"but their purport was that the body ' stopped
hard by a miller's mill,' and that this 'mil-
ler chanced to come by,' and took it out of
the water 'to make a melodye.'" G. A. C.
goes on to say: "My venerable friend's tune
here became a more lively one, and the time
quicker; but I can only recollect a few of the
couplets, and these not correctly nor in order
of sequence, in which the transformation of
the lady into a viol is described."
b. Some stanzas of this four-line version, with
a ludicrous modern supplement, are given in
'The Scouring of the White Horse,' p. 161, as
from the Welsh marshes. Five out of the first
six verses are there said to be very old indeed,
"the rest all patchwork by different hands."
Mr Hughes has kindly informed me that he
derived the ballad from his father, who had
originally learned it, at Ruthyn when a boy.
What is material here follows:
1 O it was not a pheasant cock,
Nor yet a pheasant hen,
But O it was a lady fair
Came swimming down the stream.
2 An ancient harper passing by
Found this poor lady's body,
To which his pains he did apply
To make a sweet melddy.
3 To cat-gut dried he her inside,
He drew out her back-bone,
And made thereof a fiddle sweet
All for to play upon.
4 And all her hair, so long and fair,
That down her back did flow,
O he did lay it up with care,
To string his fiddle bow.
5 And what did he with her fingers,
Which were so straight and small?


140
10. THE TWA SISTERS
O he did cut them into pegs, down says she had heard another way of it, quite
To screw up his fiddoll. local, whose burden runs thus:
6 Then forth went he, as it might be,
Upon a summer's day,
And met a goodly company,
Who asked him in to play.
7 Then from her bones he drew such tones
As made their bones to ache,
They sounded so like human groans
Their hearts began to quake.
8 They ordered him in ale to swim, —
For sorrow's mighty dry, —
And he to share their wassail fare
Essayd right willingly.
9 He laid his fiddle on a shelf
In that old manor-hall,
It played and sung all by itself,
And thus sung this fiddoll:
10 'There sits the squire, my worthy sire,
A-drinking hisself drunk, ' etc., etc.
N. Pinkerton tells us, in the Preface to his An-
cient Scottish Poems, p. cxxxi, tlmt " Binnorie
is one half from tradition, one half by the ed-
itor." One fourth and three fourths would
have been a more exact apportionment. The
remainder of his text, which is wholly of his
invention, is as follows:
'Gae saddle to me my swiftest steid;
Her fere, by my fae, for her dethe sail bleid.'
A page cam rinning out owr the lie:
'O heavie tydings I bring,' quoth he.
'My luvely lady is far awa gane;
We weit the fairy hae her tane.
Her sister gaed wood wi dule and rage;
Nocht cold we do her mind to suage. •
"O Isabel, my sister," she wold cry,
"For thee will I weip, for thee will I die."
Till late yestrene, in an elric hour,
She lap frae aft the hichest louir.'
'Now sleip she in peace,' quoth the gallant squire;
'Her dethe was the maist that I cold require.
But I 'll main for the, my Isabel deir,
Full mony a dreiry day, bot weir.'
20. This stanza occurs also in B c (17), and
was perhaps borrowed from Pinkerton by
the reviser of that copy.
O. a. Buchan's note, rI, 320: "I have seen four
or five different versions of this ballad, but
none in this dress, nor with the same chorus. . . .
The old woman from whose recitation I took it
'Ever into Buchanshire, vari vari O.'"
l2. hae courted.
b. Mr Christie has "epitomized" Buchan's
copy {omitting stanzas 9-12), with these few
slight alterations from the singing of a Banff-
shire woman, who died in 1860, at the age of
nearly eighty:
Burden: It's hey, etc.
22. And he courted the eldest wi mony other
thing.
31. But it fell.
52. And the eldest.
P. b. This stanza only:
There livd twa sisters in a bower,
Hey my bonnie Annie O
There cam a lover them to woo.
And the swan swims bonnie O,
And the swan swims bonnie O
Q. The burden is given thus in Pop. Tales of the
West Highlands, rv, 125:
Oh ochone, ochone a rie,
On the banks of the Banna, ochone a rie.
R. a. The title ' The Three Sisters,' and perhaps
the first stanza, belongs rather to No 1 A, B,
p. 3 f.
b. 1. A farmer there lived in the north coun-
tree,
Bo down
And he had daughters one, two, three.
And I 'll be true unto my love, if he 'll
be true unto me
{The burden is given as Bo down, bo down,
etc., in Popular Tales of the West High-
lands, iv, 125.)
Between 1 and 2 b has:
The eldest she had a lover come,
And he fell in love with the younger one.
He bought the younger a . . .
The elder she thought . . .
3. wanting.
41. The sisters they walkt by the river brim.
62. my true love.


11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
141
8. The miller's daughter was at the door,
As sweet as any gillyflower.
9. O father, O father, there swims a swain,
And he looks like a gentleman.
10. The miller he feteht his line and hook,
And he fisht the fair maiden out of the
brook.
II1. O miller, I'll give you guineas ten,
12. The miller he took her guineas ten,
And then he popt her in again.
131.. . . behind his back gate,
2. the farmer's daughter Kate.
Instead of 14:
The sister she sailed over the sea,
And died an old maid of a hundred and three.
The lover became a beggar man,
And he drank out of a rusty tin can.
b 8, 11, 12, 14, 15 are cited in Popular Tales
of the West Highlands, iv, 127.
o. 1. A varmer he lived in the west countree,
Hey-down, bow-down
A varmer he lived in the west countree,
And he had daughters one, two, and dree.
And I 'll be true to my love,
If my love H be true to me.
2, 3. wanting.
41. As thay wur walking by the river's brim.
51. pray gee me thy hand.
71. So down she sank and away she swam.
8. The miller's daughter stood by the door,
As fair as any gilly-flower.
9. here swims a swan,
Very much like a drownded gentlewoman.
10. The miller he fot his pole and hook,
And he fished the fair maid out of the
brook.
II1. O miller, I 'll gee thee guineas ten.
122. pushed the fair maid in again.
Between 12 and 13 c has,
But the crowner he cum and the justice
too,
With a hue and a cry and a hullaballoo.
They hanged the miller beside his own
gate
For drowning the varmer's daughter, Kate.
Instead of 14:
The sister she fled beyond the seas,
And died an old maid among black savagees.
So I've ended my tale of the west coun-
tree,
And they calls it the Barkshire Tragedee.
S. V. MS. Or less (?).
T. "Sung to a peculiar and beautiful air." Al-
lingham, p. xxxiii.
11
THE CRUEL BROTHER
A. '[The] Cruel Brother, or the Bride's Testament.' T. 'The Three Knights,' Gilbert's Ancient Christmas
a. Alex. Fraser Tytler's Brown MS. b. Jamieson's Carols, 2d ed., p. 68.
Popular Ballads, i, 66.
B. The Kinloch MSS, i, 21.
C. 'Ther waur three ladies,' Harris MS., p. 11 b.
O. 'Fine Flowers of the Valley.' a. Herd's MSS, i,
41. b. Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, i, 88.
H. Fragment appended to O.
D. a. Notes and Queries, 1st S., vi, 53. b. 2d S.. v, I. The Kinloch MSS, I, 27.
171.
E. Notes and Queries, 4th S., v, 105.
J. As current in County Meath, Ireland, about 1860.
K. Notes and Queries, 4th S., iv, 517.


142
11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
A a was obtained directly from Mrs Brown
of Falkland, in 1800, by Alexander Fraser
Tytler. Jamieson says that he gives b ver-
batim from the recitation of Mrs Arrott; but
it would seem that this must have been a slip
of memory, for the two agree except in half a
dozen words. B, C, I, J are now for the first
time printed. G only was taken down earlier
than the present century.
Aytoun remarks (1858): "This is, per-
haps, the most popular of all the Scottish bal-
lads, being commonly recited and sung even at
the present da^." The copy which he gives,
I, 232, was "taken down fiom recitation,"
but is nevertheless a compound of G and A b,
with a few unimportant variations, proceed-
ing, no doubt, from imperfect recollection.*
The copy in Dixon's Ancient Poems, Ballads,
and Songs, p. 56, repeated in Bell's volume
of the same title, p. 50, is Gilbert's F. Dixon
informs us that the ballad was (in 1846) still
popular amongst the peasantry in the west of
England. Cunningham gives us a piece called
'The Three Ladies of Leithan Ha,' Songs of
Scotland, n, 87, which he would fain have us
believe that he did not know he had written
himself. "The common copies of this tragic
lyric," he truly says, "differ very much from
this; not so much in the story itself as in the
way it is told."
All versions but K, which has pretty nearly
lost all point, agree after the opening stanzas.
A-E have three ladies and only one knight;
F has three knights and one lady; G, I, J, K
have three ladies and three knights [lords in
G, "bonny boys" in I, the first line being
caught from ' Sir Hugh.'] Three knights are
to no purpose; only one knight has anything
to do. The reason for three ladies is, of
course, that the youngest may be preferred to
the others, — an intention somewhat obscured
in B. The ladies are in colors in B, C, I, J,
and this seems to be the better interpretation
in the case of G, though a strict construction
of the language would rather point to the
other. The colors are transferred to the
* Aytoun, l-8=Herd, 1776, 1-8: 9-13 = Jamieson, Il-
ls: 14,15 = Herd, 11,12: 16, 17 = Jamieson, 18, 19: 18,
19 = Herd, 13, 14: 20-24 = Jamieson, 21-25.
knights in F because there is only one lady.
In K this is a part of the general depravation
of the ballad.
'Rizzardo bello,' Wolf, Volkslieder aus Ve-
netien, No 83, seems to be the same story, with
a change of relations such as we often find
in ballad poetry. Rizzardo is conducting his
bride home, and on the way embraces and
kisses her. Her brother witnesses "questo
onore," and thrusts his sword into the happy
bridegroom's heart. Rizzardo tells his bride
to come on slowly; he will go before to make
preparation. He begs his mother to open the
doors, for his bride is without, and he is
wounded to death. They try to make the
bride eat. She says she can neither eat nor
drink: she must put her husband to bed. He
gives her a ring, saying, Your brother has
been the death of me; then another ring, in
sign that she is to be wife of two brothers.
She answers him as Guldborg answers Ribold,
that she would die rather: "Rather die be-
tween two knives than be wife of two broth-
ers." This ballad was obtained from a peas-
ant woman of Castagnero. Another version,
which unfortunately is not printed, was sung
by a woman at Ostiglia on the Po.
Dr Prior remarks that the offence given by
not asking a brother's assent to his sister's
marriage was in ballad-times regarded as un-
pardonable. Other cases which show the im-
portance of this preliminary, and the some-
times fatal consequences of omitting it, are:
'Hr. Peder og Mettelille,' Grundtvig, No 78,
n, 325, sts 4, 6 ; 'Jomfruen i Skoven,' Danske
Viser, m, 99, st. 15; 'Jomfru Ellensborg og
Hr. Olof,' ib., in, 316, st. 16; 'Iver Lang og
hans Saster,' ib., iv, 87, st. 116 ; ' Herr Helmer
Blaa,' ib., IV, 251, st. 8; 'Jomfru.Giselmaar,'
ib., rv, 309, st. 13. See Prior's Ancient Dan-
ish Ballads, nI, 112, 232 f, 416.
There is a very common German ballad,
'Graf Friedrich,' in which a bride receives a
mortal wound during the bringing-home, but
accidentally, and from the bridegroom's hand.
The marriage train is going up a hill; the way
is narrow ; they are crowded; Graf Friedrich's
sword shoots from its sheath and wounds the
bride. The bridegroom is exceedingly dis-


11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
143
tressed; he tries to stop the bleeding with his
shirt; «he begs that they may ride slowly.
When they reach the house there is a splendid
feast, and everything is set before the bride;
but she can neither eat nor drink, and only
wishes to lie down. She dies in the night.
Her father comes in the morning, and, learn-
ing what has happened, runs Graf Friedrich
through, then drags his body at a horse's heels,
and buries it in a bog. Three lilies sprang
from the spot, with an inscription announcing
that Graf Friedrich was in heaven, and a voice
came from the sky commanding that the body
should be disinterred. The bridegroom was
then buried with his bride, and this act of
reparation was attended with other miracu-
lous manifestations. As the ballads stand
now, the kinship of 'Graf Friedrich' with
'The Cruel Brother' is not close and cannot
be insisted on; still an early connection is not
improbable.
The versions of 'Graf Friedrich' are some-
what numerous, and there is a general agree-
ment as to all essentials. They are: A, a
Nuremberg broadside " of about 1535," which
has not been made accessible by a reprint.
B, a Swiss broadside of 1647, without place,
"printed in Seckendorf's Musenalmanach fiir
1808, p. 19 ;" Uhland, No 122, p. 277; Mit-
tler, No 108; Wunderhorn, n, 293 (1857);
Erk's Liederhort, No 15a, p. 42; Bohnie, No
79, p. 166: also, in Wunderhorn, 1808, n,
289, with omission of five stanzas and with
many changes; Simrock, No 11, p. 28, omit-
ting four stanzas and with changes; as writ-
ten down by Goethe for Herder, Diintzer u.
Herder, Briefe Goethes, u. s. w., Aus Herder's
Nachlass, I, 167, with the omission of eight
stanzas and with some variations. C, Wun-
derhorn (1857), n, 299, from the Schwarz-
wald, = Erlach, IV, 291, Mittler, No 113.
D, Taschenbuch fiir Dichter, u. fc. w., Theil
vm, 122, from Upper Lusatia, = Erlach, m,
448, Talvj, Charakteristik, p. 421. E, from
the Kuhlandchen, Meinert, p. 23, = Mittler,
No 109. F, Hoffmann u. Richter, Schlesische
V. L., No 19, p. 35, = Mittler, No 112, Erk's
Liederhort, No 15, p. 40. G, Zingerle, in
Wolf's Zeitschrift fur deutsche Mythologie,
I, 341, from Meran. H, from Uckermark,
Brandenburg, Mittler, No 114. I, Hesse, from
oral tradition, Mittler, No 111. J, Erk u.
Irmer, n, 54, No 54, from the neighborhood
of Halle, = Mittler, No 110. K, from Estedt,
district of Magdeburg, Parisius, p. 31, No 9.
A Danish ballad, 'Den saarede Jomfru,'
Grundtvig, No 244, iv, 474, has this slight
resemblance with 'Graf Friedrich:' While a
knight is dancing with a princess, his sword
glides from the scabbard and cuts her hand.
To save her partner from blame, she repre-
sents to her father that she had cut herself
with her brother's sword. This considerate-
ness so touches the knight (who is, of course,
her equal in rank) that he offers her his hand.
The Danish story is found also in Norwegian
and in Faroe ballads.
The peculiar testament made by the bride
in 'The Cruel Brother,' by which she be-
queaths good things to her friends, but ill
things to the author of her death, is highly
characteristic of ballad poetry. It will be
found again in ' Lord Ronald,' ' Edward,' and
their analogues. Still other ballads with this
kind of testament are: 'Frillens Haevn,'
Grundtvig, No 208 C, 16-18, rv, 207; a
young man, stabbed by his leman, whom he
was about to give up in order to marry, leaves
his lands to his father, his bride-bed to his
sister, his gilded couch to his mother, and his
knife to his leman, wishing it in her body.
'Maen paa Baalet,' Grundtvig, No 109 A, 18-
21, n, 587 ; Ole, falsely accused by her brother,
and condemned to be burned, gives her mother
her silken sark, her sister her shoes, her father
her horse, and her brother her knife, with the
same wish. 'Kong Valdemar og hans Sas-
ter,' Grundtvig, No 126, nI, 97, has a testa-
ment in A-E and I; in I, 14-19 (nI, 912),
Liden Kirsten bequeaths her knife, with the
same imprecation, to the queen, who, in the
other copies, is her unrelenting foe: so Lil-
lelin to Herr Adelbrand, Danske Viser, m,
386, No 162, 16-18, Kristensen, I, 262, No
100, A 20-23, having been dragged at a horse's
heels in resentment of a taunt. 'Hustru og
Mands Moder,' Grundtvig, No. 84, n, 404, has
a testament in A, B, D, H, and in the last


144
H. THE CRUEL BROTHER
three a bequest of shoes or sark to a cruel
mother-in-law or foster-mother, with the wish
that she may have no peace or much pain
in the wearing. 'Catarina de Li6,' Briz y
Candi, Cansons de la Terra, I, 209, has been
beaten by her mother-in-law while in a deli-
cate state. When she is at the point of death,
the mother-in-law asks what doctor she will
have and what will she will make. "My
will," says Catherine, "will not please you
much. Send back my velvet dress to my fa-
ther's; my gala dress give my sister; give my
working dress to the maid, my jewels to the
Virgin." "And what will you leave to me?"
"What I leave you will not please you much:
my husband to be hanged, my mother-in-law
to be quartered, and my sister-in-law to be
burned." 'Le Testament de Marion,' another
version of this story from the south of France,
Uchaud, Gard, Podsies pop. de la France, MS.,
rv, fol. 283, bequeaths " my laces to my sister
Marioun, my prettiest gowns to my sister
Jeanneton; to my rascal of a husband three
fine cords, and, if that is not enough (to hang
him), the hem of his shirt." The Portuguese
ballad of 'Dona Helena ' rather implies than
expresses the imprecation: Braga, C. P. do
Archipelago Ac,oriano, p. 225, No 15, p. 227,
No 16 ; Almeida-Garrett, m, 56; Hartung, I,
233-43, No 18. Helena leaves her husband's
house when near childbirth, out of fear of his
mother. Her husband, who does not know her
reason, goes after her, and compels her to re-
turn on horseback, though she has just borne a
son. The consequences are what might be ex-
pected, and Helena desires to make her shrift
and her will. She leaves one thing to her oldest
sister, another to her youngest. "And your
boy?" "To your bitch of a mother, cause
of my woes." "Rather to yours," says the
husband, " for I shall have to kill mine" (so
Braga ; Garrett differs somewhat). 'Die Frau
zur Weissenburg' (A), Uhland, p. 287, No
123 B, Scherer's Jungbrunnen, p. 94, No 29;
'Das Lied von der Lowenburg' (B), Simrock,
p. 65, No 27; 'Hans Steutlinger' (C), Wun-
derhorn, n, 168 (1857), all one story, have a
bitterly sarcastic testament. A lady insti-
gates her paramour to kill her husband. The
betrayed man is asked to whom he will leave
his children [commit, A, bequeath, B, C].
"To God Almighty, for he knows who they
are." "Your property?" "To the poor, for
the rich have enough." "Your wife?" "To
young Count Frederic, whom she always liked
more than me (A)." "Your castle?" "To
the flames."
In some cases there is no trace of animosity
towards the person who has caused the tes-
tator's death ; as in ' El testamento de Amelia'
(who has been poisoned by her mother), Mila,
Observaciones, p. 103, No 5, Briz y Salt6, Can-
sons de la Terra, n, 197 (two copies); 'Her-
ren Bald,' Afzelius, i, 76, No 16 (new ed. I, 59,
No 15); a Swedish form of 'Frillens Haevn,'
Grundtvig, iV, 203; ' Renee le Glaz ' and ' Er-
voanik Le Lintier,' Luzel, C. P. de la Basse
Bretagne, I, 405, 539, 553. There are also
simple testaments where there is no occasion
for an ill remembrance, as in 'Ribold og
Guldborg,' Grundtvig, No 82, I, K, L, U, X,
tt, Kristensen, n, No 84 B; 'Pontplancoat,'
Luzel, I, 383, 391. And, again, there are par-
odies of these wills. Thus the fox makes his
will: Grundtvig, Gamle danske Minder, 1854,
'Mikkels Arvegods,' p. 24, and p. 25 a copy
from a manuscript three hundred years old;
Kristensen, Jyske Folkeviser, n, 324, No 90;
'Reven og Bjonnen,' ' Reven og Nils fiskar,'
Landstad, Nos 85, 86, p. 637,639: and the rob-
in, ' Robin's Tesment,' Buchan, I, 273, Herd's
MSS, I, 154, and Scottish Songs (1776), n,
166, Chambers' Popular Rhymes, p. 38,
"new edition."
Translated in Grundtvig's Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, No 33, p. 212, F, with
use of A and G b; Aytoun's copy, with omis-
sions, by Rosa Warrens, Schottische Volks-
lieder der Vorzeit, No 17, p. 80; after Al-
lingham and others, by Knortz, Lieder und
Romanzen Alt-Englands, No 5, p. 16.


11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
145
A
a. Alex. Fraser Tytler's Brown MS. b. Jamieson's
Popular Ballads, i, 66, purporting to be from the recitation
of Mrs Arret of Aberbrothick.
1 There was three ladies playd at the ba,
With a hey ho and a lillie gay
There came a knight and played oer them a'.
As the primrose spreads so sweetly
2 The eldest was baith tall and fair.
But the youngest was beyond compare.
3 The midmost had a graceful mien,
But the youngest lookd like beautie's queen.
4 The knight bowd low to a' the three,
But to the youngest he bent his knee.
5 The ladie turned her head aside,
The knight he woo'd her to be his bride.
6 The ladie blushd a rosy red,
And sayd, 'Sir knight, I'm too young to
wed.'
7 'O ladie fair, give me your hand,
And I 'll make you ladie of a' my land.'
8 'Sir knight, ere ye my favor win,
You maun get consent frae a' my kin.'
9 He's got consent frae her parents dear,
And likewise frae her sisters fair.
10 He's got consent frae her kin each one,
But forgot to spiek to her brother John.
11 Now, when the wedding day was come,
The knight would take his bonny bride home.
12 And many a lord and many a knight
Came to behold that ladie bright.
13 And there was nae man that did her see,
But wishd himself bridegroom to be.
19 •
14 Her father dear led her down the stair,
And her sisters twain they kissd her there.
15 Her mother dear led her thro the closs,
And her brother John set her on her horse.
16 She leand her oer the saddle-bow,
To give him a kiss ere she did go.
17 He has taen a knife, baith lang and sharp,
And stabbd that bonny bride to the heart.
18 She hadno ridden half thro the town,
Until her heart's blude staind her gown.
19 'Ride softly on,' says the best young man,
'For I think our bonny bride looks pale and
wan.'
20 'O lead me gently up yon hill,
And I '11 there sit down, and make my will.'
21 'O what will you leave to your father dear?'
'The silver-shod steed that brought me here.'
22 'What will you leave to your mother dear?'
'My velvet pall and my silken gear.'
23 'What will you leave to your sister Anne?'
'My silken scarf and my gowden fan.'
24 'What will you leave to your sister Grace?'
'My bloody cloaths to wash and dress.'
25 'What will you leave to your brother John?'
'The gallows-tree to hang him on.'
26 'What will you leave to your brother John's
wife?'
'The wilderness to end her life.'
27 This ladie fair in her grave was laid,
And many a mass was oer her said.
28 But it would have made your heart right sair,
To see the bridegroom rive his haire.


146
H. THE CRUEL BROTHER
B
Kinloch's MSS, i, 21, from Mary Barr, May, 1827, Clydes-
dale.
1 A gentleman cam oure the sea,
Fine flowers in the valley
And he has courted ladies three.
With the light green and the yellow
2 One o them was clad in red:
He asked if she wad be his bride.
3 One o them was clad in green:
He asked if she wad be his queen.
4 The last o them was clad in white:
He asked if she wad be his heart's delight.
5 'Ye may ga ask my father, the king:
Sae maun ye ask my mither, the queen.
6 'Sae maun ye ask my sister Anne:
And dinna forget my brither John.'
7 He has asked her father, the king:
And sae did he her mither, the queen.
8 And he has asked her sister Anne:
But he has forgot her brother John.
9 Her father led her through the ha,
Her mither danced afore them a'.
10 Her sister Anne led her through the closs,
Her brither John set her on her horse.
11 It's then he drew a little penknife,
And he reft the fair maid o her life.
12 'Ride up, ride up,' said the foremost man;
'I think our bride comes hooly on.'
13 'Ride up, ride up,' said the second man;
'I think our bride looks pale and wan.'
14 Up than cam the gay bridegroom,
And straucht unto the bride he cam.
15 'Does your side-saddle sit awry?
Or does your steed . . .
16 'Or does the rain run in your glove?
Or wad ye chuse anither love?'
17 'The rain runs not in my glove,
Nor will I e'er chuse anither love.
18 'But O an I war at Saint Evron's well,
There I wad licht, and drink my fill!
19 'Oh an I war at Saint Evron's closs,
There I wad licht, and bait my horse!'
20 Whan she cam to Saint Evron's well,
She dought na licht to drink her fill.
21 Whan she cam to Saint Evron's closs,
The bonny bride fell aff her horse.
22 'What will ye leave to your father, the king?
'The milk-white steed that I ride on.'
23 'What will ye leave to your mother, th
queen?'
'The bluidy robes that I have on.'
24 'What will ye leave to your sister Anne?'
'My gude lord, to be wedded on.'
25 'What will ye leave to your brither John?'
'The gallows pin to hang him on.'
26 'What will ye leave to your brither's wife?'
'Grief and sorrow a' the days o her life.'
27 'What will ye leave to your brither's bairns?
'The meal-pock to hang oure the arms.'
28 Now does she neither sigh nor groan:
She lies aneath yon marble stone.


11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
147
0
Harris MS., p. 11 b, No 7.
1 There waur three ladies in a ha,
Hech hey an the lily gey
By cam a knicht, an he wooed them a'.
An the rose is aye the redder aye
2 The first ane she was cled in green;
'Will you fancy me, an be my queen?'
3 'You may seek me frae my father dear,
An frae my mither, wha did me bear.
4 'You may seek me frae my sister Anne,
But no, no, no frae my brither John.'
5 The niest ane she was cled in yellow;
'Will you fancy me, an be my marrow?'
6 'Ye may seek me frae my father dear,
An frae my mither, wha did me bear.
7 'Ye may seek me frae my sister Anne,
But no, no, no frae my brither John.'
8 The niest ane she was cled in red:
'Will ye fancy me, an be my bride?'
9 'Ye may seek me frae my father dear,
An frae my mither wha did me bear.
10 'Ye may seek me frae my sister Anne,
An dinna forget my brither John.'
11 He socht her frae her father, the king,
An he socht her frae her mither, the queen.
12 He socht her frae her sister Anne,
But he forgot her brither John.
13 Her mither she put on her goun,
An her sister Anne preened the ribbons doun.
14 Her father led her doon the close,
An her brither John set her on her horse.
*****
15 Up an spak our foremost man:
'I think our bonnie bride's pale an wan.'
*****
16 'What will ye leave to your father dear?'
'My an my chair.'
17 'What will ye leave to your mither dear?'
'My silken screen I was wont to wear.'
18 'What will ye leave to your sister Anne?'
'My silken snood an my golden fan.'
19 'What will you leave to your brither John?'
'The gallows tree to hang him on.'
Notes and Queries, 1st S., vi, 53, 2d S., v, 171. As sung
by a lady who was a native of County Kerry, Ireland.
1 There were three ladies playing at ball,
Farin-dan-dan and farm-dan-dee
There came a white knight, and he wooed them
all.
With adieu, sweet honey, wherever you be
2 He courted the eldest with golden rings,
And the others with many fine things.
And adieu, etc.
,pi
. There cam a knicht an lookt ower the wa\
Notes and Queries, 4th S, v, 105. From Forfarshire, W. F. *he Primr0se sPrings sae sweetly.
Sing Annet, an Marret, an fair Maisrie,
There were three sisters playin at the ba, An the dew hangs i the wood, gay ladie.
Wi a hech hey an a lillie gay


148
11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
P
Gilbert's Ancient Christmas Carols, 2d ed., p. 68, as re-
membered by the editor. West of England.
1 There did three knights come from the west,
With the high and the lily oh
And these three knights courted one lady.
As the rose was so sweetly blown
2 The first knight came was all in white,
And asked of her, if she'd be his delight.
3 The next knight came was all in green,
And asked of her, if she 'd be his queen.
4 The third knight came was all in red,
And asked of her, if she would wed.
5 'Then have you asked of my father dear,
Likewise of her who did me bear?
6 'And have you asked of my brother John?
And also of my sister Anne?'
7 'Yes, I have asked of your father dear.
Likewise of her who did you bear.
8 'And I have asked of your sister Anne,
But I've not asked of your brother John.'
9 Far on the road as they rode along,
There did they meet with her brother John.
10 She stooped low to kiss him sweet,
He to her heart did a dagger meet.
11 'Ride on, ride on,' cried the serving man,
'Methinks your bride she looks wondrous
wan.'
12 'I wish I were on yonder stile,
For there I would sit and bleed awhile.
13 'I wish I were on yonder hill,
There I'd alight and make my will.'
14 'What would you give to your father dear?'
'The gallant steed which doth me bear.'
15 'What would you give to your mother dear?'
'My wedding shif t which I do wear.
16 'But she must wash it very clean,
For my heart's blood sticks in evry seam.'
17 'What would you give to your sister Anne?'
'My gay gold ring and my feathered fan.'
18 'What would you give to your brother John?'
'A rope and gallows to hang him on.'
19 'What would you give to your brother John's
wif e?'
'A widow's weeds, and a quiet life.'
G
a. Herd's MSS, i, 41. b. Herd's Scottish Songs,
i, 88.
1 There was three ladys in a ha,
Fine flowers i the valley
There came three lords amang them a',
Wi the red, green, and the yellow
2 The first of them was clad in red:
'O lady fair, will you be my bride?'
3 The second of them was clad in green:
'O lady fair, will you be my queen?'
4 The third of them was clad in yellow:
'O lady fair, will you be my marrow?'
5 'You must ask my father dear,
Likewise the mother that did me bear.'
6 'You must ask my sister Ann,
And not forget my brother John."
7 'I have askt thy father dear,
Likewise thy mother that did thee bear.
8 'I have askt thy sister Ann,
But I forgot thy brother John.'
9 Her father led her through the ha.
Her mother dancd before them a".
10 Her sister Ann led her through the closs,
Her brother John put her on her horse.


11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
149
11 'You are high and I am low;
Let me have a kiss before you go.'
12 She was louting down to kiss him sweet,
Wi his penknife he wounded her deep.
# * * ♦ *
13 'O lead me over into yon stile,
That I may stop and breath a while.
14 'O lead me over to yon stair,
For there I 'll ly and bleed ne mair.'
15 'O what will you leave your father dear?'
'That milk-white steed that brought me here.'
16 'O what will you leave your mother dear?'
'The silken gown that I did wear.'
17 'What will you leave your sister Ann?'
'My silken snood and golden fan.'
18 'What will you leave your brother John?'
'The highest gallows to hang him on.'
19 'What will you leave your brother John's
wife?'
'Grief and sorrow to end her life.'
20 'What will ye leave your brother John's
bairns?'
'The world wide for them to range.'
H He stuck his penknife in her hass.
. . „ And the rose it smells so sweetly
Herd's MSS, i, 44, n, 75; Scottish Songs, 1776, i, 90; J
appended to G.
'Ride up, ride up,' cry'd the foremost man;
She louted down to gie a kiss, 'I think our bride looks pale and wan.'
With a hey and a lilly gay
I
Kinloch's MSS, i, 27. From Mrs Bouchart, an old lady
native of Forfarshire.
1 There war three bonnie boys playing at the
ba,
Hech hey and a lily gay
There cam three ladies to view them a'.
And the rose it smells sae sweetlie
2 The first ane was clad in red:
'O,' says he, 'ye maun be my bride.'
3 The next o them was clad in green:
'O,' says he, 'ye maun be my queen.'
4 The tither o them was clad in yellow:
'O,' says he, 'ye maun be my marrow.'
5 'Ye maun gang to my father's bouer,
To see gin your bride he 'll let me be.'
6 Her father led her doun the stair,
Her mither at her back did bear.
7 Her sister Jess led her out the closs,
Her brother John set her on the horse.
8 She loutit doun to gie him a kiss;
He struck his penknife thro her breist.
9 'Ride on, ride on,' says the foremaist man;
'I think our bride looks pale and wan.'
10 'Ride on, ride on,' says the merry bride-
groom;
'I think my bride's blude is rinnin doun.'
11 'O gin I war at yon bonnie hill,
I wad lie doun and bleed my fill!
12 'O gin I war at yon bonnie kirk-yard,
I wad mak my testament there!'
13 'What will ye leave to your father dear?'
'The milk-white steed that brocht me here.'
14 'What will ye leave to your mother dear?'
'The bluidy robes that I do wear.'
15 'What will ye leave to your sister Ann?'
'My silken snood and gowden fan.'
16 'What will ye leave to your sister Jess?'
'The bonnie lad that I loe best.'


150
11. THE CRUEL BROTHER
17 'What will ye leave to your brother John?' 19 'What will ye leave to your brother's bairns?'
'The gallows pin to hang him on.' 'The warld's wide, and let them beg.'
18 'What will ye leave to your brother John's
wife?'
'Sorrow and trouble a' her life.'
J
From Miss Margaret Reburn, as current in County Meath,
Ireland, about 1860.
1 There were three sisters playing ball,
With the high and the lily O
And there came three knights to court them
all.
With the rosey sweet, heigh ho
2 The eldest of them was drest in green:
'I wish I had you to be my queen.'
3 The second of them was drest in red:
'I wish I had you to grace my bed.'
4 The youngest of them was drest in white:
'I wish I had you to be my wife.'
5
6 'Or did ye ask my brother John?
For without his will I dare not move on.'
7 'I did ask your parents dear.
But I did not see your brother John.'
*****
8 'Ride on, ride on,' said the first man,
'For I fear the bride comes slowly on.'
9 'Ride on, ride on,' said the next man,
'For lo! the bride she comes bleeding on.'
*****
10 'What will you leave your mother dear?'
'My heart's best love for ever and aye.'
11 'What will ye leave your sister Anne?'
'This wedding garment that I have on.'
12 'What will ye leave your brother John's
wife?'
'Grief and sorrow all the days of her life.'
14 'What will ye leave your brother John's son?'
'The grace of God to make him a man.'
'Did ye ask my father brave? 13 'What will ye leave your brother John?'
Or did ye ask my mother fair ?' The highest gallows to hang him on.'
K
Notes and Queries, 4th S., iv, 517, as "sung in Cheshire
amongst the people" in the last century. T. W.
1 There were three ladies playing at ball,
Gilliver, Gentle, and Rosemary
There came three knights and looked over the
wall.
Sing O the red rose and the white lilly
2 The first young knight, he was clothed in red,
And he said, ' Gentle lady, with me will you
wed?'
3 The second young knight, he was clothed in
blue,
And he said, 'To my love I shall ever be
true.'
4 The third young knight, he was clothed in
green,
And he said, ' Fairest maiden, will you be my
queen?'
5 The lady thus spoke to the knight in red,
'With you, sir knight, I never can wed.'
6 The lady then spoke to the knight in blue,
And she said, 'Little faith I can have in you.'
7 The lady then spoke to the knight in green,
And she said, ' 'T is at court you must seek for
a queen.'
8 The three young knights then rode away,
And the ladies they laughed, and went back to
their play.
Singing, etc.


12. LORD RANDAL
151
A. b. 62. oer young.
10*. spear at.
172. the bonny.
191. said.
231. And what will ye.
251. This fair lady. 2. And a mass.
Variations of Aytoun's copy, sts. 9-13, 16, 17,
20-24: ll1 omits And; 12\ 13l omit dear;
13s omits And; 161, through half for half
thro ; 172 omits For, bonny ; 212, pearlin for
silken; 221 omits And; 222, My silken
gown that stands its lane; 232, shirt for
cloaths; 241, And what; 242, The gates o
hell to let him in.
B. "I have seen a fragment of another copy in
which [the burden is]
The red rose and the lily
And the roses spring fu sweetly." Kinloch,
p. 19.
F. 91. For on the road.
G. a. 1. Burden*. The red, green, etc.: after-
wards, Wi the red, etc.
22. MS. also, He askt of me if I'd be his
bride.
32. MS. also, He askt of me if I'd be his
queen.
42. MS. also, He askt me if I'd be his mar-
row.
152. MS. also, The gold and silver that I have
here.
162. MS. also, The silken garment.
172. MS. also, My satine hat
202, MS. also, The world wide, let them go
beg.
b. 7'. the mother,
b. 141. into yon stair.
Variations of Aytoun's copy, sts. 1-8, 14, 15,
18, 19 from Herd, 1776: l1, three sisters;
22, 32, 42 omit fair; 51, 0 ye maun ; 61, And
ye ; 71, O I have ; 8l, And I have ask'd your
sister; 82, your brother; 142, Give me a
kiss; 152, When wi his knife.
H. "I have heard this song, to a very good tune
not in any collection, with the above varia-
tions — the chorus, of the whole as in the
above two verses." Herd's note in his MSS.
12
LORD RANDAL
A. From a manuscript copy, probably of the beginning
of this century.
B. 'Lord Donald,' Einloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads,
p. 110.
C. Motherwell's MS., p. 69.
D. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1803, m, 292.
E. Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales, p.
261.
P. 'Lord Ronald, my Son,' Johnson's Museum, No
327, p. 337.
G. Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 319.
H. From recitation, 1881.
L 'Tiranti, my Son.' a. Communicated by a lady of
Boston, b. By an aunt of the same. c. By a lady
of New Bedford, d. By a lady of Cambridge, e, f, g.
By ladies of Boston.
J. 'The Bonnie Wee Croodlin Dow,' Motherwell's
MS., p. 238.
K. a. 'The Croodlin Doo,' Chambers, Scottish Bal-
lads, p. 324. b. 'The Wee Croodlen Doo,' Cham-
bers, Popular Rhymes, 1842, p. 53. o. Johnson's
Museum, by Stenhouse and Laing, iv, 364*.
L. 'Willie Doo,' Buchan's MSS, ii, 322, and Ballads,
ii, 179.
M. 'The Croodin Doo,' Chambers, Popular Rhymes,
1870, p. 51.
N. Kinloch MSS, v, 347.
O. 'The Croodlin Doo.' From a manuscript belong-
ing to the Fraser-Tytler family.


152
12. LORD RANDAL
The title ' Lord Randal' is selected for this
ballad because that name occurs in one of the
better versions, and because it has become fa-
miliar through Scott's Minstrelsy. Scott says
that the hero was more generally termed Lord
Ronald: but in the versions that have come
down to us this is not so. None of these can
be traced back further than a century. F
and D were the earliest published. Jamieson
remarks with respect to G (1814): "An
English gentleman, who had never paid any
attention to ballads, nor ever read a collection
of such things, told me that when a child he
learnt from a playmate of his own age, the
daughter of a clergyman in Suffolk, the fol-
lowing imperfect ditty." I, a version current
in eastern Massachusetts, may be carried as
far back as any. a, b derive from Elizabeth
Foster, whose parents, both natives of eastern
Massachusetts, settled, after their marriage, in
Maine, where she was born in 1789. Eliza-
beth Foster's mother is remembered to have
sung the ballad, and I am informed that the
daughter must have learned it not long after
1789, since she was removed in her childhood
from Maine to Massachusetts, and continued
there till her death. 'Tiranti' [' Taranti']
may not improbably be a corruption of Lord
Randal.
The copy in Smith's Scottish Minstrel, nI,
58, is Scott's altered. The first four stanzas
are from the Border Minstrelsy, except the
last line of the fourth, which is from Johnson's
Museum. The last two stanzas are a poor
modern invention.
Three stanzas which are found in A. Cun-
ningham's Scottish Songs, I, 286 f, may be
given for what they are worth. 'The house
of Marr,' in the first, is not to be accepted on
the simple ground of its appearance in his
pages. The second is inserted in his beauti-
fied edition of Scott's ballad, and has its bur-
den accordingly; but there is, besides this, no
internal evidence against the second, and none
against the third.
* Opera nnova, nella quale si contiene una incatenatura
di piii villanelle cd altre cose ridiculose. . . . Data in luce
per me Camillo, detto il Bianchino, cieco Fiorentino. Flie-
'O where have you been, Lord Ronald, my son?
0 where have you been, my handsome young man?'
'At the house of Marr, mother, so make my bed
soon,
For I'm wearied with hunting, and fain would lie
down.'
'O where did she find them, Lord Randal, my son?
O where did she catch them, my handsome young
man?'
'Neath the bush of brown bracken, so make my
bed soon,
For I'm wae and I'm weary, and fain would lie
down.'
'O what got your bloodhounds, Lord Ronald, my
son?
O what got your bloodhounds, my handsome young
man?'
'They lapt the broo, mother, so make my bed soon,
1 am wearied with hunting, and fain would lie
down.'
A pot-pourri or quodlibet, reprinted in
Wolff's Egeria, p. 53, from a Veronese broad-
side of the date 1629, shows that this ballad
was popular in Italy more than 250 years
ago; for the last but one of the fragments
which make up the medley happens to be the
first three lines of ' L'Avvelenato,' very nearly
as they are sung at the present day, and these
are introduced by a summary of the story:
"Io vo' finire con questa d'un amante
Tradito dalV amata.
Oh che Ye si garbata
A cantarla in isehiera:
'Dov' aiidastu iersfra,
Figliuol mio ricco, savio e gentile?
Dov' andastu iersera ' ?" *
The ballad was first recovered in 1865, by
Dr G. B. Bolza, who took it down from the
singing of very young girls at Loveno. Since
then good copies have been found at Venice.
A, 'L'Avvelenato,' Bolza, Canzoni popolari
comasche, No 49, Sitzungsberichte of the
Vienna Academy (philos. histor. class), Lin,
gendes Blatt von Verona, 1629. Egeria, p. 53; p. 260, note
31. — With the ahove (Egeria, p. 59) compare especially the
beginning of Italian B, further on.



[To 'Lord Randal,' p. 152f.]
I have unaccountably failed to mention
(though I had made note of them) three ver-
sions of 'L'Avvelenato' which are cited by
Professor D'Ancona in his Poesia popolare
italiana, p. 106 ff.
D. The Canon Lorenzo Panciatichi refers
to the ballad in a 'Cicalata in lode della Pa-
della e della Frittura,' recited at the Crusca,
September 24, 1656, and in such manner as
shows that it was well known. He quotes
the first question of the mother, 'Dove an-
dastu a cena,' etc. To this the son answered,
he says, that he had been poisoned with a
roast eel; and the mother asking what the
lady had cooked it in, the reply was, In the
oil pot.
E. A version obtained by D'Ancona from
the singing of a young fellow from near Pisa,
of which the first four stanzas are given.
Some verses after these are lost, for the testa-
ment is said to supervene immediately.
F. A version from Lecco, which has the
title, derived from its burden,' De lu cavalieri
e figliu de re,' A. Trifone Nutricati Briganti,
Intorno ai Canti e Raceonti popolari del Lec-
cese, p. 17. The first four stanzas are cited,
and it appears from these that the prince had
cooked the eel himself, and, appropriately, in
a gold pan.
[To 'The Cruel Brother,' p. 142.]
I will take the opportunity to remark that
Nigra has just republished in Romania XI,
391, 'Luggieri,' a version, from Arezzo, of
'Rizzardo bello,' previously printed by Giulio
Salvatori in the Rassegna Settimanale, No.
77, Rome, June 22,1879. Nigra treats 'Lug-
gieri' as a variety of 'Jean Renaud.' To me
it seems an independent ballad.





12. LORD RANDAL
153
668, is of seventeen stanzas, of seven short
lines, all of which repeat but two: the 8th
and 10th stanzas are imperfect.* A mother
inquires of her son where he has been. He
has been at his mistress's, where he has eaten
part of an eel; the rest was given to a dog,
that died in the street. The mother declares
that he has been poisoned. He bids her send
for the doctor to see him, for the curate to
shrive him, for the notary to make his will.
He leaves his mother his palace, his brothers
his carriage and horses, his sisters a dowry,
his servants a free passage to mass (" la strada
d'anda a messa" = nothing), a hundred and
fifty masses for his soul; for his mistress the
gallows to hang her. B, C, 'L'Avvelenato,'
Bernoni, Nuovi Canti popolari veneziani, 1874,
No 1, p. 5, p. 3, have twelve and eighteen
four-line stanzas, the questions and answers
in successive stanzas, and the last three lines
of the first pair repeated respectively through-
out.f B, which is given as a variant of C,
agrees with A as to the agent in the young
man's death. It is his mistress in B, but in
C it is his mother. In both, as in A, he has
eaten of an eel. The head he gave to the
dogs, the tail to the cats (C). He leaves to
his stewards (castaldi) his carriages and horses
(C); to his herdsmen his cows and fields; to
the maids his chamber furnishings; to his
sister the bare privilege of going to mass (C,
as in A); to his mother [wife, C] the keys
of his treasure. "La forca per picarla " is in
B as in A the bequest to his false love, in-
stead of whom we have his mother in C.
The corresponding German ballad has been
known to the English for two generations
through Jamieson's translation. The several
versions, all from oral tradition of this century,
* It begins:
"Dove si sta jersira,
Figliuol mio caro,Jiorito e gentU t
Dove si sta jersira t"
"Sun sta dalla mia dama;
Signora Mama, mio core sta mat!
Son sta dalla mia dama;
Ohime ! ch'io moro, ohime!"
t E. g. (B):
1 "E dove xestu sta gieri sera,
Figlio mio rico, sapio e gcntil?
show the same resemblances and differences
as the English.
A, B, 'Schlangenkbchin,' eight stanzas of
six lines, four of which are burden, A, Lieder-
hort, p. 6, No 2», from the neighborhood of
Wilsnack, Brandenburg, B, Peter, I, 187, No
6, from Weidenau, Austrian Silesia, run thus:
Henry tells his mother that he has been at
his sweetheart's (but not a-hunting); has had
a speckled fish to eat, part of which was given
to the dog [cat, B], which burst. Henry
wishes his father and mother all blessings, and
hell-pains to his love, A 6-8. His mother, B 8,
asks where she shall make his bed: he replies,
In the church-yard. C,'Grossmutter Schlang-
enkochin,' first published in 1802, in Maria's
(Clemens Brentano's) romance Godwi, n, 113,
afterward in the Wunderhorn, i,19 (ed. 1819,
I, 20, ed. 1857), has fourteen two-line stanzas,
or seven of four lines, one half burden. The
copy in Zuccalmaglio, p. 217, No 104, "from
Hesse and North Germany," is the same thing
with another line of burden intercalated and
two or three slight changes. Maria has been
at her grandmother's, who gave her a fish to
eat which she had caught in her kitchen gar-
den; the dog ate the leavings, and his belly
burst. The conclusion agrees with B, neither
having the testament. D,' Stiefmutter,' seven
stanzas of four short lines, two being burden,
Uhland, No 120, p. 272; excepting one slight
variation, the same as Liederhort, p. 5, No 2,
from the vicinity of Biickeburg, Lippe-Schaum-
burg. A child has been at her mother's sis-
ter's house, where she has had a well-peppered
broth and a glass of red wine. The dogs
[and cats] had some broth too, and died on
the spot. The child wishes its father a seat
in heaven, for its mother one in hell. B,
E dove xestu sta gieri sera,
Gentil mio cavalier?"
2 "E mi so' stato da la mia bela;
Signora madre, el mio cuor sta mal!
E mi so' stato da la mia bela;
Oh Dio, cbe moro, ohime!"
3 "E cossa t'ala dato da cena,
Figlio mio? " etc.
4 "E la m'a dato 'n'anguila rostita;
Signora madre," etc.
20


154
12. LOBD RANDAL
* Kind, wo bist du denn henne west?' Reiffen-
berg, p. 8, No 4, from Bokendorf, Westphalia,
four stanzas of six lines, combining question
and answer, two of the six burden. A child
has been at its step-aunt's, and has had a bit
of a fish caught in the nettles along the wall.
The child gives all its goods to its brother,
its clothes to its sister, but three devils to
its [step-]mother. F, 'Das vergiftete kind,'
seven four-line stanzas, two burden, Schuster,
Siebenburgisch-sachsische V. L., p. 62, No
58, from Miihlbach. A child tells its father
that its heart is bursting; it has eaten of a
fish, given it by its mother, which the father
declares to be an adder. The child wishes
its father a seat in heaven, its mother one in
hell.
A, B are nearer to ' Lord Randal,' and have
even the name Henry which we find in Eng-
lish C. C-F are like J-O,'The Croodlin Doo.'
Dutch. 'Isabelle,' Snellaert, p. 73, No 67,
seven four-line stanzas, the first and fourth
lines repeated in each. Isabel has been sew-
ing at her aunt's, and has eaten of a fish with
yellow stripes that had been caught with tongs
in the cellar. The broth, poured into the
street, caused the dogs to burst. She wishes
her aunt a red-hot furnace, herself a spade to
bury her, her brother a wife like his mother.
Swedish. A, ' Den lillas Testamente,' ten
five-line stanzas, three lines burden, Afzelius,
m, 13, No 68; ed. Bergstrom, I, 291, No 55.
A girl, interrogated by her step-mother, says
she has been at her aunt's, and has eaten two
wee striped fishes. The bones she gave the
dog; the stanza which should describe the
effect is wanting. She wishes heaven for her
father and mother, a ship for her brother, a
jewel-box and chests for her sister, and hell
for her step-mother and her nurse. B, Ar-
widsson, n, 90, No 88, nine five-line stanzas,
two lines burden. In the first stanza, evidently
corrupt, the girl says she has been at her broth-
er's. 'She has had eels cooked with pepper,
and the bones, given to the dogs, made them
burst. She gives her father good corn in his
barns, her brother and sister a ship, etc., hell
to her step-mother and nurse.
Danish. Communicated by Prof. Grundt-
vig, as obtained for the first time from tra-
dition in 1877; five stanzas of five lines, three
lines repeating. Elselille, in answer to her
mother, says she has been in the meadow,
where she got twelve small snakes. She wishes
heavenly joy to her father, a grave to her
brother, hell torment to her sister.
Magyar. 'Der vergiftete Knabe,' Aigner,
Ungarische Volksdichtungen, 2e Auflage, p.
127, in nine six-line stanzas, four being a bur-
den. Johnnie, in answer to his mother, says
he has been at his sister-in-law's, and has eaten
a speckled toad, served on her handsomest
plate, of which he is dying. He bequeaths
to his father his best carriage, to his brothers
his finest horses, to his sister his house fur-
niture, to his sister-in-law everlasting damna-
tion, to his mother pain and sorrow.
Wendish. 'Der vergiftete Knabe,' Haupt
u. Schmaler, I, 110, No 77, twelve four-line
stanzas, combining question and answer, the
first and last line repeating. Henry has been
at the neighbor's, has eaten part of a fish
caught in the stable with a dung-fork; his
dog ate the rest, and burst. There is no tes-
tament. His mother asks him where she shall
make his bed; he replies, In the churchyard;
turn my head westward, and cover me with
green turf.
The numerous forms of this story show a
general agreement, with but little difference
except as to the persons who are the object
and the agent of the crime. These are, ac-
cording to the Italian tradition, — which is 250
years old, while no other goes back more than
a hundred years, and far the larger part have
been obtained in recent years, — a young man
and his true-love; and in this account unite
two of the three modern Italian versions,
English A-G, German A, B. Scott suggests
that the handsome young sportsman (whom we
find in English A, C, D, E, F, H) may have
been exchanged for a little child poisoned by
a step-mother, to excite greater interest in the
nursery. This seems very reasonable. What
girl with a lover, singing the ballad, would
not be tempted to put off the treacherous act
on so popular, though most unjustly popular,
an object of aversion? A mother, again,


IS. LORD
RANDAL 155
would scarcely allow "mother" to stand, as
is the case in Italian C and German F, and a
singer who considered that all blood relations
should be treated as sacred would ascribe the
wickedness to somebody beyond that pale, say
a neighbor, as the Wendish ballad does, and
Zuccalmaglio's reading of German C. The
step-mother is expressly named only in Eng-
lish J, K o, L, M, N, O, and in four of these,
J, K c, M, O, the child has a mammie,* which
certainly proves an alibi for the step-mother,
and confirms what Scott says. There is a
step-aunt in German E and Swedish A, and
the aunt in German D and the Dutch ballad,
and the grandmother in English I, K a, b,
German C, are perhaps meant (as the brother
in Swedish B certainly is) to be step-relations
and accommodating instruments.
The poisoning is shifted to a wife in English
H, to an uncle in English I d, and to a sister-
in-law in the Magyar version.
There is all but universal consent that the
poisoning was done by serving up snakes for
fish. The Magyar says a toad, English M a
four-footed fish,f German D a well-peppered
broth and a glass of red wine. English L
adds a drink of hemlock stocks to the speckled
trout; F, H have simply poison. The fish
are distinctively eels in the Italian versions,
and in English A, D, E, G, I, Swedish B.
English A, J, E, M, N, O, German A-D, the
Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Wendish versions,
and by implication English C, D, E also, con-
cur in saying that a part of the fish was given
to a dog [dogs, cat, cats], and that death was
the consequence. Bursting or swelling is char-
acteristic of'this kind of poisoning: German
A, B, C, F, English D, E, and the Dutch and
Wendish versions.
The dying youth or child in many cases
makes a nuncupative will, or declares his last
wishes, upon a suggestion proceeding from the
person who is by him, commonly from the
mother: English A, B, C, H, I: German A,
* Grundtvig notices this absurdity, Eng. og skotske
F. v, p. 286, note **.
t "The nurse or nursery maid who sung these verses (to
a very plaintive air) always informed the juvenile audience
D, E, F: the Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish,
Magyar versions. The bequest to the poisoner
is the gallows in English B, C, H, I, Italian
A, B, C; hell, English A, German A, D, F,
Swedish A, B, Danish; and an equivalent in
German E, the Dutch and the Magyar copy.
'The Cruel Brother,' No 11, and 'Edward,'
No 13, have a will of this same fashion.
In all the English versions the burden has
the entreaty " Make my bed," and this is ad-
dressed to the mother in all but L, N. In H,
an Irish copy, and I, an American one, the
mother asks where the bed shall be made;
and the answer is, "In the churchyard. This
feature is found again in German B, C and in
the Wendish version.
The resemblance in the form of the stanza
in all'the versions deserves a word of remark.
For the most part, the narrative proceeds in
sections of two short lines, or rather half lines,
which are a question and an answer, the rest
of the stanza being regularly repeated. Eng-
lish L, N, as written (L not always), separate
the question and answer; this is done, too, in
Italian B, C. German E, on the contrary, has
two questions and the answers in each stanza,
and is altogether peculiar. Swedish B varies
the burden in part, imagining father, brother,
sister, etc., to ask what the little girl will
give to each, and adapting the reply accord-
ingly, "Faderen min," " Broderen min."
A Bohemian and a Catalan ballad which
have ttto of the three principal traits of the
foregoing, the poisoning and the testament, do
not exhibit, perhaps have lost, the third, the
employment of snakes.
The story of the first is that a mother who
dislikes the wife her son has chosen attempts
to poison her at the wedding feast. She sets
a glass of honey before the son, a glass of
poison before the bride. They exchange
cups. The poison is swift. The young man
leaves four horses to his brother, eight cows to
his sister, his fine house to his wife. "And
that the step-mother was a rank witch, and that the fish was
an ask (newt), which was in Scotland formerly deemed a
most poisonous reptile." C. K. Sharpe, in the Musical Mu-
seum, Laing-Stenhouse, iv, 364*.


156
12. LORD EAKDAL
what to me, my son?" asks the mother. A
broad mill-stone and the deep Moldau is the
bequest to her. Waldau, Bohmische Granaten,
n, 109, cited by Reifferscheid, p. 137 f.
The Catalan ballad seems to have been sof-
tened at the end. Here again a mother hates
her daughter-in-law. She comes to the sick
woman, "com qui no 'n sabds res," and asks
What is the matter? The daughter says, You
have poisoned me. The mother exhorts her
to confess and receive the sacrament, and then
make her will. She gives her castles in France
to the poor and the pilgrims [and the friars],
and to her brother Don Carlos [who in one
version is her husband]. Two of the versions
remember the Virgin. "And to me?" "To
you, my husband [my cloak, rosary], that
when you go to mass you may remember me."
In one version the mother asks the dying
woman where she will be buried. She says At
Saint Mary's. Mila, Observaciones, p. 103 f,
No 5, two versions: Briz y Salt6, n, 197 f,
two also, the first nearly the same as Mila's
first.
Poisoning by giving a snake as food, or by
infusing the venom in drink, is an incident in
several other popular ballads.
Donna Lombarda attempts, at the instiga-
tion of a lover, to rid herself of her husband
by pounding a serpent, or its head, in a mor-
tar, and mixing the juice with his wine [in
one version simply killing the snake and put-
ting it in a cask]: Nigra, Canzoni del Pie-
monti, in Rivista Contemporanea, xn, 32 ff,
four versions ; Marcoaldi, p. 177, No 20; Wolf,
Volkslieder aus Venetien, p. 46, No 72; Righi,
Canti popolari veronesi, p. 37, No 100*; Fer-
raro, C. p. monferrini, p. 1, No 1; Bernoni, C.
p. veneziani, Puntata V, No 1. In three of Ni-
gra's versions and in Ferraro's the drink is of-
fered when the husband returns from hunting.
The husband, rendered suspicious by the look
of the wine, or warned of his danger, forces
his wife to drink first. So in a northern bal-
lad, a mother who attempts to destroy her sons
[step-sons] with a brewage of this descrip-
tion is obliged to drink first, and bursts with
the poison: 'Eiturbyrlunar kvaeSi,' Islenzk
Fornkv., n, 79, No .43 A; 'Fru Gundela,'
Arwidsson, n, 92, No 89;' Signelill aa hennes
synir,' Bugge, p. 95, No xx, the last half.
In one of the commonest Slavic ballads, a
girl, who finds her brother an obstacle to her
desires, poisons him, at the instigation and
under the instruction of the man she fancies,
or of her own motion, by giving him a snake
to eat, or the virus in drink. The object of
her passion, on being informed of what she has
done, casts her off, for fear of her doing the like
to him. Bohemian: 'Sestra traviiSka,' Erben,
r. n. w Cechach, 1842,I, 9, No 2, Prostona-
rodni ceskd P., 1864, p. 477, No 13 ; Swoboda,
Sbirka c. n. P., p. 19; German translations by
Swoboda, by Wenzig, W. s. Marchenschatz,
p. 263, I. v. Diiringsfeld, Bohmische Rosen, p.
176, etc. Moravian: Susil, p. 167, No 168.
Slovak, 6elakowsky, Slowanskd n. P., m,
76. Polish: Kolberg, P. L. p., i,115, No 8,
some twenty versions; Wojcicki, P. L. bialo-
chrobatow, etc., I, 71, 73, 232, 289; Pauli, P.
L. polskiego, p. 81, 82: Konopka, P. L. kra-
kowskiego, p. 125. Servian: Vuk, I, 215,
No 302, translated by Talvj, n, 192, and by
Kapper, Gesiinge der Serben, n, 177. Rus-
sian: Celakowsky, as above, m, 108. Etc.
The attempt is made, but unsuccessfully, in
Sacharof, P. russkago N., iv, 7.
A version given by De Rada, Rapsodie d'un
poema albanese, p. 78, canto x, resembles the
Slavic, with a touch of the Italian. A man
incites a girl to poison her brother by pound-
ing the poison out of a serpent's head and
tail and mixing it with wine.
In a widely spread Romaic ballad, a mother
poisons the bride whom her son has just
brought home, — an orphan girl in some ver-
sions, but in one a king's daughter wedding a
king's son. The cooks who are preparing the
feast are made to cook for the bride the heads
of three snakes [nine snakes' heads, a three-
headed snake, winged snakes and two-headed
adders]. In two Epirote versions the poisoned
girl bursts with the effects. "To. nana irtOtpuia.,"
Passow, p. 335, No 456, nearly = Zambelios,
p. 753, No 41; Passow, p. 337, No 457; Tom-
maseo, Canti popolari, m, 135; Jeannaraki,
:,


12. LORD RANDAL
157
p. 127, No 130 *; Chasiotis (Epirote), p. 51,
No 40, "'H fiovpyapowovXa. kol fj naid] irtOtpa;"
p. 108, NO 22, ""O AlOVVS KOLl 7] KOLKT] TTtdipd."
(Liebrecht, Volkskunde, p. 214.)
An Italian mother-in-law undertakes to poi-
son her son's wife with a snake-potion. The
wife, on her husband's return from the chase,
innocently proposes to share the drink with
him. Her husband no sooner has tasted than
he falls dead. (Kaden, Italien's Wunderhorn,
p. 85).
Scott cites in his preface to 'Lord Randal'
a passage from a MS. chronicle of England,
in which the death of King John is described
as being brought about by administering to
him the venom of a toad (cf. the Magyar
ballad). The symptoms — swelling and rup-
ture— are found in the Scandinavian and
Epirote ballads referred to above, besides those
previously noticed (p. 155). King John had
asked a monk at the abbey of Swinshed how
much a loaf on the table was worth. The
monk answered a half-penny. The king said
that if he could bring it about, such a loaf
should be worth twenty pence ere half a year.
The monk thought he would rather die than
that this should come to pass. "And anon
the monk went unto his abbot and was shrived
of him, and told the abbot all that the king
said, and prayed his abbot to assoil him, for
he would give the king such a wassail that all
England should be glad and joyful thereof.
Then went the monk into a garden, and found
a toad therein, and took her up, and put her
in a cup, and filled it with good ale, and
pricked her in every place, in the cup, till the
venom came out in every place, and brought
it before the king, and kneeled, and said:
'Sir, wassail: for never in your life drank ye
of such a cup.' • Begin, monk,' said the king:
and the monk drank a great draught, and took
the king the cup, and the king also drank a
great draught, and set down the cup. The
monk anon went to the firmary, and there
died anon, on whose soul God have mercy,
amen. And five monks sing for his soul es-
pecially, and shall while the abbey standeth.
The king was anon full evil at ease, and com-
manded to remove the table, and asked after
the monk; and men told him that he was
dead, for his womb was broke in sunder.
When the king heard this tiding, he com-
manded for to truss: but all it was for nought,
for his belly began to swell from the drink
that he drank, that he died within two days,
the morrow after Saint Luke's day." Min-
strelsy, m, 287 f. The same story in Eulo-
gium Historiarum, ed. Haydon, m, 109 f.
B and K o are translated by Grundtvig,
Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 284, 286.
D, by W. Grimm, 3 Altschottische Lieder, p.
3 ; by Schubart, p. 177; Arndt, p. 229; Doen-
niges, p. 79; Gerhardt, p. 83; Knortz, L. u.
R. Alt-Englands, p. 174. K a by Fiedler,
Geschichte der volksthiimlichen schottischen
Liederdichtung, n, 268. German C is trans-
lated by Jamieson, Illustrations, p. 320: Swed-
ish A by W. and M. Howitt, Literature and
Romance of Northern Europe, I, 265.
A
From a small manuscript volume lent me by Mr William
Macmath, of Edinburgh, containing four pieces written in or
about 1710, and this ballad in a later hand. Charles Mackie,
August, 1808, is scratched upon the binding.
1 'O where ha you been, Lord Randal, my
son?
And where ha you been, my handsome young
man?'
* A golden bird, sitting on the bride's hand, sings, " You
had better not go there; you will have a bad mother-in-law
'I ha been at the greenwood; mother, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie
down.'
2 'An wha met ye there, Lord Randal, my
son?
An wha met you there, my handsome young
man?'
and a bad father-in-law." There are ill omens also in Fas-
sow, No 457.


158
12. LORD RANDAL
'O I met wi my true-love; mother, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, an fain wad lie
down.'
3 'And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my
son?
And what did she give you, my handsome
young man?'
'Eels fried in a pan; mother, mak my bed
soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie
down.'
4 'And wha gat your leavins, Lord Randal, my
son?
And wha gat your leavins, my handsom young
man?'
'My hawks and my hounds; mother, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi hunting, and fain wad lie
down.'
5 'And what becam of them, Lord Randal, my
son?
And what becam of them, my handsome young
man?'
'They stretched their legs out an died; mother,
mak my bed soon,
For I'm wearied wi huntin, and fain wad lie
down.'
6 'O I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my
son!
I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young
man!'
'O yes, I am poisoned; mother, mak my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad He
down.'
7 'What d' ye leave to your mother, Lord Ran-
dal, my son?
What d' ye leave to your mother, my handsome
young man?'
'Four and twenty milk kye; mother, mak my
bed soon, »
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
down.'
8 'What d' ye leave to your sister, Lord Ran-
dal, my son?
What d' ye leave to your sister, my handsome
young man?'
'My gold and my silver; mother, mak my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, an I fain wad lie
down.'
9 'What d' ye leave to your brother, Lord Ran-
dal, my son?
What d' ye leave to your brother, my hand-
some young man?'
'My houses and my lands; mother, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
down.'
10 'What d' ye leave to your true-love, Lord Ran-
dal, my son?
What d' ye leave to your true-love, my hand-
some young man?'
'I leave her hell and fire; mother, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
down.'
B
Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 110. From Mrs
Comie, Aberdeen.
1 'O whabe hae ye been a' day, Lord Donald,
my son?
O whare hae ye been a' day, my jollie young
man?'
'I've been awa courtin; mither, mak my bed
sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
2 'What wad ye hae for your supper, Lord Don-
ald, my son?
What wad ye hae for your supper, my jollie
young man?'


13. LORD
RANDAL 159
'I've gotten my supper; mither, mak my
bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
doun.'
3 'What did ye, get for your supper, Lord Don-
ald, my son?
What did ye get for your supper, my jollie
young man?'
'A dish of sma fishes; mither mak my bed
sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
doun.'
4 'Whare gat ye the fishes, Lord Donald, my
son?
Whare gat ye the fishes, my jollie young
man?'
'In my father's black ditches; mither, mak
my bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad lie
doun.'
5 'What like were your fishes, Lord Donald, my
son?
What like were your fishes, my jollie young
man?'
'Black backs and spreckld bellies; mither,
mak my bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
6 'O I fear ye are poisond, Lord Donald, my
son!
O I fear ye are poisond, my jollie young
man!'
'O yes! I am poisond; mither mak my bed
sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
7 'What will ye leave to your father, Lord Don-
ald my son?
What will ye leave to your father, my jollie
young man?'
'Baith my houses and land; mither, mak my
bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
8 'What will ye leave to your brither, Lord
Donald, my son?
What will ye leave to your brither, my jollie
young man?'
'My horse and the saddle; mither, mak my
bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
9 'What will ye leave to your sister, Lord
Donald, my son?
What will ye leave to your sister, my jollie
young man?'
'Baith my gold box and rings; mither, mak
my bed sune,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wad he
doun.'
10 'What will ye leave to your true-love, Lord
Donald, my son?
What will ye leave to your true-love, my jollie
young man?'
'The tow and the halter, for to hang on yon
tree,
And lat her hang there for the poysoning o
me.'
o
Motherwell's MS., p. 69. From the recitation of Marga-
ret Bain, in the parish of Blackford, Perthshire.
1 'What's become of your hounds, King Hen-
rie, my son?
What's become of your hounds, my pretty lit-
tle one?'
'They all died on the way; mother, make my
bed soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
2 'What gat ye to your supper, King Henry, my
son?
What gat ye to your supper, my pretty little
one?'


160
12. LORD RANDAL
'I gat fish boiled in broo ; mother, mak my bed
soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
3 'What like were the fish, King Henry, my
son?
What like were the fish, my pretty little one?'
'They were spreckled on the back and white
on the belly ; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
4 'What leave ye to your father, King Hepry,
my son?
What leave ye to your father, my pretty little
one?'
'The keys of Old Ireland, and all that's there-
in ; mother, make my bed soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
5 'What leave ye to your brother, King Henry,
my son?
What leave ye to your brother, my pretty little
one?'
D
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1803, m, 292.
1 'O where hae ye been, Lord Randal, my
son?
O where hae ye been, my handsome young
man?'
'I hae been to the wild wood; mother, make
my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie
down.'
2 'Where gat ye your dinner, Lord Randal, my
son?
Where gat ye your dinner, my handsome young
man?'
'I din'd wi my true-love; mother, make my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald lie
down.'
3 'What gat ye to your dinner, Lord Randal, my
son?
What gat ye to your dinner, my handsome
young man?'
'The keys of my coffers and all that's therein;
mother, mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
6 'What leave ye to your sister, King Henry,
my son?
What leave ye to your sister, my pretty little
one?'
'The world's wide, she may go beg; mother,
mak my bed soon,
For I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
7 'What leave ye to your trew-love, King Henry,
my son?
What leave ye to your trew-love, my pretty
little one?'
'The highest hill to hang her on, for she's poi-
soned me and my hounds all; mother,
make my bed soon,
Oh I'm sick to the heart, and I fain wald lie
down.'
'I gat eels boild in broo; mother, make my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald he
down.'
4 'What became of your bloodhounds, Lord Ran-
dal, my son?
What became of your bloodhounds, my hand-
some young man?'
'0 they swelld and they died; mother, make
my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and fain wald he
down.'
5 '0 I fear ye are poisond, Lord Randal, my
son!
O I fear ye are poisond, my handsome young
man!'
'O yes! I am poisond; mother, make my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald he
down.'


12. LORD
RANDAL 161
B
Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nnrsery Tales, p. 261.
"A version still popular in Scotland," 1849.
1 'Ah where have you been, Lairde Rowlande,
my son?
Ah where have you been, Lairde Rowlande,
my son?'
'I've been in the wild woods ; mither, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and faine would lie
down.'
2 'Oh you've been at your true love's, Lairde
Rowlande, my son!
Oh you've been at your true-love's, Lairde
Rowlande, my son!'
'I've been at my true-love's; mither, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and faine would lie
down.'
3 'What got you to dinner, Lairde Rowlande, my
son?
^What got you to dinner, Lairde Rowlande, my
son?'
'I got eels boild in brue ; mither, mak my bed
soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and faine would
lie down.'
4 'What's become of your warden, Lairde Row-
lande, my son?
What's become of your warden, Lairde Row-
lande, my son?'
'He died in the muirlands; mither, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and faine would
lie down.'
5 'What's become of your stag-hounds, Lairde
Rowlande, my son?
What's become of your stag-hounds, Lairde
Rowlande, my son?'
'They swelled and they died ; mither, mak my
bed soon,
For I'm weary wi hunting, and faine would lie
down.'
Johnson's hiuseum, No 327, p. 337. Communicated by
Burns.
1 'O where hae ye been, Lord Ronald, my
son?
O where hae ye been, Lord Ronald, my son?'
'I hae been wi my sweetheart; mother, make
my bed soon,
For I'm weary wi the hunting, and fain wad
lie down.'
2 'What got ye frae your sweetheart, Lord Ron-
ald, my son?
What got ye frae your sweetheart, Lord Ron-
ald, my son?'
'I hae got deadly poison; mother, make my
bed soon,
For life is a burden that soon I 'll lay down.'
a
Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p. 319. Originally
from a clergyman's daughter, in Suffolk.
1 'Where have you been today, Billy, my son?
Where have you been today, my only man?'
'I've been a wooing; mother, make my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at heart, and fain would lay
down.'
2 'What have you ate today, Billy, my son?
What have you ate today, my only man?'
'I've ate eel-pie; mother, make my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at heart, and shall die before
noon.'
31


162
12. LORD RANDAL
H
Taken down by me, February, 1881, from the recitation of
Ellen Healy, as repeated to her by a young girl at " Lacka-
bairn," Kerry, Ireland, about 1868.
1 'Where was you all day, my own pretty boy?
Where was you all day, my comfort and joy?'
'I was fishing and fowling; mother, make my
bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
2 'What did you have for your breakfast, my
own pretty boy?
What did you have for your breakfast, my com-
fort and joy?'
'A cup of strong poison; mother, make my
bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
3 'I fear you are poisoned, my own pretty boy,
I fear you are poisoned, my comfort and joy!'
'O yes, I am poisoned; mother, make my bed
soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
4 'What will you leave to your father, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your father, my com-
fort and joy?'
'I 'll leave him my house and my property;
mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
5 'What will you leave to your mother, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your mother, my com-
fort and joy?'
'I 'll leave her my coach and four horses;
mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
6 'What will you leave to your brother, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your brother, my com-
fort and joy?'
'I 'll leave him my bow and my fiddle;
mother, make my bed soon.
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
7 'What will you leave to your sister, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your sister, my comfort
and joy?'
'I 'll leave her my gold and my silver;
mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
8 'What will you leave to your servant, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your servant, my com-
fort and joy?'
'I 'll leave him the key of my small silver box;
mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
9 'What will you leave to your children, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your children, my com-
fort and joy?'
'The world is wide all round for to beg;
mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
10 'What will you leave to your wife, my own
pretty boy?
What will you leave to your wife, my comfort
and joy?'
'I 'll leave' her the gallows, and plenty to hang
her; mother, make my bed soon,
There's a pain in my heart, and I mean to lie
down.'
11 'Where shall I make it, my own pretty boy?
Where shall I make it, my comfort and joy?'
'Above in the churchyard, and dig it down
deep,
Put a stone to my head and a flag to my
feet,
And leave me down easy until I 'll take a long
sleep.'


12. LOED RANDAL
163
I
a. Communicated by Mrs L. F. Wesselhoeft, of Boston,
as sung to her when a child by her grandmother, Elizabeth
Foster, born in Maine, who appears to have learned the bal-
lad of her mother about 1800. b. By a daughter of Eliza-
beth Foster, as learned about 1820. c. By Miss Ellen Mars-
ton, of New Bedford, as learned from her mother, born 1778.
d. By Mrs Cushing, of Cambridge, Mass., as learned in
1838 from a schoolmate, who is thought to have derived
it from an old nurse, e. By Mrs Augustus Lowell, of Bos-
ton, f. By Mrs Edward Atkinson, of Boston, learned of
Mrs A. Lowell, in girlhood, g. By Mrs A. Lowell, as de-
rived from a friend.
1 'O where have you been, Tiranti, my son?
O where have you been, my sweet little one?'
'I have been to my grandmother's; mother,
make my bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
down.'
2 'What did you have for your supper, Tiranti,
my son?
What did you have for your supper, my sweet
little one?'
'I had eels fried in butter; mother, make my
bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to he
down.'
3 'Where did the eels come from, Tiranti, my
son?
Where did the eels come from, my sweet little
one?'
'From the corner of the haystack; mother,
make my bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
down.'
4 'What color were the eels, Tiranti, my son?
What color were the eels, my sweet little
one?'
, 'They were streaked and striped; mother,
make my bed soon,
For I 'in sick to my heart, and I'm faint to
lie down.'
5 'What 'll you give to your father, Tiranti, my
son?
What 'll you give to your father, my sweet lit-
tle one?'
'All my gold and my silver; mother, make
my bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
down.'
6 'What 'll you give to your mother, Tiranti, my
son?
What 'll you give to your mother, my sweet
little one?'
. 'A coach and six horses; mother, make my
bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
down.'
7 'What 'll you give to your grandmother, Ti-
ranti, my son?
What'll you give to your grandmother, my
sweet little one?'
'A halter to hang her; mother, make my bed
soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
• down.'
8 'Where 'll you have your bed made, Tiranti,
my son?
Where 'll you have your bed made, my sweet
little one?'
'In the corner of the churchyard; mother,
make my bed soon,
For I'm sick to my heart, and I'm faint to lie
down.'
J
Motherwell's MS., p. 238. From the recitation of Miss
Maxwell, of Brediland.
1 'O whare hae ye been a' day, my bonnie wee
croodlin dow?
O whare hae ye been a' day, my bonnie wee
croodlin dow?'
'I've been at my step-mother's; oh mak my
bed, mammie, now!
I've been at my step-mother's; oh mak my
bed, mammie, now!'
2 'O what did ye get at your step-mother's, my
bonnie wee croodlin dow?' [Twice.]
'I gat a wee wee fishie ; oh mak my bed. mam-
mie, now!' [Twice.]


164
12. LORD RANDAL
3 'O whare gat she the wee fishie, my bonnie
wee croodlin dow?'
'In a dub before the door; oh mak my bed,
mammie, now!'
4 'What did ye wi the wee fishie, my bonnie wee
croodlin dow?'
'I boild it in a wee pannie; oh mak my bed,
mammy, now!'
5 'Wha gied ye the banes o the fishie till, my
bonnie wee croodlin dow?'
rI gied them till a wee doggie; oh mak my bed,
mammie, now!'
6 'O whare is the little wee doggie, my bonnie
wee croodlin dow?
O whare is the little wee doggie, my bonnie
wee croodlin doo?'
'It shot out its fit and died, and sae maun I do
too;
Oh mak my bed, mammy, now, now, oh mak
my bed, mammy, now!'
K
a. Chambers' Scottish Ballads, p. 324. b. Chambers'
Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1842, p. 53. O. The Sten-
house-Laing ed. of Johnson's Museum, lv, 364*, communi-
cated by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe.
1 'O WHAUR hae ye been a' the day, my little
wee croodlin doo?'
'O I've been at my grandmother's; mak my
bed, mammie, now!'
2 'O what gat ye at your grandmother's, my lit-
tle wee croodlin doo?'
'I got a bonnie wee fishie; mak my bed, mam-
mie, now!'
3 'O whaur did she catch the fishie, my bonnie
wee croodlin doo?'
'She catchd it in the gutter hole; mak my bed,
mammie, now!'
4 'And what did she do wi the fish, my little wee
croodlin doo?'
'She boiled it in a brass pan; O mak my bed,
mammie, now!'
5 'And what did ye do wi the banes o't, my
bonnie wee croodlin doo?'
'I gied them to my little dog; mak my bed,
mammie, now!'
6 'And what did your little doggie do, my bonnie
wee croodlin doo?'
'He stretched out his head, his feet, and deed;
and so will I, mammie, now!'
L
Buchan'a MSS, n, 322 ; Ballads of the North of Scotland,
n, 179.
1 'Whar hae ye been a' the day, Willie doo,
Willie doo?
Whar hae ye been a' the day, Willie, my
doo?'
2 'I've been to see my step-mother; make my
bed, lay me down;
Make my bed, lay me down, die shall I now!'
3 'What got ye frae your step-mother, Willie
doo, Willie doo?
What got ye frae your step-mother, Willie, my
doo?'
4 'She gae me a speckled trout; make my bed,
lay me down;
She gae me a speckled trout, die shall I now!'
5 'Whar got she the speckled trout, Willie doo,
Willie doo?'
'She got it amang the heather hills; die shall I
now.'
6 'What did she boil it in, Willie doo, Willie
doo?'
'She boild it in the billy-pot; die shall I now!'
7 'What gaed she you for to drink, Willie doo,
Willie doo?
What gaed she you for to drink, Willie, my
doo?'


166
12. LORD RANDAL
C. 42. your father, King Henry, my son.
I. a. I4. faint to, an obvious corruption of fain to,
is found also in b, O; d has fain wad; e,
faint or fain; f, fain; g, I faint to.
N. B. 8 stands 5 in the MS. copy, but is the
last stanza in all others which have it.
b. 21. for your dinner.
After 2 follows:
Who cooked you the eels, Tiranti, my son?
etc.
O't was my grandmother; mother, make my
bed soon, etc.
b 5 = a 3: Where did she get the eels? etc.
*. By the side of the haystack, etc.
b 6 = a 7 : 7 = a 8 : 8 = a 5. 84. and die to
lie down,
a 6 is wanting in b.
o. I4. at my heart {and always).
21. O what did she give you ? etc. '. Striped
eels fried, etc.
3 = a 4. l. O how did they look? etc.
s. Ringed, streaked, and speckled, etc.
4 = a 3. l. O where did they come from?
51. O what will you give your father, my
son?
2. O what will you give him?
*. A coach and six horses.
61. O what will you give your mother, my
son ? as in 5.
'. All my gold and my silver.
71. O what will you give your granny? as
in 5.
81. O where H, etc.
c adds, as 9:
So this is the end of Tiranti my son,
So this is the end of my sweet little one:
His grandmother poisoned him with an old
dead snake,
And he left her a halter to hang by the
neck.
d. 1\ etc. Tyrante.
'.01 've been to my uncle's, etc.
4. and fain wad lie doun.
2s. eels and fresh butter.
3 = a 4. '. black striped with yellow.
4 = a 7. l. What 'll ye will to your mither?
's. My gold and my silver.
5 = a6. l. What 'll ye will to your father?
*. My coach and my horses.
6 = a 8. \ What 'll you will to your uncle?
3, 5 of a are want ing.
e. I4. For I'm sick at heart, and faint [fain]
to lie down.
3 = a 7. l. What will you leave your moth-
er?'
s. A box full of jewels.
41. What will you leave your sister?
*. A box of fine clothing.
5 — a 8. *.A rope to hang her with.
6 = a 5. \ Where shall 1 make it?
3, 4 of a are wanting.
f. This copy was derived from the singing of
the lady who communicated e, and they
naturally agree closely.
V. fain to lie down. f3 = e4:f4 = e3.
g. I4. For I'm sick at the heart, and I faint
to lie down.
21. What did you get at your grandmoth-
er's?
*. I got eels stewed in butter.
3 = a 8. 1. What will you leave ....
41. What will you leave to your brother?
*. A full suit of mourning.
5 = a 7. l. leave to your mother.
*. A carriage and fine horses.
6 = a 5.
3, 4 of a are wanting.
K. a, b, c are printed, in the publications in
which they occur, in four-line stanzas.
b. Omits 4.
61. the little doggie. 2. as I do, mammie,
noo.
c. I1. my bonnie wee crooden doo: and al-
ways.
2. at my step-mither's.
2. And what did scho gie you to eat. . .
Scho gied to me a wee fishie ....
3l. An what did she catch the fishie in . . .
4 is wanting.
Li. Written in the MS., and printed by Buchan,
in stanzas of 4 lines.
M. Printed by Chambers in stanzas of 4 lines, the
last repeated.
N. The second line of each stanza is written as
two in tlte MS.
O. The stanza, being written with short lines in
the manuscript, is of seven lines, including
the repetitions.


13. EDWARD
167
13
EDWARD
k.. a. Motherwell's MS., p. 189. b. Motherwell's Min- B. Percy's Reliques, 17G5, I, 58. Communicated by
strelsy, p. 339. From recitation. Sir David Dalrymple.
C. MS. of A. Laing, one stanza.
A b, " given from the recitation of an old
woman," is evidently A a slightly regulated
by Motherwell. B, we are informed in the
4th edition of the Reliques, p. 61, was sent
Percy by Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes.
Motherwell thought there was reason to be-
lieve " that his lordship made a few slight ver-
bal improvements on the copy he transmitted,
and altered the hero's name to Edward, —
a name which, by the bye, never occurs in a
Scottish ballad, except where allusion is made
to an English king." * Dalrymple, at least,
would not be likely to change a Scotch for an
English name. The Bishop might doubtless
prefer Edward to Wat, or Jock, or even Da-
vie. But as there is no evidence that any
change of name was made, the point need
not be discussed. As for other changes, the
word " brand," in the first stanza, is possibly
more literary than popular; further than this
the language is entirely fit. The affectedly an-
tique spelling f in Percy's copy has given rise
to vague suspicions concerning the authen-
ticity of the ballad, or of the language: but as
spelling will not make an old ballad, so it will
not unmake one. We have, but do not need,
• An eager "Englishman" might turn Motherwell's ob-
jection to the name into an argument for ' Edward ' being an
"English" ballad.
t That is to say, initial guh and z for modern wh and y,
for nothing else would have excited attention. Perhaps a
transcriber thought he ought to give the language a look
at least as old as Gavin Douglas, who spells quhy, dois,
lour. The quh would serve a purpose, if understood as in-
dicating that the aspirate was not to be dropped, as it often
is in English why. The z is the successor of J, and was
the later traditional copy to prove the other
genuine. 'Edward' is not only unimpeach-
able, but has ever been regarded as one of
the noblest and most sterling specimens of
the popular ballad.
Motherwell seems to incline to regard ' Ed-
ward ' rather as a detached portion of a ballad
than as complete in itself. "The verses of
which it consists," he says, "generally con-
clude the ballad of 'The Twa Brothers,' and
also some versions of 'Lizie Wan:'" Min-
strelsy, lxviI, 12. The Finnish parallel
which Motherwell refers to, might have con-
vinced him that the ballad is complete as it
is; and he knew as well as anybody that one
ballad is often appended to another by reciters,
to lengthen the story or improve the conclu-
sion. J More or less of ' Edward ' will be found
in four versions of 'The Twa Brothers' and
two of 'Lizie Wan,' further on in this vol-
ume.
This ballad has been familiarly known to
have an exact counterpart in Swedish. There
are four versions, differing only as to length:
'Sven i Rosengard,' A, Afzelius, No 67, in,
4, eleven two-line stanzas, with three more
meant to be pronounced y, as z is, or was, pronounced in
gaberlunzie and other Scottish words. See Dr J. A. H. Mur-
ray's Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, pp. 118,
129. Since quh and z serve rather as rocks of offence than
landmarks, I have thought it best to use wh and y.
} Motherwell also speaks of a ballad of the same nature
as quoted in Werner's ' Twenty-Fourth of February.' The
stanza cited (in Act I, Scene 1) seems to be Herder's trans-
lation of Edward ' given from memory.


168
13. EDWARD
lines of burden; B, nI, 3, six stanzas (Berg-
strbm's ed., No 54, 1,2); C, Arwidsson, No
87 A, n, 83, eighteen stanzas; D, No 87 B,
n, 86, sixteen stanzas. The same in Danish:
A, Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folke-
viser, p. 175, nine stanzas; B, Boisen, Nye
og gamle Viser, 10th ed., No 95, p. 185,
'Brodermordet.' And in Finnish, probably
derived from the Swedish, but with traits of
its own: A, Schroter's Finnische Runen, p.
124, ' Werinen Pojka,' The Bloodstained Son,
fifteen two-line stanzas, with two lines of re-
frain; B, 'Velisurmaaja,' Brother-Murderer,
Kanteletar, p. x, twenty stanzas.
All these are a dialogue between mother
and son, with a question and answer in each
stanza. The mother asks, Where have you
been? The son replies that he has been in
the stable [Danish, grove, fields; Finnish A,
on the sea-strand]. "How is it that your foot
is bloody ?" * [clothes, shirt; Finnish, " How
came your jerkin muddy?" etc.] A horse
has kicked or trod on him. "How came your
sword so bloody?" He then confesses that he
has killed his brother. [Swedish D and the
Danish copies have no question about the foot,
etc.] Then follows a series of questions as to
what the son will do with himself, and what
shall become of his wife, children, etc., which
are answered much as in the English ballad.
Finally, in all, the rnother asks when he will
come back, and he replies (with some varia-
tions), When crows are white. And that will
be? When swans are black. And that?
When stones float. And that? When feath-
ers sink, etc. This last feature, stupidly ex-
aggerated in some copies, and even approach-
ing burlesque, is one of the commonplaces of
ballad poetry, and may or may not have been,
• We have a similar passage in most of the copies of the
third class of the German ballads corresponding to No 4. A
brother asks the man who has killed his sister why his shoes
[sword, hands] are bloody. See p. 36, p. 38. So in 'Herr
Axel,' Arwidsson, No 46,1, 308.
t These have perhaps been adapted to the stanza of ' The
from the beginning, a part of the ballads in
which it occurs. Such a conclusion could not
be made to adhere to ' Edward,' the last stanza
of which is peculiar in implicating the mother
in the guilt of the murder. Several versions
of ' The Twa Brothers' preserve this trait, and
'Lizie Wan' also.
The stanza of this ballad was originally, in
all probability, one of two lines — a question
and an answer — with refrains, as we find it
in A 10, 11, 12, and the corresponding Swed-
ish and Finnish ballad ; and in ' Lord Randal,'
J, K, etc., and also the corresponding Swedish
and German ballad. A 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9 are
now essentially stanzas of one line, with re-
frains; that is, the story advances in these at
that rate. A 4, 7 (= C) are entirely irregu-
lar, substituting narrative or descriptive cir-
cumstances for the last line of the refrain,
and so far forth departing from primitive sim-
plicity, t The stanza in B embraces always
a question and a reply, but for what is re-
frain in other forms of the ballad we have
epical matter in many cases. A 1, 2, sub-
stantially, = B 1; A 3, 4 = B2; A 5, 6 =
B3; A 8, 9 = B4; A 11 = 6; A 12=7.
Testaments such as this ballad ends with
have been spoken of under No 11.
A is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, No 26, p. 172; by Rosa
Warrens, Schottische V. L., No 21, p. 96; by
Wolff, Halle des Volker, I, 22, and Haus-
schatz, p. 223. B, in Afzelius, nI, 10 ; "often
in Danish," Grundtvig; by Herder, Volkslie-
der, n, 207; by Diiring, p. 217; Gerhard, p.
88; Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 27.
Swedish A, by W. and M. Howitt, Literature
and Romance of Northern Europe, I, 263.J
Twa Brothers,' with some versions of which, as already re-
marked, the present ballad is blended.
} With regard to translations, I may say now, what I
might well have said earlier, that I do not aim at making a
complete list, but give such as have fallen under my notice.


13. EDWARD
169
A
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 139. From Mrs King, Kilbar-
chan. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 839.
1 'What bluid's that on thy coat lap,
Son Davie, son Davie?
What bluid's that on thy coat lap?
And the truth come tell to me.'
2 'It is the bluid of my great hawk,
Mother lady, mother lady:
It is the bluid of my great hawk,
And the truth I have told to thee.'
3 'Hawk's bluid was neer sae red,
Son Davie, son Davie:
Hawk's bluid was neer sae red,
And the truth come tell to me.'
4 'It is the bluid of my greyhound,
Mother lady, mother lady:
It is the bluid of my greyhound,
And it wadna rin for me.'
5 'Hound's bluid was neer sae red,
Son Davie, son Davie:
Hound's bluid was neer sae red,
And the truth come tell to me.'
6 'It is the bluid o my brither John,
Mother lady, mother lady:
It is the bluid o my brither John,
And the truth I have told to thee.'
7 'What about did the plea begin,
Son Davie, son Davie?'
'It began about the cutting of a willow wand
That would never been a tree.'
8 'What death dost thou desire to die,
Son Davie, son Davie?
What death dost thou desire to die?
And the truth come tell to me.'
9 'I 'll set my foot in a bottomless ship,
Mother lady, mother lady:
I 'll set my foot in a bottomless ship,
And ye 'll never see mair o me.'
10 'What wilt thou leave to thy poor wife,
Son Davie, son Davie?'
'Grief and sorrow all her life,
And she 'll never see mair o me.'
11 'What wilt thou leave to thy old son,
Son Davie, son Davie?'
'I 'll leave him the weary world to wander up
and down,
And he 'll never get mair o me.'
12 'What wilt thou leave to thy mother dear,
Son Davie, son Davie?'
'A fire o coals to burn her, wi hearty cheer,
And she 'll never get mair o me.'
B
Percy's Reliqnes, 1765, i, 53. Communicated by Sir
David Dalrymple.
1 'Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,
Edward, Edward,
Why dob your brand sae drap wi bluid,
And why sae sad gang yee O?'
'O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my hauke sae guid,
And I had nae mair bot hee O-'
2 'Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
Edward, Edward,
Your haukis bluid was nevir sae reid,
My deir son I tell thee O.'
'O I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my reid-roan steid,
That erst was sae fair and frie O.'
3 'Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Edward, Edward, •
Your steid was auld, and ye hae gat mair,
Sum other dule ye drie O.'
'O I hae killed my fadir deir,
Mither, mither,
O I hae killed my fadir deir,
Alas, and wae is mee O!'
4 'And whatten penance wul ye drie, for that,
Edward, Edward?
22


170 14. BABYLON; OR, THE
NIE BANKS O FORDIE
And whatten penance will ye drie for that?
My deir son, now tell me O.'
'He set my feit in yonder boat,
Mither, mither,
He set my feit in yonder boat,
And He fare ovir the sea O.'
5 'And what wul ye doe wi your towirs and
your ha,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye doe wi your towirs and your
ha,
That were sae fair to see O?'
'He let thame stand tul they doun fa,
Mither, mither,
He let thame stand tul they doun fa,
For here nevir mair maun I bee 0.'
6 'And what wul ye leive to your bairns and
your wife,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your bairns and your
wife,
Whan ye gang ovir the sea O?'
'The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
Mither, mither,
The warldis room, late them beg thrae life,
For thame nevir mair wul I see O.'
7 'And what wul ye leive to your ain mither
deir,
Edward, Edward?
And what wul ye leive to your ain mither
deir?
My deir son, now tell me O.'
'The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Mither, mither,
The curse of hell frae me sall ye beir,
Sic counseils ye gave to me 0.'
^ 'It began about the breaking o the bonny hazel
MS. of Alexander Laing, 1829, p. 25. wand,
And a penny wad hae bought the tree.'
.' O what did the fray begin about?
My son, come tell to me :'
A. b. 1*. tell to me O. And so every fourth line. B.
7*. That would never hae been a tree O.
104. And she H never get mair frae me O.
11s. The weary warld to wander up and
down.
Initial qu for w and z for y have been changed
throughout to w and y.
67. let.
14
BABYLON; OR, THE BONNIE BANKS 0 FORDIE
A. a, b. 'Babylon; or, The Bonnie Banks o Fordie,'
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 88. c. The same, Ap-
pendix, p. xxii, No xxvi.
B. a. Herd's MSS, i, 38, n, 76. b. 'The Banishd
Man,' The Scots Magazine, October, 1803, p. 699,
evidently derived from Herd.
C. Motherwell's MS., p. 172.
D. Motherwell's MS., p. 174.
B. 'Duke of Perth's Three Daughters,' Kinloch's An-
cient Scottish Ballads, p. 212.


14. BABYLON; OR, THE BONNIE BANKS O FORDIE
171
B a ia from tradition of the latter half of
the eighteenth century; the other copies from
the earlier part of this.
Three sisters go out (together, A, B, C, suc-
cessively, D, E) to gather flowers (A, B, E).
A banished man (outlyer bold, D, Loudon
lord, E) starts up from a hiding-place, and
offers them one after the other the choice of
being his wife or dying by his hand.
(A.) 'It 's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee penknife?'
(D.) 'Wiltow twinn with thy maidenhead, or thy
sweet life?'
The first and the second express a simple
preference for death, and are killed and laid
by, "to bear the red rose company" (A).
The youngest, in A, says she has a brother in
the wood, who will kill him if he kills her.
The outlaw asks the brother's name, finds that
he himself is the man, and takes his own life
with the same weapon that had shed the blood
of his sisters. B, C, D have three brothers,
the youngest of whom is the banished lord
(C), the outlyer bold (D). The story is de-
fective in B, C. In D the outlaw, on finding
what he has done, takes a long race, and falls
on his knife. The conclusion of E is not so
finely tragic. A brother John comes riding
by just as the robber is about to kill the third
sister, apprehends him by the agency of his
three pages, and reserves him to be hanged on
a tree,
Or thrown into the poisond lake,
To feed the toads and rattle-snake.
According to the account given by Herd,
and repeated by Jamieson, the story of the
lost conclusion of B made the banished man
discover that he had killed his two brothers as
well as his two sisters.
This ballad, with additional circumstances,
is familiar to all branches of the Scandinavian
race.
Danish. There are many versions from
oral tradition, as yet unprinted, besides these
two: A, 'Hr. Truels's Dattre,' Danske Viser,
III, 392, No 164, there reprinted from Sand-
vig, Beskrivelse over 0en Maen, 1776: B,
'Herr Thors Barn,' from recent tradition of
North Sleswig, Berggreen, Danske Folke-
Sange, 3d ed., p. 88, No 42.
A. Herr Truels' three daughters oversleep
their matins one morning, and are roused by
their mother. If we have overslept our mat-
ins, they say, we will make up at high mass.
They set out for church, and in a wood fall in
with three robbers, who say:
'Whether will ye be three robbers' wives,
Or will ye rather lose your lives?'
Much rather death, say they. The two elder
sisters submitted to their fate without a word;
the third made a hard resistance. With her
last breath she adjured the robbers to seek
a lodging at Herr Truels' that night. This
they did. They drank so long that they
drank Herr Truels to bed. Then they asked
his wife to promise herself to all three. First,
she said, she must look into their bags. In
their bags she saw her daughters' trinkets.
She excused herself for a moment, barred the
door strongly, roused her husband, and made
it known to him that these guests had killed
his three daughters. Herr Truels called on
all his men to arm. He asked the robbers
who was their father. They said that they
had been stolen by robbers, on their way to
school, one day; had had a hard life for four-
teen years; and the first crime they had com-
mitted was killing three maids yesterday.
Herr Truels revealed to them that they had
murdered their sisters, and offered them new
clothes, in which they might go away. "Nay,"
they said, "not so; life for life is meet."
They were taken out of the town, and their
heads struck off. B differs from A in only a
few points. The robbers ask lodging at Herr
Thor's, as being pilgrims. When he discovers
their true character, he threatens them with
the wheel. They say, Shall we come to the
wheel? Our father drinks Yule with the
king. They tell him their story, and their
father offers them saddle and horse to make
their best way off. They reply, "We will


172
14. BABYLON; OR, THE BONNIE BANKS O FORDIE
give blood for blood," spread their cloaks on
the floor, and let their blood run.
Swedish. 'Pehr Tyrsons Dottrar i
Wange.' A, Arwidsson, n, 413, No 166. B,
Afzelius, m, 193, No 98: ed. Bergstrbm, I,
380, No 84, i. C, Afzelius, in, 197 : ed. Berg-
strb'm, I, 382, No 84, 2, as old as the last half
of the seventeenth century. D, Afzelius, m,
202: ed. Bergstrbm, i, 384, No 84, 3. E, "C.
J. Wesson, De paroecia Kama (an academical
dissertation), Upsala, 1836," Arwidsson, as
above, who mentions another imprinted copy
in the Royal Library.
A. Herr Tores' daughters overslept matins,
dressed themselves handsomely, and set off for
mass. All on the heath they were met by
three wood-robbers, who demanded, Will ye
be our wives, or lose your lives? The first
answered: God save us from trying either!
the second, Rather let us range the world!
the third, Better death with honor! But
First were they the three wood-robbers' wives,
And after that they lost their young lives.
The robbers strip them; then go and ask to be
taken in by Herr Tores. He serves them with
mead and wine, but presently begins to wish
his daughters were at home. His wife sees
him to bed; then returns to her guests, who
offer her a silken sark to pass the night with
them. "Give me a sight of the silken sark,"
she cries, with prophetic soul: "God have
mercy on my daughters!" She rouses her
husband, and tells him that the robbers have
slain his bairns. He puts on his armor and
kills two of them: the third begs to be spared
till he can say who were his kin; his father's
name is Tores! Father and mother resolve
to build a church for penance, and it shall be
called Kerna. B, C, D. The girls meet three
"vallare," strolling men, and none of them
good (C). The robbers cut off the girls' heads
on the trunk of a birch (cf. English C 5: "It's
lean your head upon my staff," and with his
pen-knife he has cutted it aff): three springs
* Lyngbye insists on translating vadlarar pilgrims, though
his people understood the word to mean robbers. He refers
to the Icelandic vallari, which, originally a pilgrim, came to
mean a tramp. No one can fail to recognize the character
burst forth immediately. They go to the
house, and ask the mother if she will buy
silken sarks that nine maids have stitched
(B). She says:
'Open your sacks, and let me see:
Mayhap I shall know them all three.'
The father, in B, when he discovers that he
has slain his own sons, goes to the smith, and
has an iron band fastened round his middle.
The parents vow to build a church as an ex-
piation, and it shall be called Kerna (B, C).
Faroe. 'Torkilds Riim, eller St. Catha-
rinae Vise,' Lyngbye, Faeraiske Qvasder,
In this form of the story, as in the Icelandic
versions which follow, the robbers are not the
brothers of the maids. Torkild's two daugh-
ters sleep till the sun shines on their beds.
Their father wakens them, and tells Katrine
she is waited for at church. Katrine dresses
herself splendidly, but does not disdain to sad-
dle her own horse.
And since no knave was ready to help,
Katrine bridled the horse herself.
And since no knave was standing about,
Herself put the bit in her horse's mouth.
First she came upon three strollers (vadla-
rar *), then two, then one, and the last asked
her whether she would pass the night with
him (vera qvoldar vujv) or die. He cut off
her head, and wherever her blood ran a light
kindled; where her head fell a spring welled
forth: where her body lay a church was [af-
terwards] built. The rover came to Torkild's
house, and the father asked if he had seen
Katrine. He said she had been at Mary kirk
the day before, and asked for a lodging,
feigning to be sick. This was readily granted.
He went to bed, and Aasa, the other sister,
waited upon him. He offered her a silken
sark to sleep with him. Aasa asked to see the
sark first, and found on it her sister's mark.
who has become the terror of our rural districts, and to
whom, in our preposterous regard for the rights of "man,"
we sacrifice the peace, and often the lives, of women.


14. BABYLON; OR, THE BONNIE BANKS O FORDIE
173
The fellow went on to offer her a blue cloak
and gold crown successively, and on both of
these she saw her sister's mark. Aasa bade
him good-night, went to her father, and told
him that the man they had housed had killed
his daughter. Torkild ordered his swains
to light a pile in the wood: early the next
morning they burned the murderer on it.
Icelandic. Five Icelandic versions, and the
first stanza of two more, are given in Islenzk
Fornkvseoi, I, 108 ff, No 15, • Vallara kvaeSi.'
The story is nearly the same as in the Fiirde
ballad. Two of Thorkell's daughters sleep
till after the sun is up (B, C). They wash
and dress; they set out for church (C). On
the heath they encounter a strolling man, A; a
tall, large man, C, E; a horseman or knight, D.
He greets them: "Why will ye not speak?
Are ye come of elves, or of kings them-
selves?" A [Are ye come of earls, or of
beggar-churls? B]. They answer, We are
not come of elves, nor of kings themselves;
we are Thorkell's daughters, and serve Mary
kirk. He asks, Will ye choose to lose your
life, or shall I rather take you to wife?
The choice, they say, is hard: they would
rather die. He kills them and buries them.
At night he goes to Thorkell's house, where
Asa is alone. He knocks to be let in; Asa
refuses; he draws the latch with his deft
fingers (A, C, D). He offers Asa a silken
sark to sleep with him [and a blue cloak to
say nothing, A]. She asked to see the sark,
and knew her sisters' work, begged him to
wait a moment, went to her father, and told
him that the murderer of his daughters was
there. Thorkell dashed his harp to the floor
[and kicked over the table, D, E], The mur-
derer in the morning was hanged like a dog,
A, B. [Thorkell tore at his hair and cut
him down with an elder-stock, C; they fought
three days, and on the fourth the villain was
hanged in a strap, E, the knight was hang-
ing like a dog, D]. A miraculous light burned
over the place where the maids had been
buried, A 16, C 27, D 24, E 12. When their
bodies were taken into the church, the bells
rang of themselves, D.
Norwegian versions of this ballad have
been obtained from tradition, but none as yet
have been published.
"The mains and burn of Fordie, the banks
of which are very beautiful," says Aytoun (I,
159), "lie about six miles to the east of Dun-
keld." Tradition has connected the story
with half a dozen localities in Sweden, and,
as Professor Grundtvig informs me, with at
least eight places in the different provinces of
Denmark. The Kerna church of the Swedish
ballads, not far from Linkoping (Afzelius),
has been popularly supposed to derive its name
from a Catharina, Karin, or Karna, killed by
her own brother, a wood-robber, near its site.
See Afzelius, ed. Bergstrom, n, 329 ff: Danske
Viser, m, 444 f.
A is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske
_og skotske Folkeviser, No 34, p. 216, and,
with some slight use of Aytoun, I, 160, by
Rosa Warrens, Schottische Volkslieder der
Vorzeit, No 18, p. 85. Danish A, by Prior,
nI, 252.
A
a. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 88. b. The same. c. The
same, Appendix, p. xxii, No xxvi, apparently from South
Perthshire.
1 There were three ladies lived in a bower,
Eh vow bonnie
And they went out to pull a flower.
On the bonnie banks o Fordie
2 They hadna pu'ed a flower but ane,
When up started to them a banisht man.
3 He's taen the first sister by her hand,
And he's turned her round and made her
stand.
4 'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?'
5 'It's I 'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I 'll rather die by your wee pen-knife.'
6 He's killed this may, and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.


174
14. BABYLON; OB, THE BONNIE BANKS O FOBDIE
7 He's taken the second ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round and made her
stand.
8 'It's whether will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?'
9 'I 'll not be a rank robber's wife,
But I 'll rather die by your wee pen-knife.'
10 He's killed this may, and he's laid her by,
For to bear the red rose company.
11 He's taken the youngest ane by the hand,
And he's turned her round and made her
stand.
12 Says, 'Will ye be a rank robber's wife,
Or will ye die by my wee pen-knife?'
13 'I 'll not be a rank robber's wife,
Nor will I die by your wee pen-knife.
14 'For I hae a brother in this wood.
And gin ye kill me, it's he 'll kill thee.'
15 'What's thy brother's name? come tell to
me.'
'My brother's name is Baby Lon.'
16 'O sister, sister, what have I done!
O have I done this ill to thee!
17 '0 since I've done this evil deed,
Good sall never be seen o me.'
18 He's taken out his wee pen-knife,
And he's twyned hirnsel o his ain sweet life.
B
a. Herd's MSS, i, 38, n, 76. b. The Scots Magazine,
Oct., 1803, p. 699, communicated by Jamieson, and evidently
from Herd's copy.
1 There wond three ladies in a bower,
Annet and Margret and Marjorie
And they have gane out to pu a flower.
And the dew it lyes on the wood, gay ladie
2 They had nae pu'd a flower but ane,
When up has started a banished man.
3 He has taen the eldest by the hand,
He has turned her about and bade her stand.
4 'Now whether will ye be a banisht man's wife,
Or will ye be sticked wi my pen-knife?'
5 'I will na be ca'd a banished man's wife,
I 'll rather be sticked wi your pen-knife.'
6 And he has taen out his little pen-knife,
And frae this lady he has taen the life.
7 He has taen the second by the hand,
He has turned her about and he bad her stand.
8 'Now whether will ye be a banisht man's wife,
Or will ye be sticked wi my pen-knife?'
9 'I will na be ca'd a banished man's wife;
I 'll rather be sticked wi your pen-knife.'
10 And he has taen out his little pen-knife,
And frae this lady he has taen the life.
11 He has taen the youngest by the hand,
He has turned her about and he bad her stand.
12 'Now whether will ye be a banished man's
wife,
Or will ye be sticked wi my pen-knife?'
13 'I winnae be called a banished man's wife,
Nor yet will I be sticked wi your pen-knife.
14 'But gin my three brethren had been here,
Ye had nae slain my sisters dear.'
*****


14. BABYLON; OB, THE BONNIE BANKS O FOEDIE
175
0
Motherwell's MS., p. 172. From J. Goldie, March, 1825.
1 There were three sisters on a road,
Gilly flower gentle rosemary
And there they met a banished lord.
And the dew it hings over the mulberry tree
2 The eldest sister was on the road,
And there she met with the banished lord.
3 'O will ye consent to lose your life,
Or will ye be a banished lord's wife?'
4 'IH rather consent to lose my life
Before I 'll be a banished lord's wife.'
5 'It's lean your head upon my staff,'
And with his pen-knife he has cutted it aff.
6 He flang her in amang the broom,
Saying, ' Lye ye there till another ane come.'
7 The second sister was on the road,
And there she met with the banished lord.
8 'O will ye consent to lose your life,
Or will ye be a banished lord's wife?'
9 * I 'll rather consent to lose my life
Before I 'll be a banished lord's wife.'
10 'It's lean your head upon my staff,'
And with his pen-knife he has cutted it aff.
11 He flang her in amang the broom,
Saying, ''Lie ye there till another ane come.'
12 The youngest sister was on the road,
And there she met with the banished lord.
13 'O will ye consent to lose your life,
Or will ye be a banished lord's wife?'
14 'O if my three brothers were here,
Ye durstna put me in such a fear.'
15 'What are your three brothers, altho they were
here,
That I durstna put you in such a fear?'
16 'My eldest brother's a belted knight,
The second, he's a . . .
17 'My youngest brother's a banished lord,
And oftentimes he walks on this road.'
*****
D
Motherwell's MS., p. 174. From the recitation of Agnes
Lyle, Kilbarchan, July 27, 1825.,
1 There were three sisters, they lived in a
bower,
Sing Anna, sing Margaret, sing Marjorie
The youngest o them was the fairest flower.
And the dew goes thro the wood, gay ladie
2 The oldest of them she's to the wood gane,
To seek a braw leaf and to bring it hame.
3 There she met with an outlyer bold,
Lies many long nights in the woods so cold.
4 'Istow a maid, or istow a wife?
Wiltow twinn with thy maidenhead, or thy
sweet life?'
6 'O kind sir, if I hae't at my will,
IH twinn with my life, keep my maidenhead
still.'
6 He's taen out his we pen-knife,
He's twinned this young lady of her sweet life
7 He wiped his knife along the dew;
But the more he wiped, the redder it grew.
8 The second of them she's to the wood gane,
To seek her old sister, and to bring her hame.
9 There she met with an outlyer bold,
Lies many long nights in the woods so cold.
10 'Istow a maid, or istow a wife?
Wiltow twinn with thy maidenhead, or thy
sweet life?'
11 'O kind sir, if I hae't at my will,
I 'll twinn with my life, keep my maidenhead
still.'
12 He's taen out his we pen-knife,
He's twinned this young lady of her sweet life.


176
14. BABYLON; OR, THE BONNIE BANKS O FORDIE
13 He wiped his knife along the dew;
But the more he wiped, the redder it grew.
14 The youngest of them she's to the wood gane,
To seek her two sisters, and to bring them
hame.
15 There she mei with an outlyer bold,
Lies many long nights in the woods so cold.
16 'Istow a maid, or istow a wife?
Wiltow twinn with thy maidenhead, or thy
sweet life?'
17 'If my three brethren they were here,
Such questions as these thou durst nae speer.'
18 'Pray, what may thy three brethren be,
THat I durst na mak so bold with thee?'
19 'The eldest o them is a minister bred,
He teaches the people from evil to good.
20 'The second o them is a ploughman good,
He ploughs the land for his livelihood.
21 'The youngest of them is an outlyer bold,
Lies many a long night in the woods
cold.'
22 He stuck his knife then into the ground,
He took a long race, let himself fall on.
E
Kinlocb's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 212. From M>
shire.
1 The Duke o Perth had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and fair Marie;
And Elizabeth's to the greenwud gane,
To pu the rose and the fair lilie.
2 But she hadna pu'd a rose, a rose,
A double rose, but barely three,
Whan up and started a Loudon lord,
Wi Loudon hose, and Loudon sheen.
3 'Will ye be called a robber's wife?
Or will ye be stickit wi my bloody knife?
For pu'in the rose and the fair lilie,
For pu'in them sae fair and free.'
4 'Before I 'll be called a robber's wife,
I 'll rather be stickit wi your bloody knife,
For pu'in,' etc.
5 Then out he's tane his little pen-knife,
And he's parted her and her sweet life,
And thrown her oer a bank o brume,
There never more for to be found.
6 The Duke o Perth had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and fair Marie;
And Margaret's to the greenwud gane,
To pu the rose and the fair lilie.
7 She hadna pu'd a rose, a rose,
A double rose, but barely three,
When up and started a Loudon lord,
Wi Loudon hose, and Loudon sheen.
8 'Will ye be called a robber's wife?
Or will ye be stickit wi my bloody knife?
For pu'in,' etc.
9 'Before I 'll be called a robber's wife,
I 'll rather be stickit wi your bloody knife,
For pu'in,' etc.
10 Then out he's tane his little pen-knife,
And he's parted her and her sweet life,
For pu'in, etc.
11 The Duke o Perth had three daughters,
Elizabeth, Margaret, and fair Marie;
And Mary's to the greenwud gane,
To pu the rose and the fair lilie.
12 She hadna pu'd a rose, a rose,
A double rose, but barely three,
When up and started a Loudon lord,
Wi Loudon hose, and Loudon sheen.
13 'O will ye be called a robber's wife?
Or will ye be stickit wi my bloody knife?
For pu'in,' etc.
14 'Before I 'll be called a robber's wife,
I 'll rather be stickit wi your bloody knife,
For pu'in,' etc.


15. LEESOME BRAND
177
15 But just as he took out his knife,
To tak frae her her ain sweet life,
Her brother John cam ryding bye,
And this bloody robber he did espy.
16 But when he saw his sister fair,
He kennd her by her yellow hair;
He calld upon his pages three,
To find this robber speedilie.
17 'My sisters twa that are dead and gane,
For whom we made a heavy maene,
It's you that's twinnd them o their life,
And wi your cruel bloody knife.
18 'Then for their life ye sair shall dree;
Ye sall be hangit on a tree,
Or thrown into the poisond lake,
To feed the toads and rattle-snake.'
A. a. "Given from two copies obtained from reci-
tation, which differ but little from each other.
Indeed, the only variation is in the verse
where the outlawed brother unweetingly slays
his sister." [19.] Motherwell.
b. 19. He's taken out his wee penknife,
Hey how bonnie
And he's twined her o her ain sweet life.
On the, etc.
o. The first stanza only:
There were three sisters livd in a bower,
Fair Annet and Margaret and Marjorie
And they went out to pu a flower.
And the dew draps off the hyndberry tree
B. a. "To a wild melancholy old tune not in any
collection."
"N. B. There are a great many other verses
which I could not recover. Upon describing
her brothers, the banished man finds that he
has killed his two brothers and two sisters, —
upon which he kills himself." Herd.
2*. MS. Quhen. 41, 42, 5", 12l, 122, 132, 14s.
ye, your, yet, MS. ze, zour, zet. 8, 9, 10
are not written out.
b. "Of this I have got only 14 stanzas, but
there are many more. It is a horrid story.
The banished man discovers that he has killed
two of his brothers and his three (?) sisters,
upon which he kills himself." Jamieson.
The first two stanzas only are cited by Jimieson.
I1. three sisters. 22. up there started.
C. 7-11 and 122 are not written out in the MS.
"Repeat as to the second sister, mutatis mu-
tandis." Motherwell.
D. 9-13 are not written out in the MS. "Same
as 1st sister." Motherwell.
142. bring her.
15,16 are not written out. "Same as 1st and
2d sisters, but this additional, viz'." M.
222. longe, or large?
15
LEESOME BRAND
L 'Leesome Brand.' a. Buchan's Ballads of the North B. 'The Broom blooms bonnie,' etc., Motherwell's MS.,
of Scotland, i, 38. b. Motherwell's MS., p. 626. p. 365.
ThIs is one of the cases in which a remark-
ably fine ballad has been worse preserved in
Scotland than anywhere else. Without light
from abroad we cannot fully understand even
so much as we have saved, and with this light
comes a keen regret for what we have lost.
A, from Buchan's Ballads of the North of
Scotland, is found also in Motherwell's MS.,
but without doubt was derived from Buchan.
Though injured by the commixture of foreign
elements, A has still much of the original
story. B has, on the contrary, so little that
23


178
15. LEESOME BRAND
distinctively and exclusively belongs to this
story that it might almost as well have been
put with the following ballad, 'Sheath and
Knife,' as here. A third ballad, 'The Birth
of Robin Hood,' preserves as much of the
story as A, but in an utterly incongruous and
very modern setting, being, like 'Erlinton,'
C, forced into an absurd Robin Hood frame-
work.
The mixture of four-line with two-line
stanzas in A of course comes from different
ballads having been blended, but for all that,
these ballads might have had the same theme.
Stanzas 33-35, however, are such as we meet
with in ballads of the ' Earl Brand' class, but
not in those of the class to which • Leesome
Brand' belongs. In the English ballads, and
nearly all the Danish, of the former class,
there is at least a conversation between son
and mother [father], whereas in the other the
catastrophe excludes such a possibility. Again,
the "unco land" in the first stanza, "where
winds never blew nor cocks ever crew," is at
least a reminiscence of the paradise depicted
in the beginning of many of the versions of
'Ribold and Guldborg,' and stanza 4 of 'Lee-
some Brand' closely resembles stanza 2 of
'Earl Brand,' A.* Still, the first and fourth
stanzas suit one ballad as well as the other,
which is not true of 33-35.
The name Leesome Brand may possibly be
a corruption of Hildebrand, as Earl Brand
almost certainly is; but a more likely origin
is the Gysellannd of one of the kindred Dan-
ish ballads.
The white hind, stanzas 28, 30, is met with
in no other ballad of this class, and, besides
this, the last four stanzas are in no kind of
keeping with what goes before, for the " young
son " is spoken of as having been first brought
home at some previous period. Grundtvig has
suggested that the hind and the blood came
from a lost Scottish ballad resembling ' The
Maid Transformed into a Hind,' D. g. F, No
58. In this ballad a girl begs her brother,
who is going hunting, to spare the little hind
that "plays before his foot." The brother
• And also stanza 3 of Buchan'9 'Fairy Knight,' ' The
Elfin Knight,' D, p. 17 of this volume, which runs:
nevertheless shoots the hind, though not mor-
tally, and sets to work to flay it, in which
process he discovers his sister under the hind's
hide. His sister tells him that she had been
successively changed into a pair of scissors, a
sword, a hare, a hind, by her step-mother, and
that she was not to be free of the spell until
she had drunk of her brother's blood. Her
brother at once cuts his fingers, gives her some
of his blood, and the girl is permanently re-
stored to her natural shape, and afterwards is
happily married. Stanzas similar to 36-41 of
A and 12-16 of B will be found in the ballad
which follows this, to which they are especially
well suited by their riddling character; and I
believe that they belong there, and not here.
It is worthy of remark, too, that there is a
hind in another ballad, closely related to No
16 (' The Bonny Hind'), and that the hind
in « Leesome Brand' may, in some way not
now explicable, have come from this. The
confounding of ' Leesome Brand' with a bal-
lad of the ' Bonny Hind' class would be par-
alleled in Danish, for in 'Redselille og Me-
delvold' T (and perhaps I, see Grundtvig's
note, V, 237), the knight is the lady's brother.
The " auld son" in B, like the first bring-
ing home of the young son in A 45, 47, shows
how completely the proper story has been lost
sight of. There should be no son of any de-
scription at the point at which this stanza
comes in, and auld son should everywhere be
young son. The best we can do, to make
sense of stanza 3, is to put it after 8, with
the understanding that woman and child are
carried off for burial; though really there is
no need to move them on that account. The
shooting of the child is unintelligible in the
mutilated state of the ballad. It is apparently
meant to be an accident. Nothing of the
kind occurs in other ballads of the class, and
the divergence is probably a simple corrup-
tion.
The ballad which 'Leesome Brand' repre-
sents is preserved among the Scandinavian
races under four forms.
Danish. I. 'Bolde Hr. Nilaus' Lon,' a
I hae a sister eleven years auld,
And she to the young men's bed has made kauld.


15. LEESOME BRAND'
179
single copy from a manuscript of the begin-
ning of the 17th century: Grundtvig, V, 231,
No 270. II. 'Redselille og Medelvold,' in an
all but unexampled number of versions, of
,which some sixty are collated, and some twen-
ty-five printed, by Grundtvig, most of them
recently obtained from tradition, and the old-
est a broadside of about the year 1770:
Grundtvig, v, 234, No 271. III. 'Sonnens
Sorg,' Grundtvig, v, 289, No 272, two ver-
sions only: A from the middle of the 16th
century; B three hundred years later, pre-
viously printed in Berggreen's Danske Folke-
sange, I, No 83 (3d ed.). IV. 'Stalbroders
Kvide,' Grundtvig, v, 301, No 273, two ver-
sions: A from the beginning of the 17th cen-
tury, B from about 1570.
Swedish. II. A, broadside of 1776, re-
printed in Grundtvig, No 271, V, 281, Bilag
1, and in Jamieson's Illustrations, p. 373 ff,
with a translation. B, 'Herr Redevall,' Af-
zelius, n, 189, No 58, new ed. No 51. C,
'Krist' Lilla och Herr Tideman,' Arwidsson,
I, 352, No 54 A. D, E, F, G, from Caval-
lius and Stephens' manuscript collection, first
printed by Grundtvig, No 271, V, 282 ff, Bilag
2-5. H, 'Rosa lilla,' Eva Wigstrom, Folk-
visor fran Skane, in Ur de nordiska Folkens
Lif, af Artur Hazelius, p. 133, No 8. III. A
single version, of date about 1650, 'Moder
och Son,' Arwidsson, n, 15, No 70.
Norwegian. II. Six versions and a frag-
ment, from recent tradition: A-E, G, first
printed by Grundtvig, No 271, V, 284 ff, .Bilag
6-11; F, 'Grivilja,' in Lindeman's Norske
Fjeldmelodier, No 121. III. Six versions from
recent tradition, A-F, first printed by Grundt-
vig, No 272, v, 297 ff, Bilag 1-6.
Icelandic. III. 'Sonar harmur,' Islenzk
FornkvaetSi, I, 140 ff, No 17, three versions,
A, B, C, the last, which is the oldest, being
from late in the 17th century; also the first
stanza of a fourth, D.
All the Scandinavian versions are in two-
line stanzas save Danish 272 B, and A in part,
and Icelandic 17 C, which are in four; the
last, however, in stanzas of two couplets.
It will be most convenient to give first a
summary of the story of 'Redselille og Me-
delvold,' and to notice the chief divergences
of the other ballads afterwards. A mother
and her daughter are engaged in weaving
gold tissue. The mother sees milk running
from the girl's breasts, and asks an explana-
tion. After a slight attempt at evasion, the
daughter confesses that she has been beguiled
by a knight. The mother threatens both with
. punishment: he shall be hanged [burned,
broken on the wheel, sent out of the country,
i. e., sold into servitude], and she sent away
[broiled on a gridiron, burned, drowned].
Some copies begin further back, with a stanza
or two in which we are told that the knight
has served in the king's court, and gained the
favor of the king's daughter. Alarmed by
her mother's threats, the maid goes to her lov-
er's house at night, and after some difficulty in
effecting an entrance (a commonplace, like the
ill-boding milk above) informs him of the fate
that awaits them. The knight is sufficiently
prompt now, and bids her get her gold to-
gether while he saddles his horse. They ride
away, with [or without] precautions against
discovery, and come to a wood. Four Nor-
wegian versions, A, B, C, G, and also two Ice-
landic versions, A, B, of 'Sannens Sorg,' in-
terpose a piece of water, and a difficulty in
crossing, owing to the ferryman's refusing
help or the want of oars; but this passage is
clearly an infiltration from a different story.
Arriving at the wood, the maid desires to rest
a while. The customary interrogation does
not fail, — whether the way is too long or the
saddle too small. The knight lifts her off the
horse, spreads his cloak for her on the grass,
and she gives way to her anguish in such ex-
clamations as " My mother had nine women:
would that I had the worst of them!" "My
mother would never have been so angry with
me but she would have helped me in this
strait!" Most of the Danish versions make
the knight offer to bandage his eyes and ren-
der such service as a man may; but she re-
plies that she would rather die than that man
should know of woman's pangs. So Swedish
H, nearly. Partly to secure privacy, and
partly from thirst, she expresses a wish for
water, and her lover goes in search of some.


180
15. LEESOME BRAND
(This in nearly all the Danish ballads, and
many of the others. But in four of the Nor-
wegian versions of 'Sannens Sorg ' the lover
is told to go and amuse himself, much as in
our ballads.) When he comes to the spring
or the brook, there sits a nightingale and
sings. Two nightingales, a small bird, a voice
from heaven, a small dwarf, an old man, re-
place the nightingale in certain copies, and in
others there is nothing at all; but the great
majority has a single nightingale, and, as
Grundtvig points out, the single bird is right,
for the bird is really a vehicle for the soul of
the dead Redselille. The nightingale sings,
"Redselille lies dead in the wood, with two
sons [son and daughter] in her bosom." All
that the nightingale has said is found to
be true. According to Danish O and Swedish
C, the knight finds the lady and a child, ac-
cording to Swedish B and Norwegian A, B, C,
the lady and two sons, dead. In Danish B,
L (as also the Icelandic 'Sonar Harmur,' A,
B, and Danish 'Stalbroders Kvide,' A) the
knight digs a grave, and lays mother and chil-
dren in it; he lays himself with them in A
and M. It is not said whether the children
are dead or living, and the point would hardly
be raised but for what follows. In Danish
D, P and Swedish F, it is expressly mentioned
that the children are alive, and in Q, R, S, T,
U, six copies of V, and Y, and also in ' Bolde
Hr. Nilaus' Lan,' and in 'Sannens Sorg,' Dan-
ish A, Norwegian A, C, D, E, the children
are heard, or seem to be heard, shrieking from
under the ground. Nearly all the versions
make the knight run himself through with
his sword, either immediately after the others
are laid in the grave, or after he has ridden
far and wide, because he cannot endure the
cries of the children from under the earth.
This would seem to be the original conclusion
of the story; the horrible circumstance of the
children being buried alive is much more
likely to be slurred over or omitted at a later
day than to be added.
We may pass over in silence the less im-
portant variations in the very numerous ver-
sions of ' Redselille and Medelvold,' nor need
we be detained long by the other three Scan-
dinavian forms of the ballad. 'Sannens Sorg'
stands in the same relation to ' Redselille and
Medelvold ' as ' Hildebrand and Hilde,' does
to 'Ribold and Guldborg' (see p. 89 of this
volume); that is, the story is told in the first
person instead of the third. A father asks his
son why he is so sad, Norwegian A, B, C, D,
Icelandic A, B, C, D. Five years has he sat
at his father's board, and never uttered a merry
word. The son relates the tragedy of his life.
He had lived in his early youth at the house
of a nobleman, who had three daughters. He
was on very familiar terms with all of them,
and the youngest loved him. When the time
came for him to leave the family, she proposed
that he should take her with him, Danish B,
Icelandic A, B, C [he makes the proposal in
Norwegian C]. From this point the narrative
is much the same as in ' Redselille and Medel-
vold,' and at the conclusion he falls dead in
his father's arms [at the table], Norwegian A,
B, D, Icelandic A. The mother takes the
place of the father in Danish B and Swedish,
and perhaps it is the mother who tells the
story in English A, but the bad condition of
the text scarcely enables us to say. Danish B
and the Swedish copy have lost the middle and
end of the proper story: there is no wood, no
childbirth, no burial. The superfluous boat
of some Norwegian versions of ' Redselille' re-
appears in these, and also in Icelandic A, B;
it is overturned in a storm, and the lady is
drowned.
'Stalbroders Kvide' differs from ' Sannens
Sorg' only in this: that the story is related
to a comrade instead of father or mother.
'Bolde Hr. Nilaus' Lan,' which exists but
in a single copy, has a peculiar beginning.
Sir Nilaus has served eight years in the king's
court without recompense. He has, however,
gained the favor of the king's daughter, who
tells him that she is suffering much on his ac-
count. If this be so, says Nilaus, I will quit
the land with speed. He is told to wait till
she has spoken to her mother. She goes to
her mother and says: Sir Nilaus has served
eight years, and had no reward; he desires
the best that it is in your power to give. The
queen exclaims, He shall never have my only


15. LEESOME BRAND
181
daughter's hand! The young lady immediately
bids Nilaus saddle his horse while she collects
her gold, and from this point we have the
story of Redselille.
Dutch. Willems, Oude vlaemsche Lieder-
en, p. 482, No 231,' De Ruiter en Mooi Elsje;'
Hoffmann v. Fallersleben, Niederlandische
Volkslieder, 2d ed., p. 170, No 75: broadside
of the date 1780.
A mother inquires into her daughter's con-
dition, and learns that she is going with child
by a trooper (he is called both 'ruiter' and
'landsknecht'). The conversation is overheard
by the other party, who asks the girl whether
she will ride with him or bide with her mother.
She chooses to go with him, and as they ride
is overtaken with pains. She asks whether
there is not a house where she can rest. The
soldier builds her a hut of thistles, thorns,
and high stakes, and hangs his cloak over the
aperture. She asks him to go away, and to
come back when he hears a cry : but the maid
was dead ere she cried. The trooper laid his
head on a stone, and his heart brake with
grief.
German. A, Simrock, No 40, p. 92, 'Von
Farbe so bleich,' from Bonn and Rheindorf,
repeated in Mittler, No 194. The mother, on
learning her daughter's plight, imprecates a
curse on her. The maid betakes herself to
her lover, a trooper, who rides off with her.
They come to a cool spring, and she begs for
a fresh drink, but, feeling very ill, asks if there
is no hamlet near, from which she could have
woman's help. The aid of the trooper is re-
jected in the usual phrase, and he is asked to
go aside, and answer when called. If there
should be no call, she will be dead. There
was no call, and she was found to be dead,
with two sons in her bosom. The trooper
wrapped the children in her apron, and dug
her grave with his sword. B, Reifferscheid,
Westfalische Volkslieder, p. 106, ' Ach Wun-
der iiber Wunder,' from Bokendorf: much the
same as to the story. C, Mittler, No 195, p.
175, 'Von Farbe so bleich,' a fragment of a
copy from Hesse; Zuccalmaglio, p. 187, No
90, 'Die Waisen,' an entire copy, ostensibly
from the Lower Rhine, but clearly owing its
last fourteen stanzas to the editor. The trooper,
in this supplement, leaves the boys with his
mother, and goes over seas. The boys grow
up, and set out to find their father. In the
course of their quest, they pass a night in a
hut in a wood, and are overheard saying a
prayer for their father and dead mother, by a
person who announces herself as their mater-
nal grandmother! After this it is not sur-
prising that the father himself should turn up
early the next morning. The same editor,
under the name of Montanus, gives in Die
deutschen Volksfeste, p. 45 f, a part of this
ballad again, with variations which show his
hand beyond a doubt. We are here informed
that the ballad has above a hundred stanzas,
and that the conclusion is that the grand-
mother repents her curse, makes her peace
with the boys, and builds a convent.
French. Bujeaud, Chants et Chansons pop-
ulates des provinces de l'Ouest, A, I,198, B, i,
200,' J'entends le rossignolet.' A. This ballad
has suffered injury at the beginning and the
end, but still preserves very well the chief
points of the story. A lover has promised his
mistress that after returning from a long ab-
sence he would take her to see his country.
While traversing a wood she is seized with her
pains. The aid of her companion is declined:
"Cela n'est point votre mdtier." She begs for
water. The lover goes for some, and meets
a lark, who tells him that he will find his love
dead, with a child in her arms. Two stanzas
follow which are to no purpose. B. The other
copy of this ballad has a perverted instead of
a meaningless conclusion, but this keeps some
traits that are wanting in A. It is a two-
line ballad, with the nightingale in the re-
frain: "J'entends le rossignolet." A fair
maid, walking with her lover, falls ill, and lies
down under a thorn. The lover asks if he
shall go for her mother. "She would not
come: she has a cruel heart." Shall I go for
mine ?" Go, like the swallow!" He comes
back and finds his love dead, and says he will
die with his mistress. The absurd conclusion
follows that she was feigning death to test his
love.
The names in the Scandinavian ballads, it


182
15. LEESOME BRAND
is remarked by Grundtvig, V, 242, 291, are not
Norse, but probably of German derivation,
and, if such, would indicate a like origin for
the story. The man's name, for instance, in
the Danish 'Sannens Sorg,' A, Gysellannd,
seems to point to Gisal brand or Gisalbald,
German names of the 8th or 9th century.
There is some doubt whether this Gysellannd
is not due to a corruption arising in the course
of tradition (see Grundtvig, v, 302); but if
the name may stand, it will account for our
Leesome Brand almost as satisfactorily as
Hildebrand does for Earl Brand in No 7.
The passage in which the lady refuses male
assistance during her travail — found as well
in almost all the Danish versions of ' Redselille
and Medelvold,' in the German and French,
and imperfectly in Swedish D — occurs in
several other English ballads, viz.,' The Birth
of Robin Hood,' 'Rose the Red and White
Lily,'' Sweet Willie,' of Finlay's Scottish Bal-
lads, n, 61, 'Burd Helen,' of Buchan, n, 30,
'Bonnie Annie,' No 23. Nearly the whole of
the scene in the wood is in 'Wolfdietrich.'
Wolfdietrich finds a dead man and a woman
naked to the girdle, who is clasping the stem
of a tree. The man, who was her husband,
was taking her to her mother's house, where
her first child was to be born, when he was at-
tacked by the dragon Schadesam. She was now
in the third day of her travail. Wolfdietrich,
having first wrapped her in his cloak, offers his
help, requesting her to tear a strip from her
shift and bind it round his eyes. She rejects
his assistance in this form, but sends him for
water, which he brings in his helmet, but only
to find the woman dead, with a lifeless child at
her breast. He wraps mother and child in his
mantle, carries them to a chapel, and lays them
on the altar; then digs a grave with his sword,
goes for the body of the man, and buries all
three in the grave he has made. Grimm, Alt-
danische Heldenlieder, p. 508; Holtzmann,
Der grosse Wolfdietrich, st. 1587-1611; Ame-
lung u. Janicke,* Ortnit u. die Wolfdietriche,
n, 146, D, st. 51-75; with differences, I, 289,
B, st. 842-848; mother and child surviving,
I, 146, A st. 562-578; Weber's abstract of
the Heldenbuch, in Illustrations of Northern
Antiquities, p. 119, 120.
'Herr Medelvold,' a mixed text of Danish
II, Danske Viser, No 156, is translated by
Jamieson, Illustrations, p. 377; by Borrow,
Romantic Ballads, p. 28 (very ill); and by
Prior, No 101. Swedish, II, A, is translated
by Jamieson, ib., p. 373.
A
a. Bnchan's Ballads of tbe North of Scotland, i, 38. b.
Motherwell's MS., p. 626.
1 My boy was scarcely ten years auld,
Whan he went to an unco land,
Where wind never blew, nor cocks ever crew,
Ohon for my son, Leesome Brand!
2 Awa to that king's court he went,
It was to serve for meat an fee;
Gude red gowd it was his hire,
And lang in that king's court stayd he.
3 He hadna been in that unco land
But only twallmonths twa or three,
Till by the glancing o his ee,
He gaind the love o a gay ladye.
4 This ladye was scarce eleven years auld,
When on her love she was right bauld;
She was scarce up to my right knee,
When oft in bed wi men I'm tauld.
5 But when nine months were come and gane,
This ladye's face turnd pale and wane.
6 To Leesome Brand she then did say,
'In this place I can nae inair stay.
7 'Ye do you to my father's stable,
Where steeds do stand baith wight and able.
8 'Strike ane o them upo the back,
The swiftest will gie his head a wap.
• Who suggests, ii, xlv, somewhat oddly, that the pas-
sage may have been taken from Revelation, xii, 2 f, 13 f.


15. LEESOME BRAND
9 'Ye take him out upo the green,
And get him saddled and bridled seen.
10 'Get ane for you, anither for me,
And lat us ride out ower the lee.
11 'Te do you to my mother's coffer,
And out of it ye 'll take my tocher.
12 'Therein are sixty thousand pounds,
Which all to me by right belongs.'
13 He's done him to her father's stable,
Where steeds stood baith wicht and able.
14 Then he strake ane upon the back,
The swiftest gae his head a wap.
15 He's taen him out upo the green,
And got him saddled and bridled seen.
16 Ane for him, and another for her,
To carry them baith wi might and virr.
17 He's done him to her mother's coffer,
And there he's taen his lover's tocher;
18 Wherein were sixty thousand pound,
Which all to her by right belongd.
19 When they had ridden about six mile,
His true love then began to fail.
20 'O wae's me,' said that gay ladye,
'I fear my back will gang in three!
21 'O gin I had but a gude midwife,
Here this day to save my life,
22 'And ease me o my misery,
0 dear, how happy I woud be!'
23 'My love, we 're far frae ony town,
There is nae midwife to be foun.
24 'But if ye 'll be content wi me,
1 'll do for you what man can dee.'
25 'For no, for no, this maunna be,'
Wi a sigh, replied this gay ladye.
26 'When I endure my grief and pain,
My companie ye maun refrain.
27 'Ye '11 take your arrow and your bow,
And ye will hunt the deer and roe.
28 'Be sure ye touch not the white hynde,
For she is o the woman kind.'
29 He took sic pleasure in deer and roe,
Till he forgot his gay ladye. •
30 Till by it came that milk-white hynde,
And then he mind on his ladye syne.
31 He hasted him to yon greenwood tree,
For to relieve his gay ladye;
32 But found his ladye lying dead,
Likeways her young son at her head.
33 His mother lay ower her castle wa,
And she beheld baith dale and down;
And she beheld young Leesome Brand,
As he came riding to the town.
34 'Get minstrels for to play,' she said,
'And dancers to dance in my room;
For here comes my son, Leesome Brand,
And he comes merrilie to the town.'
35 'Seek nae minstrels to play, mother,
Nor dancers to dance in your room;
But tho your son comes, Leesome Brand,
Yet he comes sorry to the town.
36 'O I hae lost my gowden knife;
I rather had lost my ain sweet life!
37 'And I hae lost a better thing,
The gilded sheath that it was in.'
38 'Are there nae gowdsmiths here in Fife,
Can make to you anither knife?
39 'Are there nae sheath-makers in the land,
Can make a sheath to Leesome Brand?'
40 'There are nae gowdsmiths here in Fife,
Can make me sic a gowden knife;
41 'Nor nae sheath-makers in the land,
Can make to me a sheath again.
42 'There ne'er was man in Scotland born,
Ordaind to be so much forlorn.


184
16. LEESOME BRAND
43 'I've lost my ladye I lovd sae dear,
Likeways the son she did me bear.'
44 'Put in your hand at my bed head,
There ye 'll find a gude grey horn;
In it three draps o' Saint Paul's ain blude,
That hae been there sin he was born.
45 'Drap twa o them o your ladye,
And ane upo your little young son;
Then as lively they will be
As the first night ye brought them hame.'
46 He put his hand at her bed head,
And there he found a gude grey horn,
"Wi three draps o' Saint Paul's ain blude,
That had been there sin he was born.
47 Then he drappd twa on his ladye,
And ane o them on his young son,
And now they do as lively be,
As the first day he brought them hame.
B
Motherwell's MS., p. 365. From the recitation of Agnes
Lylc, Kilbarchan.
1 'There is a feast in your father's house,
The broom blooms bonnie and so is it fair
It becomes you and me to be very douce.
And we 'll never gang up to the broom nae
mair
2 'You will go to yon hill so hie;
Take your bow and your arrow wi thee.'
3 He's tane his lady on his back,
And his auld son in his coat lap.
4 'When ye hear me give a cry,
Ye 'll shoot your bow and let me lye.
5 'When ye see me lying still,
Throw away your bow and come running me
till.'
6 When he heard her gie the cry,
He shot his bow and he let her lye.
7 When he saw she was lying still,
He threw away his bow and came running her
till.
8 It was nae wonder his heart was sad
When he shot his auld son at her head.
9 He houkit a grave, long, large and wide,
He buried his auld son doun by her side.
10 It was nae wonder his heart was sair
When he shooled the mools on her yellow
hair.
11 'Oh,' said his father, ' son, but thou 'rt sad!
At our braw meeting you micht be glad.'
12 'Oh,' said he, ' Father, I've lost my knife
I loved as dear almost as my own life.
13 'But I have lost a far better thing,
I lost the sheath that the knife was in.'
14 'Hold thy tongue, and mak nae din;
I 'll buy thee a sheath and a knife therein.'
15 'A' the ships eer sailed the sea
Neer 'll bring such a sheath and a knife to me.
16 'A' the smiths that lives on land
Will neer bring such a sheath and knife to my
hand.'
A. b. l2. he came to. For wind .... and 31l. to greenwood tree.
cock never. 331. the castle wa.
44. bed wi him. 341. Go, minstrels.
52. His lady's. 431. lady I've loved.
22*. would I be. 44'. draps Saint Paul's. *. That has.
291. deer and doe. 452. little wee son.
30". And then on his lady he did mind. B. 21. Will you.
«


186
16. SHEATH AND KNIFE
8 'O Willie, O Willie, what makes thee in pain?'
'I have lost a sheath and knife that I 'll never
see again.'
For we 'll never, etc.
9 'There is ships o your father's sailing on the sea
That will bring as good a sheath and a knife
unto thee.'
10 'There is ships o my father's sailing on the
sea,
But sic a sheath and a knife they can never
bring to me.'
Now we 'll never, etc.
B
Sharpe's Ballad Book, ed. by D. Laing, p. 159 : Sir Walter
Scott, from his recollection of a nursery-maid's singing.
1 Ae lady has whispered the other,
The broom grows bonnie, the broom grows
fair
Lady Margaret's wi bairn to Sir Richard, her
brother.
And we daur na gae doun to the broom nae
mair
*****
2 'And when ye hear me loud, loud cry,
0 bend your bow, let your arrow fly.
And I daur na, etc.
3 'But when ye see me lying still,
O then you may come and greet your fill.'
*****
4 'It's I hae broken my little pen-knife
That I loed dearer than my life.'
And I daur na, etc.
*****
5 'It's no for the knife that my tears doun run,
But it's a' for the case that my knife was kept in.'
Johnson's Museum, No 461.
1 It's whispered in parlour, it's whispered in ha,
The broom blooms bonie, the broom blooms
fair
Lady Marget 's wi child amang our ladies a'.
And she dare na gae down to the broom nae
mair
2 One lady whisperd unto another
Lady Marget's wi child to Sir Richard, her
brother.
*****
3 'O when that you hear my loud loud cry,
Then bend your bow and let your arrows fly.
For I dare na,' etc.
D We 'll gae ride like sister and brither.
„ , jr>,,i.o- ..jt But we'll never gae down to the broom nae
Notes and Queries, 1st Series, v, 345, communicated by , 6
E. F. Rimbault. "mair
1 Ae king's dochter said to anither,
Broom blooms bonnie an grows sae fair
A. b. Motherwell's printed copy has these varia-
tions:
l1. It is talked, it is talked; a variation found
in the MS.
31. O when . . . loud, loud cry.
32. an arrow frae thy bow.
41. cauld and dead.
51. loud, loud cry.
61. has houkit
62. babie.
71. came hame.
72. dancing mang them a': this variation also
in the MS.
9\ 10l. There are.
B. "I have heard the ' Broom blooms bonnie' sung
by our poor old nursery-maid as often as I have


17. HIND HORN
187
teeth in my head, but after cudgelling my
memory I can make no more than the follow-
ing stanzas." Scott, Sharpe's Ballad Book,
1880, p. 159.
Scott makes Effie Deans, in The Heart of
Mid-Lothian, vol. i, ch. 10, sing this stanza,
probably of his own making:
The elfin knight sat on the brae,
The broom grows bonny, the broom grows
fair
And by there came lilting a lady so gay.
And we daurna gang down to the broom
nae mair
17
HIND HORN
A. 'Hindhorn,' Motherwell's MS., p. 106.
B. 'Young Hyndhorn,' Motherwell's MS., p. 418.
C. a. 'Young Hyn Horn,' Motherwell's Note-Book, p.
42. b. Motherwell's MS., p. 418.
D. 'Young Hynhorn,' Cromek's Select Scotish Songs,
iI, 204.
B. 'Hynd Horn,' Motherwell's MS., p. 91.
F. Lowran Castle, or the Wild Boar of Curridoo: with
other Tales. By B. Trotter, Dumfries, 1822.
G. 'Hynde Horn,' Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads,
p. 135.
H. 'Hynd Horn,' Buchan's Ballads of the North of
Scotland, u, 268.
A defective copy of this ballad was
printed in Cromek's Select Scottish Songs,
Ancient and Modern, 1810 (D). A fragment,
comprising the first half of the story, was in-
serted in "Lowran Castle, or the Wild Boar
of Curridoo: with other Tales," etc., by Rob-
ert Trotter, Dumfries, 1822 * (F). A com-
plete copy was first given in Kinloch's Ancient
Scottish Ballads, 1827 (G) ; another, described
by the editor as made up from Cromek's frag-
ment and two copies from recitation, in Moth-
erwell's Minstrelsy, p. 36,f later in the same
year; and a third, closely resembling Kin-
loch's, in Buchan's Ballads of the North of
Scotland, in 1828 (H). Three versions com-
plete, or nearly so, and a fragment of a fourth
are now printed for the first time, all from
Motherwell's manuscripts (A, B, C, E).
The stanza about the auger bore [wimble
* This I should have missed bat for the kindness of Mr
W. Macmath.
t Motherwell's printed copy, Minstrelsy, p. 36, is thus
made up: stanzas 1, 2, 3, 8, 15, from Cromek (D); 4-7, 9,
11, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24-28,30-37, from B; 12, 17, 18 from
bore], B 1, F 3, H 4, is manifestly out of
place. It is found in 'The Whummil Bore'
(see further on), and may have slipped into
'Hind Horn' by reason of its following, in its
proper place, a stanza beginning, " Seven lang
years I hae served the king : " cf. F 2, H 3.
G 17, 18, 21, 22, which are not intelligible
in their present connection, are perhaps, as
well as G 16, H 18-20, borrowed from some
Robin Hood ballad, in which a change is made
with a beggar.
The noteworthy points in the story of Hind
Horn are these. Hind Horn has served the
king seven years (D, F), and has fallen in love
with his daughter. She gives Hind Horn a
jewelled ring: as long as the stone keeps its
color, he may know that she is faithful; but if
it changes hue, he may ken she loves another
man. The king is angry (D), and Hind Horn
E. 23 = A 14. 10, 21, 22, 29, have not been found in his
manuscripts. The first line of the burden is from B, the
second from B. Motherwell alters his texts slightly, now
and then.


188
I7. HIND HORN
goes to sea [is sent, D]. He has been gone
seven years, E, F [seven years and a day, B],
when, looking on his ring, he sees that the
stone is pale and wan, A-H. He makes for
the land at once, and, meeting an old beggar,
asks him for news. No news but the king's
daughter's wedding: it has lasted nine days
[two and forty, A], and she will not go into
the bride-bed till she hears of Hind Horn, E.
Hind Horn changed cloaks and other gear
with the beggar, and when he came to the
king's gate asked for a drink in Horn's name,*
A, B, D. The bride herself came down, and
gave him a drink out of her own hand, A, B,
C, G, H. He drank out the drink and dropped
in the ring.
'O gat ye't by sea, or gat ye't by lan,
Or gat ye't aff a dead man's han?'
So she asked; and he answered:
'I gat na't by sea, I gat na't by lan,
But I gat it out of your own ban.' D 14.
'I got na't by sea, I got na't by land,
Nor got I it aff a drownd man's hand;
'But I got it at my wooing,
And I 'll gie it at your wedding.' G 29, 30.
The bride, who had said,
'I 'll go through nine fires so hot,
But I 'll give him a drink for Young Hyn-
horn's sake,' B 16,
is no less ready now:
'I 'll tak the red gowd frae my head,
And follow you and beg my bread.
'I 'll tak the red gowd frae my hair,
And follow you for evermair.' H 31, 32.
But Hind Horn let his cloutie cloak fall, G,
H, and told her,
* C 16,17 are corrupted, and also P 19,23,0 21; all three
in a way which allows of easy emendation. Hymen [high,
man] in C should of course be Hyn Horn. The injunction
'Ye need na leave your bridal gown,
For I 'll make ye ladie o many a town.'
The story of Horn, of which this ballad gives
little more than the catastrophe, is related at
full in
I. 'King Horn,' a gest in about 1550 short
verses, preserved in three manuscripts: the
oldest regarded as of the second half of the
13th century, or older; the others put at
1300 and a little later. All three have been
printed: (1.) By MicheL Horn et Rimenhild,
p. 259 ff, Bannatyne Club, 1845; J. R. Lum-
by, Early English Text Society, 1866; and in
editions founded on Lumby's text, by Matz-
ner, Altenglische Sprachproben, p. 270 ff,
and later by Wissmann, Quellen u. Forsch-
ungen, No 45. (2.) By Horstmann, Archiv
fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen, 1872,
l, 39 ff. (3.) By Ritson, A. E. Metrical Ro-
mancee's, II, 91 ff.
II. 'Horn et Rymenhild,' a romance in
about 5250 heroic verses, preserved likewise
in three manuscripts; the best in the Public
Library of the University of Cambridge, and
of the 14th century.
III. 'Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild,'
from a manuscript of the 14th century, in not
quite 100 twelve-line stanzas: Ritson, Metrical
Romancees, m, 282 ff; Michel, p. 341 ff.
Horn, in the old English gest, is son of
Murry [Allof], king of Suddenne. He is a
youth of extraordinary beauty, and has twelve
comrades, of whom Athulf and Fikenild are
his favorites. One day, as Murry was out rid-
ing, he came upon fifteen ships of Saracens,
just arrived. The pagans slew the king, and
insured themselves, as they thought, against
Horn's future revenge by putting him and his
twelve aboard a vessel without sail or rudder;
but " the children " drove to shore, unhurt, on
the coast of Westerness. The king, Ailmar,
gave them a kind reception, and committed
them to Athelbrus, his steward, to be properly
brought up. Rymenhild, the king's daughter,
in Or, H should be to ask nothing for Peter or Paul's sake,
but all for Horn's.


17. HIND HORN
189
fell in love with Horn, and having, with some
difficulty, prevailed upon Athelbrus to bring
him to her bower, offered herself to him as
his wife. It were no fair wedding, Horn told
her, between a thrall and a king, — a speech
which hurt Rymenhild greatly ; and Horn was
so moved by her grief that he promised to do
all she required, if she would induce the king
to knight him. This was done the next day,
and Horn at once knighted all his comrades.
Rymenhild again sent for Horn, and urged
him now to make her his wife. But Horn
said he must first prove his knighthood: if he
came back alive, he would then marry her.
Upon this Rymenhild gave him a ring, set
with stones of such virtue that he could never
be slain if he looked on it and thought of his
leman. The young knight had the good for-
tune to fall in immediately with a ship full
of heathen hounds, and by the aid of his ring
killed a hundred of the best of them. The
next day he paid Rymenhild a visit, and found
her drowned in grief on account of a bad
dream. She had cast her net in the sea, and
a great fish had broken it: she weened she
should lose the fish that she would choose.
Horn strove to comfort her, but could not con-
ceal his apprehension that trouble was brew-
ing. The fish proved to be Fikenild, Horn's
much cherished friend. He told Ailmar of
the intimacy with Rymenhild, and asserted
that Horn meant to kill the king as well as
marry the princess. Ailmar was very angry
(v. 724, Wissmann), and much grieved, too.
He found the youth in his daughter's bower,
and ordered him to quit the land anon. Horn
saddled his horse and armed himself, then
went back to Rymenhild, and told her that he
was going to a strange land for seven years:
if, after that, he neither came nor sent word,
she might take a husband. He sailed a good
way eastward (v. 799) to Ireland, and, land-
ing, met two princes, who invited him to take
service with their father. The king, Thurs-
ton, welcomed him, and had soon occasion to
employ him; for at Christmas came into court
a giant, with a message from pagans newly
arrived. They proposed that one of them
should fight three Christians:
'If your three slay our one,
Let all this land be your own;
If our one oercomes your three,
All this land then ours shall be.'
Horn scorned to fight on such terms; he
alone would undertake three of the hounds;
and so he did. In the course of a hard fight
it came out that these were the very heathen
that had slain King Murry. Horn looked on
his ring and thought on Rymenhild, then fell
on his foes. Not a man of them escaped; but
King Thurston lost many men in the fight,
among them his two sons. Having now no
heir, he offered Horn his daughter Reynild
and the succession. Horn replied that he had
not earned such a reward yet. He would
serve the king further; and when he asked
for his daughter, he hoped the king would not
refuse her.
Seven years Horn stayed with King Thurs-
ton, and to Rymenhild neither sent nor went.
A sorry time it was for her, and worst at the
end, for King Modi of Reynis asked her in
marriage, and her father consented. The wed-
ding was to be in a few days. Rymenhild
despatched messengers to every land, but Horn
heard nothing, till one day, when he was going
out to shoot, he encountered one of these, and
learned how things stood. He sent word to
his love not to be troubled; he would be there
betimes. But, alas, the messenger was drowned
on his way back, and Rymenhild, peering out
of her door for a ray of hope, saw his body
washed up by the waves. Horn now made a
clean breast to Thurston, and asked for help.
This was generously accorded, and Horn set
sail for Westerness. He arrived not too early
on the day of the wedding, — " ne might he
come no later!" — left his men in a wood,
and set off for Ailmar's court alone. He met
a palmer, and asked his news. The palmer
had come from a bridal; a wedding of maid
Rymenhild, who wept and would not be mar-
ried, because she had a husband, though he
was out of the land. Horn changed clothes
with the palmer, put on the sclavin, took scrip
and staff, blackened his skin and twisted his
lip, and presented himself at the king's gate.
The porter would not let him in ; Horn kicked


190
17. HIND HORN
open the wicket, threw the porter over the
bridge, made his way into the hall, and sat
down in the beggars' row. Rymenhild was
weeping as if she were out of her wits, but
after meat she rose to give all the knights
and squires drink from a horn which she bare:
such was the custom. Horn called to her:
'Skink us with the first,
The beggars ben a thirst.'
She laid down her horn and filled him a gallon
bowl; but Horn would not drink of that. He
said, mysteriously, "Thou thinkest I am a
beggar, but I am a fisher, come far from the
East, to fish at thy feast. My net lies near at
hand, and hath full seven year. I am come
to see if it has taken any fish.
'I am come to fish;
Drink to me from thy dish,
Drink to Horn from horn !'"
Rymenhild looked at him, a chill creeping
over her heart. What he meant by his fish-
ing she did not see. She filled her horn and
drank to him, handed it to the pilgrim, and
said, " Drink thy fill, and tell me if ever thou
saw Horn." Horn drank, and threw the ring
into the vessel. When the princess went to
bower, she found the ring she had given Horn.
She feared he was dead, and sent for the
palmer. The palmer said Horn had died on
the voyage to Westerness, and had begged
him to go with the ring to Rymenhild. Ry-
menhild could bear no more. She threw her-
self on her bed, where she had hid a knife,
to kill both King Modi and herself if Horn
should not come; she set the knife to her
heart, and there Horn stopped her. He wiped
off the black, and cried, " I am Horn!" Great
was their bliss, but it was not a time to in-
dulge themselves fully.
Horn sprang out of hall,
And let his sclavin fall, (1246)
and went to summon his knights. Rymen-
hild sent after him the faithful Athulf, who
all the while had been watching for Horn in
the tower. They slew all that were in the
castle, except King Ailmar and Horn's old
comrades. Horn spared even Fikenild, taking
an oath of fidelity from him and the rest.
Then he made himself known to Ailmar, de-
nied what he had been charged with, and
would not marry Rymenhild even now, not
till he had won back Suddenne. This he
went immediately about; but while he was
engaged in clearing the land of Saracens and
rebuilding churches, the false Fikenild bribed
young and old to side with him, built a strong
castle, " married" Rymenhild, carried her into
his fortress, and began a feast. Horn, warned
in a dream, again set sail for Westerness, and
came in by Fikenild's new castle. Athulf's
cousin was on the shore, to tell him what had
happened; how Fikenild had wedded Rymen-
hild that very day; he had beguiled Horn
twice. Force would not avail now. Horn
disguised himself and some of his knights as
harpers and fiddlers, and their music gained
them admittance. Horn began a lay which
threw Rymenhild into a swoon. This smote
him to the heart; he looked on his ring and
thought of her. Fikenhild and his men were
soon disposed of. Horn was in a condition to
reward all his faithful adherents. He mar-
ried Athulf to Thurston's daughter, and made
Rymenhild queen of Suddenne.
The French romance contains very nearly
the same story, extended, by expansions of
various sorts, to about six times the length of
King Horn. It would be out of place to no-
tice other variations than those which relate
to the story preserved in the ballads. Rimild
offers Horn a ring when she first avows her
love. He will not take it then, but accepts a
second tender, after his first fight. When he
is accused to the king, he offers to clear him-
self by combat with heavy odds, but will not
submit, king's son as he is, to purgation by
oath. The king says, then he may quit the
land and go — to Norway, if he will. Horn
begs Rimild to maintain her love for him
seven years. If he does not come then, he
will send her word to act thereafter at her
pleasure. Rimild exchanges the ring she had
previously given him for one set with a sap-


17. HIND HORN
191
phire, wearing which faithfully he need not
fear death by water nor fire, battle nor tour-
ney (vv 2051-8). He looks at this ring when
he fights with the pagan that had killed his
father, and it fires his heart to extraordinary
exploits (3166 ff). Having learned through
a friend, who had long been seeking him, that
Rimild's father is about to marry her to a
young king (Modun), Horn returns to Brit-
tany with a large force. He leaves his men
in a woody place, and goes out alone on horse-
back for news ; meets a palmer, who tells him
that the marriage is to take place that very
day; gives the palmer his fine clothes in ex-
change for sclavin, staff and scrip, forces his
way into the city, and is admitted to the ban-
quet hall with the beggars. After the guests
had eaten (4152 ff), Rimild filled a splendid
cup with piment, presented it first a sun dru,
and then, with her maids, served the whole
company. As she was making her fifth round,
Horn pulled her by the sleeve, and reproached
her with attending only to the rich. "Your
credit would be greater should you serve «8."
She set a handsome cup before him, but he
would not drink. "Corn apelent Horn k'
Engleis," he said. "If, for the love of him
who bore that name, you would give me the
same horn that you offered your ami, I would
share it with you." All but fainting, Rimild
gave him the horn. He threw in his ring,
even that which she had given him at part-
ing, drank out half, and begged her to drink
* When Horn was near the city, he stopped to see how
things would go. King Modun passed, with Wikel, in gay
discourse of the charms of Rimild. Horn called out to them
insultingly, and Modun asked who he was. Horn said he
had formerly served a man of consequence as his fisherman:
he had thrown a net almost seven years ago, and had now
come to give it a look. If it had taken any fish, he would
love it no more; if it should still be as he left it, he would
carry it away. Modun thinks him a fool. (3984^1057,
and nearly the same in 'Horn Childe and Maiden Ri-
mild,' 77-79). This is part of a story in the Gesta Roma-
norum, of a soldier who loved the emperor's daughter, and
went to the holy land for seven years, after a mutual ex-
change of fidelity for that time. A king comes to woo the
princess, but is put off for seven years, upon her alleging
that she has made a vow of virginity for so long. At the
expiration of this term, the king and the soldier meet as
they are on the way to the princess. The king, from cer-
tain passages between them, thinks the soldier a fool. The
by the love of him whom he had named. In
drinking, she sipped the ring into her mouth,
and she saw at once what it was (4234). "I
have found a ring," said she. "If it is yours,
take it. Blest be he to whom I gave it: if
you know aught of him, conceal it not. If you
are Horn, it were a great sin not to reveal
yourself." Horn owned that the ring was his,
but denied knowledge of the man she spake
of. For himself, he had been reared in that
land, and by service had come into possession
of a hawk, which, before taming it, he had
put in a cage: that was nigh seven years since:
he had come now to see what it amounted to.
If it should prove to be as good as when he
left it, he would carry it away with him ; but if
its feathers were ruffled and broken, he would
have nothing to do with it. At this, Rimild
broke into a laugh, and cried, "Horn, 't is
you, and your hawk has been safely kept!" *
She would go with him or kill herself. Horn
saw that she had spoken truth, but, to try
her yet further, said he was indeed Horn,
whom she had loved, but he had come back
with nothing: why should she follow a poor
wretch who could not give her a gown to her
back ?" Little do you know me," was her
reply. "I can bear what you bear, and there
is no king in the East for whom I would quit
you."
'Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild,' with
many diversities of its own as to details, is
more like the French than the English ro-
soldier takes leave of the king under pretence of looking
after a net which he had laid in a certain place seven years
before, rides on ahead, and slips away with the princess.
Gest. Rom., Oesterley, p. 597, No 193; Grasse, n, 159;
Madden, p. 32; Swan, i, p. lxv. A similar story in Camp-
hell's Tales of the West Highlands, i, 281,' Baillie Lun-
nain.' (Simrock, Deutsche Marchen, No 47, is apparently a
translation from the Gesta.) The riddle of the hawk, slightly
varied, is met with in the romance of Blonde of Oxford
and Jehan of Dammartin, v. 2811 ff, 3143 ff, 3288 ff (ed. Le
Roux de Lincy, pp. 98, 109, 114), and, still further modified,
in Le Romant de Jehan de Paris, ed. Montaiglon, pp. 55,
63, 111. (Le Roux de Lincy, KShler, Mussafia, G. Paris).
'Horn et Rimenhild,' it will be observed, has both riddles,
and that of the net is introduced under circumstances en-
tirely like those in the Gesta Romanorum. The French
romance is certainly independent of the English in this pas-
sage.


192
17. HIND HORN
mance as to the story, and, on the other hand,
has one or two resemblances to the ballads
which they both lack. Rimnild's father, mad-
dened by the traitor Wikel's false information,
beats her till she bleeds, and threatens to slay
Horn. Rimnild, expecting her lover to be at
least exiled, assures Horn that she will marry
no other man for seven years. The king,
who had shut himself up till his first wrath
was past, tells Horn, when he next comes into
his presence, that if he is found in the land
on the morrow, he shall be drawn with horses
and hanged. Rimnild, at parting, gives him
a ring, with these words:
'Loke thou forsake it for no thing,
It schal ben our tokening;
The ston it is wele trewe.
When the ston wexeth wan,
Than chaungeth the thoujt of thi leman,
Take than a newe;
When the ston wexeth rede,
Than have Y lorn mi maidenhed,
Ojaines the untrewe.' (Michel, st» 48.)
Horn, for his part, bids her every day look
into a spring in her arbor: should she see his
shadow, then he is about to marry another;
till then his thought will not have changed
(sts 48, 49). Though loved, as before, by an-
other princess, Horn kept his faith; but when
seven years were gone, on looking at the stone
he saw that its hue was changed (st. 71).
He immediately gathered a force, and set sail
for Rimnild. On landing he saw a beggar,
who turned out to be one of his old friends,
and had been looking for him a long time.
That day Moging the king was to marry Rim-
nild. They changed weeds (76) ; Horn forced
his way into the castle. While Rimnild was
serving the guests, Horn, who had tried to
pass for a fool, called to her to attend to
God's men. She fetched him drink, and he
said, "For Horn's love, if ever he was dear
to thee, go not ere this be drunk." He threw
the ring into the cup: she brought him an-
other drink (something is wrong here, for noth-
ing is said of her seeing and recognizing the
ring), and asked if Horn were there. She
fainted when she learned that he was, but on
recovering sent Hatherof (= Athulf) to bid
the king make merry, and then to gather per-
iwinkle and ivy, "grasses that ben of main"
(to stain her face with, no doubt), and then
to tell Horn to wait for her under a wood-
side.
'When al this folk is gon to play,
He and Y schal steal oway,
Bituene the day and the nijt.' (87)
Hatherof did his message. Of true love Horn
was sure. He said he would come into the
field with a hundred knights. A tournament
follows, as in the French romance; the royal
bridegroom is unhorsed, but spared; treachery
is punished and forced to confession.
Now is Rimnild tuiis wedde,
Horn broujt hir to his bedde. (94)
That the lay or gest of King Horn is a far
more primitive poem than the French ro-
mance, and could not possibly be derived from
it, will probably be plain to any one who will
make even a hasty comparison of the two ; and
that the contrary opinion should have been
held by such men as Warton and Tyrwhitt
must have been the result of a general theory,
not of a particular examination.* There is,
on the other hand, no sufficient reason for sup-
posing that the English lay is the source of
the other two poems. Nor do the special ap-
proximations of the ballads to the romance of
Horn Child oblige us to conclude that these,
or any of them, are derived from that poem.
The particular resemblances are the discolora-
tion of the ring, the elopement with the bride,
in C, G, H (which is only prepared for, but
not carried out, in Horn Child), and the
agreement between the couplet just cited from
Horn Child,
Now is Rimnild tuiis wedde,
Horn broujt hir to his bedde,
and the last stanza of A, B, C:
The bridegroom he had wedded the bride,
But Young Hind Horn he took her to bed. (A)
* See the excellent studies of King Horn by Wissmann,
in Quellen und Forschungen, No 16, and Anglia, iv, 342 ft.


17. HIND HORN
193
The bridegroom thought he had the bonnie bride
wed,
But Young Hyn Horn took the bride to bed. (B)
Her ain bridegroom had her first wed,
But Young Hyn Horn had her first to bed. (0)
The likeness evinces a closer affinity of the
oral traditions with the later English romance
than with the earlier English or the French,
but no filiation. And were filiation to be ac-
cepted, there would remain the question of
priority. It is often assumed, without a mis-
giving, that oral tradition must needs be
younger than anything that was committed
to writing some centuries ago; but this re-
quires in each case to be made out; there is
certainly no antecedent probability of that
kind.*
Two Scandinavian ballads, as Dr Prior has
remarked, seem to have been at least suggested
by the romances of Horn.
(1.) 'Unge Hr. Tor og Jomfru Tore,'
Grundtvig, No 72, n, 263, translated by Prior,
m, 151. Of this there are two traditional
versions: A from a manuscript of the six-
teenth century, B from one of the seventeenth.
They agree in story. In A, Tor asks Sel-
ffuermord how long she will wait for him.
Nine years, she answers, if she can do so with-
out angering her friends. He will be satisfied
with eight. Eight have passed : a family coun-
cil is held, and it is decided that she shall
not have Young Tor, but a certain rich count.
Her father "gives her away" that same day.
The lady goes up to a balcony and looks sea-
ward. Everybody seems to be coming home
but her lover. She begs her brother to ride
down to the shore for her. Tor is just coming
in, hails the horseman, and eagerly asks how
are the maids in the isle. The brother tells
him that his maid has waited eight years, and
is even now drinking her bridal, but with
tears. Tor takes his harp and chess-board, and
* A, B, and E, which had not been printed at the time of
his wri ting, will convince Professor Stimming, whose valua-
ble review in Englische Stadien, 1, 351 ff, supplements, and in
the matter of derivation, I think, rectifies, Wissmann's Un-
tereuchungen, that the king's daughter in the ballads was
faithful to Horn, and that they were marrying her against
plays outside the bridal hall till the bride
hears and knows him. He then enters the
hall, and asks if there is anybody that can
win a game of chess. The father replies, No-
body but Salffuermord, and she sits a bride at
the board. The mother indulgently suggests
that the midsummer day is long, and the bride
might well try a game. The bride seeks an
express sanction of her father, who lessons
her the livelong day, being suspicious of Tor,
but towards evening consents to her playing
a little while, — not long. Tor wins the first
game, and must needs unpack his heart in a
gibing parable, ending
'Full hard is gold to win,
And so is a trothless quean.'
She wins the next game, takes up the parable,
and says
'Many were glad their faith to hold,
Were their lot to be controlled.'
They are soon at one, and resolve to fly. They
slip away, go aboard Tor's ship, and put off.
The bride's parents get information, and the
mother, who is a professor of the black art,
raises a storm which she means shall sink
them both. No one can steer the ship but
the bride. She stands at the helm, with her
gold crown on, while her lover is lying seasick
on the deck, and she brings the craft safe
into Norway, where a second wedding is cele-
brated.
(2.) Tha other ballad is 'Herr Lovmand
og Herr Thor,' Syv, iv, No 68, Danske Viser,
rv, 180, No 199, translated by Prior, n, 442.
Lovmand, having betrothed Ingelil, asks how
long she will be his maid. "Eight years, if I
may," she says. This term has elapsed; her
brothers consult, and give her to rich Herr
Thor. They drink the bridal for five days;
for nine days; she will not go to bed. On
the evening of the tenth they begin to use
her will, as in the romances. This contingency seems not to
have been foreseen when the ring was given: but it must
be admitted that it was better for the ring to change, to the
temporary clouding of the lady's character, than to have
Horn stay away and the forced marriage go on.
25


194
17. HIND HORN
force. She begs that she may first go to
the look-out up-stairs. From there she sees
ships, great and small, and the sails which her
own hands have made for her lover. Her
brother goes down to the sea, as in the other
ballad, and has a similar interview. Lovmand
has the excuse of having been sick seven years.
He borrows the brother's horse, flies faster
than a bird, and the torch is burning at the
door of the bride's house when he arrives.
Thor is reasonable enough to give up the bride,
and to accept Lovmand's sister.
The ballad is extremely common in Sweden,
and at least six versions have been published.
A, 'Herr Lagman och Herr Thor,' from a
manuscript of the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury, Arwidsson, I, 165, No 24; B, from a
manuscript, ib., p. 168; C, from oral tra-
dition, p. 171; D, ' Lageman och hans Brud,'
Eva Wigstrom, Folkdiktning samlad och
upptecknad i Skane, p. 29, No 12; E,'Stolt
Ingrid,'. Folkvisor fran Skane, upptecknade
af E. Wigstrom, in Hazelius, Ur de nordiska
Folkens Lif, p. 121, No 3; F, 'Deielill och
Lageman,' Fagerlund, Anteckningar om Korpo
och Houtskars Socknar, p. 192, No 3. In A,
D the bride goes off in her lover's ship; in
C he carries her off on his horse, when the
dancing is at its best, and subsequently, upon
the king's requisition, settles matters with his
rival by killing him in single fight. The stolid
bridegroom, in the others, consents to a peace-
able arrangement.
Certain points in the story of Horn — the
long absence, the sudden return, the appear-
ance under disguise at the wedding feast, and
the dropping of the ring into a cup of wine
obtained from the bride — repeat themselves
in a great number of romantic tales. More
commonly it is a husband who leaves his wife
for seven years, is miraculously informed on
the last day that she is to be remarried on
the morrow, and is restored to his home in
* See the ample introduction to 'Henrik af Brunsvig,' in
Grundtvig, No 114, n, 608 ff.
t It appears that these half rings are often dng up.
"Neuere Ausgrabungen haben vielfach anf solche Ring-
Btiicke gef iihrt, die, als Zeichen unverbriichlicher Treue, einst
the nick of time, also by superhuman means.
Horn is warned to go back, in the ballads and
in Horn Child, by the discoloration of his ring,
but gets home as he can; this part of the
story is slurred over in a way that indicates
a purpose to avoid a supernatural expedient.
Very prominent among the stories referred
to is that of Henry of Brunswick [Henry the
Lion, Reinfrid of Brunswick], and this may
well be put first, because it is preserved in
Scandinavian popular ballads.*
(1.) The latest of these, a Swedish bal-
lad, from a collection made at the end of the
last century, 'Hertig Henrik,' Arwidsson, No
168, n, 422, represents Duke Henry as telling
his wife that he is minded to go off for seven
years (he says not whither, but it is of course
to the East) ; should he stay eight or nine, she
may marry the man she fancies. He cuts a
ring in two; gives her one half and keeps the
other. He is made captive, and serves a
heathen lord and lady seven years, drawing
half the plough, "like another horse." His
liberation is not accounted for, but he was
probably set free by his mistress, as in the
ballad which follows. He gets possession of an
excellent sword, and uses it on an elephant
who is fighting with a lion. The grateful lion
transports the duke to his own country while
he is asleep. A herdsman, of whom he asks
food, recommends him to go to the Brunswick
mansion, where there is a wedding, and Duke
Henry's former spouse is the bride. When
Henry comes to the house, his daughter is
standing without; he asks food for a poor pil-
grim. She replies that she has never heard
of a pilgrim taking a lion about with him.
But they give him drink, and the bride, pro
more, drinks out of the same bowl, and finds
the half ring in the bottom. The bride feels in
her pocket and finds her half,f and the two,
when thrown upon a table, run together and
make one ring.
mit dem Geliebten gebrochen, ja wie der Augenschein be-
weist, entzwei geschnitten, nnd so ins Grab mitgenommen
wnrden, zam Zeichen dass die Liebe iiber den Tod hinaus
daure." Rochholz, Schweizersagen aus dem Aargau, n,
116.


I7. HIND HORN
195
(2.) The Danish ballad* (Grundtvig, No
114, B, from a 17th century manuscript), re-
lates that Duke Henry, in consequence of a
dream, took leave of his wife, enjoining her to
wait to the eighth year, and, if then he did
not return, marry whom she liked. In the
course of his fights with the heathen, Henry
was made captive, and had to draw the harrow
and plough, like a beast. One day (during
his lord's absence, as we learn from A) the
heathen lady whom he served set him free.
He had many adventures, and in one of them
killed a panther who was pressing a lion hard,
for which service the lion followed him like a
dog. The duke then happened upon a her-
mit, who told him that his wife was to be mar-
ried the next day, but he was to go to sleep,
and not be concerned. He laid his head on a
stone in the heathen land, and woke in a trice
to hear German speech from a herdsman's
mouth. The herdsman confirmed what the
hermit had said: the duchess was to be mar-
ried on the morrow. The duke went to the
kitchen as a pilgrim, and sent word to the
lady that he wished to drink to her. The
duchess, surprised at this freedom, summoned
him into her presence. The verses are lost in
which the cup should be given the pilgrim
and returned to the lady. When she drank
off the wine that was left, a half ring lay in
the glass.
Danish A, though of the 16th century, does
not mention the ring.
(3.) A Flemish broadside, which may orig-
inally have been of the 15th century, relates
the adventures of the Duke of Brunswick in
sixty-five stanzas of four long lines : reprinted
in von der Hagen's Germania, VIIi, 359, and
Hoffmann's Niederlandische Volkslieder, No
2, p. 6; Coussemaker, No 47, p. 152 ; abridged
and made over, in Willems, O. v. L., p. 251,
No 107. The duke, going to war, tells his
wife to marry again if he stays away seven
years. She gives him half of her ring. Seven
years pass, and the duke, being then in des-
perate plight in a wilderness, is taken off by
a ship; by providential direction, no doubt,
* Translated, with introduction of verses from A, by
Prior, Ancient Danish Ballads, n, 71.
though at first it does not so appear. For the
fiend is aboard, who tells him that his wife is
to be married to-morrow, and offers, for his
soul, to carry him to his palace in his sleep
before day. The duke, relying on heaven and
his lion, professes to accept the terms: he is
to be taken to his palace in Ms sleep. The
lion rouses his master at the right time, and
the fiend is baffled. The duke goes to the
marriage feast, and sends a message to the
bride that he desires a drink from her in
memory of her lord. They take him for a
beggar, but the lady orders him wine in a gold
cup. The cup goes back to her with the
duke's half ring in it. She cries, " It is my
husband!" joins her half to the one in the
cup, and the two adhere firmly.
(4.) A German poem of the 15th century,
by Michel Wyssenhere, in ninety-eight stanzas
of seven lines, first printed by Massmann,
Denkmaeler deutscher Sprache und Literatur,
p. 122, and afterwards by Erlach, n, 290, and
elsewhere. The Lord of Brunswick receives
an impression in a dream that he ought to go
to the Holy Sepulchre. He cuts a ring in
two, and gives his wife one half for a souvenir,
but fixes no time for his absence, and so nat-
urally says nothing about her taking another
husband. He has the adventures which are
usual in other versions of the story, and at
last finds himself among the Wild Hunt (das
wbden her), and obliges one of the company,
by conjurations, to tell him how it is with his
wife and children. The spirit informs him
that his wife is about to marry another man.
He then constrains the spirit to transport him
and his lion to his castle. This is done on the
same terms as in the Flemish poem, and the
lion wakes his master. His wife offers him
drink ; he lets his half ring drop in the glass,
and, upon the glass being returned to the lady,
she takes out the token, finds it like her half,
and cries out that she has recovered her dear
husband and lord.
(5.) Henry the Lion, a chap-book printed
in the 16th century, in one hundred and four
stanzas of eight short verses; reprinted in
Biisching's Volkssagen, Marchen und Le-
genden, p. 213 ff, and (modernized) by Sim-


196
I7. HIND HORN
rock in the first volume of Die deutschen
Volksbiicher. The hero goes out simply in
quest of adventures, and, having lost his ship
and all his companions, is floating on a raft
with his lion, when the devil comes to him
and tells him that his wife is to remarry. A
compact is made, and the devil balked, as be-
fore. Though we were not so informed at the
beginning, it now turns out that the duke had
given a half ring to the duchess seven years
before, and had bidden her take a second hus-
band if he did not come back in that time.
The duke sends a servant to beg a drink of
wine of his wife, and returns the cup, as in
(3), (4).
(6.) A ballad in nine seven-line stanzas,
supposed to be by a Meistersinger, preserved
in broadsides of about 1550 and 1603, Bohme,
No 5, p. 30, Erk's Wunderhorn, rv, 111. (7.)
Hans Sachs's 'Historia,' 1562, in two hundred
and four verses, Works, ed. 1578, Buch iv,
Theil ii, Blatt lviiMviii".* (8.) A Meister-
singerlied of the end of the 16th century, in
three twenty-line stanzas, printed in Idunna
u. Hermode for March 27, 1813 (appended
to p. 64), and after this, with changes, in
Kretzschmer, n, 17, No 5. — These three agree
with the foregoing as to the ring.
(9.) Reinfrid von Braunschweig, c. 1300, ed.
Bartsch, 1871. Reinfrid is promised by the
Virgin, who appears to him thrice in vision,
that he shall have issue if he will go over sea
to fight the heathen. He breaks a ring which
his wife had given him, and gives her one half,
vv. 14,906-11. If he dies, she is to marry,
for public reasons, vv. 14,398-407; but she is
not to believe a report of his death unless she
receives his half of the ring back, vv. 14,782-
816, 15,040-049. The latter part of the ro-
mance not being extant, we do not know the
conclusion, but a variation as to the use made
of the ring is probable.f
The story of Reinfrit is also preserved in
* I have not seen this, and depend upon others here.
t Godeke, ' Reinfrit von Braunschweig,' p. 89, conjectures
that the half ring was, or would have been, employed in the
sequel by some impostor (the story may never have been fin-
ished) as evidence of Brunswick's death. A ring is so used
in a Silesian tradition, of the general character of that of
a Bohemian prose chap-book printed before
1565. This prose is clearly a poem broken
up, and it is believed that the original should
be placed in the first half of the 14th century,
or possibly at the end of the 13th. The hero
returns, in pilgrim's garb, after seven years'
absence, to find his wife about to be handed
over by her father to another prince. He lets
his ring fall into a cup, and goes away; his
wife recognizes the ring, and is reunited to him.
The story has passed from the Bohemian into
Russian and Magyar. Feifalik, Sitzungsbe-
richte der phil.-bist. Classe der Wiener Akad-
emie, xxiX, 83 ff, the ring at p. 92; xxxn,
322 ff.
Similar use is made of the ring in other
German romances. (1.) 'Der edle Moringer'
(MS. of 14th century) asks his wife to wait
seven years for him, while he visits the land
of St Thomas. He is warned by an angel, at
the expiration of that period, that he will lose
her if he does not go back, bewails himself to
his patron, and is conveyed home in a sleep.
He begs an alms at his castle-gate in the name
of God, St Thomas, and the noble Moringer;
is admitted to his wife's presence; sings a lay
describing his own case, which moves the lady
much; throws into a beaker of wine, which
she sets before him, the ring by which she
was married to him, sends the cup back to
her, and is recognized. Bohme, No 6, p. 32;
Uhland, No 298, p. 773. (2.) In the older
Hildebrandslied, which is of the 14th century,
or earlier, the hero, returning after an absence
of thirty-two years, drops his ring into a cup
of wine presented to him by his wife. Bohme,
No 1, p. 1; Uhland, No 132, p. 330. (3.)
Wolfdietrich drops Ortnit's ring into a cup of
wine sent him by Liebgart, who has been ad-
judged to the Graf von Biterne in considera-
tion of his having, as he pretended, slain the
dragon. The cup is returned to the empress,
the ring identified, the pretension refuted, and
Henry the Lion, with the difference that the knight is awak-
ened by a cock's crowing: 'Die Hahnkrahe bei Breslau,' in
Kern's Schlesische Sagen-Chronik, p. 151. There is a varia-
tion of this last, without the deception by means of the ring,
in Goedsche's Schlesischer Sagenschatz, p. 37, No 16.


I7. HIND HORN
197
Liebgart given to Ortnit's avenger. Wolf-
dietrich B, ed. Janicke, I, 280 ff, stanzas 767-
785. (4.) King Rother (whose history has
passages of the strongest resemblance to
Horn's), coming to retrieve his wife, who has
been kidnapped and carried back to her fa-
ther, lands below Constantinople, at a woody
and hilly place, and assumes a pilgrim's dis-
guise. On his way to the city he meets a
man who tells him that Ymelot of Babylon
has invaded Greece, and taken Constantin, his
wife's father, prisoner; and that Constantin,
to save his life, has consented to give his
daughter to the heathen king's son. Rother
steals into the hall, and even under the table
at which the royal party are sitting, and con-
trives to slip his ring into the hand of his
distressed young queen, who, thus assured of
his presence, immediately recovers her spirits.
Massmann, Deutsche Gedichte des zwcelften
Jahrhunderts, Theil ii, p. 213, vv. 3687-3878.
One of the best and oldest stories of the
kind we are engaged with is transmitted by
Caesarius of Heisterbach in his Dialogus
Miraculorum, of the first quarter of the 13th
century. Gerard, a soldier living in Holen-
bach (" his grandchildren are still alive, and
there is hardly a man in the town who does
not know about this"), being, like Moringer,
devoted to St Thomas of India, was impelled
to visit his shrine. He broke a ring and gave
one half to his wife, saying, Expect me back in
five years, and marry whom you wish if I do
not come then. The journey, which would be
long enough any way, was providentially pro-
tracted. He reached the shrine at last, and
said his prayers, and then remembered that
that was the last day of his fifth year. Alas,
my wife will marry again, he thought; and
quite right he was, for the wedding was even
then preparing. A devil, acting under the
orders of St Thomas, set Gerard down at his
own door. He found his wife supping with
her second partner, and dropped his half ring
into her cup. She took it out, fitted it to the
half which had been given her, rushed into his
* There are marked correspondences between Boccaccio's
story and the veritable history of Henry the Lion as given
by Bartsch, Herzog Ernst, cxxvi f: e. g., the presents of
arms, and bade good-by to the new bride-
groom. Ed. Strange, n, 131.
A tradition closely resembling this has been
found in Switzerland, Gerard and St Thomas
being exchanged for Wernhart von Strattlin-
gen and St Michael. Menzel's Odin, p. 96.
Another of the most remarkable tales of
this class is exquisitely told by Boccaccio in
the Decamerone, G. x, N. ix. Messer Torello,
going to the crusade, begs his wife to wait a
year, a month, and a day before she marries
again. The lady assures him that she will
never be another man's wife; but he replies
that a woman young, beautiful, and of high
family, as she is, will not be allowed to have
her way. With her parting embrace she gives
him a ring from her finger, saying, If I die
before I see you again, remember me when
you look on this. The Christians were wasted
by an excessive mortality, and those who es-
caped the ravages of disease fell into the
hands of Saladin, and were imprisoned by him
in various cities, Torello in Alexandria. Here
he was recognized by Saladin, whom he had
entertained with the most delicate and splen-
did hospitality a few months before, when the
soldan was travelling through Italy in dis-
guise. Saladin's return for this courtesy was
so magnificent as almost to put Lombardy out
of Torello's head,* and besides he trusted that
his wife had been informed of his safety by a
letter which he had sent. This was not so, how-
ever, and the death of another Torello was re-
ported in Italy as his, in consequence of which
his supposed widow was solicited in marriage,
and was obliged to consent to take another
husband after the time should have expired
which she had promised to wait. A week
before the last day, Torello learned that the
ship which carried his letter had been wrecked,
and the thought that his wife would now
marry again drove him almost mad. Saladin
extracted from him the cause of his distress,
and promised that he should yet be at home
before the time was out, which Torello, who
had heard that such things had often been
clothes by the empress (transferred to Torello's wife), and
the handsome behavior of two soldans, here attributed to
Saladin.


198
17. HIND HORN
done, was ready to believe. And in fact, by
means of one of his necromancers, Saladin
caused Torello to be transported to Pavia in
one night — the night before the new nuptials.
Torello appeared at the banquet the next day
in the guise of a Saracen, under the escort of
an uncle of his, a churchman, and at the right
moment sent word to the lady that it was a
custom in his country for a bride to send her
cup filled with wine to any stranger who might
be present, and for him to drink half and cover
the cup, and for her to drink the rest. To
this the lady graciously assented. Torello
drank out most of the wine, dropped in the
ring which his wife had given him when they
parted, and covered the cup. The lady, upon
lifting the cover, saw the ring, knew her hus-
band, and, upsetting the table in her ecstasy,
threw herself into Torello's arms.
Tales of this description still maintain them-
selves in popular tradition. 'Der Ring ehe-
licher Treue,' Gottschalk, Deutsche Volksmar-
chen, n, 135, relates how Kuno von Falken-
stein, going on a crusade, breaks his ring and
gives one half to his wife, begging her to wait
seven years before she marries again. He
has the adventures of Henry of Brunswick,
with differences, and, like Moringer, sings a
lay describing his own case. The new bride-
groom hands him a cup; he drops in his half
ring, and passes the cup to the bride. The
two halves join of themselves.* Other exam-
ples, not without variations and deficiencies, in
details, are afforded by 'Der getheilte Trau-
ring,' Schmitz, Sagen u. Legenden des Eifler
Volkes, p. 82; 'Bodman,' Uhland, in Pfeif-
fer's Germania, IV, 73-76; 'Graf Hubert von
Kalw,' Meier, Deutsche Sagen, u. s. w., aus
Schwaben, p. 332, No 369, Grimms, Deutsche
Sagen, No 524; 'Der Barenhauter,' Grimms,
K. u. H. marchen, No 101; 'Berthold von
Neuhaus,' in Kern's Schlesische Sagen-Chro-
nik, p. 93.
* Without the conclusion, also in Binder's Schwabische
Volkssagen, n, 173. These Volksmarchen, by the way, are
"erzahlt" by Gottschalk. It is not made quite so clear as
could be wished, whether they are merely re-told.
t Germaine's husband, after an absence of seven years,
overcomes his wife's doubts of his identity by exhibiting half
of her ring, which happened to break the day of their wed-
A story of the same kind is interwoven
with an exceedingly impressive adventure re-
lated of Richard Sans-Peur in Les Chroniques
de Normandie, Rouen, 1487, chap. Ivii, cited
in Michel, Chronique des Dues de Normandie
par Benoit, n, 336 ff. A second is told of
Guillaume Martel, seigneur de Bacqueville;
still others of a seigneur Gilbert de Lomblon,
a comrade of St. Louis in his first crusade.
Amdlie de Bosquet, La Normandie romanesque
et merveilleuse, pp. 465-68, 470.
A Picard ballad, existing in two versions,
partly cited by Rathery in the Moniteur Uni-
versel for August 26, 1853, tells of a Sire de
Crequi, who, going beyond seas with his sov-
ereign, breaks his ring and gives half to his
young wife; is gone ten years, and made cap-
tive by the Turks, who condemn him to death
on account of his adhesion to Christ; and is
transported to his cMteau on the eve of the
day of his doom. This very day his wife is to
take another husband, sorely against her will.
Crequi appears in the rags of a beggar, and
legitimates himself by producing his half of
the ring (which, in a way not explained by
Rathery, has been brought back by a swan).
'Le Retour du Mari,' Puymaigre, Chants
populaires messins, p. 20, has also some traits
of ballads of this class. A bridegroom has to
go on a campaign the very day of his nup-
tials. The campaign lasts seven years, and
the day of his return his wife is about to re-
marry. He is invited to the wedding supper,
and towards the close of it proposes to play
cards to see who shall have the bride. The
guests are surprised. The soldier says he will
have the bride without winning her at cards
or dice, and, turning to the lady, asks, Where
are the rings I gave you at your wedding
seven years ago? She will go for them; and
here the story breaks off.t
The same hard fortune is that of Costan-
tino, a young Albanian, who is called to the
ding, or the day after: Puymaigre, p. 11, Champfleury,
Chansons des Provinces, p. 77. The conclusion to Sir Tris-
trem, which Scott supplied, " abridged from the French met-
rical romance, in the style of Tomas of Erceldoune," makes
Ganhardin lay a ring in a cup which Brengwain hands
Ysonde, who recognizes the ring as Tristrem's token. The
cup was one of the presents made to King Mark by Tris-


17. HIND HORN
199
service of his king three days after his mar-
riage. He gives back her ring to his wife,
and tells her he must go to the wars for nine
years. Should he not return in nine years
and nine days, he bids her marry. The young
wife says nothing, waits her nine years and
nine days, and then, since she is much sought
for, her father wishes her to marry. She says
nothing, again, and they prepare for the bridal.
Costantino, sleeping in the king's palace, has
a bad dream, which makes him heave a sigh
that comes to his sovereign's ear. The king
summons all his soldiers, and inquires who
heaved that sigh. Costantino confesses it was
he, and says it was because his wife was mar-
rying. The king orders him to take the swift-
est horse and make for his home. Costantino
meets his father, and learns that his dream is
true, presses on to the church, arrives at the
door at the same time as the bridal procession,
and offers himself for a bride's-man. When
they come to the exchange of rings, Costantino
contrives that his ring shall remain on the
bride's finger. She knows the ring; her tears
burst forth. Costantino declares himself as
having been already crowned with the lady.*
Camarda, Appendice al Saggio di Grammato-
logia, etc., 90-97, a Calabrian-Albanese copy.
There is a Sicilian, but incomplete, in Vigo,
Canti popolari siciliani, p. 342 ff, ed. 1857, p.
695 ff, ed. 1870-74.
With this belongs a ballad, very common
in Greece, which, however, has for the most
part lost even more of what was in all prob-
ability the original catastrophe. ''Kvayvwpur-
ftos,' Chasiotis, Popular Songs of Epirus, p. 88,
No 27, comes nearer the common story than
other versions.f A man who had been twelve
years a slave after being a bridegroom of
three days, dreams that his wife is marrying,
trem's envoy, and is transferred to Ysonde by Scott The
passage has been cited as ancient and genuine.
* In the Greek rite, rings are nsed in the betrothal, which
as a rule immediately precedes the marriage. The rings
are exchanged by the priest and sponsors (Camarda says
three times). Crowns, of vine twigs, etc., are the emblems
in the nuptial ceremony, and these are also changed from
one head to the other.
t I was guided to nearly all these Greek ballads by Pro-
fessor Liebrecht's notes, Zur Volkskunde, p. 207.
runs to the cellar, and begins to sing dirges.
The king hears, and is moved. "If it is one
of the servants, increase his pay; if a slave,
set him free." The slave tells his story (in
three lines); the king bids him take a swift
gray. The slave asks the horses, which is a
swift gray. Only one answers, an old steed
with forty wounds. "I am a swift gray; tie
two or three handkerchiefs around your head,
and tie yourself to my back!" J He comes
upon his father pruning the vineyard. "Whose
sheep are those feeding in the meadows?"
"My lost son's." He comes to his mother.
"What bride are they marrying?" "My lost
son's." "Shall I get to them in church while
they are crowning?" "If you have a fast
horse, you will find them crowning; if you
have a bad horse, you will find them at ta-
ble." He finds them at church, and calls out,
A bad way ye have: why do ye not bring out
the bride, so that strangers may give her the
cup? A good way we have, they answer,
we who bring out the bride, and strangers
give her the cup. Then he takes out his ring,
while he is about to present the cup to the
bride. The bride can read; she stands and
reads (his name), and bids the company be-
gone, for her mate has come, the first crowned.
In other cases we find the hero in prison.
He was put in for thirty days; the keys are
lost, and he stays thirty years. Legrand, p.
326, No 145; H(oe\VviKa 'AvaXtKra, I, 85, No 19.
More frequently he is a galley slave: Zam-
belios, p. 678, No 103 = Passow, No 448;
Tommaseo, iil, 152 = Passow, No 449; Sa-
kellarios, Ku7rpiaKd, m, 37, No 13: NeotAAi/Kita
'AvaAeKTa, I, 86, No 20; Jeannaraki, "Ao-^ara
KprjTiKa, p. 203, No 265. His bad dream [a
letter from home] makes him heave a* sigh
which shakes the prison, or stops [splits] the
t This high-mettled horse is a capital figure in most ot
the versions. In one of them the caution is given, " Do not
feel safe in spurring him: he will scatter thy brains ten ells
below the ground." The gray (otherwise the black) is of
the same breed as the Russian Dobrynya's, a little way on; or
the foal that took Charles the Great, under similar circum-
stances, from Passau t» Aachen between morn and eve,
('Karl der Grosse,' from Enenkels Weltbuch, c. 1250, in
von der Hagen's Gesammtabenteuer, n, 619ff); or the
black in the poem and tale of Thedel von Walmoden.


200
17. HIND HORN
galley.* In Tommaseo, m, 152, on reaching
the church, he cries," Stand aside, gentlemen,
stand aside, my masters; let the bride pour
for me." She pours him one cup and two, and
exclaims (the ring which was dropped into
the cup having dropped out of the story), My
John has come back! Then they both " go
out like candles." In Sakellarios they embrace
and fall dead, and when laid in the grave come
up as a cypress and a citron tree. In the Cretan
ballad John does not dismount, but takes the
bride on to the horse and is off with her; so
in the beautiful ballad in Fauriel, II, 140, No
11,''H 'hpvayrj,' " peut-e"tre la plus distingude
de ce recueil," which belongs with this group,
but seems to be later at the beginning and the
end. Even here the bride takes a cup to pour
a draught for the horseman.
In Russia the ring story is told of Dobrynya
and Nastasya. Dobrynya, sent out shortly
after his marriage to collect tribute for Vladi-
mir, requests Nastasya to wait for him twelve
years: then she may wed again, so it be not
with Alesha. Twelve years pass. Alesha
avows that he has seen Dobrynya's corpse
lying on the steppe, and sues for her hand.
Vladimir supports the suit, and Nastasya is
constrained to accept this prohibited husband.
Dobrynya's horse [two doves, a pilgrim] re-
veals to his master what is going on, and car-
ries him home with marvellous speed. Do-
brynya gains admittance to the wedding-feast
in the guise of a merry-maker, and so pleases
Vladimir with his singing that he is allowed
to sit where he likes. He places himself op-
posite Nastasya, drops his ring in a cup, and
asks her to drink to him. She finds the ring in
* In Jeannaraki the bey says, " My slave, give us a song,
and I will free yon." John sings of his love, whom he was
to lose that day. So Zambelios, as above, Tommaseo, p.
1S2, and Neo. 'Kvix. No. 20. Compare Brunswick, in
Wyssenhere, and Moringer.
t Otherwise : Nastasya waits six years, as desired; is told
that Dobrynya is dead and is urged to marry Alesha; will
not hear of marriage for six years more; Vladimir then inter-
poses. Dobrynya is furious, as these absentees are sometimes
pleased to be. He complains that women have long hair
and short wits, and so does Brunswick in Wyssenbere's
poem, st. 89. Numerous as are the instances of these long
absences, the woman is rarely, if ever, represented as in the
least to blame. The behavior of the man, on the other hand,
the bottom, falls at his feet and implores par-
don, f Wollner, Volksepik der Grossrussen,
p. 122 f; Rambaud, La Russie ]£pique, p. 86 f.
We have the ring employed somewhat after
the fashion of these western tales in Soma-
deva's story of Vidushaka. The Vidyudharl
Bhadra, having to part for a while with Vi-
dushaka, for whom she had conceived a pas-
sion, gives him her ring. Subsequently, Vi-
dushaka obliges a rakshas whom he has subdued
to convey him to the foot of a mountain on
which Bhadra had taken refuge. Many beau-
tiful girls come to fetch water in golden pitch-
ers from a lake, and, on inquiring, Vidushaka
finds that the water is for Bhadra. One of
the girls asks him to lift her pitcher on to her
shoulder, and while doing this he drops into
the pitcher Bhadra's ring. When the water
is poured on Bhadra's hands, the ring falls
out. Bhadra asks her maids if they have seen
a stranger. They say they have seen a mor-
tal, and that he had helped one of them with
her pitcher. They are ordered to go for the
youth at once, for he is Bhadra's consort.^
According to the letter of the ballads, should
the ring given Horn by his lady turn wan or
blue, this would signify that she loved another
man: but though accuracy would be very de-
sirable in such a case, these words are rather
loose, since she never faltered in her love, and
submitted to marry another, so far as she sub-
mitted, only under constraint. 'Horn Child,'
sts 48, 71, agrees with the ballads as to this
point. We meet a ring of similar virtue in
'Bonny Bee-Hom,' Jamieson's Popular Bal-
lads, I, 187, and Buchan's Ballads of the North
of Scotland, I, 169.
is in some cases trying. Thus, the Conde Dirlos tells his
young wife to wait for him seven years, and if he does not
come in eight to marry the ninth. He accomplishes the ob-
ject of his expedition in three years, but stays fifteen, never
writes, — he had taken an unnecessary oath not to do that
before he started, — and forbids anybody else to write, on
pain of death. Such is hisx hnmor; but he is very much pro-
voked at being reported dead. Wolf and Hofmann, Pri-
m aver a y Flor de Romances, n, 129, No 164.
} Kathi Sarit Sagara (of the early part of the 12th cen-
tury), Tawney's translation, i, 136 ff. The story is cited by
Bajna, in Romania, vi, 359. Herr v. Bodman leaves his
marriage ring in a wash-bowl! Meier, Deutsche V. m. aus
Schwaben, 214 f.


I7. HIND HORN
201
'But gin this ring should fade or fail,
Or the stone should change its hue,
Be sure your love is dead and gone,
Or she has proved untrue.'
Jamieson, p. 191.
In the Roumanian ballad,' Ring and Hand-
kerchief,' a prince going to war gives his wife
a ring: if it should rust, he is dead. She gives
him a gold-embroidered handkerchief: if the
gold melts, she is dead. Alecsandri, Poesii
pop. ale Romanilor, p. 20, No 7; Stanley,
Rouman Anthology, p. 16, p. 193. In Gon-
zenbach's Sicilianische Marchen, I, 39, No 7, a
prince, on parting with his sister, gives her a
ring, saying, So long as the stone is clear, I
am well: if it is dimmed, that is a sign that I
am dead. So No 5, at p. 23. A young man,
in a Silesian story, receives a ring from his
sweetheart, with the assurance that he can
count upon her faith as long as the ring holds;
and after twenty years' detention in the mines
of Siberia, is warned of trouble by the ring's
breaking: Goedsche, Schlesischer Sagen- His-
torien- u. Legendenschatz, I, 37, No 16. So in
some copies of 'Lamkin,' the lord has a fore-
boding that some ill has happened to his lady
from the rings on his fingers bursting in twain:
Motherwell, p. 291, st. 23; Finlay, n, 47, st.
30*
Hind Horn is translated by Grundtvig, Eng.
og sk. Folkeviser, p. 274, No 42, mainly after
the copy in Motherwell's Minstrelsy ; by Rosa
Warrens, Schottische V. l. der Vorzeit, p. 161,
No 37, after Buchan (H); by Knortz, L. u.
R. Alt-Englands, p. 184, No 52, after Alling-
ham.
A
Motherwell's MS., p. 106. From Mrs King, Kilbarchan.
1 In Scotland there was a babie born,
Lill lal, etc.
And his name it was called young Hind Horn.
"With a fal lal, etc.
2 He sent a letter to our king
That he was in love with his daughter Jean.
3 He's gien to her a silver wand,
With seven living lavrocks sitting thereon.
4 She's gien to him a diamond ring,
With seven bright diamonds set therein.
* The ring given Horn by Rymenhild, in 'King Horn,'
579 ff (Wissmann), and in the French romance, 2056 ff, pro-
tects him against material harm or mishap, or assures him
superiority in fight, as long as he is faithful. So in Buchan's
version of' Bonny Bee-Ho'm,' st. 8:
'As lang 's this ring's your body on,
Your blood shall neer be drawn.'
"The king's daughter of Linnc " gives her champion two
rings, one of which renders him invulnerable, and the other
will staunch the blood of any of his men who may be
wounded: Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Introduction, p. lvii.
Eglamore's ring, Percy MS., n, 363, st. 51, will preserve his
life on water or land. A ring given Wolfdietrich by the
5 'When this ring grows pale and wan,
You may know by it my love is gane.'
6 One day as he looked his ring upon,
He saw the diamonds pale and wan.
7 He left the sea and came to land,
And the first that he met was an old beggar
man.
8 'What news, what news?' said young Hind
Horn;
'No news, no news,' said the old beggar man.
9 'No news,' said the beggar, 'no news at a',
But there is a wedding in the king's ha.
empress, D vim, st. 42, ed. Janicke, doubles his strength
and makes him fire-proof in his fight with the dragon. The
ring lent Ywaine by his lady will keep him from prison,
sickness, loss of blood, or being made captive in battle, and
give him superiority to all antagonists, so long as he is true
in love: Ritson, Met Rom. i, 65, w 1533 ff. But an In-
dian ring which Reinfrit receives from his wife before he de-
parts for the crusade, 15,066 ff, has no equal, after all; for,
besides doing as much as the best of these, it imparts per-
petual good spirits. It is interesting to know that this
matchless jewel had once been the property of a Scottish
king, and was given by him to his daughter when she was
sent to Norway to be married: under convoy of Sir Patrick
Spens?
26


202
17. HIND HORN
10 'But there is a wedding in the king's ha,
That has halden these forty days and twa.'
11 'Will ye lend me your begging coat?
And I 'll lend you my scarlet cloak.
12 'Will you lend me your beggar's rung?
And I 'll gie you my steed to ride upon.
13 'Will you lend me your wig o hair,
To cover mine, because it is fair?'
14 The auld beggar man was bound for the mill,
But young Hind Horn for the king's hall.
15 The auld beggar man was bound for to ride,
But young Hind Horn was bound for the bride.
16 When he came to the king's gate,
He sought a drink for Hind Horn's sake.
17 The bride came down with a glass of wine,
When he drank out the glass, and dropt in the
ring.
4
B
Motherwell's MS., p. 418. From the singing of a servant-
girl at Halkhead.
1 I never saw my love before,
With a hey lillelu and a ho lo lan
Till I saw her thro an oger bore.
With a hey down and a hey diddle downie
2
3 And I gave to her a silver wand,
With three singing lavrocks set thereon.
4 'What if these diamonds lose their hue,
Just when your love begins for to rew?'
5 He's left the land, and he's gone to sea,
And he's stayd there seven years and a day.
6 But when he looked this ring upon,
The shining diamonds were both pale and
wan.
18 'O got ye this by sea or land?
Or got ye it off a dead man's hand?'
19 'I got not it by sea, I got it by land,
And I got it, madam, out of your own
hand.'
20 'O I 'll cast off my gowns of brown,
And beg wi you frae town to town.
21 'O I 'll cast off my gowns of red,
And I 'll beg wi you to win my bread.'
22 'Ye needna cast off your gowns of brown,
For I 'll make you lady o many a town.
23 'Te needna cast off your gowns of red,
It's only a sham, the begging o my bread.'
24 The bridegroom he had wedded the bride,
But young Hind Horn he took her to bed.
7 He's left the seas and he's come to the land,
And there he met with an auld beggar man.
8 'What news, what news, thou auld beggar man
For it is seven years sin I've seen lan.'
9 'No news,' said the old beggar man, ' at all,
But there is a wedding in the king's hall.'
11 'Wilt thou give to me thy begging staff?
And I 'll give to thee my good gray steed.'
12 The old beggar man was bound for to ride,
But Young Hynd Horn was bound for the
bride.
13 When he came to the king's gate,
He asked a drink for Young Hynd Horn's sake.
14 The news unto the bonnie bride came
That at the yett there stands an auld man.
She gave to me a gay gold ring, 10 'Wilt thou give to me thy begging coat?
With three shining diamonds set therein. And I 'll give to thee my scarlet cloak.


17. HIND HORN
203
15 'There stands an auld man at the king's gate;
He asketh a drink for young Hyn Horn's sake.'
16 '111 go thro nine fires so hot,
But I 'll give him a drink for Young Hyn Horn's
sake.'
17 She gave him a drink out of her own hand;
He drank out the drink and he dropt in the
ring.
18 'Got thou't by sea, or got thou't by land?
Or got thou't out of any dead man's hand?'
19 'I got it not by sea, but I got it by land,
For I got it out of thine own hand.'
20 'I 'll cast off my gowns of brown,
And I 'll follow thee from town to town.
21 'I 'll cast off my gowns of red,
And along with thee I 'll beg my bread.'
22 'Thou need not cast off thy gowns of brown,
For I can make thee lady of many a town.
23 'Thou need not cast off thy gowns of red,
For I can maintain thee with both wine and
bread.'
24 The bridegroom thought he had the bonnie
bride wed,
But Young Hyn Horn took the bride to bed.
o
a. Motherwell's Note-Book, p. 42: from Agnes Lyle. b.
Motherwell's MS., p. 413 : from the singing of Agnes Lyle,
Kilbarchan, August 24, 1825.
1 Yotjng Hyn Horn's to the king's court gone,
Hoch hey and an ney O
He's fallen in love with his little daughter
Jean.
Let my love alone, I pray you
2 He's bocht to her a little gown,
With seven broad flowers spread it along.
3 She's given to him a gay gold ring.
The posie upon it was richt plain.
4 'When you see it losing its comely hue,
So will I my love to you.'
5 Then within a little wee,
Hyn Horn left land and went to sea.
6 When he lookt his ring upon,
He saw it growing pale and wan.
7 Then within a little [wee] again,
Hyn Horn left sea and came to the land.
8 As he was riding along the way,
There he met with a jovial beggar.
9 'What news, what news, old man?' he did say:
'This is the king's young dochter's wedding
day.'
10 'H this be true you tell to me,
You must niffer clothes with me.
11 'You 'll gie me your cloutit coat,
I 'll gie you my fine velvet coat
12 'You '11 gie me your cloutit pock,
I 'll gie you my purse; it 'll be no joke.'
13 'Perhaps there['s] nothing in it, not one baw-
bee ;'
'Yes, there's gold and silver both,' said he.
14 'You H gie me your bags of bread,
And I H gie you my milk-white steed.'
15 When they had niffered all, he said,
'You maun learn me how I 'll beg.'
16 'When you come before the gate,
You '11 ask for a drink for the highman's sake.'
17 When that he came before the gate,
He calld for a drink for the highman's sake.
18 The bride cam tripping down the stair,
To see whaten a bold beggar was there.


204
I7. HIND HORN
19 She gave him a drink with her own hand;
He loot the ring drop in the can.
20 'Got ye this by sea or land?
Or took ye't aff a dead man's hand?'
21 'I got na it by sea nor land,
But I got it aff your own hand.'
22 The bridegroom cam tripping down the stair,
But there was neither bride nor beggar there.
23 Her ain bridegroom had her first wed,
But Young Hyn Horn had her first to bed.
D
Cromek's Select Scotish Songs, n, 204.
1 Near Edinburgh was a young son born,
Hey lilelu an a how low lan
An his name it was called young Hyn Horn.
An it's hey down down deedle airo
2 Seven long years he served the king,
An it's a' for the sake of his daughter Jean.
3 The king an angry man was he;
He send young Hyn Horn to the sea.
* » # * *
4 An on his finger she put a ring.
*****
6 'When your ring turns pale and wan,
Then I'm in love wi another man.'
*****
6 Upon a day he lookd at his ring,
It was as pale as anything.
7 He's left the sea, an he's come to the lan,
An there he met an auld beggar man.
8 'What news, what news, my auld beggar man?
What news, what news, by sea or by lan?'
9 'Nae news, nae news,' the auld beggar said,
'But the king's dochter Jean is going to be
wed.'
10 'Cast off, cast off thy auld beggar-weed,
An I 'll gie thee my gude gray steed.'
*****
11 When he cam to our guid king's yet,
He sought a glass o wine for young Hyn Horn's
sake.
12 He drank out the wine, an he put in the ring,
An he bade them carry't to the king's dochter
Jean.
*****
13 'O gat ye't by sea, or gat ye't by lan?
Or gat ye't aff a dead man's han?'
14 'I gat na't by sea, I gat na't by lan,
But I gat it out of your own han.'
*****
15 'Go take away my bridal gown,
For I 'll follow him frae town to town.'
16 'Te need na leave your bridal gown,
For I 'll make ye ladie o' mony a town.'
E
Motherwell's MS., p. 91. From the recitation of Mrs
Wilson.
*****
1 Hvxi) Horn he has lookt on his ring,
Hey ninny ninny, how ninny nanny
And it was baith black and blue,
And she is either dead or she's married.
And the barck and the broom blooms bon-
nie
2 Hynd Horn he has shuped to land,
And the first he met was an auld beggar man.
3 'What news, what news, my silly auld man?
For it is seven years syne I have seen land
4 'What news, what news, my auld beggar man?
What news, what news, by sea or by land?'
5 'There is a king's dochter in the east,
And she has been marryed these nine nights
past.


17. HIND HORN
205
6 'Intil the bride's bed she winna gang
Till she hears tell of her Hynd Horn.'
7 'Cast aff, cast aft thy anld beggar weed,
And I will gie thee my glide gray steed.'
Ldwran Castle, or the Wild Boar of Cnrridoo: with
other Tales. By Robert Trotter, Dumfries, 1822, p. 6.
From the recitation of a young friend.
1 In Newport town this knight was born,
Hey lily loo, hey loo lan
And they've called him Young Hynd Horn.
Fal lal la, fal the dal the dady
2 Seven long years he served the king,
For the love of his daughter Jean.
3 He courted her through a wimble bore,
The way never woman was courted before.
4 He gave her through a silver wand,
With three singing laverocks there upon.
6 She gave him back a gay gold ring,
With three bright diamonds glittering.
6 'When this ring grows pale and blue,
Fair Jeanie's love is lost to you.'
7 Young Hynd Horn is gone to sea,
And there seven long years staid he.
8 When he lookd his ring upon,
It grew pale and it grew wan.
9 Young Hynd Horn is come to land,
When he met an old beggar man.
10 'What news, what news doth thee betide?'
'No news, but Princess Jeanie's a bride.'
11 'Will ye give me your old brown cap?
And I 'll give you my gold-laced hat.
12 'Will ye give me your begging weed?
And IH give you my good grey steed.'
13 The beggar has got on to ride,
But Young Hynd Horn's bound for the bride.
*****
o
Einloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 135. "From the
recitation of my niece, M. Kinnear, 23 Aug', 1826:" the
north of Scotland.
1 'Hynde Horn 'a bound love, and Hynde
Horn's free,
Whare was ye born, or in what countrie?'
2 'In gude greenwud whare I was born,
And all my friends left me forlorn.
3 'I gave my love a silver wand;
That was to rule oure all Scotland.
4.' My love gave me a gay gowd ring;
That was to rule abune a' thing.'
5 'As lang as that ring keeps new in hue,
Ye may ken that your love loves you.
6 'But whan that ring turns pale and wan,
Ye may ken that your love loves anither man.'
7 He hoisted up his sails, and away sailed he,
Till that he cam to a foreign countrie.
8 He looked at his ring; it was turnd pale and
wan;
He said, 'I wish I war at hame again.'
9 He hoisted up his sails, and hame sailed he,
Until that he came to his ain countrie.
10 The first ane that he met wi
Was wi a puir auld beggar man.
11 'What news, what newB, my silly old man?
What news hae ye got to tell to me?'
12 'Na news, na news,' the puir man did say,
'But this is our queen's wedding day.'
13 'Ye H lend me your begging weed,
And I 'll gie you my riding steed.'


17. HIND HOEN
207
10 And when he lookd upon his ring,
He knew she loved another man.
11 He hoist up sails and home came he,
Home unto his ain countrie.
12 The first he met on his own land,
It chancd to he a heggar man.
13 'What news, what news, my gude auld man?
What news, what news, hae ye to me?'
14 'Nae news, nae news,' said the auld man,
'The morn's our queen's wedding day.'
15 'Will ye lend me your begging weed?
And I 'll lend you my riding steed.'
16 'My begging weed will ill suit thee,
And your riding steed will ill suit me.'
17 But part be right, and part be wrang,
Frae the beggar man the cloak he wan.
18 'Auld man, come tell to me your leed;
What news ye gie when ye beg your bread.'
19 'As ye walk up unto the hill,
Your pike staff ye lend ye till.
20 'But whan ye come near by the yett,
Straight to them ye will upstep.
21 'Take nane frae Peter, nor frae Paul,
Nane frae high or low o them all.
22 'And frae them all ye will take nane,
Until it comes frae the bride's ain hand.'
23 He took nane frae Peter nor frae Paul,
Nane frae the high nor low o them all.
24 And frae them all he would take nane,
Until it came frae the bride's ain hand.
25 The bride came tripping down the stair,
The combs o red gowd in her hair.
26 A cup o red wine in her hand,
And that she gae to the beggar man.
27 Out o the cup he drank the wine,
And into the cup he dropt the ring.
28 'O got ye't by sea, or got ye't by land,
Or got ye't on a drownd man's hand?'
29 'I got it not by sea, nor got it by land,
Nor got I it on a drownd man's hand.
30 'But I got it at my wooing gay,
And I H gie't you on your wedding day.'
31 'I 'll take the red gowd frae my head,
And follow you, and beg my bread.
32 'I 'll take the red gowd frae my hair,
And follow you for evennair.'
33 Atween the kitchen and the ha,
He loot his cloutie cloak down fa.
34 And wi red gowd shone ower them a',
And frae the bridegroom the bride he sta.
A. l2, 81,142, 152, 162, 242. Hindhorn.
B. The burden is given in Motherwell, Appendix,
p. xviii, thus:
With a hey lilloo and a how lo lan
And the birk and the brume blooms bonnie.
122, 132. Hyndhorn. 152, 162, 242. Hynhorn.
a. 5s. to see. 52, 72. Hynhorn. 232. H. horn.
II1. clouted.
111, 141. give.
142. white milk. b. milk-white.
162. hymen's, b. highman's.
221. can.
b. 52, 7s, 23s. Hynhorn.
71. little wee.
181. there's.
D. ls, 32, ll2. Hynhorn.
E. The second line of the burden stands after st. 2
in MS.
21. The MS reading may be sheeped.
21, 6s. Hyndhorn.


208
18. SIR LIONEL
G. After my niece, M. Kinnear, etc., stands in pen-
cil Christy Smith.
15. On the opposite page, over against this
stanza, is written:
But part by richt, or part be wrang,
The auldman's duddie cloak he 's on.
G and H are printed by Kinloch and by
Buchan in four-line stanzas.
The stanzas printed by Motherwell, which
have not been found in his manuscripts, are:
10 Seven lang years he has been on the sea,
And Hynd Horn has looked how his ring
may be.
21 The auld beggar man cast off his coat,
And he 'a taen up the scarlet cloak.
22 The auld beggar man threw down his staff,
And he has mounted the good gray steed.
29 She went to the gate where the auld man
did stand,
And she gave him a drink out of her own
hand.
18
SIR LIONEL.
A. 'Sir Lionell,' Percy MS., p. 82, Hales and Furni-
vall, i, 75.
B. 'Isaac-a-Bell and Hugh the Graeme,' Christie, Tra-
ditional Ballad Airs, i, 110.
C. a. 'The Jovial Hunter of Brom8grove,' Allies, The
British, Roman and Saxon Antiquities and Folk-Lore
of Worcestershire, 2d ed., p. 116. b. Bell's Ancient
Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of Eng-
land, p. 124.
D. Allies, as above, p. 118.
E. a. 'The Old Man and his Three Sons,' Bell, as
above, p. 250. b. Mr Robert White's papers.
F. Allies, as above, p. 120.
B can be traced in Banffshire, according to
Christie, for more than a hundred years,
through the old woman that sang it, and her
forbears. C a, D were originally published
by Allies in the year 1845, in a pamphlet
bearing the title The Jovial Hunter of Broms-
grove, Home the Hunter, and Robin Hood.
No intimation as to the source of his copy,
C b, is given by Bell, i. e., Dixon. Appar-
ently all the variations from Allies, C a, are
of the nature of editorial improvements. E a
is said (1857) to be current in the north of
England as a nursery song.
One half of A, the oldest and fullest copy
of this ballad (the second and fourth quar-
ters), is wanting in the Percy MS. What
we can gather of the story is this. A knight
finds a lady sitting in a tree, A, C, D [under
a tree, E], who tells him that a wild boar has
slain Sir Broning, A [killed her lord and thirty
of his men, C; worried her lord and wounded
thirty, E]. The knight kills the boar, B-D,
and seems to have received bad wounds in the
process, A, B; the boar belonged to a giant,
B; or a wild woman, C, D. The knight is
required to forfeit his hawks and leash, and
the little finger of his right hand, A [his
horse, his hound, and his lady, C]. He re-
fuses to submit to such disgrace, though in no
condition to resist, A; the giant allows him
time to heal his wounds, forty days, A; thirty-
three, B; and he is to leave his lady as se-
curity for his return, A. At the end of this
time the knight comes back sound and well,


18. SIR LIONEL
209
A, B, and kills the giant as he had killed the
boar, B. C and D say nothing of the knight
having been wounded. The wild woman, to re-
venge her " pretty spotted pig," flies fiercely
at him, and he cleaves her in two. The last
quarter of the Percy copy would, no doubt,
reveal what became of the lady who was sit-
ting in the tree, as to which the traditional
copies give no light.
Our ballad has much in common with the
romance of 'Sir Eglamour of Artois,' Percy
MS., Hales and Furnlvall, n, 338; Thornton
Romances, Camden Society, ed. Halliwell, p.
121; Ellis, Metrical Romances, from an early
printed copy, Bonn's ed., p. 527. Eglamour,
simple knight, loving Christabel, an earl's
daughter, is required by the father, who does
not wish him well, to do three deeds of arms,
the second being to kill a boar in the kingdom
of Sattin or Sydon, which had been known to
slay forty armed knights in one day (Percy,
st. 37). This Eglamour does, after a very se-
vere fight. The boar belonged to a giant, who
had kept him fifteen years to slay Christian
men (Thornton, st. 42, Percy, 40). This giant
had demanded the king of Sydon's daughter's
hand, and comes to carry her off, by force, if
necessary, the day following the boar-fight.
Eglamour, who had been found by the king
in the forest, in a state of exhaustion, after a
contest which had lasted to the third or fourth
day, and had been taken home by him and
kindly cared for, is now ready for action again.
He goes to the castle walls with a squire,
who carries the boar's head on a spear. The
giant, seeing the head, exclaims,
'Alas, art thou dead!
My trust was all in thee!
Now by the law that I lieve in,
My little speckled hoglin,
Dear bought shall thy death be.'
Percy, st. 44.
Eglamour kills the giant, and returns to Ar-
tois with both heads. The earl has another
adventure ready for him, and hopes the third
chance may quit all. Eglamour asks for twelve
weeks to rest his weary body.
B comes nearest the romance, and possibly
even the wood of Tore is a reminiscence of Ar-
tois. The colloquy with the giant in B is also,
perhaps, suggested by one which had previous-
ly taken place between Eglamour and another
giant, brother of this, after the knight had
killed one of his harts (Percy, st. 25). C 11,
D 9 strikingly resemble the passage of the ro-
mance cited above (Percy, 44, Thornton, 47).
The ballad has also taken up something
from the romance of ' Eger and Grime,' Percy
MS., Hales and Furnivall, I, 341; Laing, Early'
Metrical Tales, p. 1; ' Sir Eger, Sir Grahame,
and Sir Gray-Steel,' Ellis's Specimens, p. 546.
Sir Egrabell (Rackabello, Isaac-a-Bell), Lio-
nel's father, recalls Sir Eger, and Hugh the
Grasme in B is of course the Grahame or
Grime of the romance, the Hugh being de-
rived from a later ballad. Gray-Steel, a man
of proof, although not quite a giant, cuts off
the little finger of Eger's right hand, as the
giant proposes to do to Lionel in A 21.
The friar in E l3, 41, may be a corruption
of Ryalas, or some like name, as the first line
of the burden of E, 'Wind well, Lion, good
hunter,' seems to be a perversion of 'Wind
well thy horn, good hunter,' in C, D.* This
part of the burden, especially as it occurs in
A, is found, nearly, in a fragment of a song
of the time of Henry VIII, given by Mr
Chappell in his Popular Music of the Olden
Time, I, 58, as copied from '' MSS Reg., Ap-
pend. 58."
'Blow thy horne, hunter,
Cum, blow thy horne on hye!
In yonder wode there lyeth a doo,
In fayth she woll not dye.
Cum, blow thy horne, hunter,
Cum, blow thy horne, joly hunter!'
A terrible swine is a somewhat favorite fig-
ure in romantic tales. A worthy peer of the
boar of Sydon is killed by King Arthur in
'The Avowynge of King Arthur,' etc., Rob-
son, Three Early English Metrical Romances
(see st. xii). But both of these, and even the
Erymanthian, must lower their bristles before
* The friar might also be borrowed from 'The Felon Sow
and the Friars of Richmond,' but this piece does not appear
to have been extensively known.
27


210
18. SIR LIONEL
the boar in 'Kilhwch and Olwen,' Mabino-
gion, Part iv, pp. 309-16. Compared with
any of these, the "felon sow " presented by
Ralph Rokeby to the friars of Richmond
(Evans, Old Ballads, n, 270, ed. 1810, Scott,
Appendix to Rokeby, note M) is a tame vil-
latic pig: the old mettle is bred out.
Professor Grundtvig has communicated to
me a curious Danish ballad of this class,' Lim-
grises Vise,' from a manuscript of the latter
part of the 16th century. A very intractable
damsel, after rejecting a multitude of aspi-
rants, at last marries, with the boast that her
progeny shall be fairer than Christ in heaven.
She has a litter of nine pups, a pig, and a boy.
The pig grows to be a monster, and a scourge
to the whole region.
He drank up the water from dike and from dam,
And ate up, besides, both goose, gris and lamb.
The beast is at last disposed of by baiting
him with the nine congenerate dogs, who
jump down his throat, rend liver and lights,
and find their death there, too. This ballad
smacks of the broadside, and is assigned to
the 16th century. A fragment of a Swedish
swine-ballad, in the popular tone, is given by
Dybeck, Runa, 1845, p. 23 ; another, very sim-
ilar, in Axelson's Vesterdalarne, p. 179, ' Kol-
oregris,' and Professor Sophus Bugge has re-
covered some Norwegian verses. The Danish
story of the monstrous birth of the pig has
become localized: the Liimfiord is related to
have been made by the grubbing of the Lim-
gris: Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagn, n. 19, two
forms.
There can hardly be anything but the name
in common between the Lionel of this ballad
and Lancelot's cousin-german.
A
Percy MS., p. 32, Hales and Furnivall, i, 75.
1 Sir Egrabell had sonnes three,
Blow thy home, good hunter
Sir Lyonell was one of these.
As I am a gentle hunter
2 Sir Lyonell wold on hunting ryde,
Vntill the forrest him beside.
3 And as he rode thorrow the wood,
Where trees and harts and all were good,
4 And as he rode over the plaine,
There he saw a knight lay slaine.
5 And as he rode still on the plaine,
He saw a lady sitt in a graine.
6 'Say thou, lady, and tell thou me,
What blood shedd heere has bee.'
7 'Of this blood shedd we may all rew,
Both wife and childe and man alsoe.
8 'For it is not past 3 days right
Since Sir Broninge was mad a knight.
9 'Nor it is not more than 3 dayes agoe
Since the wild bore did him sloe.'
10 'Say thou, lady, and tell thou mee,
How long thou wilt sitt in that tree.'
11 She said, ' I will sitt in this tree
Till my friends doe feitch me.'
12 'Tell me, lady, and doe not misse,
Where that yowr friends dwellings is.'
13 'Downe,' shee said, 'in yonder towne,
There dwells my freinds of great renowne.'
14 Says, ' Lady, Ile ryde into yonder towne
And see wether yowr friends beene bowne.
15 'I my self wilbe the formost man
That shall come, lady, to feitch you home.'
16 But as he rode then by the way,
He thought it shame to goe away;
17 And vmbethought him of a wile,
How he might that wilde bore beguile.
18 'Sir Egrabell,' he said, 'my father was;
He neuer left lady in such a case;


18. SIR LIONEL
211
19 'Noe more will I' . . .
*****
20 'And a[fter] that thou shalt doe mee
Thy hawkes and thy lease alsoe.
21 'Soe shalt thou doe at my command
The litle fingar on thy right hand.'
22 'Ere I wold leaue all this with thee,
Vpoon this ground I rather dyee.'
23 The gyant gaue Sir Lyonefl such a blow,
The fyer out of his eyen did throw.
24 He said then, ' if I were saffe and sound,
• As with-in this hower I was in this ground,
25 'It shold be in the next towne told
How deare thy buffett it was sold;
26 'And it shold haue beene in the next towne
said
How well thy buffett it were paid.'
27 'Take 40 daies into spite,
To heale thy wounds that beene soe wide.
28 'When 40 dayes beene at an end,
Heere meete thou me both safe and sound.
29 'And till thou come to me againe,
With me thoust leaue thy lady alone.'
30 When 40 dayes was at an end,
Sir Lyonell of his wounds was healed sound.
31 He tooke with him a litle page,
He gaue to him good yeomans wage.
32 And as he rode by one hawthorne,
Even there did hang his hunting home.
33 He sett his bugle to his mouth,
And blew his bugle still full south.
34 He blew his bugle lowde and shrill;
The lady heard, and came him till.
35 Sayes, 'the gyant lyes vnder yond low,
And well he heares yowr bugle blow.
36 'And bidds me of good cheere be,
This night heele supp with you and me.'
37 Hee sett that lady vppon a steede,
And a litle boy before her yeede.
38 And said, 'lady, if you see that I must dye,
As euer you loued me, from me flye.
39 'But, lady, if you see that I must liue,'
*****
B
Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, i, 110. From the sing-
ing of an old woman in Buckie, Enzie, Banffshire.
1 A knicht had two sons o sma fame,
Hey nien nanny
Isaac-a-Bell and Hugh the Graeme.
And the norlan flowers spring bonny
2 And to the youngest he did say,
'What occupation will you hae?
When the, etc.
3 'Will you gae fee to pick a mill?
Or will you keep hogs on yon hill?'
While the, etc.
4 'I winna fee to pick a mill,
Nor will I keep hogs on yon hill.
While the, etc.
5 'But it is said, as I do hear,
That war will last for seven year,
And the, etc.
6 'With a giant and a boar
That range into the wood o Tore.
And the, etc.
7 'Tou 'll horse and armour to me provide,
That through Tore wood I may safely ride.'
When the, etc.


212
18. SIR LIONEL
8 The knicht did horse and armour provide,
That through Tore wood Graeme micht safely
ride.
When the, etc.
9 Then he rode through the wood o Tore,
And up it started the grisly boar.
When the, etc.
10 The firsten bout that he did ride,
The boar he wounded in the left side.
When the, etc.
11 The nexten bout at the boar he gaed,
He from the boar took aff his head.
And the, etc.
12 As he rode back through the wood o Tore,
Up started the giant him before.
And the, etc.
13 'O cam you through the wood o Tore,
Or did you see my good wild boar?'
And the, etc.
15 'The firsten bout that I did ride,
I wounded your wild boar in the side.
And the, etc.
16 'The nexten bout at him I gaed,
From your wild boar I took aff his head.'
And the, etc.
17 'Gin you have cut aff the head o my boar,
It 'a your head shall be taen therfore.
And the, etc.
18 'I 'll gie you thirty days and three,
To heal your wounds, then come to me.'
While the, etc.
19 'It's after thirty days and three,
When my wounds heal, I'll come to thee.'
When the, etc.
20 So Graeme is back to the wood o Tore,
And he's killd the giant, as he killd the
boar.
And the, etc.
14 'I cam now through the wood o Tore,
But woe be to your grisly boar.
And the, etc.
0
a. Allies, The British, Roman, and Saxon Antiquities
and Folk-Lore of Worcestershire, 2d ed., p. 116. From the
recitation of Benjamin Brown, of Upper Wick, about 1845.
b. Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry of
England, edited by Robert Bell, p. 124.
1 Sm Robert Bolton had three sons,
Wind well thy horn, good hunter
And one of them was called Sir Ryalas.
For he was" a jovial hunter
2 He rang'd all round down by the woodside,
Till up in the top of a tree a gay lady he
spy'd.
For he was, etc.
3 'O what dost thou mean, fair lady ?' said he;
'O the wild boar has killed my lord and his
men thirty.'
As thou beest, etc.
4 'O what shall I do this wild boar to see?'
'O thee blow a blast, and he 'll come unto
thee.'
As thou beest, etc.
5 [Then he put his horn unto his mouth],
Then he blowd a blast full north, east, west
and south.
As he was, etc.
6 And the wild boar heard him full into his
den;
Then he made the best of his speed unto
him.
To Sir Ryalas, etc.
7 Then the wild boar, being so stout and so
strong,
He thrashd down the trees as he came along.
To Sir Ryalas, etc.
«


18. SIR LIONEL
213
8 'O what dost thou want of me ?' the wild boar
said he;
'0 I think in my heart I can do enough for
thee.'
For I am, etc.
9 Then they fought four hours in a long sum-
mer's day,
Till the wild boar fain would have gotten away.
From Sir Ryalas, etc.
10 Then Sir Ryalas drawd his broad sword with
might,
And he fairly cut his head off quite.
For he was, etc.
11 Then out of the wood the wild woman
flew:
'Oh thou hast killed my pretty spotted
Pig!
As thou beest, etc.
D
Allies, Antiquities and Folk-Lore of Worcestershire, p.
118. From the recitation of Oseman, Hartlebury.
1 As I went up one brook, one brook,
Well wind the horn, good hunter
I saw a fair maiden sit on a tree top.
As thou art the jovial hunter
2 I said, 'Fair maiden, what brings you here?'
'It is the wild boar that has drove me here.'
As thou art, etc.
3 'I wish I could that wild boar see ;'
Well wind the horn, good hunter,
And the wild boar soon will come to thee.'
As thou art, etc.
4 Then he put his horn unto his mouth,
And he blowd both east, west, north and
south.
As he was, etc.
6 The wild boar hearing it into his den,
[Then he made the best of his speed unto
him].
12 'There are three things I do demand of thee,
It 's thy horn, and thy hound, and thy gay
lady.'
As thou beest, etc.
13 'If these three things thou dost demand of me,
It's just as my sword and thy neck can agree.'
For I am, etc.
14 Then into his locks the wild woman flew,
Till she thought in her heart she had torn him
through.
As he was, etc.
15 Then Sir Ryalas drawd his broad sword again,
And he fairly split her head in twain.
For he was, etc.
16 In Bromsgrove church they both do lie;
There the wild boar's head is picturd by
Sir Ryalas, etc.
6 He whetted his tusks for to make them strong,
And he cut down the oak and the ash as he
came along.
For to meet with, etc.
7 They fought five hours one long summer's day,
Till the wild boar he yelld, and he'd fain run
away.
And away from, etc.
8 O then he cut his head clean off,
9 Then there came an old lady running out of
the wood,
Saying, 'You have killed my pretty, my pretty
spotted pig.'
As thou art, etc.
10 Then at him this old lady she did go,
And he clove her from the top of her head to
her toe.
As he was, etc.
11 In Bromsgrove churchyard this old lady lies,
And the face of the boar's head there is drawn
by,
That was killed by, etc.


214
18. SIR LIONEL
E
a. Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry
of England, edited by Robert Bell, p. 250. b. Mr Robert
White's papers.
1 There was an old man and sons he had three;
Wind well, Lion, good hunter
A friar he heing one of the three,
With pleasure he ranged the north country.
For he was a jovial hunter
2 As he went to the woods some pastime to see,
He spied a fair lady under a tree,
Sighing and moaning mournfully.
He was, etc.
3 'What are you doing, my fair lady?'
'I'm frightened the wild boar he will kill me;
He has worried my lord and wounded thirty.'
As thou art, etc.
4 Then the friar he put his horn to his mouth,
And he blew a blast, east, west, north and
south,
And the wild boar from his den he came forth.
Unto the, etc.
*****
F Sir Ryalash was one of these.
,,,, ...... .tit . ,„„ And be was a jovial hunter
Allies, Antiquities of Worcestershire, p. 120. J
1 Sib Rackabello had three sons,
Wind well your horn, brave hunter
A. 31. MS. And as the\
62. MS. had bee.
II1. MS. I wilt
12l. MS. miste.
162. MS. awaw.
17l. MS. vnbethought . . . while.
19. Between 19 and 20 half a page of the
MS. is wanting.
201. a[fter]: MS. blotted.
361. MS. bidds eue.
39. Half a page of the MS. is wanting.
B. The stanzas are doubled in Christie, to suit the
air.
C. a. 31, 42, V. D. 21, 32, 6. John Cole, who had
heard an old man sing the ballad fifty years
before (Allies, p. 115), could recollect only so
much:
'Oh! lady, Oh! lady, what bringst thou
here?'
Wind went his horn, as a hunter
'Thee blow another blast, and he 'll soon
come to thee.'
As thou art a jovial hunter
He whetted his tusks as he came along,
Wind went his horn, as a hunter
a 5, 6 stand thus in Allies:
v Then he blowd a blast full north, east,
west and south,
For he was, etc.
And the wild boar heard him full into his
den,
As he was, etc.
vi Then he made the best of his speed unto
him.
(Two lines wrongly supplied from another
source.)
To Sir Ryalas, etc.
5 has been completed from the corresponding
stanza in D, and the two verses of 6, sep-
arated above, are put together.
b. I1. Old Sir Robert. Is. was Sir Ryalas.
2*. Till in a tree-top.
31. dost thee. 32. The wild boar's killed my
lord and has thirty men gored.
Burden2. And thou beest.
41. for to see.
5l. As in Allies (see above), except full in
his den.
5'. then heard him full in his den.


19. KING ORFEO 215
6l. As in Allies (see above), but 62 supplied
by Bell.
72. Thrashed down the trees as he ramped
him along.
8l. 'Oh, what dost thee want of me, wild
boar.'
Burden2, the jovial.
91. summer. 92. have got him.
10s. cut the boar's head off quite.
11s. Oh, my pretty spotted pig thou hast slew.
Burden2, for thou beest.
121. I demand them of thee.
131. dost ask.
141. long locks. 142. to tear him through.
Burden2. Though he was.
152. into twain.
161. the knight he doth lie. 16s. And the
wild boar's head is pictured thereby.
D. 5, 6. In Allies thus:
v The wild boar hearing it into his den,
Well wind, etc.
He whetted his tusks, for to make them
strong,
And he cut down the oak and the ash as he
came along.
For to meet with, etc.
Stanza 5 has been completed from stanza vi
of Allies' other ballad, and 6 duly sepa-
rated from the first line of 5.
8s, 9. In Allies' copy thus:
vn Oh! then he cut his head clean off!
Well wind, etc.
Then there came an old lady running out
of the wood
Saying, 'You have killed my pretty, my
pretty spotted pig.'
As thou art, etc.
What stanza 8 should be is easily seen from
C 10.
C 16, D 11. As imperfectly remembered by
AUies (p. 114):
In Bromsgrove church his corpse doth he,
Why winded his horn the hunter?
Because there was a wild boar nigh,
And as he was a jovial hunter.
E. b. "Fragment found on the fly-leaf of an old
book." Mr R. White's papers.
I2. one of these three. 1s. wide countrie.
Burden2. He was.
21. was in woods. 2*. With a bloody river
running near she.
31. He said, ' Fair lady what are you doing
there?' 3s. killed my lord.
4. wanting.
19
KING ORFEO
The Leisure Hour, February 14, 1880, No 1468: Folk-Lore from Unst, Shetland, by Mrs Saxby, p. 109.
Me Edmondston, from whose memory this
ballad was derived, notes that though stanzas
are probably lost after the first which would
give some account of the king in the east
wooing the lady in the west, no such verses
were sung to him. He had forgotten some
stanzas after the fourth, of which the sub-
stance was that the lady was carried off by
fairies; that the king went in quest of her, and
one day saw a company passing along a hill-
side, among whom he recognized his lost wife.
The troop went to what seemed a great "ha-
house," or castle, on the hillside. Stanzas after
the eighth were also forgotten, the purport
being that a messenger from behind the grey
stane appeared and invited the king in.


216
19. KING ORFEO
We have here in traditional song the story
of the justly admired mediaeval romance of
Orpheus, in which fairy-land supplants Tar-
tarus, faithful love is rewarded, and Eury-
dice (Heurodis, Erodys, Eroudys) is retrieved.
This tale has come down to us in three ver-
sions: A, in the Auchinleck MS., dating from
the beginning of the fourteenth century, Ad-
vocates Library, Edinburgh, printed in Laing's
Select Remains of the Ancient Popular Poe-
try of Scotland, 'Orfeo and Heurodis,' No 3;
B, Ashmole MS., 61, Bodleian Library, of the
first half of the fifteenth century, printed in
Halliwell's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology,
'Kyng Orfew,' p. 37; C, Harleian MS., 3810,
British Museum, printed by Ritson, Metrical
Romancees, n, 248,' Sir Orpheo.' At the end
of the Auchinleck copy we are told that harp-
ers in Britain heard this marvel, and made a
lay thereof, which they called, after the king,
'Lay Orfeo.' The other two copies also, but
in verses which are a repetition of the intro-
duction to 'Lay le Freine',' call this a Breton
lay.
The story is this (A). Orfeo was a king
[and so good a harper never none was, B].
One day in May his queen went out to a
garden with two maidens, and fell asleep un-
der an "ympe" tree. When she waked she
shrieked, tore her clothes, and acted very
wildly. Her maidens ran to the palace and
called for help, for the queen would go mad.
Knights and ladies went to the queen, took
her away, and put her to bed; but still the
excitement continued. The king, in great
affliction, besought her to tell him what was
the matter, and what he could do. Alas! she
said, I have loved thee as my life, and thou
me, but now we must part. As she slept
knights had come to her and had bidden her
come speak with their king. Upon her re-
fusal, the king himself came, with a company
of knights and damsels, all on snow-white
steeds, and made her ride on a palfrey by his
side, and, after he had shown her his palace,
brought her back and said: Look thou be
under this ympe tree tomorrow, to go with us;
and if thou makest us any let, we will take
thee by force, wherever thou be. The next
day Orfeo took the queen to the tree under
guard of a thousand knights, all resolved to
die before they would give her up: but she was
spirited away right from the midst of £hem,
no one knew whither.
The king all but died of grief, but it was
no boot. He gave his kingdom in charge to
his high steward, told his barons to choose a
new king when they should learn that he was
dead, put on a sclavin and nothing else, took
his harp, and went barefoot out at the gate.
Ten years he lived in the woods and on the
heath; his body wasted away, his beard grew
to 'his girdle. His only solace was in his harp,
and, when the weather was bright, he would
play, and all the beasts and birds would flock
to him. Often at hot noon-day he would see
the king of fairy hunting with his rout, or
an armed host would go by him with banners
displayed, or knights and ladies would come
dancing; but whither they went he could not
tell. One day he descried sixty ladies who
were hawking. He went towards them and
saw that one of them was Heurodis. He looked
at her wistfully, and she at him; neither spoke
a word, but tears fell from her eyes, and the
ladies hurried her away. He followed, and
spared neither stub nor stem. They went in
at a rock, and he after. They alighted at a
superb castle; he knocked at the gate, told
the porter he was a minstrel, and was let in.
There he saw Heurodis, sleeping under an
ympe tree.
Orfeo went into the hall, and saw a king
and queen, sitting in a tabernacle. He kneeled
down before the king. What man art thou?
said the king. I never sent for thee, and never
found I man so bold as to come here unbidden.
Lord, quoth Orfeo, I am but a poor minstrel,
and it is a way of ours to seek many a lord's
house, though we be not welcome. Without
more words he took his harp and began to
play. All the palace came to listen, and lay
down at his feet. The king sat still and was
glad to hear, and, when the harping was done,
said, Minstrel, ask of me whatever it be ; I will
pay thee largely. "Sir," said Orfeo, "I be-
seech thee give me the lady that sleepeth un-
der the ympe tree." "Nay," quoth the king,


19. KING ORFEO
217
"ye were a sorry couple; for thou art lean and
rough and black, and she is lovely and has no
lack. A lothly thing were it to see her in thy
company." "Gentle king," replied the harper,
it were a fouler thing to hear a lie from thy
mouth." "Take her, then, and be blithe of
her," said the king.
Orfeo now turned homewards, but first pre-
sented himself to the steward alone, and in
beggar's clothes, as a harper from heathen-
dom, to see if he were a true man. The loyal
steward was ready to welcome every good
harper for love of his lord. King Orfeo made
himself known; the steward threw over the
table, and fell down at his feet, and so did all
A
The Leisure Hour, February 14, 1880, No 1468, p. 109.
Obtained from the singing of Andrew Coutts, an old man in
Unst, Shetland, by Mr Biot Edmondston.
1 Der lived a king inta da aste,
Scowan -iirla griin
Der lived a lady in da wast.
Whar giorten han griin oarlac
2
3
4 'For da king o Ferrie we his daert,
Has pierced your lady to da hert.'
* * # * #
5 And aifter dem da king has gaen,
But whan he cam it was a grey stane.
6 Dan he took oot his pipes ta play,
Bit sair his hert wi dbl an wae.
the lords. They brought the queen to the
town. Orfeo and Heurodis were crowned
anew, and lived l°ng afterward.
The Scandinavian burden was, perhaps, no
more intelligible to the singer than " Hey non
nonny" is to us. The first line seems to be
Unst for Danish
Skoven axle gron (Early green's the wood).
The sense of the other line is not so obvious.
Professor Grundtvig has suggested to me,
Hvor hjorten han gar arlig (Where the hart goes
yearly).
* * * * *
9 'Noo come ye in inta wir ha,
An come ye in among wis a'.'
10 Now he's gaen in inta der ha,
An he's gaen in among dem a'.
11 Dan he took out his pipes to play,
Bit sair his hert wi dbl an wae.
14 'Noo tell to us what ye will hae:
What sall we gie you for your play?
15 'What I will hae I will you tell,
An dat's me Lady Isabel.'
16 'Yees tak your lady, an yees gaeng home,
An yees be king ower a' your ain.'
Dis king he has a huntin gaen,
He's left his Lady Isabel alaue. .
'Oh I wis ye'd never gaen away,
For at your hame is dbl an wae.
12 An first he played da notes o noy,
An dan he played da notes o joy.
13 An dan he played da god gabber reel,
Dat meicht ha made a sick hert hale.
7 And first he played da notes o* noy, 17 He's taen his lady, an he's gaen hame,
An dan he played da notes o joy. An noo he's king ower a' his ain.
8 An dan he played da god gabber reel,
Dat meicht ha made a sick hert hale.
28


218
20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
20
THE CRUEL MOTHER.
A. Herd's MSS, i, 182, ir, 191. Herd's Ancient and
Modern Scottish Songs, 1776, n, 237.
B. a. 'Fine Flowers in the Valley,' Johnson's Mu-
seum, p. 331. b. Scott's Minstrelsy, in, 259 (1803).
C. 'The Cruel Mother,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p.
161.
D. a. Kinloch MSS, v, 108. b. 'The Cruel Mother,'
Kinloch, Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 46.
E. 'The Cruel Mother.' a. Motherwell's MS., p. 390.
b. Motherwell's Note-Book, p. 88.
B. 'The Cruel Mother.' a. Buchan's MSS, n, 98.
b. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, n, 222.
G. Notes and Queries, 1st S., vm, 358.
H. 'The Cruel Mother,' Motherwell's MS., p. 402.
X. 'The Minister's Daughter of New York.' a. Bu-
chan's MSS, n, 111. b. Buchan's Ballads of the
North of Scotland, n, 217. o. 'Hey wi the rose and
the lindie <),' Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, i,
106.
J. a. ' The Rose o Malindie O,' Harris MS., f. 10. b.
Fragment communicated by Dr T. Davidson.
K. Motherwell's MS., p. 186.
L. 'Fine Flowers in the Valley,' Smith's Scottish Min-
strel, iv, 83.
M. From Miss M. Reburn, as learned in County Meath,
Ireland, one stanza.
Two fragments of this ballad, A, B, were
printed in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century ; C-L were committed to writing after
1800 ; and, of these, E, H, J, K are now printed
for the first time.
A-H differ only slightly, but several of these
versions are very imperfect. A young woman,
who passes for a leal maiden, gives birth to
two babes [A, B, one, H, three], puts them
to death with a penknife, B-F, and buries
them, or, H, ties them hand and feet and
buries them alive. She afterwards sees two
pretty boys, and exclaims that if they were
hers she would treat them most tenderly.
They make answer that when they were hers
they were very differently treated, rehearse
what she had done, and inform or threaten
her that hell shall be her portion, C, D, E,
F, H. In I the children are buried alive, as
* All the genuine ones. 'Lady Anne,' in Scott's Min-
strelsy, in, 259, 1803, is on the face of it a modern composi-
tion, with extensive variations, on the theme of the popular
in H, in J a strangled, in J b and L killed
with the penknife, but the story is the same
down to the termination, where, instead of
simple hell-fire, there are various seven-year
penances, properly belonging to the ballad of
'The Maid and the Palmer,' which follows this.
All the English ballads are in two-line
stanzas.*
Until 1870 no corresponding ballad had
been found in Denmark, though none was
more likely to occur in Danish. That year
Kristensen, in the course of his very remarka-
ble ballad-quest in Jutland, recovered two ver-
sions which approach surprisingly near to
Scottish tradition, and especially to E : Jydske
Folkeviser, I, 329, No 121 A, B, ' Barnemor-
dersken.' Two other Danish versions have
been obtained since then, but have not been
published. A and B are much the same, and
ballad. It is here given in an Appendix, with a companion
piece from Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway
Song.


20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
219
a close translation of A will not take much
more space than would be required for a suffi-
cient abstract.
Little Kirsten took with her the bower-women five,
And with them she went to the wood belive.
She spread her cloak down on the earth,
And on it to two little twins gave birth.
She laid them under a turf so green,
Nor suffered for them a sorrow unseen.
She laid them under so broad a stone,
Suffered sorrow nor harm for what she had done.
Eight years it was, and the children twain
Would fain go home to their mother again.
They went and before Our Lord they stood:
'Might we go home to our mother, we would.'
'Te may go to your mother, if ye will,
But ye may not contrive any ill.'
They knocked at the door, they made no din:
'Rise up, our mother, and let us in.'
By life and by death hath she cursed and sworn,
That never a child in the world had she borne.
'Stop, stop, dear mother, and swear not so fast,
We shall recount to you what has passed.
'You took with you the bower-women five,
And with them went to the wood belive.
'You spread your cloak down on the earth,
And on it to two little twins gave birth.
'You laid us under a turf so green,
Nor suffered for us a sorrow unseen.
'You laid us under so broad a stone,
Suffered sorrow nor harm for what you had done.'
'Nay my dear bairns, but stay with me;
And four barrels of gold shall be your fee.'
'You may give us four, or five, if you choose,
But not for all that, heaven will we lose.
'You may give^us eight, you may give us nine,
But not for all these, heaven will we tine.
'Our seat is made ready in heavenly light,
But for you a seat in hell is dight.'
A ballad is spread all over Germany which
is probably a variation of ' The Cruel Mother,'
though the resemblance is rather in the gen-
eral character than in the details. A, ' Hpl-
lisches Recht,' Wunderhorn, n, 202, ed. of
1808, n, 205, ed. 1857. Mittler, No 489, p.
383, seems to be this regulated and filled out.
B, Erlach, 'Die Rabenmutter,' rv, 148; re-
peated, with the addition of one stanza, by
Zuccalmaglio, p. 203, No 97. C, ' Die Kinds-
morderinn,' Meinert, p. 164, from the Kuh-
landchen; turned into current German, Erk's
Liederhort, p. 144, No 41°. D, Simrock, p.
87, No 37% from the Aargau. E,' Das falsche
Mutterherz,' Erk u. Irmer, Heft 5, No 7, and
'Die Kindesmorderin,' Erk's Liederhort, p.
140, No 41, Brandenburg. F, Liederhort, p.
142, No 41% Silesia. G, Liederhort, p. 143,
41% from the Rhein, very near to B. H, Hoff-
mann u. Richter, No 31, p. 54, and I, No 32,
p. 57, Silesia. J, Ditfurth, Frankische V. I.,
n, 12, No 13. K, ' Die Rabenmutter,' Peter,
Volksthiimliches aus Osterreichisch-Schlesien,
I, 210, No 21. L, 'Der Teufel u. die Miil-
lerstocbter,' Prohle, Weltliche u. geistliche V.
L, p. 15, No 9, Hanoverian Harz. Repeti-
tions and compounded copies are not noticed.
The story is nearly this in all. A herds-
man, passing through a wood, hears the cry
of a child, but cannot make out whence the
sound comes. The child announces that it is
hidden in a hollow tree, and asks to be taken
to the house where its mother is to be married
that day. There arrived, the child proclaims
before all the company that the bride is its
mother. The bride, or some one of the party,
calls attention to the fact that she is still wear-
ing her maiden-wreath. Nevertheless, says
the child, she has had three children : one she
drowned, one she buried in a dung-heap [the
sand], and one she hid in a hollow tree. The
bride wishes that the devil may come for her


220
20. THE CETJEL MOTHER
if this is true, and, upon the word, Satan ap-
pears and takes her off; in B, G, J, with words
like these:
'Komm her, komm her, meine schonste Braut,
Dein Sessel ist dir in der Holle gebaut.' J 9.
A Wendish version, 'Der Hollentanz,' in
Haupt and Schmaler, I, 290, No 292, differs
from the German ballads only in this, that the
bride has already borne nine children, and is
going with the tenth.
A combination of B, C, D, F is translated
by Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folkeviser,
No 43, p. 279, and I, from the eighth stanza
on, p. 282. C is translated by Wolff, Halle
der Volker, I, 11, and Hauschatz, p. 223; Al-
lingham's version (nearly B a) by Knortz, L.
u. R. Alt-Englands, p. 178, No 48.
A
Herd's MSS/i, 132, n, 191: Ancient and Modern Scot-
tish Songs, 1776, n, 237.
*****
1 And there she's leand her back to a thorn,
Oh and alelladay, oh and alelladay
And there she has her baby born.
Ten thousand times good night and be wi
thee
2 She has houked a grave ayont the sun,
And there she has buried the sweet babe in.
3 And she's gane back to her father's ha,
She's counted the leelest maid o them a'.
*****
4 'O look not sae sweet, my bonie babe,
Gin ye smyle sae, ye 'll smyle me dead.'
*****
B
a. Johnson's Museum, p. 331. b. Scott's Minstrelsy,
1803, in, 259, preface.
1 She sat down below a thorn,
Fine flowers in the valley
And there she has her sweet babe born.
And the green leaves they grow rarely
2 'Smile na sae sweet, my bonie babe,
And ye smile sae sweet, ye 'll smile me dead.'
3 She 's taen out her little pen-knife,
And twinnd the sweet babe o its life.
4 She's howket a grave by the light o the
moon,
And there she's buried her sweet babe in.
5 As she was going to the church,
She saw a sweet babe in the porch.
6 'O sweet babe, and thou were mine,
I wad deed thee in the silk so fine.'
7 'O mother dear, when I was thine,
You did na prove to me sae kind.'
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 161.
1 She leaned her back unto a thorn,
Three, three, and three by three
And there she has her two babes born.
Three, three, and thirty-three
2 She took frae 'bout her ribbon-belt,
And there she bound them hand and foot.
3 She has taen out her wee pen-knife,
And there she ended baith their life.
4 She has howked a hole baith deep and wide,
She has put them in baith side by side.


20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
221
5 She has covered them oer wi a marble stane,
Thinking she would gang maiden hame.
6 As she was walking by her father's castle wa,
She saw twa pretty babes playing at the ba.
7 'O bonnie babes, gin ye were mine,
I would dress you up in satin fine.
8 'O I would dress you in the silk,
And wash you ay in morning milk.'
9 'O cruel mother, we were thine,
And thou made us to wear the twine.
10 'O cursed mother, heaven's high,
And that's where thou will neer win nigh.
11 'O cursed mother, hell is deep,
And there thou 'll enter step by step.'
a. Kinloch's MSS, v, 103, in the handwriting of James
Beattie. b. Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 46: from
the recitation of Miss C. Beattie.
1 There lives a lady in London,
All alone and alone ee
She's gane wi bairn to the clerk's son.
Down by the green wood sae bonnie
2 She's taen her mantle her about,
She's gane aff to the gude green wood.
3 She's set her back untill an oak,
First it bowed and then it broke.
4 She's set her back untill a tree,
Bonny were the twa boys she did bear.
5 But'she took out a little pen-knife,
And she parted them and their sweet life.
6 She's aff untill her father's ha;
She was the lealest maiden that was amang
them a'.
7 As she lookit oure the castle wa,
She spied twa bonnie boys playing at the ba.
8 'O if these two babes were mine,
They should wear the silk and the sabel-
line!*
9 'O mother dear, when we were thine,
"We neither wore the silks nor the sabel-
line.
10 'But out ye took a little pen-knife,
And ye parted us and our sweet life.
11 'But now we 're in the heavens hie,
And ye've the pains o hell to drie.'
E
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 390. b. Motherwell's Note-
Book, p. 33. From the recitation of Agnes Lyle, Kilbar-
cban, August 24, 1825.
1 Thebe was a lady, she lived in Lurk,
Sing hey alone and alonie O
She fell in love with her father's clerk.
Down by yon greenwood sidie O
2 She loved him seven years and a day,
Till her big belly did her betray.
3 She leaned her back unto a tree,
And there began her sad misery.
4 She set her foot unto a thorn,
And there she got her two babes born.
5 She took out her wee pen-knife,
She twind them both of their sweet life.
6 She took the sattins was on her head,
She rolled them in both when they were
dead.
7 She howkit a grave forenent the sun,
And there she buried her twa babes in.
8 As she was walking thro her father's ha,
She spied twa boys playing at the ba.


222
20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
9 'O pretty boys, if ye were mine,
I would dress ye both in the silks so fine.'
10 'O mother dear, when we were thine,
Thou neer dressed us in silks so fine.
11 'For thou was a lady, thou livd in Lurk,
And thou fell in love with thy father's clerk.
12 'Thou loved him seven years and a day,
Till thy big belly did thee betray.
13 'Thou leaned thy back unto a tree,
And there began thy sad misery.
14 'Thou set thy foot unto a thorn,
And there thou got thy two babes born.
15 'Thou took out thy wee pen-knife,
And twind us both of our sweet hie.
16 'Thou took the sattins was on thy head,
Thou rolled us both in when we were dead.
17 'Thou howkit a grave forenent the sun,
And there thou buried thy twa babes in.
18 'But now we 're both in [the] heavens hie,
There is pardon for us, but none for thee.'
19 'My pretty boys, beg pardon for me!'
'There is pardon for us, but none for thee.'
F
a. Buchan's MSS, iI, 98. b. Buchan's Ballads of the
North of Scotland, n, 222.
1 It fell ance upon a day,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh
It fell ance upon a day,
Stirling for aye
It fell ance upon a day
The clerk and lady went to play.
So proper Saint Johnston stands fair upon
Tay
2 'If my baby be a son,
I 'll make him a lord of high renown.'
3 She's leand her back to the wa,
Prayd that her pains might fa.
4 She's leand her back to the thorn,
There was her baby born.
5 'O bonny baby, if ye suck sair,
You 'll never suck by my side mair.'
6 She's riven the muslin frae her head,
Tied the baby hand and feet.
7 Out she took her little pen-knife,
Twind the young thing o its sweet life.
8 She's howked a hole anent the meen,
There laid her sweet baby in.
9 She had her to her father's ha,
She was the meekest maid amang them a'.
10 It fell ance upon a day,
She saw twa babies at their play.
11 'O bonny babies, gin ye were mine,
I'd cleathe you in the silks sae fine.'
12 'O wild mother, when we were thine,
You cleathd us not in silks so fine.
13 'But now we 're in the heavens high,
And you've the pains o hell to try.'
14 She threw hersell oer the castle-wa,
There I wat she got a fa.


20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
223
Notes and Queries, 1st S., Tnl, 358. From Warwick-
shire, communicated by C. Clifton Barry.
1 There was a lady lived on [a] lea,
All alone, alone O
Down by the greenwood side went she.
Down the greenwood side O
2 She set her foot all on a thorn,
There she had two babies born.
3 O she had nothing to lap them in,
But a white appurn, and that was thin.
H
Motherwell's MS., p. 402. From Agnes Laird, Kilbar-
chan, August 24, 1825.
1 There was a lady brisk and smart,
All in a lone and a lonie O
And she goes with child to her father's clark.
Down by the greenwood sidie O
2 Big, big oh she went away,
And then she set her foot to a tree.
3 Big she set her foot to a stone,
Till her three bonnie babes were borne.
4 She took the ribbons off her head,
She tied the little babes hand and feet.
5 She howkit a hole before the sun,
She's laid these three bonnie babes in.
6 She covered them over with marble stone,
For dukes and lords to walk upon.
7 She lookit over her father's castle wa,
She saw three bonnie boys playing at the ba.
8 The first o them was clad in red,
To shew the innocence of their blood.
9 The neist o them was clad in green,
To shew that death they had been in.
10 The next was naked to the skin,
To shew they were murderd when they were
born.
11 'O bonnie babes, an ye were mine,
I wad dress you in the satins so fine.'
12 'O mother dear, when we were thine,
Thou did not use us half so kind.'
13 'O bonnie babes, an ye be mine,
Whare hae ye been a' this time?'
14 'We were at our father's house,
Preparing a place for thee and us.'
15 'Whaten a place hae ye prepar'd for me?'
'Heaven's for us, but hell's for thee.
16 'O mother dear, but heaven's high;
That is the place thou 'll ne'er come nigh.
17 'O mother dear, but hell is deep;
'T will cause thee bitterlie to weep.'
I
a. Buchan's MS., n, 111. b. Buchan's Ballads of the
North of Scotland, n, 217. c. Christie, Traditional Ballad
Airs, i, 106.
1 The minister's daughter of New York,
Hey wi the rose and the lindie, O
Has faen in love wi her father's clerk.
Alone by the green burn sidie, O
2 She courted him six years and a day,
At length her belly did her betray.
3 She did her down to the greenwood gang,
To spend awa a while o her time.
4 She lent her back unto a thorn,
And she's got her twa bonny boys born.


224
20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
5 She's taen the ribbons frae her hair,
Bound their bodyes fast and sair.
6 She's put them aneath a marble stane,
Thinking a maiden to gae hame.
7 Looking oer her castle wa,
She spied her bonny boys at the ba.
8 'O bonny babies, if ye were mine,
I woud feed you with the white bread and
wine.
9 'I woud feed you wi the ferra cow's milk,
And dress you in the finest silk.'
10 'O cruel mother, when we were thine,
We saw none of your bread and wine.
11 'We saw none of your ferra cow's milk,
Nor wore we of your finest silk.'
12 'O bonny babies, can ye tell me,
What sort of death for you I must die?'
13 'Yes, cruel mother, we 'll tell to thee,
What sort of death for us you must die.
14 'Seven years a fowl in the woods,
Seven years a fish in the floods.
15 'Seven years to be a church bell,
Seven years a porter in hell.'
16 'Welcome, welcome, fowl in the wood[s],
Welcome, welcome, fish in the flood[s].
17 'Welcome, welcome, to be a church bell,
But heavens keep me out of hell.'
a. Harris MS., fol. 10, " Mrs Harris and others." b. Frag-
ment communicated by Dr T. Davidson.
1 She leant her back against a thorn,
Hey for the Rose o' Malindie O
And there she has twa bonnie babes born.
Adoon by the green wood sidie O
2 She's taen the ribbon frae her head,
An hankit their necks till they waur dead.
3 She luikit outowre her castle wa,
An saw twa nakit boys, playin at the ba.
4 'O bonnie boys, waur ye but mine,
I wald feed ye wi flour-bread an wine.'
5 'O fause mother, whan we waur thine,
Te didna feed us wi flour-bread an wine.'
6 'O bonnie boys, gif ye waur mine,
I wald clied ye wi silk sae fine.'
7 'O fause mother, whan we waur thine,
You didna clied us in silk sae fine.
8 'Ye tuik the ribbon aft your head,
An' hankit our necks till we waur dead.
* * * ♦ »
9 'Ye sall be seven years bird on the tree,
Ye sall be seven years fish i the sea.
10 'Ye sall be seven years eel i the pule,
An ye sall be seven years doon into hell.'
11 'Welcome, welcome, bird on the tree,
Welcome, welcome, fish i the i
12 'Welcome, welcome, eel i the pule,
But oh for gudesake, keep me frae hell!'
Motherwell's MS., p. 186.
1 Lady Margaret looked oer the castle wa,
Hey and a lo and a lilly O
And she saw twa bonnie babes playing at the
ba.
Down by the green wood sidy O
2 'O pretty babes, an ye were mine,
I would dress you in the silks so fine.'


20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
225
3 'O false mother, when we were thine, * * * *
Ye did not dress us in silks so fine.' 6 'Seven years a fish in the sea,
And seven years a bird in the tree.
4 'O bonnie babes, an ye were mine,
I would feed you on the bread and wine.' 7 'Seven years to ring a bell,
And seven years porter in hell.'
5 'O false mother, when we were thine,
Te did not feed us on the bread and the wine.'
L
Smith's Scottish Minstrel, iv, 33, 2d ed.
1 A lady lookd out at a castle wa,
Fine flowers in the valley
She saw twa bonnie babes playing at the ba.
And the green leaves they grow rarely
2 '0 my bonnie babes, an ye were mine,
I would cleed ye i the scarlet sae fine.
3 'I'd lay ye saft in beds o down,
And watch ye morning, night and noon.'
4 'O mither dear, when we were thine,
Ye didna cleed us i the scarlet sae fine.
5 'But ye took out yere little pen-knife,
And parted us frae our sweet life.
6 'Ye howkit a hole aneath the moon,
And there ye laid our bodies down.
7 'Ye happit the hole wi mossy stanes,
And there ye left our wee bit banes.
8 'But ye ken weel, 0 mither dear,
Ye never cam that gate for fear.'
* # * #
9 'Seven lang years ye 'll ring the bell,
And see sic sights as ye darna tell.' x
M You neither dressed us in coarse or fine.'
Down by the greenwood sidy 0
Communicated by Miss Margaret Reburn, as learned in
County Meath, Ireland, about 1860. .
'O mother dear, when we were thine,
All a lee and aloney O
A. Superscribed, "Fragment to its own tune.
Melancholy." Against the first line of the
burden is written in the margin, "perhaps
alas-a-day," and this change is adopted in
Herd's printed copy. Scott suggested well-a-
day.
42. MSS and ed. 1776 have ze . . . ze TL
B. b. "A fragment [of 5 stanzas] containing the
following verses, which I have often heard
sung in my childhood." Scott, in. 259. No
burden is given.
I1. She set her back against. I2. young son
born.
21. 0 smile nae sae.
3, 4, wanting.
51. An when that lady went. 5*. She spied a
naked boy.
61. O bonnie boy, an ye. 62. I'd cleed ye in
the silks.
72. To me ye were na half.
Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, i, 340, says:
"I remember a verse, and but a verse, of an
old ballad which records a horrible instance
of barbarity," and quotes the first two stanzas
of Scott's fragment literally ; from which we
may infer that it was Scott's fragment that
he partly remembered. But he goes on:
"At this moment a hunter came — one whose
29


226
30. THE CRUEL MOTHER
suit the lady had long rejected with scorn —
the brother of her lover:
He took the babe on his spear point,
And threw it upon a thorn:
'Let the wind blow east, the wind blow west,
The cradle will rock alone.'
Cunningham's recollection was evidently much
confused. This last stanza, which is not in
the metre of the others, is perhaps from some
copy of' Edom o Gordon.'
D. a. 62. I was.
b. Kinloch makes slight changes in his printed
copy, as usual.
41. until a brier.
51. out she's tane.
62. She seemd the lealest maiden amang.
81. O an thae.
E. I1, ll1. Lurk may be a corruption of York,
which is written in pencil (by way of sugges-
tion?) in the MSS.
a. 161. on your.
b. 41, 141. upon a thorn.
52. twind wanting. 61. sattins wanting.
13, 14,15,16, 17 are not written out in the
note-book.
181. the heavens.
19s. but there is none.
F. a. 9 stands last but one in the MS.
142. Here,
b. 4*. has her.
72. sweet is omitted.
Printed as from the MS. in Dixon's Scottish
Traditional Versions, etc., p. 46. Dixon
has changed baby to babies in 4, 5, 6, 8,
and indulges in other variations.
H. The ballad had been heard with two differ-
ent burdens; besides the one given in the text,
this:
Three and three, and three by three
Ah me, some forty three
7 'Lady Mary Ann,' Johnson's Museum, No
377, begins:
O Lady Mary Ann looks oer the castle wa,
She saw three bonie boys playing at the ba.
I. a, b. 141,16l. fool, i. e. fowl spelt phonetically.
a. 31. greenwoods
b. 22. it did.
82. with white.
II2. wear'd.
132. maun die.
o. "Epitomized" from Buchan, n, 217, "and
somewhat changed for this work, some of the
changes being made according to the way the
Editor has heard it sung." Note by Chris-
tie, p. 106.
Burden, It's hey with the rose, etc.
71. As a lady was looking. 72. She spied twa.
II2. Nor wore we a. ,
122. What sort of pain for you I must drie.
132. What sort of pain for us you must drie.
142. And seven.
Printed as from the MS. in Dixon's Scottish
Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads,
p. 50, ' The Minister's Dochter o Newarke,'
with a few arbitrary changes.
J. a. 9l. You.
b has stanzas corresponding to a 1, 3, 4, 6,
and, in place of 2,
She 's taen oot a little pen-knife,
And she's robbit them o their sweet life.
Burden1. Hey i the rose o Mylindsay O.
I1. until a thorn. I2. An syne her twa bon-
nie boys was born.
31. As she leukit oer her father's. 32. bonnie
boys.
41. an ye were mine. 42. bread.
62. claithe ye in.
L. 8 looks like an interpolation, and very probably
the ballad was docked at the beginning in or-
der to suit the parlor better.


20. THE CRUEL MOTHER
227
APPENDIX
LADY ANNE
"This ballad was communicated to me by Mr
Kirkpatrick Sharpe of Hoddom, who mentions hav-
ing copied it from an old magazine. Although it
has probably received some modern corrections, the
general turn seems to be ancient, and corresponds
with that of a fragment [B b], which I have often
heard sung in my* childhood." Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border, in, 259, ed. 1803.
Buchan, Gleanings, p. 90, has an additional stanza
between 8 and 9 of Scott's, whether from the old
magazine or not, it would not be worth the while to
ascertain.
Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, i, 339, has re-
written even ' Lady Anne.'
Translated by Schubart, p. 170, and by Gerhard,
p. 92.
1 Fair Lady Anne sate in her bower,
Down by the greenwood side,
And the flowers did spring, and the birds did
sing,
'T was the pleasant May-day tide.
2 But fair Lady Anne on Sir William calld,
With the tear grit in her ee,
'O though thou be fause, may Heaven thee guard,
In the wars ayont the sea!'
3 Out of the wood came three bonnie boys,
Upon the simmer's morn,
And they did sing and play at the ba',
As naked as they were born.
4 'O seven lang years wad I sit here,
Amang the frost and snaw,
A' to hae but ane o these bonnie boys,
A playing at the ba.'
5 Then up and spake the eldest boy,
'Now listen, thou fair ladie,
And ponder well the rede that I tell,
Then make ye a choice of the three.
6 "T is I am Peter, and this is Paul,
And that ane, sae fair to see,
But a twelve-month sinsyne to paradise came,
To join with our companie.'
7 'O I will hae the snaw-white boy,
The bonniest of the three :'
'And if I were thine, and in thy propine,
O what wad ye do to me?'
8 "T is I wad clead thee in silk and gowd,
And nourice thee on my knee:'
'O mither, mither, when I was thine,
Sic kindness I couldna see.
9 'Beneath the turf, where now I stand,
The fause nurse buried me;
The cruel pen-knife sticks still in my heart,
And I come not back to thee.'
"There are many variations of this affecting
tale. One of them appears in the Musical Museum,
and is there called ' Fine Flowers of the Valley,' of
which the present is either the original or a parallel
song. I am inclined to think it is the original."
Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song,
p. 267.
This is translated by Talvj, Versuch, p. 571.
1 There sat 'mang the flowers a fair ladie,
Sing ohon, ohon, and ohon O
And there she has born a sweet babie.
Adown by the greenwode side 0
2 An strait she rowed its swaddling band,
An O! nae mother grips took her hand.
3 O twice it lifted its bonnie wee ee:
'Thae looks gae through the saul o me 1'
4 She buried the bonnie babe neath the brier,
And washed her hands wi mony a tear.
5 And as she kneelt to her God in prayer,
The sweet wee babe was smiling there.
6 'O ay, my God, as I look to thee,
My babe 's atween my God and me.
7 'Ay, ay, it lifts its bonnie wee ee:
'" Sic kindness get as ye shawed me."'
8 'An O its smiles wad win me in,
But I'm borne down by deadly sin.


228
21. THE MAID AND THE PALMER
21
THE MAID AND THE PALMER
A. Percy MS., p. 461. 'Lillumwham,' Hales and Fur- B. Sharpe's Ballad Book, ed. Laing, p. 157.
nivall, iv, 96.
The only English copy of this ballad that
approaches completeness is furnished by the
Percy manuscript, A. Sir Walter Scott re-
membered, and communicated to Kirkpatrick
Sharpe, three stanzas, and half of the burden,
of another version, B.
There are three versions in Danish, no one
of them very well preserved. A,' Maria Mag-
dalena,' is a broadside of about 1700, existing
in two identical editions: Grundtvig, No 98,
n, 530 ; B, ib., was written down in the Faroe
isles in 1848, by Hammershaimb; C was ob-
tained from recitation by Kristensen in Jut-
land in 1869, Jydske Folkeviser, I, 197, No
72, ' Synderinden.'
A Faroe version, from the end of the last
century or the beginning of this, is given in
Grundtvig's notes, p. 533 ff.
Versions recently obtained from recitation
in Norway are: 'Maria,' Bugge's Gamle
Norske Folkeviser, No 18; A, p. 88; B, p.
90, a fragment, which has since been com-
pleted, but only two more stanzas printed,
Grundtvig, in, 889; C, Bugge, p. 91. D, E
are reported, but only a stanza or two printed,
Grundtvig, hI, 889 f; F, printed 890 f, and
G, as obtained by Lindeman, 891: all these,
D-G, communicated by Bugge. C, and one
or two others, are rather Danish than Nor-
wegian.
This is, according to Afzelius, one of the
commonest of Swedish ballads. These ver-
sions are known: A, "a broadside of 1798
and 1802," Grundtvig, n, 531, Bergstrom's
Afzelius, I, 335; B,' Magdalena,' Atterbom's
Poetisk Kalender for 1816, p. 20; C, Afze-
lius, H, 229; D, Arwidsson, I, 377, No 60; E,
Dybeck's Svenska Visor, Hafte 2, No 6, only
two stanzas; F, G, "in Wiede's collection, in
the Swedish Historical and Antiquarian Acad-
emy ;" H, "in Cavallius and Stephens' col-
lection, where also A, F, G are found;" I,
Maximilian Axelson's Vesterdalarne, p. 171;
J, 'Jungfru Adelin,' E. Wigstrom's Folkdikt-
ning, No 38, p. 76; K, 'Jungfru Maja,' Al-
bum utgifvet af Nylandingar, VL, 227. A-F
are printed in Grundtvig's notes, n, 533 ff,
and also some verses of G, H.
The ballad is known to have existed in
Icelandic from a minute of Arne Magnusson,
who cites the line, "Swear not, swear not,
wretched woman," but it has not been recov-
ered (Grundtvig, nI, 891, note d).
Finnish, ' Mataleenan vesimatka,' Kantele-
tar, ed. 1864, p. 240.
The story of the woman of Samaria, John,
iv, is in all these blended with mediaeval tradi-
tions concerning Mary Magdalen, who is as-
sumed to be the same with the woman "which
was a sinner," in Luke, vii, 37, and also with
Mary, sister of Lazarus. This is the view of
the larger part of the Latin ecclesiastical writ-
ers, while most of the Greeks distinguish the
three (Butler, ' Lives of the Saints,' vn, 290,
note). It was reserved for ballads, as Grundt-
vig remarks, to confound the Magdalen with
the Samaritan woman.
The traditional Mary Magdalen was a beau-
tiful woman of royal descent, who derived her
surname from Magdalum, her portion of the
great family estate. For some of her earlier
years entirely given over to carnal delights,
"unde jam, proprio nomine perdito, peccatrix
consueverat appellari," she was, by the preach-
ing of Jesus, converted to a passionate re-
pentance and devotedness. In the course of
the persecution of the church at Jerusalem,
when Stephen was slain and the Christians


31. THE MAID AND THE PALMER
229
widely dispersed, Mary, with Lazarus, her
brother, Martha, and many more, were set
afloat on the Mediterranean in a rudderless
ship, with the expectation that they would
find a watery grave. But the malice of the
unbelieving was overruled, and the vessel
came safe into port at Marseilles. Having
labored some time for the christianizing of
the people, and founded churches and bishop-
rics, Mary retired to a solitude where there
was neither water, tree, nor plant, and passed
the last thirty years of her life in heavenly
contemplation. The cave in which she se-
cluded herself is still shown at La Sainte
Baume. The absence of material comforts
was, in her case, not so great a deprivation,
since every day at the canonical hours she
was carried by angels to the skies, and heard,
with ears of the flesh, the performances of the
heavenly choirs, whereby she was so thoroughly
refected that when the angels restored her to
her cave she was in need of no bodily aliment.
(Golden Legend, Grasse, c. 96.) It is the
practical Martha that performs real austeri-
ties, and those which are ascribed to her cor-
respond too closely with the penance in the
Scandinavian ballads not to be the original of
it: "Nam in primis septem annis, glandibus et
radicibus herbisque crudis et pomis * silves-
tribus corpusculum sustentans potius quam re-
ficiens, victitavit .... Extensis solo ramis
arboreis aut viteis, lapide pro cervicali capiti
superposito subjecto, .... incumbebat." (Vin-
cent of Beauvais, Spec. Hist., ix, 100.)
The best-preserved Scandinavian ballads
concur nearly in this account. A woman at
a well, or a stream, is approached by Jesus,
who asks for drink. She says she has no ves-
sel to serve him with. He replies that if she
were pure, he would drink from her hands.
She protests innocence with oaths, but is si-
• The Magdalen's food is to be dry apple in Danish B 9.
t Swedish P:
14 'And tell me how has it been with thy meat?'
'0 I have eaten of almonds sweet.'
15 'And tell me how it has been with thy drink?'
'1 have drunk both mead and wine, I think.'
IS 'And tell me how was that bed of thine?'
'Ob I have rested on ermeline-'
lenced by his telling her that she has had three
children, one with her father, one with her
brother, one with her parish priest: Danish
A, B, C; Faroe; Swedish C, D, F, I, J, K;
Norwegian A, C, F, G. She falls at his feet,
and begs him to shrive her. Jesus appoints
her a seven years' penance in the wood. Her
food shall be the buds or the leaves of the
tree [grass, worts, berries, bark], her drink
the dew [brook, juice of plants], her bed the
hard ground [linden-roots, thorns and prickles,
rocks, straw and sticks]; all the while she
shall be harassed by bears and lions [wolves],
or snakes and drakes (this last in Swedish
B, C, D, I, K, Norwegian A). The time ex-
pired, Jesus returns and asks how she has
liked her penance. She answers, as if she had
eaten daintily, drunk wine, slept on silk or
swan's-down, and had angelic company [had
been listening to music] .f Jesus then tells
her that a place is ready for her in heaven.
The penance lasts eight years in Swedish C,
F, J, Norwegian A; nine in the Faroe ballad;
fifteen in Danish B; and six weeks in Danish
C, It is to range the field in Danish A, Swed-
ish F ; to walk the snows barefoot in the Faroe
ballad and Norwegian B; in Norwegian D to
stand nine years in a rough stream and eight
years naked in the church-paths.
The names Maria, or Magdalena, Jesus, or
Christ, are found in most of the Scandinavian
ballads. Swedish E has 'Lena (Lilla Lena);
Swedish H He-lena; J, Adelin; K, Maja.
Norwegian A gives no name to the woman,
and Danish A a name only in the burden;
Norwegian B has, corruptly, Margjit. In Dan-
ish C, Norwegian B, G, Jesus is called an old
man, correspondingly with the "old palmer"
of English A, but the old man is afterwards
called Jesus in Norwegian G (B is not printed
in full), and in the burden of Danish 0. The
Norwegian Q:
13 'I hare fed as well on herbage wild
As others have fed on roast and broiled.
14 'I have rested as well on the hard, hard stone
As others have rested on beds of down.
15 'I have drunk as well from the rippling rill
As others that drank both wine and ale.'


230
21. THE MAID AND THE PALMER
Son is exchanged for the Father in Swed-
ish D.
Stanzas 4, 5 of Swedish A, G, approach sin-
gularly near to English A 6, 7:
Swedish A:
4 'Would thy leman now but come,
Thou wouldst give him to drink out of thy hand.'
5 By all the worlds Magdalen swore,
That leman she never had.
Swedish G:
4 'Yes, but if I thy leman were,
I should get drink from thy snow-white hand.'
5 Maria swore by the Holy Ghost,
She neer had to do with any man.
The woman is said to have taken the lives
of her three children in Danish A, B, C, and
of two in Swedish C, D, F, I, J, K (B also,
where there are but two in all), a trait prob-
ably borrowed from 'The Cruel Mother.'
The seven years' penance of the Scandina-
vian ballads is multiplied three times in Eng-
lish A, and four times in B and in those ver-
sions of ' The Cruel Mother' which have been
affected by the present ballad (20, I, J, K;
L is defective). What is more important, the
penance in the English ballads is completely
different in kind, consisting not in exagger-
ated austerities, but partly, at least, in trans-
migration or metensomatosis: seven years to
be a fish, 20, I, J, K; seven years a bird, 20,
I, J, K; seven years a stone, 21, A, B; seven
years an eel, 20, J; seven years a bell, or bell-
clapper, 20, I, 21, A (to ring a bell, 20, K,
L). Seven years in hell seems to have been
part of the penance or penalty in every case:
seven years a porter in hell, 21, B, 20, I, K;
seven years down in hell, 20, J; seven years
to "ring the bell and see sic sights as ye darna
tell, 20, Li;" "other seven to lead an ape
in hell," A, a burlesque variation of the por-
tership.
The Finnish Mataleena, going to the well
for water, sees the reflection of her face, and
bewails her lost charms. Jesus begs a drink:
she says she has no can, no glass. He bids
her confess. "Where are your three boys?
One you threw into the fire, one into the
water, and one you buried in the wilderness."
She fills a pail with her tears, washes his feet,
and wipes them with her hair: then asks for
penance. "Put me, Lord Jesus, where you
will. Make me a ladder-bridge over the sea, a
brand in the fire, a coal in the furnace."
There are several Slavic ballads which blend
the story of the Samaritan woman and that of
'The Cruel Mother,' without admixture of the
Magdalen. Wendish A, 'Aria' (M-aria?),
Haupt and Schmaler, I, 287, No 290, has a
maid who goes for water on Sunday morning,
and is joined by an old man who asks for a
drink. She says the water is not clean; it is
dusty and covered with leaves. He says, The
water is clean, but you are unclean. She de-
mands proof, and he bids her go to church in
her maiden wreath. This she does. The grass
withers before her, a track of blood follows
her, and in the churchyard there come to her
nine headless boys, who say, Nine sons hast
thou killed, chopt off their heads, and mean-
est to do the same for a tenth. She entreats
their forgiveness, enters the church, sprinkles
herself with holy water, kneels at the altar
and crosses herself, then suddenly sinks into
the ground, so that nothing is to be seen but
her yellow hair. B, 'Die Kindesmorderin,'
ib., n, 149, No 197, begins like A. As the
maid proceeds to the church, nine graves open
before her, and nine souls follow her into the
church. The oldest of her children springs
upon her and breaks her neck, saying," Mother,
here is thy reward. Nine of us didst thou
kill."
There are two Moravian ballads of the
same tenor: A, Deutsches Museum, 1855, I,
282, translated by M. Klapp: B, communi-
cated to the Zeitschrift des bohmischen Mu-
seums, 1842, p. 401, by A. W. Sembera, as
sung by the " mahrisch sprechenden Slawen"
in Prussian Silesia; the first seven stanzas
translated in Haupt u. Schmaler, n, 314, note
to No 197. The Lord God goes out one Sun-
day morning, and meets a maid, whom he asks
for water. She says the water is not clean.
He replies that it is cleaner than she: for (A)


21. THE MAID AND THE PALMER
231
she has seduced fifteen men and had children
with all of them, has filled hell with the men
and the sea with the children. He sends her
to church; but, as she enters the church-yard,
the bells begin to ring (of themselves), and
when she enters the church, all the images
turn their backs. As she falls on her knees,
she is changed into a pillar of salt.
The popular ballads of some of the southern
nations give us the legend of the Magdalen
without mixture.
French. A, Podsies populaires de la France,
I (not paged), from Sermoyer, Ain, thirty
lines, made stanzas by repetition. Mary goes
from door to door seeking Jesus. He asks
what she wants: she answers, To be shriven.
Her sins have been such, she says, that the
earth ought not to bear her up, the trees that
see her can but tremble. For penance she is
to stay seven years in the woods of Baume,
eat the roots of the trees, drink the dew, and
sleep under a juniper. Jesus comes to inquire
about her when this space has expired. She
says she is well, but her hands, once white as
flower-de-luce, are now black as leather. For
this Jesus requires her to stay seven years
longer, and then, being thoroughly cured of
her old vanities, she is told,
'Marie Magdeleine, allez au paradis;
La porte en est ouverte depuis hier a midi.'
B is nearly the same legend in Provencal:
Damase Arbaud, I, 64. The penance is seven
years in a cave, at the end of which Jesus
passes, and asks Mary what she has had to
eat and drink. "Wild roots, and not always
them; muddy water, and not always that."
The conclusion is peculiar. Mary expresses
a wish to wash her hands. Jesus pricks the
rock, and water gushes out. She bewails the
lost beauty of her hands, and is remanded to
the cavern for another seven years. Upon her
exclaiming at the hardship, Jesus tells her
that Martha shall come to console her, the
wood-dove fetch her food, the birds drink.
But Mary is not reconciled:
'Lord God, my good father,
Make me not go back again!
With the tears from my eyes
I will wash my hands clean.
'With the tears from my eyes
I will wash your feet,
And then I will dry them
With the hair of my head.'
C, Poesies populaires de la Gascogne, Bladd,
1881, p. 339, 'La pauvre Madeleine,' seven-
teen stanzas of four short lines, resembles B
till the close. When Jesus comes back after
the second penance, and Mary says, as she
had before, that she has lived like the beasts,
only she has lacked water, Jesus again causes
water to spring from the rock. But Mary
says, I want no water. I should have to go
back to the cave for another seven years. She
is conducted straightway to paradise.
D, Bladd, as before, p. 183,'Marie-Made-
leine,' six stanzas of five short lines. Mary is
sent to the mountains for seven years' pen-
ance; at the end of that time washes her
hands in a brook, and is guilty of admiring
them ; is sent back to the mountains for seven
years, and is then taken to heaven.
A Catalan ballad combines the legend of
the Magdalen's penance with that of her con-
version: Mila, Observaciones, p. 128, No 27,
'Santa Magdalena,' and Briz y Salt6, Can-
sons de la Terra, n, 99. Martha, returning
from church, asks Magdalen, who is combing
her hair with a gold comb, if she has been at
mass. Magdalen says no, nor had she thought
of going. Martha advises her to go, for she
certainly will fall in love with the preacher, a
young man; pity that he ever was a friar.
Magdalen attires herself with the utmost
splendor, and, to hear the sermon better, takes
a place immediately under the pulpit. The
first word of the sermon touched her; at the
middle she fainted. She stripped off all her
ornaments, and laid them at the preacher's
feet. At the door of the church she inquired
of a penitent where Jesus was to be found.
She sought him out at the house of Simon,
washed his feet with her tears, and wiped
them with her hair, picked up from the floor
the bones which he had thrown away. Jesus
at last noticed her, and asked what she wished.


232
21. THE MAID AND THE PALMER
She wished to confess. He imposed the pen-
ance of seven years on a mountain, "eating
herbs and fennels, eating bitter herbs." Mag-
dalen turned homewards after the seven years,
and found on the way a spring, where she
washed her hands, with a sigh over their dis-
figurement. She heard a voice that said, Mag-
dalen, thou hast sinned. She asked for new
penance, and was sent back to the mountain
for seven years more. At the end of this sec-
ond term she died, and was borne to the skies
with every honor from the Virgin, saints, and
angels.
Danish A is translated by Prior, n, 25, No
44: Swedish C by William and Mary Howitt,
Literature and Romance of Northern Europe,
I, 282.
A
Percy MS., p. 461. Furnivall, iv, 96.
1 The maid shee went to the well to washe,
Lillumwham, lillumwham!
The mayd shee went to the well to washe,
Whatt then? what then?
The maid shee went to the well to washe,
Dew ffell of her lilly white fleshe.
Grandam hoy, grandam hoy, heye!
Leg a deny, leg a merry, mett, mer, whoope,
whir!
Driuance, larumben, grandam boy, heye!
2 While shee washte and while shee ronge,
While shee hangd o the hazle wand.
3 There came an old palmer by the way,
Sais, ' God speed thee well, thou faire maid!'
4 'Hast either cupp or can,
To giue an old palmer drinke therin?'
5 Sayes, 'I have neither cupp nor cann,
To giue an old palmer drinke therin.'
6 'But an thy lemwtan came from Roome,
Cupps and canns thou wold ffind soone.'
7 Shee sware by God & good St. John,
Lemman had shee neuer none.
8 Saies, ' Peace, ffaire mayd, you are fPorsworne!
Nine children you haue borne.
9 'Three were buryed vnder thy bed's head,
Other three vnder thy brewing leade.
10 'Other three on yon play greene;
Count, maid, and there be 9.'
11 'But I hope you are the good old man
That all the world beleeues vpon.
12 'Old palmer, I pray thee,
Pennaunce that thou wilt giue to me.'
13 'Penance I can giue thee none,
But 7 yeere to be a stepping-stone.
14 'Other seaven a clapper in a bell,
Other 7 to lead an ape in hell.
15 'When thou hast thy penance done,
Then thoust come a mayden home.'
2 'Seven years ye 'll be porter of hell,
And then I 'll take you to mysell.'
* * * ♦ *
3 'Weel may I be a' the other three,
1 'Seven years ye shall be a stone, But porter of hell I never will be.'
A Ballad Book, by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, edited by
David Laing, p. 157 f, vn ; from Sir W. Scott's recollection.
And I, etc.
For many a poor palmer to rest him upon.
And you the fair maiden of Gowden-gane


22. ST STEPHEN
AND HEROD 233
A. 21. White shee washee & white. 2*. White.
91. They were.
101. on won. 102. maids.
B. Note by Scott: "There is or was a curious
song with this burthen to the verse,
'And I the fair maiden of Gowden-gane.'
Said maiden is, I think, courted by the devil
in human shape, but I only recollect imper-
fectly the concluding stanzas [1, 2]:
'Seven years ye shall be a stone,'
(here a chorus line which I have forgot), etc.
The lady answers, in allusion to a former word
which I have forgotten,
Weel may I be [etc., st. 3]."
22
ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
Sloane MS., 2593, foL 22 b; British Museum.
The manuscript "which preserves this de-
lightful little legend has been judged by the
handwriting to be of the age of Henry VI.
It was printed entire by Mr T. Wright, in
1856, for the Warton Club, under the title,
Songs and Carols, from a manuscript in the
British Museum of the fifteenth century, the
ballad at p. 63. Ritson gave the piece as 'A
Carol for St Stephen's Day,' in Ancient
Songs, 1790, p. 83, and it has often been re-
peated; e. g., in Sandys' Christmas Carols, p.
4, Sylvester's, p. 1.
The story, with the Wise Men replacing
Stephen, is also found in the carol, still cur-
rent, of 'The Carnal and the Crane,' Sandys,
p. 152, in conjunction with other legends and
in this order: the Nativity, the Wise Men's
passage with Herod, the Massacre of the In-
nocents, the Flight into Egypt, Herod and
the Sower.
The legend of Stephen and Herod occurs,
and is even still living, in Scandinavian tradi-
tion, combined, as in English, with others re-
lating to the infancy of Jesus.
Danish. 'Jesusbarnet, Stefan og Herodes:'
A, Grundtvig, No 96, n, 525. First printed
* Everriculum fermenti veteris, sen residua in Danico
orbe cum paganismi turn papismi reliquiae in apricum pro-
latse. "Rogata anus num vera esse crederet quae canebat,
in Erik Pontoppidan's little book on the rel-
iques of Paganism and Papistry among the
Danish People, 1736, p. 70, as taken down
from the singing of an old beggar-woman be-
fore the author's door.* Syv alludes to the
ballad in 1695, and cites one stanza. The
first five of eleven stanzas are devoted to the
beauty of the Virgin, the Annunciation, and
the birth of the Saviour. The song then goes
on thus:
6 Saint Stephen leads the foals to water,
All by the star so gleaming:
'Of a truth the prophet now is born
That all the world shall ransom.'
7 King Herod answered thus to him:
'I 'll not believe this story,
Till the roasted cock that is on the board
Claps his wings and crows before me.'
8 The cock he clapped his wings and crew,
'Our Lord, this is his birthday!'
Herod fell off from his kingly seat,
For grief he fell a swooning.
9 King Herod bade saddle his courser gray,
He listed to ride to Bethlem;
respondit: Me il1a in dubium vocaturam averruncet Deus I"
Grundtvig, u, 518.
30


234
22. ST STEPHEN AND HEEOD-
Fain would he slay the little child
That to cope with him pretended.
10 Mary took the child in her arms,
And Joseph the ass took also,
So they traversed the Jewish land,
To Egypt, as God them guided.
11 The little children whose blood was shed,
They were full fourteen thousand,
But Jesus was thirty miles away
Before the sun was setting.
B. A broadside of fourteen four-line stanzas,
in two copies, a of the middle, b from the lat-
ter part, of the last century, b was printed
"in the Dansk Kirketidende for 1862,No 43,"
by Professor George Stephens: a is given by
Grundtvig, m, 881. The first three stanzas
correspond to A1-5, the next three to A 6-8:
the visit of the Wise Men to Herod is then
intercalated, 7-10, and the story concludes as
in A 9-11.
C. 'Sankt Steffan,' Kristensen, n, 123, No
36, from recitation about 1870, eight four-line
stanzas, 1-3 agreeing with A 3-6, 4-6 with
A 6-9, 7, 8 with A 9, 11. The verbal re-
semblance with the copy sung by the old beg-
gar-woman more than a hundred and thirty
years before is often close.
A Faroe version, ' Rudisar vfsa,' was com-
municated to the Dansk Kirketidende for 1852,
p. 293, by Hammershaimb, twenty-six two-line
stanzas (Grundtvig, n, 519). Stephen is in
Herod's service. He goes out and sees the
star in the east, whereby he knows that the
Saviour of the world, "the great king," is
born. He comes in and makes this announce-
ment. Herod orders his eyes to be put out:
• " Staffans-skede, Iubus, vel, nt recti us dicam, licentia
puerorum agrestium, qui in Festo S. Stephani, equis vecti
per villas discurrunt, et cerevisiam in lagenis, ad hoc ipsum
praeparatis, mendicando osiiatim colliguut:" a dissertation,
Upsala, 1734, cited by Bergstrom in his edition of Afzelius,
li, 358, note 28. Skede is gallop, or run, Icelandic skciS
(Bergstrom), Norwegian skeid, skjei. Many copies of the
Staffansvisa have been collected: see Bergstriim's Afzelius,
ii, 356: and for a description of the custom as practised
among Swedes in Finland, with links and lanterns, but no
foals, Fagerlund, Anteckningar om Korpo och Houtskars
Socknar, p. 39 ft. Something very similar was known in
Holstein: see Schiitze, Holsteinsches Idioticon, in, 200, as
so, he says, it will appear whether this "king"
will help him. They put out Stephen's eyes,
but now he sees as well by night as before by
day. At this moment a cock, roast and carved,
is put on the board before Herod, who cries
out:
'If this cock would stand up and crow,
Then in Stephen's tale should I trow.'
Herod he stood, and Herod did wait,
The cock came together that lay in the plate.
The cock flew up on the red gold chair,
He clapped his wings, and he crew so fair.
Herod orders his horse and rides to Bethle-
hem, to find the new-born king. As he comes
in, Mary greets him, and tells him there is
still mead and wine. He answers that she
need not be so mild with him: he will have
her son and nail him on the cross. "Then
you must go to heaven for him," says Mary.
Herod makes an attempt on Jesus, but is
seized by twelve angels and thrown into the
Jordan, where the Evil One takes charge of
him.
Swedish. A single stanza, corresponding
to Danish A 6, B 4, C 4, is preserved in a
carol, ' Staffans Visa,' which was wont to be
sung all over Sweden on St Stephen's day,
in the Christmas sport, not yet given up,
called Staffansskede ; which consisted in young
fellows riding about from house to house early
in the morning of the second day of Yule,
and levying refreshments.* One of the party
carried at the end of a pole a lighted lantern,
made of hoops and oiled paper, which was
sometimes in the shape of a six-comered star.
Much of the chant was improvised, and both
quoted by Grundtvig, n, 521, note **. From Chambers' Book
of Days, it, 763 f, it appears that a custom, called a Stephen-
ing, was still existing at the beginning of this century, of
the inhabitants of the parish of Drayton Beauchamp, Bucks,
paying a visit to the rector on December 26, and lightening
his stores of all the bread, cheese and ale they wanted.
Chambers, again, in his Popular Rhymes of Scotland, p.
168 f, gives a song closely resembling the Staffansvisa, which
was sung before every house on New Year's eve, in Deer-
ness, Orkney, with the same object of stimulating hospital-
ity. Similar practices are known in the Scottish Highlands:
see Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, m, 19, and
Chambers, at p. 167 of the Popular Rhymes.


22. ST STEPHEN AND HEEOD
235
the good wishes and the suggestions as to the
expected treat would naturally be suited to
particular cases ; but the first stanza, with but
slight variations, was (Afzelius, In, 208, 210):
Stephen was a stable-groom,
We thank you now so kindly!
He watered the five foals all and some,
Ere the morning star was shining.
No daylight's to be seen,
The stars in the sky
Are gleaming.
or,
Stephen was a stable-groom,
Bear thee well my foal!
He watered the five foals all and some,
God help us and Saint Stephen!
The sun is not a-shining,
But the stars in the sky
Are gleaming.
There is also a Swedish ballad which has
the substance of the story of Danish A 6-8,
but without any allusion to Stephen. It oc-
curs as a broadside, in two copies, dated 1848,
1851, and was communicated by Professor
Stephens to the Dansk Kirketidende, 1861,
Nos 3, 4, and is reprinted by Grundtvig, iII,
882 f, and in Bergstrom's Afzelius, n, 360 f.
There are eleven four-line stanzas, of which
the last six relate how Mary was saved from
Herod by the miracle of the Sower (see ' The
Carnal and the Crane,' stanzas 18-28). The
first five cover the matter of our ballad. The
first runs:
In Bethlem of Judah a star there rose,
At the time of the birth of Christ Jesus:
'Now a child is born into the world
That shall suffer for us death and torment.'
Herod then calls his court and council, and
* Stephen in all the ballads can be none other than the
first martyr, though Ihre, and other Swedes since his day,
choose, for their part, to understand a " Stephanum primum
Hclsingorum apostolum," who certainly did not see the star
in the east. The peasantry in Helsingland, we are told,
make their saints' day December 26, too, and their St Ste-
phen is a great patron of horses. The misappropriation of
the glories of the protomartyr is somewhat transparent.
t Grundtvig, whom I chiefly follow here, n, 521-24. In
says to them, as he says to Stephen in the
Danish ballad, "I cannot believe your story
unless the cock on this table claps his wings
and crows." This comes to pass, and Herod
exclaims that he can never thrive till he has
made that child feel the effects of his wrath.
He then steeps his hands in the blood of the
Innocents, and falls off his throne in a marvel-
lous swoon. Mary is warned to fly to Egypt.
It is altogether likely that the person who
speaks in the first stanza was originally the
same as the one who says nearly the same
thing in the three Danish ballads, that is,
Stephen, and altogether unlikely that Herod's
words, which are addressed to Stephen in the
Danish ballads, were addressed to his court
and council rather than to Stephen here.
Norwegian. Two stanzas, much corrupted,
of what may have been a ballad like the fore-
going, have been recovered by Professor
Bugge, and are given by Grundtvig, m, 883.
St Stephen's appearance as a stable-groom,
expressly in the Swedish carol and by impli-
cation in the Danish ballads, is to be ex-
plained by his being the patron of horses
among the northern nations.* On his day,
December 26, which is even called in Germany
the great Horse Day, it was the custom for
horses to be let blood to keep them well dur-
ing the year following, or raced to protect
them from witches. In Sweden they were
watered "ad alienos fontes" (which, perhaps,
is what Stephen is engaged in in the carol),
and treated to the ale which had been left in
the cups on St Stephen's eve; etc., etc.f This
way of observing St Stephen's day is presumed
to be confined to the north of Europe, or at
least to be derived from that quarter. Other
saints are patrons of horses in the south, as
St Eloi, St Antony, and we must seek the
explanation of St Stephen's having that office
a note on page 521, supplemented at m, 883 e, Grundtvig
has collected much interesting evidence of December 26 being
the great Horse Day. J. W. Wolf, cited by Grundtvig, n,
524, had said previously: "Nichts im leben des ersten
christlichen blutzeugen erinnert auch nur fern an pferde;
trotzdem machte das volk ihn zum patron der pferde, und
setzte ihn also an die stelle des Fro, dem im Norden, und
nicht weniger bei uns, die pferde heilig waren." Beitrage
zur deutschen Mythologie, i, 124.


236
22. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
in Scandinavia, Germany, and England in the
earlier history of these regions. It was sug-
gested as long ago as the middle of the six-
teenth century by the Archbishop Olaus Mag-
nus, that the horseracing, which was universal
in Sweden on December 26, was a remnant of
heathen customs. The horse was sacred to
Frey, and Yule was Frey's festival. There
can hardly be a doubt that the customs con-
nected with St Stephen's day are a continua-
tion, under Christian auspices, of old rites aiid
habits which, as in so many other cases, the
church found it easier to consecrate than to
abolish.*
The miracle of the cock is met with in
other ballads, which, for the most part, relate
the wide-spread legend of the Pilgrims of St
James. ,
French. In three versions, Chants de Pau-
vres en Forez et en Velay, collected by M.
Victor Smith, Romania, n, 473 ff. Three pil-
grims, father, mother, and son, on their way
to St James, stop at an inn, at St Dominic.
A maid-servant, enamored of the youth (qui
ressemble une image, que semblavo-z-un ange)
is repelled by hitn, and in revenge puts a sil-
ver cup [cups] belonging to the house into his
knapsack. The party is pursued and brought
back, and the young pilgrim is hanged. He
exhorts his father to accomplish his vow, and
to come that way when he returns. When the
father returns, after three [six] months, the
boy is found to be alive; his feet have been
supported, and he has been nourished, by God
and the saints. The father tells the judge
that his son is alive; the judge replies, I will
believe that when this roast fowl crows. The
bird crows: A, le poulet se mit a chanter sur
la table; B, le poulet vole au ciel, trois fois
n'a battu l'aile; C, trois fois il a chante-, trois
fois l'a battu l'aile. The boy is taken down
and the maid hanged.
Spanish. A, Mila, Observaciones sobre la
Poesia Popular, p. 106, No 7, ' El Romero;'
* Jean Baptiste Thiers, Traite' des Superstitions, etc., 2d
ed., Paris, 1697, as cited by Liebrecht, Gervasiusvon Tilbury,
Otia Impcrialia, p. 233, No 169, condemns the belief, "qu'il
vnut bien mieax .... saigner des chevaux le jour de la
tete de S. Ebtienne qu'a tout autre jour." This may be one
B, Briz, Cansons de la Terra, I, 71,' S. Jaume
de Galicia,' two copies essentially agreeing.
The course of the story is nearly as in the
French. The son does not ask his father to
come back. It is a touch of nature that the
mother cannot be prevented from going back
by all that her husband can say. The boy is
more than well. St James has been sustain-
ing his feet, the Virgin his head. He directs
his mother to go to the alcalde (Mila), who
will be dining on a cock and a hen, and to
request him politely to release her son, who
is still alive. The alcalde replies: "Off with
you! Your son is as much alive as this cock
and hen." The cock began to crow, the hen
laid an egg in the dish!
Dutch. 'Een liedeken van sint Jacob,'
Antwerpener Liederbuch, 1544, No 20, Hoff-
mann, p. 26; Uhland, p. 803, No 303; Wil-
lems, p. 318, No 133. The pilgrims here are
only father and son. The host's daughter
avows her love to her father, and desires to
detain the young pilgrim. The older pilgrim,
hearing of this, says, My son with me and
I with him. We will seek St James, as pil-
grims good and true. The girl puts the cup
in the father's sack. The son offers himself
in his father's place, and is hanged. The fa-
ther finds that St James and the Virgin have
not been unmindful of the pious, and tells the
host that his son is alive. The host, in a rage,
exclaims, " That's as true as that these roast
fowls shall fly out at the door!"
But ere the host could utter the words,
One by one from the spit brake the birds,
And into the street went flitting;
They flew on the roof of St Dominic's house,
Where all the brothers were sitting.
The brothers resolve unanimously to go to the
judicial authority in procession; the innocent
youth is taken down, the host hanged, and his
daughter buried alive.
Wendish. Haupt und Schmaler, I, 285, No
of the practices which Thiers had learned of from his read-
ing (see Liebrecht's preface, p. xvii f), but might also have
migrated from the east or north into France. Superstitions,
like new fashions, are always sure of a hospitable reception,
even though they impose a servitude.


22. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
237
289, 'Der gehenkte Schenkwirth.' There are
two pilgrims, father and son. The host him-
self puts his gold key into the boy's basket.
The boy is hanged: the father bids him hang
a year and a day, till he returns. The Virgin
has put a stool under the boy's feet, and the
angels have fed him. The father announces
to the host that his son is living. The host
will not believe this till three dry staves which
he has in the house shall put out green shoots.
This comes to pass. The host will not believe
till three fowls that are roasting shall recover
their feathers and fly out of the window. This
also comes to pass. The host is hanged.
A Breton ballad,'Marguerite Laurent,' Lu-
zel, I, A, p. 211, B, p. 215, inverts a principal
circumstance in the story of the pilgrims: a
maid is hanged on a false accusation of hav-
ing stolen a piece of plate. This may be an
independent tradition or a corrupt form of the
other. Marguerite has, by the grace of St
Anne and of the Virgin, suffered no harm.
A young clerk, her lover, having ascertained
this, reports the case to the seneschal, who
will not believe till the roasted capon on the
dish crows. The capon crows. Marguerite
goes on her bare knees to St Anne and to
Notre-Dame du Folgoat, and dies in the
church of the latter (first version).
'Notre-Dame du Folgoat,' Villemarqud,
Barzaz Breiz, p. 272, No 38, 6th ed., is of a
different tenor. Marie Fanchonik, wrongly
condemned to be executed for child murder,
though hanged, does not die. The execu-
• From a copy of this collection the story is given in Acta
Sanctorum, vi Jnlii, p. 50, § 202 ff.
t Vincent, as pointed out by Professor George Stephens,
knew of the miracle of the cock, and tells it at l. 25, c. 64,
on the authority of Pietro Damiani. Two Bolognese dining
together, one of them carved a cock and dressed it with pep-
per and sauce. "Gossip," says the other, "you have ' fixed'
that cock so that Peter himself could not put him on his legs
again." "Peter ? No, not Christ himself." At this the cock
jumped up, in all his feathers, clapped his wings, crew, and
threw the sauce all over the blasphemous pair, whereby they
were smitten with leprosy.
} So, naturally, the Fornsvenskt Legendarium, i, 170,
and the Catalan Recull de Eximplis e Miracles, etc., Barce-
lona, 1880, i, 298.
§ Opus de Tholosanorum gestis, fol. 49 verso, according
to Acta S., p. 46, of the volume last cited. Toulouse rivalled
with Compostella in the possession of relies of St James, and
tioner reports to the seneschal. "Burn her,"
says the seneschal. "Though in fire up to her
breast," says the executioner, "she is laugh-
ing heartily." "Sooner shall this capon crow
than I will believe you." The capon crows: a
roast capon on the dish, all eaten but the feet.
Religious writers of the 13th century have
their version of the story of the pilgrims, but
without the prodigy of the cock. Vincent of
Beauvais, Speculum Historiale, l. 26, c. 33,
who bases his narrative on a collection of the
miracles of St James incorrectly attributed to
Pope Callixtus II,* has but two pilgrims, Ger-
mans, father and son. On their way to Com-
postella they pass a night in an inn at Tou-
louse. The host, having an eye to the forfeit-
ure of their effects, makes them drunk and
hides a silver cup in their wallet. Son wishes
to die for father, and father for son. The
son is hanged, and St James interposes to
preserve his life.f With Vincent agree the
author of the Golden Legend, following Cal-
lixtus, Graesse, 2d ed., p. 426, c. 99 (94),
§ 5, J and Caesarius Heisterbacensis, Dialogus
Miraculorum, c. 58, II, 130, ed. Strange, who,
however, does not profess to remember every
particular, and omits to specify Toulouse as
the place. Nicolas Bertrand, who published
in 1515 a history of Toulouse, places the mira-
cle there.§ He has three pilgrims, like the
French and Spanish ballads, and the roast
fowl flying from the spit to convince a doubt-
ing official, like the Dutch and Wendish bal-
lads.
was amply entitled to the honor of the miracle. Dr Andrew
Borde, in his First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge,
says that an ancient doctor of divinity at Compostella told
him, "We have not one hair nor bone of St. James; for St
James the More and St James the Less, St Bartholomew
and St Philip, St Simon and Jude, St Bernard and St
George, with divers other saints, Carolus Magnus brought
them to Toulouse." Ed. Furnivall, p. 204 f. I do not know
where the splenetic old divine got his information, but cer-
tainly from no source so trustworthy as the chronicle of Tur-
pin. Besides other places in France, the body, or at least
the head, of St James was claimed by churches in Italy,
Germany, and the Low Countries. But the author of an old
Itinerary of the Pilgrims to Compostella asserts that James
the Greater is one of four saints who never changed his
burial-place. See Victor Le Clerc in Hist. Litt de la
France, xxi, 283.


238
22. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
But, much earlier than the last date, this
miracle of St James had become connected
with the town of San Domingo de la Calzada,
one of the stations on the way to Compostella,*
some hours east of Burgos. Roig, the Valen-
cian poet, on arriving there in the course of
his pilgrimage, tells the tale briefly, with two
roasted fowls, cock and hen: Lo Libre de les
Dones e de Coneells, 1460, as printed by Briz
from the edition of 1735, p. 42, Book 2, vv.
135-183. Lucio Marineo, whose work, De
las cosas memorables de Espana, appeared in
1530, had been at San Domingo, and is able
to make some addition to the miracle of the
cock. Up to the revivification, his account
agrees very well with the Spanish ballad. A
roast cock and hen are lying before the mayor,
and when he expresses his incredulity, they
jump from the dish on to the table, in feathers
whiter than snow. After the pilgrims had
set out a second time on their way to Com-
postella, to return thanks to St James, the
mayor returned to his house with the priests
and all the people, and took the cock and hen
to the church, where they lived seven years,
and then died, leaving behind them a pair of
the same snowy whiteness, who in turn, after
seven years, left their successors, and so on to
Marineo's day; and though of the infinite
number of pilgrims who resorted to the tomb
each took away a feather, the plumage was al-
ways full, and Marineo speaks as an eye-wit-
ness. (Edition of 1539, fol. xliii.) Dr Andrew
Borde gives nearly the same account as Ma-
rineo, in the First Book of the Introduction
of Knowledge, 1544, p. 202 ff, ed. FurnivalLf
Early in the sixteenth century the subject
was treated in at least two miracle-plays, for
which it is very well adapted: Un miracolo
* See ' La grande Chanson des Pterins de Saint-Jacques,'
in Socard, Noels et Cnntiques, etc., p. 76, last stanza, p. 80,
third stanza, p. 89, fifth stanza; the last = Romanccro de
Champagne, i, 165, stanza 5.
t Southey follows Marineo in his Christmas Tale ot " The
Pilgrim to Compostella."
t "Auch eino deutsche Jesuitenkomodie, Peregrinns Com-
postellanus, Innsbrnck, 1624, behandelt diesen Stuff. F. Lie-
brecht, in Serapeum, 1864, S. 235."
§ Vasari, v, 184, Milan, 1809; Crowe and Cavalcaselle,
nl, 124, n, 566 ff, ed. 1866; Mrs Jameson's Sacred and
Legendary Art, i, 241, ed. 1857. Professor N. Heyen indi-
di tre Pellegrini, printed at Florence early in
the sixteenth century, D'Ancona, Sacre Rap-
presentazioni, m, 465; Ludus Sancti Jacobi,
fragment de mystSre provencale, Camille Ar-
naud, 1858.
J
Nicolas Bertrand, before referred to, speaks
of the miracle as depicted in churches and
chapels of St James. It was, for example,
painted by Pietro Antonio of Foligno, in the
fifteenth century, in SS. Antonio e Jacopo at
Assisi, and by Pisanello in the old church of
the Tempio at Florence, and, in the next cen-
tury, by Palmezzano in S. Biagio di S. Giro-
lamo at Forli, and by Lo Spagna in a small
chapel or tribune dedicated to St James, about
four miles from Spoleto, on the way to Foligno.
The same legend is painted on one of the lower
windows of St Ouen, and again on a window
of St Vincent, at Rouen. Many more cases
might, no doubt, be easily collected.§
It is not at all surprising that a miracle
performed at San Domingo de la Calzada
should, in the course of time, be at that place
attributed to the patron of the locality; and
we actually find Luis de la Vega, in a life of
this San Domingo published at Burgos in
1606, repeating Marineo's story, very nearly,
with a substitution of Dominic for James. ||
More 'than this, this author claims for this
saint, who, saving reverence, is decidedly mi-
norum gentium, the merit and glory of deliv-
ering a captive from the Moors, wherein he, or
tradition, makes free again with St James's
rightful honors. The Moor, when told that the
captive will some day be missing, rejoins, If
you keep him as close as when I last saw him,
he will as soon escape as this roast cock will
fly and crow. It is obvious that this anecdote
is a simple jumble of two miracles of St James,
cated to Grundtvig the picture of Pietro Antonio, and d'An-
cona refers to Pisanello's.
|| He denies the perpetual multiplication of the feathers,
and adds that the very gallows on which the pilgrim was
hanged is erected in the upper part of the church, where
everybody can see it. It is diverting to find Grossenhain, in
Saxony, claiming the miracle on the ground of a big cock
in an altar picture in a chapel of St James: Grassc, Sagen-
schatz des Kiinigreichs Sachsen, 2d ed., i, 80, No 82, from
Chladenius, Materialien zu Grossenhayner Stadtchronik, i,
2, Pirna, 1788; in verse by Ziehnert, Volkssagen, p. 99, No
14, ed. 1851.


11. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
239
the freeing of the captives, recounted in Acta
Sanctorum, VI Julii, p. 47, § 190 f, and the
saving the life of the young pilgrim.*
The restoration of a roasted fowl to life is
also narrated in Acta Sanctorum, I Septem-
bris, p. 529, § 289, as occurring early in the
eleventh century (the date assigned to the
story of the pilgrims), at the table of St Ste-
phen, the first king of Hungary. St Gunther
was sitting with the king while he was dining.
The king pressed Gunther to partake of a
roast peacock, but Gunther, as he was bound
by his rule to do, declined. The king then
ordered him to eat. Gunther bent his head
and implored the divine mercy; the bird flew
up from the dish; the king no longer per-
sisted. The author of the article, without
questioning the reality of the miracle, well
remarks that there seems to be something
wrong in the story, since it is impossible that
the holy king should have commanded the
saint to break his vow.
But the prime circumstances in the legend,
the resuscitation of the cock, does not belong
• For Luis de la Vega, see Acta Sanctorum, ni Maii, p.
171 f, §§ 6, 7, 8, vi Julii, p. 46, § 187. The Spanish and the
Dutch ballad give due glory to St James and the Virgin;
French C to God and St James. The Wendish ballad can
hardly be expected to celebrate St James, and refers the jus-
tification and saving of the boy to the Virgin and the saints.
French A has St Michas; B, God and the Virgin.
Luis de la Vega, with what seems an excess of caution,
says, p. 172, as above, § 8: appositique erant ad comedendum
gallus et gallina, assati nescio an elixi. Of boiled fowl we
have not heard so far. But we find in a song in Fletcher's
play of 'The Spanish Curate,' this stanza:
The stewd cock shall crow, cock-a-loodle-loo,
A loud cock-a-loodle shall he crow;
The duck and the drake shall swim in a lake
Of onions and claret below.
Act III, Sc. 2; Dyce, viii, 436.
In Father Merolla's Voyage to Congo, 1682, a reference
to which I owe to Liebrecht, there is a story of a stewed
cock, which, on the whole, justifies Luis de la Vega's scruple.
This must have been introduced into Africa by some mis-
sioner, and, when so introduced, the miracle must have had
an object, which it had lost before the tale came to Father
Merolla.
One of two parties at feud having marched upon the chief
city of his antagonist, and found all the inhabitants fled, the
soldiers fell to rifling the houses and killing all the living
creatures they met, to satisfy their hunger. "Amongst the
rest they found a cock of a larger size than ordinary, with a
great ring of iron about one of his legs, which occasioned
in the eleventh century, where Vincent and
others have put it, but in the first, where it
is put by the English and Scandinavian bal-
lads. A French romance somewhat older than
Vincent, Ogier le Danois, agrees with the later
English ballad in making the occasion to be
the visit of the Wise Men to Herod. Herod
will not believe what they say,
'Se cis capon que ci m'est en presant
N'en est plumeus corn il estoit devant,
Et se redrece a la perche en cantant.'
w li621-23.
And what he exacts is performed for his con-
viction .f Nevertheless, as we shall now see,
the true epoch of the event is not the Na-
tivity, but the Passion.
The ultimate source of the miracle of the
reanimated cock is an interpolation in two
late Greek manuscripts of the so-called Gos-
pel of Nicodemus: Thilo, Codex Apocryphus
Novi Testamenti, p. cxxix f; Tischendorf,
Evangelia Apocrypha, p. 269, note 3. After
Judas had tried to induce the Jews to take
one of the wisest among them to cry out, Surely this cock
must be bewitched, and it is not at all proper for us to med-
dle with. To which the rest answered, Be it what it will,
we are resolved to cat it. For this end they immediately
killed and tore it to pieces after the manner of the negroes,
and afterwards put it into a pot to boil. When it was
enough, they took it ont into a platter, and two, according
to the custom, having said grace, Ave of them sat down to
it with great greediness. But before they had touched a bit,
to their great wonder and amazement, the boiled pieces of
the cock, though sodden, and near dissolved, began to move
about and unite into the form they were in before, and, being
so united, the restored cock immediately raised himself up,
and jumped out of the platter upon the ground, where he
walked about as well as when he was first taken. After-
wards he leaped upon an adjoining wall, where he became
new feathered all of a sudden, and then took his flight to a
tree bard by, where fixing himself, he, after three claps of
his wings, made a most hideous noise, and then disappeared.
Every one may easily imagine what a terrible fright the
spectators were in at this sight, who, leaping with a thousand
Ave Marias in their mouths from the place where this had
happened, were contented to observe most of the particulars
at a distance." It appears that the brother of one of the two
contending parties was said to have had a very large cock,
from whose crowing he took auguries, but whether this was
the same as the one restored to life is not known. Church-
ill's Collection of Voyages and Travels, 1704,1,682, Pinker-
ton's Collection, xvi, 229.
t La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche, par Raimbert de
Paris, Poeme du xii siecle, etc., n,485, w 11606-627.


240
22. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
back the thirty pieces, he went to his house
to hang himself, and found his wife sitting
there, and a cock roasting on a spit before the
coals. He said to his wife, Get me a rope, for
I mean to hang myself, as I deserve. His wife
said to him, Why do you say such things?
And Judas said to her, Know in truth that I
have betrayed my master Jesus to evil-doers,
who will put him to death. But he will rise
on the third day, and woe to us. His wife
said, Do not talk so nor believe it; for this
cock that is roasting before the coals will as
soon crow as Jesus rise again as you say. And
even while she was speaking the words, the
cock flapped his wings and crew thrice. Then
Judas was still more persuaded, and straight-
way made a noose of the rope and hanged
himself.*
The Cursor Mundi gives its own turn to
this relation, with the intent to blacken Judas
a little more.f When Judas had betrayed
Jesus, he went to his mother with his pence,
boasting of the act. "Hast thou sold thy
master?" said she. "Shame shall be thy
lot, for they will put him to death; but he
shall rise again." "Rise, mother?" said Ju-
das, "sooner shall this cock rise up that was
scalded yesternight."
Hardly had he said the word,
The cock leapt up and flew,
Feathered fairer than before,
And by God's grace he crew;
The traitor false began to fear,
His peril well he knew.
This cock it was the self-same cock
Which Peter made to rue,
When he had thrice denied his lord
And proved to him untrue.
A still different version existed among the
Copts, who had their copies of the apocryphal
* The gospel of Nicodemus was introduced into the
French and the Italian romance of Perceforest, but unfortu-
nately this "narratio ab inepto Grseculo pessime interpo-
lata " (Thilo) seems to be lacking.
t Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem of the 14th cen-
tury, in four versions, ed. by K. Morris, p. 912 f, vv 15961-
998. This passage was kindly pointed out to me by Profes-
sor George Stephens.
( Relation d'un Voyage fait au Levant par Monsieur De
writings, and among them the gospel of Nico-
demus.
The Copts say, according to Thevenot,
"that on the day of the Supper a roasted
cock was served to our Lord, and that when
Judas went out to sell Jesus to the Jews, the
Saviour commanded the cock to get up and
follow him; which the cock did, and brought
back his report to our Lord that Judas had
sold him, for which service this cock shall be
admitted to paradise." J
The herald of the morn is described in
other carols as making known the birth of
the Saviour to the animal creation, or the
more familiar members of it.
"There is a sheet of carols headed thus:
'Christus nattts est, Christ is born,' with
a wood-cut ten inches high by eight and one
half inches wide, representing the stable at
Bethlehem; Christ in. the crib, watched by
the Virgin and Joseph; shepherds kneeling;
angels attending; a man playing on the bag-
pipes ; a woman with a basket of fruit on her
head; a sheep bleating and an ox lowing on
the ground; a raven croaking and a crow
cawing on the hay-rack; a cock crowing above
them; and angels singing in the sky. The
animals have labels from their mouths, bearing
Latin inscriptions. Down the side of the wood-
cut is the following account and explanation:
'A religious man, inventing the conceits of
both birds and beasts, drawn in the picture of
our Saviour's birth, doth thus express them.
The cock croweth Christus natus est, Christ is
born. The raven asked Quando, When? The
crow replied, Hac node, This night. The ox
cryeth out, Ubi, ubi? Where, where? The
sheep bleated out, Bethlehem, Bethlehem. A
voice from heaven sounded, Gloria in excelsis,
Glory be on high !'" London, 1701. Hone's
Every-Day Book, I, col. 1600 f.
Thevenot, Paris, 1665, i, 502. Cited by Thilo, p. xxxvii,
and by Victor Smith, Romania, n, 474, who adds: "Parmi
les manuscrits rapportes d'Ethiopie par M. d'Abbadie, il se
trouve un volume dont le titre a pour e'quivalent, Actes dela
passion. Un chapitre de ce volume, intitule' Le livre ducoq,
developpe la legende indique'e par The'venot. Catalogue
raisonne' des manuscrits e'thiopiens, appartenant a M. A. T.
d'Abbadie, in 4°, imp. impe'riale, Paris, 1859."


83. ST STEPHEN AND HEROD
241
So in Vieux Noels francais, in Les Noe
Bressans, etc., par Philibert Le Due, p. 145.
Joie des Bestes
a la nouvelle de la naissance du Sauveur.
Comme les Bestes autrefois
Parloient mieux latin que francois,
Le Coq, de loin voyant le faict,
S'ecria: Christus natus est;
Le Bceuf, d'un air tout ebaubi,
Demande: Ubi, ubi, vbi?
La Chevre, se torchant le gToin,
Respond que e'est a Bethleem;
Maistre Baudet, curiosus
De Taller voir, dit: Eamus;
Et, droit sur ses pattes, le Veau
Beugle deux fois: Volo, volo.*
And again, in Italian, Bolza, Canzoni popo-
lari comasche, p. 654, No 30:
H Gallo. E nato Gesii!
H Bue. In dova?
La Pecora. Betlem! Betlem!
L'Asino. Andem! Andem! Andem!
* A little Greek ballad, ' The Taking of Con-
stantinople,' only seven lines long, relates a
miracle entirely like that of the cock, which
was operated for the conviction of incredulity.
A nun, frying fish, hears a voice from above,
saying, Cease your frying, the city will fall
into the hands of the Turks. "When the fish
fly out of the pan alive," she says, "then shall
the Turks take the city." The fish fly out of
the pan alive, and the Turkish admiraud comes
riding into the city. Zambelios, p. 600, No
2; Passow, p. 147, No 197. (Liebrecht, Volks-
kunde, p. 179.)
With Herod's questions and Stephen's an-
swers in stanzas 5-8, we may compare a pas-
sage in some of the Greek ballads cited under
• No 17, p. 199.
2*Xa/?e, mzyps; (ncAa/Sc, Sut'js; fiSf to i/ruyu <ro0 Xci'ttci;
—K//3e, iravat; o-KXa/3e, 6ii//as; cr/oW/Je, Kpauriy <rov
-W-a;
Lakkyt pe eyper mete or drynk?
M?/re ir€ivu>, i*.r[Tt Suj/lo, p-rfrt ij/iapl [(cpoerlvj /ioC XciVtc
Lakit me neyper mete ne drynk.
Jeannaraki, p. 203, No 265:
Sakellarios, p. 37, No 13.
SfcXaySe, n-civps; axXtlfie, 5ii//as; crxXa/Je, poya cov
Xci7r«;
2«Xd/3e, ireivqs; o-*Aa/3e, Suf/as; <TKkaf3e pov pov)(a
Otktis;
Lakkyt pe eyper gold or fe,
Or ony ryche wede?
Ovrt Trctrui, oute ovri poya pov Xctirei.
MlJT< 77EUCLl, /J.)/T£ Sllf/O), p.TjTt KCU l')<JV dfXllh
Lakyt me neyper gold ne fe,
Ne non ryche wede.
Tommaseo, m, 154; Passow, p. 330, No 449:
Tommaseo, m, 152; Zambelios, p. 678, No
103; Passow, No 448.
A Danish translation of the English bal-
lad is printed in Dansk Kirketidende for 1852,
p. 254 (Grundtvig). Danish A is translated
by Dr Prior, I, 398.
Sloane MS., 2593, fol. 22 b, British Museum/'
1 Seyjvt Steuene was a clerk in. kyreg Herowdes
halle,
And seruyd hiwi of bred and clop, as euery
kywg befalle.
'2 Steuyn out of kechone cam, wyth boris hed o»
honde;
He saw a sterre was fayr and hryfi ouer Bed-
lewi stonde.
* "Ce couplet se debite en imitant successivenient le chant
du coq, le mugisscmem du bceuf, le cri de la chevre, le
31
3 He kyst adoun pe boris hed and went in to
pe halle:
'I forsak pe, kyng Herowdes, and pi werkes
alle.
4 'I forsak pe, kyng Herowdes, and pi werkes
alle;
per is a chyld in Bedlem born is beter pan
we alle.'
5 'Qiiat eylyt pe, Steuene? quat is pe befalle?
braiment de l'ane, et le benglement du veau." Bolza makes
a similar explanation with regard to the Italian colloquy.


24 2 23.
Lakkyt pe eyper mete or drynk in kyng Her-
owdes halle?'
6 'Lakit me neyper mete ne drynk in. kyng Her-
owdes halle;
per is a chyld in Bedlem born is beter pan we
alle.'
7 Quat eylyt pe, Steuyn? art pu wod, or pu
gynnyst to brede?
Lakkyt pe eyper gold or fe, or ony ryche
• wede?'
8 'Lakyt me neyper gold ne fe, ne now ryche
wede;
per is a chyld in Bedlem born xal helpyn vs
at our nede.'
9 'pat is al so so]>, Steuyn, al so so}), iwys,
As pis capoun crowe xal pat lyp here in myn
dysh.'
10 bat word was not so sone seyd, pat word in
pat halle,
be capoura crew Crises natws est! among pe
lordes alle.
11 Rysyt vp, myn turmentowres, be to and al be
on,
And ledyt Steuyn out of pis town, and stonyt
hym wytA ston!'
12 Tokyn he Steuene, and stonyd hywi in the
way,
And perfore is his euyn on Crystes owyn day.
12, 51. be falle. 91. also ... also ... I wys. 92. dych.
31. a doun. 32, 41. for sak. 10s. a mong.
52. There is room only for the h at the end of
the line.
23
JUDAS
MS. B. 14, 89, of the thirteenth century, library of Trinity College, Cambridge, as printed in Wright & Har-
well's Reliquiae Antique, I, 144.
This legend, which has not been heretofore
recognized as a ballad, is, so far as is known,
unique in several particulars. The common
tradition gives Judas an extraordinary domes-
tic history,* but does not endow him with a
sister as perfidious as himself. Neither is his
selling his Master for thirty pieces accounted
for elsewhere as it is here, if it may be strictly
said to be accounted for here.
A popular explanation, founded upon John
xii, 3-6, and current for six centuries and
* Legenda Aurea, Grasse, 2d ed., p. 184 ff; Mone's An-
zeiger, vn, col. 532 f, and du Meril, Poesies populaires lat-
ines du Moyen Age, p. 326 ff; Furnivall, Early English
more, is that Judas, bearing the bag, was ac-
customed to take tithes of all moneys that
came into his hands, and that he considered
he had lost thirty pence on the precious oint-
ment which had not been sold for three hun-
dred pence, and took this way of indemnify-
ing himself.
A Wendish ballad, Haupt und Schmaler, I,
276, No 284, has the following story. Jesus
besought hospitality for himself and his disci-
ples of a poor widow. She could give a lodg-
Poems and Lives of Saints, p. 107 ff; Douhet, Dictionnaire
des Legendea, col. 714 ff; Das alte Passional, ed. K. A. Hahn,
p. 312 ff; Backstrom, Svenska Folkbocker, n, 198 ff; etc
.


23. JUDAS
243
ing, but had no bread. Jesus said he would
care for that, and asked which of his disciples
would go and buy bread for thirty pieces of
silver. Judas offered himself eagerly, and
went to the Jews' street to do his errand.
Jews were gaming, under a tub, and they chal-
lenged Judas to p}ay. The first time he won
the stake, and the second. The third time he
lost everything. "Why so sad, Judas?" they
say: "go sell your Master for thirty pieces."
We are to suppose Judas to have rejoined his
company. Jesus then asks who has sold him.
John says, Is it I? and Peter, and then Judas,
to whom Jesus replies, Thou knowest best.
Judas, in remorse, runs to hang himself. The
Lord bids him turn, for his sin is forgiven.
But Judas keeps on till he comes to a fir:
"Soft wood, thou fir, thou wilt not bear me."
Further on, till he comes to an aspen. "Hard
wood, thou aspen, thou wilt bear me." So he
hanged himself on the aspen; and still the
aspen shakes and trembles for fear of the
judgment day.
According to the ballads, then, Judas lost
the thirty pieces at play, or was robbed of
them, with collusion of his sister. But his
passionate behavior in the English ballad, st.
9, goes beyond all apparent occasion. Surely
it was not for his tithe of the thirty pieces.
And why does he insist to Pilate on the very
thirty pieces he had lost, rejecting every other
form of payment? The ballad-singer might
answer, So it was, and rest contented. Or
perhaps he might have heard, and might tell
us by way of comment, that these pieces had
for long ages been destined to be "the price of
him that was valued, whom they of the chil-
dren of Israel did value;" had been coined by
Abraham's father for Ninus, and been given
by Terah to his son; had passed through va-
rious hands to the Ishmaelites, had been paid
by them as the price of Joseph, and been re-
paid to Joseph by his brethren for corn in
Egypt; thence were transferred to Sheba, and
in the course of events were brought by the
Queen of the South as an offering to Solo-
mon's temple; when the temple was despoiled
by Nebuchadnezzar, were given by him to the
king of Godolia, and after the kingdom of
Godolia had been fused in that of Nubia, were
brought as his tribute to the infant Jesus by
Melchior, king of the same, etc.*
It is much to be regretted that the manu-
script from which this piece was taken has
been for some years lost from Trinity College
Library, so that a collation of Wright's text
has not been possible.
1 Hit wes upon a Scere-thorsday that ure loverd
aros;
Ful milde were the wordes he spec to Judas.
2 'Judas, thou most to Jurselem, oure mete for
tobngge;
Thritti platen of selver thou bere up othi rugge.
3 'Thou contest fer ithe brode stret, fer ithe
brode strete;
Summe of thine tunesmen ther thou meiht
imete.'
4
Imette wid is roster, the swikele wimon.
* See Fabricius, Codex Pseudepigraphus VeteriB Testa-
menti, n, 79; Godfrey of Viterbo (who derives his informa-
tion from a lost writing of the apostle Bartholomew) in his
5 'Judas, thou were wrthe me stende the wid
s ton,
For the false prophete that tou bile vest upon.'
6 'Be stille, leve soster, thin herte the tobreke!
Wiste min loverd Crist, ful wel he wolde be
wreke.'
7 'Judas, go thou on the roc, heie upon the
s ton;
Lei thin heved imy barm, slep thou the
anon.'
8 Sone so Judas of slepe was awake,
Thritti platen of selver from hym weren itake.
Pantheon, Pistoriris, German. Script., ed. Strove, u, 243,
or E. du Kierfl, Poesies pop. ]mines du Moyen Age, p. 321;
Genesi de Scriptura, Biblioteca Catalans, p. 20, etc.


244
24. BONNIE ANNIE
9 He drou hymselve bi the cop, that al it lavede
a blode;
The Jewes out of Jurselem awenden he were
wode.
10 Foret hym com the riche Jeu that heihte Pi-
latus:
'Wolte sulle thi loverd, that hette Jesus?'
11 'I mil sulle my loverd [for] nones cunnes
eihte,
Bote hit be for the thritti platen that he me
bitaihte.'
12 'Wolte sulle thi lord Crist for enes cunnes
golde?'
'Nay, bote hit he for the platen that he habben
wolde.'
13 In him com ur lord Crist gon, as is postles
seten at mete:
'Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete?
14 [' Wou sitte ye, postles, ant wi nule ye ete ?]
Ic am ibouht ant isold today for oure mete.'
15 Up stod him Judas: 'Lord, am I that . . .?
'I nas never othe stude ther me the evel spec'
16 Up him stod Peter, and spec wid al is mihte,
17 'Thau Pilatus him come wid ten hundred
cnihtes,
Yet ic wolde, loverd, for thi love fihte.'
18 'Still thou be, Peter, wel I the icnowe;
Thou wolt fursake me thrien ar the coc him
crowe.'
Not divided into stanza* in Reliquiae Antiquce.
3s. meist.
10l. heiste.
II1. eiste. 11*. bitaiste.
142. i-boust.
161. miste.
171. cnistes. 17s. fiste.
In the absence of the original manuscript, I have
thought it better to change Wright's s in the
above instances (3-17) to h. In this substitu-
tion I follow Mdtzner's Altenglische Sprachpro-
ben, i, 114.
24
BONNIE ANNIE
A. 'Bonnie Annie,' Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Bal- B. < The High Banks o Yarrow,' Motherwell's MS.,
lads, p. 123. p. 652.
Had an old copy of thia still pretty and
touching, but much disordered, ballad been
saved, we should perhaps have had a story
like this. Bonnie Annie, having stolen her
father's gold and her mother's fee, and fled
with her paramour (like the maid in No 4),
the ship in which she is sailing encounters a
storm and cannot get on. Annie is seized
with the pangs of travail, and deplores the ab-
sence of women (B 6, 7, A 9,10; compare No
15, 21-26). The sailors say there is some-
body on board who is marked for death, or fly-
ing from a just doom. They cast lots, and the
lot falls on Annie, — a result which strikes us
as having more semblance of the "corrupted
currents of this world" than of a pure judg-
ment of God. Annie, conscious only of her
own guilt, asks to be thrown overboard. Her


24. BONNIE ANNIE
245
paramour offers great sums to the crew to save
her, but their efforts prove useless, and Annie
again begs, or they now insist, that she shall
be cast into the sea with her babe. This done,
the ship is able to sail on; Annie floats to
shore and is buried there.
The captain of the ship is the guilty man
in A, in B a rich squire. A may exhibit the
original plot, but it is just as likely that the
captain was substituted for a passenger, un-
der the influence of another ballad, in which
there is no Annie, but a ship-master stained
with many crimes, whom the lot points out as
endangering or obstructing the vessel. See
'Brown Robyn's Confession,' further on.
If the narrative in Jonah, i, is the ultimate
source of this and similar stories, it must be
owned that the tradition has maintained its
principal traits in this ballad remarkably well.
Jonah flies from the presence of the Lord in a
ship; the ship is overtaken by a tempest; *
the sailors cast lots to know who is the guilty
cause, and the lot falls on Jonah; he bids
the sailors take him up and cast him into the
sea; nevertheless the men row hard to bring
the ship to land, but cannot succeed; they
throw Jonah into the water, and the storm
ceases.f
Translated in Grundtvig's Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, p. 199, No 31.
A
Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 123.
1 There was a rich lord, and he lived in Forfar,
He had a fair lady, and one only dochter.
2 O she was fair, O dear, she was bonnie!
A ship's captain courted her to be his honey.
3 There cam a ship's captain out owre the sea
sailing,
He courted this young thing till he got her wi
bairn.
4 'Te H steal ydur father's gowd, and your
mother's money,
And I 'll mak ye a lady in Ireland bonnie.'
5 She's stown her father's gowd, and her moth-
er's money,
But she was never a lady in Ireland bonnie.
*****
6 'There's fey fowk in our ship, she winna sail
for me,
There's fey fowk in our ship, she winna sail
for me.'
* Jonah is asleep below. This trait we find in several
Norse ballads: see 'Brown Robyn's Confession.'
t A singular episode in the life of Saint Mary Magdalen
in the Golden Legend, Grasse, c. xcvi, 2, p. 409 (V, indicates
a belief that even a dead body might prejudice the safety of
a ship. The princess of Marseilles, in the course of a storm,
has given birth to a boy and expired. The sailors demand
that the body shall be thrown into the sea (and apparently
7 They've casten black bullets twice six and
forty,
And ae the black bullet fell on bonnie An-
nie.
8 'Ye 'll tak me in your arms twa, lo, lift me
cannie,
Throw me out owre board, your ain dear An-
nie.'
9 He has tane her in his arms twa, lo, lifted her
cannie,
He has laid her on a bed of down, his ain dear
Annie.
10 'What can a woman do, love, I 'll do for
ye;
'Muckle can a woman do, ye canna do for
me.'
11 'Lay about, steer about, lay our ship cannie,
Do all ye can to save my dear Annie.'
12 'I've laid about, steerd about, laid about can-
nie,
But all I can do, she winna sail for me.
the boy, too), for, they say, as long as it shall be with us,
this thumping will not cease. They presently see a hill, and
think it better to put off the corpse, and the boy, there, than
that these should be devoured by sea-monsters. Fear will
fasten upon anything in such a case.
The Digby Mystery of Mary Magdalene has this scene,
at p. 122 of the New Shakspere Society edition, cd. Furni-
rall.


24 6 24. BONNIE
ANNIE
13 'Ye 'll tak her in your arms twa, lo, lift her
cannie,
And throw her out owre hoard, your ain dear
Annie.'
14 He has tane her in his arms twa, lo, lifted her
cannie,
He has thrown her out owre hoard, his ain dear
Annie.
15 As the ship sailed, honnie Annie she swam,
And she was at Ireland as soon as them.
16 He made his love a coffin of the gowd sae yel-
low,
And buried his bonnie love doun in a sea val-
ley.
B
Motherwell's MS., p. 652. From the singing of a boy,
Henry French, Ayr.
1 Down in Dumbarton there wonnd a rich mer-
chant,
Down in Dumbarton there wond a rich mer-
chant,
And he had nae family but ae only dochter.
Sing fal lal de deedle, fal lal de deedle lair,
O a day
2 There cam a rich squire, intending to woo
her,
He wooed her until he had got her wi babie.
3 'Oh what shall I do! oh what shall come o
me!
Baith father and mither will think naething o
me.'
4 'Gae up to your father, bring down gowd and
money,
And I 'll take ye ower to a braw Irish la-
die.'
5 She gade to her father, brought down gowd
and money,
And she's awa ower to a braw Irish ladie.
6 She hadna sailed far till the young thing cried
'Women!'
'What women can do, my dear, I 'll do for .
you.'
7 'O haud your tongue, foolish man, dinna talk
vainly,
For ye never kent what a woman driet for
you.
8 'Gae wash your hands in the cauld spring
water,
And dry them on a towel a' giltit wi silver.
9 'And tak me by the middle, and lift me up
saftlie,
And throw me ower shipboard, baith me and
my babie.'
10 He took her by the middle, and lifted her
saftly,
And threw her ower shipboard, baith her and
her babie. ,
11 Sometimes she did sink, sometimes she did
float it,
Until that she cam to the high banks o Yarrow.
12 'O captain tak gowd, O sailors tak money,
And launch out your sma boat till I sail for my
honey.'
13 'How can I tak gowd, how can I tak money?
My ship's on a sand bank, she winna sail for
me.'
14 The captain took gowd, the sailors took money,
And they launchd out their sma boat till he
sailed for his honey.
15 'Mak my love a coffin o the gowd sae yellow,
Whar the wood it is dear, and the planks they
are narrow,
And bury my love on the high banks o Yar-
row.'
16 They made her a coffin o the gowd sae yellow,
And buried her deep on the high banks o Yar-
row.


25. WILLIE'S LYKE-WAKE
247
Printed by Kinloch in four-line stanzas. They made his love a coffin of the gowd
161. coffin off the Goats of Yerrow. sae yellow,
16. Motherwell, Minstrelsy, p. xcix, 146, gives And they buried her deep on the high
the stanza thus: banks of Yarrow.
Sing fal lal, de deedle, fal lal, de deedle
They made his love a coffin of the gowd sae lair, Oh a Day!
yellow,
25
WILLIE'S LYKE-WAKE
A. 'Willie, Willie,' Kinloch's MSS, i, 58. C. Motherwell's MS., p. 187.
B. a. 'Blue Flowers and Yellow,' Buchan's Ballads of D. 'Amang the blue flowers and yellow,' Motherwell's
the North of Scotland, i, 185. b. 'The Blue Flow- Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xix, No xvn, one stanza,
ers and the Yellow,' Christie, Traditional Ballad
Airs, i, 120.
This piece was first printed by Buchan, in
1828, and all the copies which have been re-
covered are of about that date. The device
of a lover's feigning death as a means of win-
ning a shy mistress enjoys a considerable pop-
ularity in European ballads. Even more fa-
vorite is a ballad in which the woman adopts
this expedient, in order to escape from the con-
trol of her relations : see 'The Gay Goshawk,'
with which will be given another form of the
present story.
A Danish ballad answering to our Feigned
Lyke-Wake is preserved, as I am informed
by Professor Grundtvig, in no less than four-
teen manuscripts, some of them of the 16th
century, and is still living in tradition. Five
versions, as yet unprinted, A-E, have been
furnished me by the editor of the Ballads of
Denmark.
A, from a manuscript of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Young Herre Karl asks his mother's
rede how he may get the maid his heart is
set upon. She advises him to feign sickness,
and be laid on his bier, no one to know his
counsel but the page who is to do his errands.
The page bids the lady to the wake that night.
Little Kirstin asks her mother's leave to keep
wake over Karl. The wake is to be in the
upper room of Karl's house. The mother says,
Be on your guard; he means to cheat you;
but Kirstin, neither listening to her mother
nor asking her father, goes to keep wake in
the upper room. When she went in she could
not see the lights for her tears. She begged
all the good people to pray for Karl's soul, sat
down by his head and made her own prayer,
and murmured, While thou livedst I loved
thee. She lifted the cloths, and there lay Karl
wide awake and laughing. "All the devils in
hell receive thy soul!" she cried. "If thou
livedst a hundred years, thou shouldst never
have my good will!" Karl proposed that she
should pass the night with him. "Why would
you deceive me!" Kirstin exclaimed. "Why
did you not go to my father and betroth me
honorably?" Karl immediately rode to her
father's to do this, and they were married.
B. a, from MSS of 1610 and later, almost


248 25. WILLIE'S
LYKE-WAKE
identical with b, 'Den forstilte Vaagestue,'
Levninger, Part n, 1784, p. 34, No 7.* This
version gives us some rather unnecessary pre-
vious history. Karl has sued for Ingerlille
three years, and had an ill answer. He fol-
lows her to church one fine day, and, after
mass, squeezes her fingers and asks, Will you
take pity on me? She replies, You must ask
my father and friends; and he, I have, and
can get no good answer. If you will give
me your troth, we can see to that best our-
selves. "Never," she says. "Farewell, then;
but Christ may change your mind." Karl
meets his mother on his way from church,
who asks why he is so pale. He tells her
his plight, and is advised, as before, to use
craft. The wake is held on Karl's premises.f
Ingerlille, in scarlet mantle, goes with her
maids. She avows her love, but adds that it
was a fixed idea in her mind that he would
deceive her. She lifts up the white cloth that
covers the face. Karl laughs, and says, We
were good friends before, so are we still. Bear
out the bier, and follow me to bed with the
fair maid. She hopes he will have respect
for her honor. Karl reassures her, leaves her
with his mother, rides to Ingerlille's house,
obtains her parents' approbation, and buys
wine for his wedding.
C, from manuscripts of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Karl is given out for dead, and his
pages ride to the convent to ask that his body
may be laid in the cloister. The bier is borne
in; the prioress comes to meet it, with much
respect. The pages go about bidding maids
to the wake. Ellin asks her mother if she
may go. (This looks as if there had origi-
nally been no convent in the ballad.) Her
mother tells her to put on red gold and be
wary of Karl, he is so very tricky. When
Ellin owns her attachment, Karl whispers
softly, Do not weep, but follow me. Horses
were ready at the portal — black horses all!
* Bat a has two stanzas more: the first a stev-stamme,
or lyrical introduction (see p. 7), the other, 31, nearly a rep-
etition of Sandvig's 29.
t After the page has bidden Ingerlille to the wake, we are
told, a 27, 28, b 26, 27: all the convent bells were going,
Karl sprang from the bier, took Ellin, and
made for the door. The nuns, who stood read-
ing in the choir, thought it was an angel that
had translated her, and wished one would
come for them. Karl, with fifteen men who
were in waiting, carried Ellin home, and drank
his bridal with her.
D, from recent oral tradition. As Karl lay
in his bed, he said, How shall I get the fair
maid out of the convent? His foster-mother
heard him, and recommended him to feign
death and bid the fair maid to his wake. The
maid asked her father's leave to go, but he
said, Nay, the moment you are inside the door
he will seize you by the foot. But when the
page, who had first come in blue, comes back
in scarlet, she goes. She stands at Karl's head
and says, I never shall forget thee; at his feet,
"I wished thee well;" at his side, "Thou
wast my dearest." Then she turns and bids
everybody good-night, but Karl seizes her,
and calls to his friends to come drink his
bridal. We hear nothing of the convent after
the first stanza.
E, from oral tradition of another quarter.
Karl consults his mother how he shall get lit-
tle Kirstin out of the convent, and receives
the same counsel. A page is sent to the con-
vent, and asks who will come to the wake
now Herr Karl is dead? Little Kirstin, with-
out application to the prioress, goes to her
mother, who does not forbid her, but warns
her that Karl will capture her as sure as she
goes into the room.
The maid has the door by the handle,
And is wishing them all good-night;
Young Karl, that lay a corpse on the bier,
Sprang up and held her tight.
'Why here's a board and benches,
And there's no dead body here;
This eve I 'll drink my mead and wine,
All with my Kirstin dear.
and the tidings spreading that the knight was dead; all the
ladies of the convent sat sewing, except Ingerlille, who wept.
But Ingerlille, in the next stanza, puts on her scarlet cloak
and goes to the hojeloft to see her father and mother. The
two stanzas quoted signify nothing in this version.


25. WILLIE'S LYKE-WAKE
249
'Why here's a board and beds too,
And here there 'a nobody dead;
To-morrow will I go to the priest,
All with my plighted maid.'
F, another copy from recent tradition, was
published in 1875, in Kristensen's Jyske
Folkeviser, n, 213, No 62, 'Vaagestuen.'
There is no word of a convent here. The story
is made very short. Kirsten's mother says
she will be fooled if she goes to the wake.
The last stanza, departing from all other copies,
says that when Kirsten woke in the morning
Karl was off.
G. 'Klosterranet,' Levninger, I, 23, No 4
(1780), Danske Viser, rv, 261, No 212, a very
second-rate ballad, may have the praise of
preserving consistency and conventual dis-
cipline. The young lady does not slip out to
see her mother without leave asked and had.
It is my persuasion that the convent, with its
little jest about the poor nuns, is a later in-
vention, and that C is a blending of two dif-
ferent stories. In G, Herr Morten betroths
Proud Adeluds, who is more virtuous than
rich. His friends object; her friends do not
want spirit, and swear that she shall never be
his. Morten's father sends him out of the
country, and Adeluds is put into a convent.
After nine years Morten returns, and, having
rejected an advantageous match proposed by
his father, advises with his brother, Herr Ni-
laus, how to get his true love out of the clois-
ter. The brother's plan is that of the mother
and foster-mother in the other versions. Herr
Nilaus promises a rich gift if Morten's body
may be buried within the cloister. From this
point the story is materially the same as in C.
H. A copy, which I have not yet seen,
in Rahbek's Laesning i blandede iEmner (or
Hesperus), m, 151, 1822 (Bergstrom).
'Hertugen af Skage,' Danske Viser, n, 191,
No 88, has this slight agreement with the fore-
going ballads. Voldemar, the king's youngest
son, hearing that the duke has a daughter,
Hildegerd, that surpasses all maids, seeks her
out in a convent in which she has taken refuge,
and gets a cold reception. He feigns death,
desiring that his bones may repose in the
cloister. His bier is carried into the convent
church. Hildegerd lights nine candles for
him, and expresses compassion for his early
death. While she is standing before the altar
of the Virgin, Voldemar carries her out of the
church by force.
This, says Afzelius, 1814, is one of the com-
monest ballads in Sweden, and is often rep-
resented as a drama by young people in coun-
try places. A a, ' Herr Carl, eller Klosterrof-
vet,' Afzelius, I, 179, No 26, new ed. No 24;
b, Afzelius, Sago-Haider, ed. 1851, iv, 106.
B. Atterbom, Poetisk Kalender for 1816, p.
63, 'Det lefvande Liket.' C. Rancken, Nagra
Prof af Folksang, o. s. v., p. 13, No 4. These
differ but slightly from Danish D, E. All
three conclude with the humorous verses about
the nuns, which in Rancken's copy take this
rollicking turn:
And all the nuns in the convent they all danced in
a ring;
'Christ send another such angel, to take us all under
his wing!'
And all the nuns in the convent, they all danced
each her lone;
'Christ send another such angel, to take us off every
one!'
Bergstrom, new Afzelius, II, 131, refers to
another version in Gyllenmars' visbok, p. 191,
and to a good copy obtained by himself.
An Icelandic version for the 17th century,
which is after the fashion of Danish C, G, is
given in tslenzk FornkvaeSi, H, 59, No 40,
'Marteins kviSa.' The lover has in all three
a troop of armed men in waiting outside of the
convent.
Professor Bugge has obtained a version in
Norway, which, however, is as to language
essentially Danish. (Bergstrom, as above.)
There is a very gay and pretty south-Eu-
ropean ballad, in which the artifice of feigning
death is successfully tried by a lover after the
failure of other measures.
A. Magyar. Arany and Gyulai, I, 172,
No 18, 'Palbeli Szep Antal;' translated by


250
25. WILLIE'S LYEE-WAKE
Aigner, Ungarische Volksdichtungen, p. 80,
'Schon Anton.' Handsome Tony tells his
mother that he shall die for Helen. The
mother says, Not yet. I will build a mar-
vellous mill. The first wheel shall grind out
pearls, the middle stone discharge kisses, the
third wheel distribute small change. The
pretty maids will come to see, and Helen
among them. Helen asks her mother's leave
to see the mill. "Go not," the mother replies.
"They are throwing the net, and a fox will
be caught." Tony again says he must die.
His mother says, not yet; for she will build
an iron bridge; the girls will come to see it,
and Helen among them. Helen asks to see
the bridge; her mother answers as before.
Tony says once more that he shall die for
Helen. His mother again rejoins, Not yet.
Make believe to be dead; the girls will come
to see you, and Helen among them. Helen
entreats to be allowed to go to see the hand-
some young man that has died. Her mother
tells her she will never come back. Tony's
mother calls to him to get up; the girl he was
dying for is even now before the gate, in the
court, standing at his feet. "Never," says
Helen, "saw I so handsome a dead man, —
eyes smiling, mouth tempting kisses, and his
feet all ready for a spring." Up he jumped
and embraced her.
B. Italian. Ferraro, Canti popolari mon-
ferrini, p. 59, No 40, * II Genovese.' The
Genoese, not obtaining the beautiful daughter
of a rich merchant on demand, plants a gar-
den. All the girls come for flowers, except
the one desired. He then gives a ball, with
thirty-two musicians. All the girls are there,
but not the merchant's daughter. He then
builds a church, very richly adorned. All the
girls come to mass, all but one. Next he sets
the bells a ringing, in token of his death. The
fair one goes to the window to ask who is
dead. The good people (" ra bun-ha gent,"
in the Danish ballad "det gode folk ") tell
her that it is her first love, and suggest that
she should attend the funeral. She asks her
father, who consents if she will not cry. As
she was leaving the church, the lover came to
life, and called to the priests and friars to stop
singing. They went to the high altar to be
married.
C. Slovenian. Vraz, Narodne pesni ilirske,
p. 93,' Cudna bolezen' (' Strange Sickness');
translated by Anastasius Griin, Volkslieder
aus Krain, p. 36, ' Der Scheintodte.' "Build
a church, mother," cries the love-sick youth,
"that all who will may hear mass; perhaps
my love among them." The mother built a
church, one and another came, but not his
love. "Dig a well, mother, that those who
will may fetch water; perhaps my love among
them." The well was dug, one and another
came for water, but not his love. "Say I am
dead, mother, that those who will may come
to pray." Those who wished came, his love
first of all. The youth was peeping through
the window. "What kind of dead man is
this, that stretches his arms for an embrace,
and puts out his mouth for a kiss?"
Danish G translated by the Rev. J. John-
stone, 'The Robbery of the Nunnery, or,
The Abbess Outwitted,' Copenhagen, 1786
(Danske Viser, iV, 366); by Prior, m, 400.
Swedish A, by G. Stephens, For. Quar. Rev.,
1841, XXVI, 49, and by the Howitts, Lit. and
Rom. of Northern Europe, I, 292. English
C, by Rosa Warrens, Schottische V. l., p. 144,
No 83.
Einloch's MSS, i, 53, from the recitation of Mary Barr,
Lesmahagow, aged upwards of seventy. May, 1827.
1 'Willie, Willie, I 'll learn you a wile,'
And the sun shines over the valleys and a'
'How this pretty fair maid ye may beguile.'
Among the blue flowrs and the yellow
and a'
2 'Ye maun lie doun just as ye were dead,
And tak your winding-sheet around your head.


25. WILLIE'S LYKE-WAKE
251
3 'Ye maun gie the bellman his bell-groat,
To ring your dead-bell at your lover's yett.'
4 He lay doun just as he war dead,
And took his winding-sheet round his head.
5 He gied the bellman his bell-groat,
To ring his dead-bell at his lover's yett.
6 'O wha is this that is dead, I hear?'
'O wha but Willie that loed ye sae dear.'
7 She is to her father's chamber gone,
And on her knees she's fallen down.
8 'O father, O father, ye maun grant me
this;
I hope that ye will na tak it amiss.
9 'That I to Willie's burial should go;
For he is dead, full well I do know.'
10 'Ye 'll tak your seven bauld brethren wi thee,
And to Willie's burial straucht go ye.'
11 It's whan she cam to the outmost yett,
She made the silver fly round for his sake.
12 It's whan she cam to the inmost yett,
She made the red gowd fly round for his sake.
13 As she walked frae the court to the parlour
there,
The pretty corpse syne began for to steer.
14 He took her by the waist sae neat and sae sma,
And threw her atween him and the wa.
15 'O Willie, 0 Willie, let me alane this nicht,
O let me alane till we're wedded richt'
16 'Ye cam unto me baith sae meek and mild,
But I 'll mak ye gae hame a wedded wife wi
child.'
B
a. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, i, 185. b.
Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, i, 120.
1 'O Willie my son, what makes you sae sad?'
As the sun shines over the valley
'I lye sarely sick for the love of a maid.'
Amang the blue flowers and the yellow
2 'Were she an heiress or lady sae free,
That she will take no pity on thee?
3 'O Willie, my son, I 'll learn you a wile,
How this fair maid ye may beguile.
4 'Ye 'll gie the principal bellman a groat,
And ye 'll gar him cry your dead lyke-wake.'
5 Then he gae the principal bellman a groat,
He bade him cry his dead lyke-wake.
6 This maiden she stood till she heard it a',
And down frae her cheeks the tears did fa.
7 She is hame to her father's ain bower:
'I 'll gang to yon lyke-wake ae single hour.'
8 'Ye must take with you your ain brither
John;
It's not meet for maidens to venture alone.'
9 'I 'll not take with me my brither John,
But I 'll gang along, myself all alone.'
10 When she came to young Willie's yate,
His seven brithers were standing thereat.
11 Then they did conduct her into the ha,
Amang the weepers and merry mourners a'.
12 When she lifted up the covering sae red,
With melancholy countenance to look on the
dead,
13 He's taen her in his arms, laid her gainst the
wa,
Says, ' Lye ye here, fair maid, till day.'
14 'O spare me, O spare me, but this single
night,
And let me gang hame a maiden sae bright.'
15 'Tho all your kin were about your bower,
Ye shall not be a maiden ae single hour.


252 25. WILLIE'S LYKE-WAKB
16 'Fair maid, ye came here without a convoy, 17 'Ye came here a maiden sae mild,
But ye shall return wi a horse and a boy. But ye shall gae hame a wedded wife with
child.'
0
Motherwell's MS., p. 187.
1 'O Willie, Willie, what makes thee so sad?'
And the sun shines over the valley
'I have loved a lady these seven years and
mair.'
Down amang the blue flowers and the yel-
low
2 'O Willie, lie down as thou were dead,
And lay thy winding-sheet down at thy head.
3 'And gie to the bellman a belling-great,
To ring the dead-bell at thy love's bower-yett.'
4 He laid him down as he were dead,
And he drew the winding-sheet oer his head.
5 He gied to the bellman a belling-great,
To ring the dead-bell at his love's bower-yett.
*****
6 When that she came to her true lover's gate,
She dealt the red gold and all for his sake.
7 And when that she came to her true lover's
bower,
She had not been there for the space of half an
hour,
8 Till that she cam to her true lover's bed,
And she lifted the winding-sheet to look at the
dead.
9 He took her by the hand so meek and sma,
And he cast her over between him and the wa.
10 'Tho all your friends were in the bower,
1 would not let you go for the space of half an
hour.
11 'You came to me without either horse or boy,
But I will send you home with a merry con-
voy.'
D 'I think nae music will mak ye glad.'
Amang the blue flowers and the yellow
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xix, Noivn.
'O Johnee, dear Johnie, what makes ye sae
sad?'
As the sun shines ower the valley
B. b is a with stanzas 3, 12-15 omitted, and
"a few alterations, some of them given from
the recitation of an old woman." "Buchan's
version differs little from the way the old
woman sang the ballad." The old woman's
variations, so far as adopted, are certainly of
the most trifling.
I2. I am. 21. Is she. 71. And she.
161. Ye've come. 162. And ye.
17. Evidently by Christie:
'Fair maid, I love thee as my life,
But ye shall gae hame a lovd wedded wife.'
C. Burden. The lines are transposed in the sec-
ond stanza, but are given in the third in the
order of the first.
3\ 51. MS. belling great.
II2. you come.


26. THE THREE RAVENS
253
26
THE THREE RAVENS
a. Melismata. Musicall Fhansies. Fitting the Court, b. 'The Three Ravens,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
Cittie, and Countrey Humours. London, 1611, No Appendix, p. xviii, No XIi.
20* [T. Ravenscroft.]
a was printed from Melismata, by Ritson,
in his Ancient Songs, 1790, p. 155. Mr. Chap-
pell remarked, about 1855, Popular Music of
the Olden Time, I, 59, that this ballad was
still so popular in some parts of the country
that he had "been favored with a variety of
copies of it, written down from memory, and
all differing in some respects, both as to words
and tune, but with sufficient resemblance to
prove a similar origin." Motherwell, Min-
strelsy, Introduction, p. lxxvii, note 49, says
he had met with several copies almost the
same as a. b is the first stanza of one of these
(traditional) versions, " very popular in Scot-
land."
The following verses, first printed in the
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and known
in several versions in Scotland, are treated by
Motherwell and others as a traditionary form
of 'The Three Ravens.' They are, however,
as Scott says, "rather a counterpart than a
copy of the other," and sound something like
a cynical variation of the tender little English
ballad. Dr Rimbault (Notes and Queries,
Ser. v, m, 518) speaks of unprinted copies
taken down by Mr Blaikie and by Mr Thomas
Lyle of Airth.
THE TWA CORBIES.
a. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, m, 239, ed. 1803,
communicated by C. K. Sharpe, as written down from tra-
dition by a lady. b. Albyn's Anthology, n, 27,1818, " from
the singing of Mr Thomas Shortreed, of Jedburgh, as sung
and recited by his mother." c. Chambers's Scottish Bal-
lads, p. 283, partly from recitation and partly from the Bor-
der Minstrelsy, d. Fraser-Tytler MS., p. 70.
* Misprinted 22.
1 As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine to-day?'
2 'In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.
3 'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.
4 'Te 'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I 'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We 'll theek our nest when it grows bare.
5 'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sail ken where he is gane;
Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.'
'The Three Ravens' is translated by
Grundtvig, Engelske og skotske Folkeviser,
p. 145, No 23; by Henrietta Schubart, p. 155;
Gerhard, p. 95; Rosa Warrens, Schottische
V. l. der Vorzeit, p. 198; Wolff, Halle der
Volker, I, 12, Hausschatz, p. 205.
'The Twa Corbies' (Scott), by Grundtvig,
p. 143, No 22; Arndt, p. 224; Gerhard, p.
94; Schubart, p. 157; Knortz, L. u. R. Alt-
Englands, p. 194; Rosa Warrens, p. 89. The
three first stanzas, a little freely rendered into
four, pass for Pushkin's: Works, 1855, n,
462, xxiv.


254
20. THE THREE RAVENS
1 There were three rauens sat on a tree,
Downe a downe, hay down, hay downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
With a downe
There were three rauens sat on a tree,
They were as blacke as they might be.
With a downe derrie, derrie, derrie, downe,
downe
5 'His hankes they flie so eagerly,
There's no fowle dare him come nie.'
6 Downe there comes a fallow doe,
As great with yong as she might goe.
7 She lift vp his bloudy hed,
And kist his wounds that were so red.
2 The one of them said to his mate,
'Where shall we our breakefast take?'
8 She got him vp vpon her backe,
And carried him to earthen lake.
3 'Downe in yonder greene field,
There lies a knight slain vnder his shield.
4 'His hounds they lie downe at his feete,
So well they can their master keepe.
9 She buried him before the prime,
She was dead herselfe ere euen-song time.
10 God send euery gentleman,
Such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman.
b. Thbee ravens sat upon a tree,
Hey down, hey derry day
Three ravens sat upon a tree,
Hey down
Three ravens sat upon a tree,
And they were black as black could be.
And sing lay doo and la doo and day
Variations of The Twa Corbies.
b. 1. As I cam by yon auld house end,
I saw twa corbies sittin thereon.
21. Whare but by yon new fa'en birk.
3. We 'll sit upon his bonny breast-bane,
And we'll pick out his bonny gray
een;
We 'll set our claws intil his yallow
hair,
And big our bowr, it's a' blawn bare.
4. My mother clekit me o an egg,
And brought me up i the feathers gray,
And bade me flee whereer I wad,
For winter wad be my dying day.
5. Now winter it is come and past.
And a' the birds are biggin their
nests,
But I 'll flee high aboon them a',
And sing a sang for summer's sake.
O. 1. As I gaed doun by yon hous-en,
Twa corbies there were sittand their
lane.
21. O down beside yon new-faun birk.
31. His horse. 32. His hounds to bring the
wild deer hame.
4. O we 'll sit on his bonaie breist-bane,
And we'll pyke out his bonnie grey
een.
d. I1. walking forth. I2. the ither. 1s. we twa
dine.
32. wild bird.
52. naebody kens.
5s. when we've laid them bare. 54. win
may blaw.
t


27. THE WHUMMIL BOKE.
255
27
THE WHUMMIL BORE
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 191. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. xvi, No in.
This ballad, if it ever were one, seems not
to have been met with, or at least to have
been thought worth notice, by anybody but
Motherwell. As already observed in the
preface to 'Hind Horn,' stanza 2 seems to
have slipped into that ballad, in consequence
of the resemblance of stanza 1 to F 2, H 3 of
'Hind Horn.' This first stanza is, however, a
commonplace in English and elsewhere: e. g.,
'The Squire of Low Degree :'
He served the kyng, her father dere,
Fully the tyme of seven yere. w 5, 6.
He loved her more then seven yere,
Yet was he of her love never the nere. w 17, 18.
Ritson, Met. Bom. in, 145 f.
1 Seven lang years I hae served the king,
Fa fa fa fa lilly
And I never got a sight of his daughter but
ane.
With my glimpy, glimpy, glimpy eedle,
Lillum too tee a ta too a tee a ta a tally
2 I saw her thro a whummil bore,
And I neer got a sight of her no more.
3 Twa was putting on her gown,
And ten was putting pins therein.
4 Twa was putting on her shoon,
And twa was buckling them again.
5 Five was combing down her hair,
And I never got a sight of her nae mair.
6 Her neck and breast was like the snow,
Then from the bore I was forced to go.
22. Variation: And she was washing in a pond. b. Burden: Fa, fa, falilly
6s. Variation: Ye might have tied me with a With my glimpy, glimpy, glimpy
strae. eedle>
Lillum too a tee too a tally.


256
28. BtTRD ELLEN AND YOTJNG TAMLANE
28
BURD ELLEN AND YOUNG TAMLANE
Maidment's North Countrie Garland, 1824, p. 21. Com- hpr childhood," about sixty years before the above
municated by R. Pitcairn, "from the recitation of a date,
female relative, who had heard it frequently sung in
Motherwell informs us, Minstrelsy, p.
xciv of Introduction, note to 141, that 'Burd
Helen and Young Tamlene' is very popular,
and that various sets of it are to be found tra-
ditionally current (1827). Still 1 have not
found it, out of Maidment's little book; not
even in Motherwell's large folio.
I cannot connect this fragment with what
is elsewhere handed down concerning Tam-
lane, or with the story of any other ballad.
1 Bubd Ellen sits in her bower windowe,
With a double laddy double, and for the
double dow
Twisting the red silk and the blue.
With the double rose and the May-hay
2 And whiles she twisted, and whiles she twan,
And whiles the tears fell down amang.
3 Till once there by cam Young Tamlane:
'Come light, oh light, and rock your young
son.'
4 'If you winna rock him, you may let him rair,
For I hae rockit my share and mair.'
*****
5 Young Tamlane to the seas he's gane,
And a' women's curse in his company's gane.






THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAR BALLADS
EDITED BY
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
PART II.











THE
ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH
POPULAR BALLADS
EDITED BY
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
PART II

BOSTON
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
NEW YORK: 11 EAST SEVENTEENTH STREET
SLtje iltoc rstoc press, Cambridge
London: Henry Stevens, 4 Trafalgar Square


One (C&mtfanb €.agkt PritittD.
Copyright, 1884, by F. J. Child.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge:
Printed by H. 0. Honghton and Company.


ADVERTISEMENT
I have again to express my obligations and my gratitude to many who have aided in the
collecting and editing of these Ballads.
To Sir Hugh Hume Campbell, for the use of two considerable manuscript volumes of
Scottish Ballads.
To Mr. Allakdtce, of Edinburgh, for a copy of the Skene Ballads, and for a generous
permission to print such as I required, in advance of a possible publication on his part.
To Mr. Mansfield, of Edinburgh, for the use of the Pitcairn manuscripts.
To Mrs. Robertson, for the use of Note-Books of the late Dr. Joseph Robertson, and to
Mr. Murdoch, of Glasgow, Mr. Lugton, of Kelso, Mrs. Alexander Forbes, of Edin-
burgh, and Messrs. G. L. Kittredge and G. M. Richardson, former students of Harvard
College, for various communications.
To Dr. Reinhold Kohler's unrivalled knowledge of popular fiction, and his equal liber-
ality, I am indebted for valuable notes, which will be found in the Additions at the end of this
volume.
The help of my friend Dr. Theodor Vetter has enabled me to explore portions of the
Slavic ballad-field which otherwise must have been neglected.
Professors D. Silvan Evans, John Rhys, Paul Meyer, and T. Frederick Crane have
lent me a ready assistance in literary emergencies.
The interest and cooperation of Mr. Furnivall and Mr. Macmath have been continued to
me without stint or weariness.
It is impossible, while recalling and acknowledging acts of courtesy, good will, and friend-
ship, not to allude, with one word of deep personal grief, to the irreparable loss, which all
who are concerned with the study of popular tradition have experienced in the death of Svend
Grundtvig.
F. J. C.
June, 1884





CONTENTS
Pmi
29. The Boy and the Mantle 257
30. King Arthur and King Cornwall 274
31. The Marriage of Sir Gawain 288
32. King Henry 297
33. Kempy Kay 300
34. Kemp Owyne 306
35. Allison Gross 313
36. The Laily Worm and the Machrel of the Sea 315
37. Thomas Rymer 317
38. The Wee Wee Man 329
39. Tam Lin 335
40. The Queen of Elfan's Nourice 358
41. Hind Ettn 360
42. Clerk Colvtll 371
43. The Broomtteld Hill 390
44. The Twa Magicians 399
45. King John and the Bishop • 403
46. Captain Wedderburn's Courtship 414
47. Proud Lady Margaret .... 425
48. Young Andrew • 432
49. The Twa Brothers 435
50. The Bonny Hind 444
51. Lizte Wan 447
52. The King's Dochter Lady Jean 450
53. Young Beichan .' 454
Additions and Corrections ....... 484





29
'the boy and the mantle
Percy MS., p. 284. Hales & Furnivall, II, 804.
This ballad and the two which follow it
are clearly not of the same rise, and not meant
for the same ears, as those which go before.
They would come down by professional rather
than by domestic tradition, through minstrels
rather than knitters and weavers. They suit
the hall better than the bower, the tavern or
public square better than the cottage, and
would not go to the spinning-wheel at all. An
exceedingly good piece of minstrelsy 'The
Boy and the Mantle' is, too; much livelier
than most of the numerous variations on the
somewhat overhandled theme.*
Of these, as nearest related, the fabliau or
"romance" of Le Mantel Mautaillid, 'Cort
Mantel,' must be put first: Montaiglon et
Raynaud, Recueil Gdndral des Fabliaux, III, 1,
from four manuscripts, three of the thirteenth
century, one of the fourteenth ; and previously
by Michel, from the three older manuscripts,
* After I bad finished what I had to say in the way of
introduction to this ballad, there appeared the study of the
Trinkhorn- and Mantelsage, by Otto Warnatsch: Der Man-
tel, Bruchstiick eines Lanzeletromans, etc., Breslau, 1883.
To this very thorough piece of work, in which the rela-
tions of the multiform versions of the double-branched story
are investigated with a care that had never before been at-
tempted, I naturally have frequent occasion to refer, and by
its help I have supplied some of my deficiencies, indicating
always the place by the author's name.
t The Bibliothequc des Romans, 1777, Fe'vricr, pp. 112-
115, gives an abstract of a small printed piece in prose, there
assigned to the beginning of the sixteenth century, which,
as Warnatsch observes, p. 72, must have been a different
thing from the tale given by Legrand, inasmuch as it brings
in Lancelot and Gawain as suppressing the jests of Kay and
Dinadam.
X The custom of Arthur not to eat till he had heard of
some adventnre or strange news was confined to those days
when he held full court, according to Perceval le Gallois, II,
217, 15,664-71, and the Roman de Perceval, fol. lxxviii.
It is mentioned, with the same limitations, I suppose, in the
Roman de Lancelot, III, fol. lxxxii, and we learn from this
in Wolf, Ueber die Lais, p. 324. A rendering
of the fabliau in prose, existing in a single
manuscript, was several times printed in the
sixteenth century: given in Legrand, ed. Re-
nouard, I, 126, and before, somewhat modern-
ized, by Caylus, 'Les Manteaux,' CEuvres Ba-
dines, VI, 435.f
The story in ' Cort Mantel' goes thus. Ar-
thur was holding full court at Pentecost, never
more splendidly. Not only kings, dukes, and
counts were there, but the attendance of all
young bachelors had been commanded, and he
that had a bele amie was to bring her. The
court assembled on Saturday, and on Sunday
all the world went to church. After service
the queen took the ladies to her apartments,
till dinner should be ready. But it was Ar-
thur's wont not to dine that day until he had
had or heard-of some adventure ; J dinner was
kept waiting; and it was therefore with great
last romance, I, fol. xxxvi, that Arthur was accustomed to
hold a court and wear his crown five times in the year, at
Easter, Ascension-day, Pentecost, All Saints, and Christmas.
The Roman de Merlin, II, lvib, or, as cited by Southey,
II, 48, 49, says that "King Arthur, after his first dinner at
Logres, when he brought home his bride, made a vow that
while he wore a crown he never would seat himself at table
till some adventure had occurred." In Malory's King Ar-
thur, Kay reminds the king that this had been the old cus-
tom of his court at Pentecost. Arthur is said to observe this
custom on Christmas, "vpon such a dere day," in Sir Ga-
wayn and the Green Knight, Madden, p. 6, vv 90-99. Mes-
sire Gauvain says " a feste ne mangast, devant," etc., p. 2,
vv 18-21. Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival does not
limit the custom to high holidays, ed. Bartsch, I, 331, vv 875-
79; and see Riddarasogur, Parcevals Saga, etc., ed. Kolbing,
p. 26. Neither does Wigalois, vv 247-51, or a fragment of
Daniel von Bluhenthal, Symbolae ad literaturam Teutonicam,
p. 465, cited by Benecke, Wigalois, p. 436 f, or the Faroe
Galians kvrcSi, Kolbing, in Germania, XX, 397. See Mad-
den's Syr Gawayne, which has furnished much of this note,
pp 310-12; Southey's King Arthur, II, 203, 462. Robin
Hood imitates Arthur: see the beginning of the Little Gest.
33


258
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
satisfaction that the knights saw a handsome
and courteous varlet arrive, who must certainly
bring news; news that was not to be good to
all, though some would be pleased (cf. stanza
5 of the ballad). A maid had sent him from
a very distant country to ask a boon of the
king. He was not to name the boon or the
lady till he had the king's promise; but what
he asked was no harm. The king having
said that he would grant what was asked,
the varlet took from a bag a beautiful mantle,
of fairy workmanship. This mantle would fit
no dame or damsel who had in any way mis-
behaved towards husband or lover; it would
be too short or too long; and the boon was
that the king should require all the ladies of
the court to put it on.
The ladies were still waiting dinner, un-
conscious of what was coming. Gawain was
sent to require their presence, and he simply
told them that the magnificent mantle was to
be given to the one it best fitted. The king
repeated the assurance, and the queen, who
wished much to win the mantle, was the first
to try it on. It proved too short. Ywain sug-
gested that a young lady who stood near the
queen should try. This she readily did, and
what was short before was shorter still. Kay,
who had been making his comments unguard-
edly, now divulged the secret, and after that
nobody cared to have to do with the mantle.
The king said, We may as well give it back;
but the varlet insisted on having the king's
promise. There was general consternation
and bad humor.
Kay called his mistress, and very confi-
dently urged her to put on the mantle. She
demurred, on the ground that she might give
offence by forwardness; but this roused sus-
picion in Kay, and she had no resource but
to go on. The mantle was again lamentably
short. Bruns and Ydier let loose some gibes.
Kay bade them wait; he had hopes for them.
Gawain's amie next underwent the test, then
Ywain's, then Perceval's. Still a sad disap-
* 'Quar je vous aim tant bonement,
Que je ne vondroie savoir
Vostre mesfet por nul avoir.
Micx en veuil je estre en doutance.
pointment. Many were the curses on the man-
tle that would fit nobody, and on him that
brought it. Kay takes the unlucky ladies,
one after the other, to sit with his mistress.
At this juncture Kay proposes that they
shall have dinner, and continue the experi-
ment by and by. The varlet is relentless;
but Kay has the pleasure of seeing Ydier dis-
comfited. And so they go on through the
whole court, till the varlet says that he fears
he shall be obliged to carry his mantle away
with him. But first let the chambers be
searched; some one may be in hiding who
may save the credit of the court. The king
orders a search, and they find one lady, not
in hiding, but in her bed, because she is not
well. Being told that she must come, she
presents herself as soon as she can dress,
greatly to the vexation of her lover, whose
name is Carados Briebras. The varlet ex-
plains to her the quality of the mantle, and
Carados, in verses very honorable to his heart,
begs that she will not put it on if she has
any misgivings.* The lady says very meekly
that she dare not boast being better than other
people, but, if it so please her lord, she will
willingly don the mantle. This she does, and
in sight of all the barons it is neither too short
nor too long. "It was well we sent for her,"
says the varlet. "Lady, your lover ought to
be delighted. I have carried this mantle to
many courts, and of more than a thousand
who have put it on you are the only one
that has escaped disgrace. I give it to you,
and well you deserve it." The king confirms
the gift, and no one can gainsay.
A Norse prose translation of the French
fabliau was executed by order of the Nor-
wegian king, Hakon Hakonarson, whose reign
covers the years 1217-63. Of this translation,
'Mottuls Saga,' a fragment has come down
which is as old as 1300; there are also por-
tions of a manuscript which is assigned to
about 1400, and two transcripts of this latter,
made when it was complete, besides other less
Por tot le royaume de France,
N'en voudroie je estre cert;
Quar qui sa bone amie pert
Molt a perdu, ce ni'est avis.' 818-25.


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
259
important copies. This translation, which is
reasonably close and was made from a good
exemplar, has been most excellently edited by
Messrs Cederschiold and Wulff, Versions nor-
diques du Fabliau Le Mantel Mautaillid, Lund,
1877, p. 1.* It presents no divergences from
the story as just given which are material
here.
Not so with the 'Skikkju Rfmur,' or Man-
tle Rhymes, an Icelandic composition of the
fifteenth century, in three parts, embracing
in all one hundred and eighty-five four-line
stanzas: Cederschiold and Wulff, p. 51. In
these the story is told with additions, which
occur partially in our ballad. The mantle is
of white velvet. Three elf-women had been
not less than fifteen years in weaving it, and
it seemed both yellow and gray, green and
black, red and blue: n, 22, 23, 26. Our Eng-
lish minstrel describes these variations of color
as occurring after Guenever had put the man-
tle on: stanzas 11, 12. Again, there are
among the Pentecostal guests a king and
queen of Dwarf Land; a beardless king of
Small-Maids Land, with a queen eight years
old; and a King Felix, three hundred years
old, with a beard to the crotch, and a wife, tall
and fat, to whom he has been two centuries
married, — all these severally attended by
generous retinues of pigmies, juveniles, and
seniors: I, 28-35; m, 41. Felix is of course
the prototype of the old knight pattering over
a creed in stanzas 21-24 of the ballad, and he
will have his representative in several other
pieces presently to be spoken of. In the end
Arthur sends all the ladies from his court in
* See also Brynjiilfsson, Saga af Tristram ok isond, samt
Mottuls Saga, Udtog, pp 318-26, Copenhagen, 1878. There
is a general presumption that the larger part of the works
translated for King Hakon were derived from England.
C. & W., p. 47.
t That is, the current one. The Samson saga professes
to supply the earlier history. Samson's father is another
Arthur, king of England. An abstract of so much of the
saga as pertains to the Mantle is given by Cederschiold and
Wulff, p. 90 f. Wamatsch, p. 73 f, shows that the Ri'mur
and Samson had probably a common source, independent of
the Mottulssaga.
J By Warnatsch, who gives the text with the correspond-
ing passages of the fabliau in a parallel column, pp 8-54:
the argument for Heinrich's authorship, pp 85-105. 'Der
Mantel* had been previously printed in Haupt and Hoff-
disgrace, and his knights to the wars; we will
get better wives, he says: m, 74, 75.
The land of Small-Maids and the long-lived
race are mentioned in a brief geographical
chapter (the thirteenth) of that singular gal-
limaufry the saga of Samson the Fair, but not
in connection with a probation by the mantle,
though this saga has appropriated portions of
the story. Here the mantle is one which four
fairies have worked at for eighteen years, as a
penalty for stealing from the fleece of a very
remarkable ram ; and it is of this same fleece,
described as being of all hues, gold, silk, oh
kolors, that the mantle is woven. It would
hold off from an unchaste woman and fall off
from a thief. Quintalin, to ransom his life,
undertakes to get the mantle for Samson. Its
virtue is tried at two weddings, the second
being Samson's; and on this last occasion Val-
entina, Samson's bride, is the only woman who
can put it on. The mantle is given to Valen-
tina, as in the fabliau to Carados's wife, but
nevertheless we ,hear later of its being pre-
sented by Samson to another lady, who, a
good while after, was robbed of the same by
a pirate, and the mantle carried to Africa.
From Africa it was sent to our Arthur by a
lady named Elida, " and hence the saga of the
mantle." f Bjorner, Nordiska Kampa Dater,
cc 12,14, 15, 21, 22, 24.
There is also an incomplete German ver-
sion of the fabliau, now credibly shown to be
the work of Heinrich von dem Tiirlin, dating
from the earliest years of the thirteenth cen-
tury. J Though the author has dealt freely
•with his original, there are indications that
mann's Altdeutsche Blatter, II, 217, and by Miillenhoff in
his Altdeutsche Sprachproben, p. 125. Of this poem, which
Warnatsch, pp 105-110, holds to be a fragment of a lost
romance of Lanzelet, written before the 'Crone,' only 994
verses are left. Deducting about a hundred of introduction,
there are some 782 German against some 314 French verses,
an excess which is owing, no doubt, largely to insertions
and expansions on the part of Heinrich, but in some measure
to the existing texts of the fabliau having suffered abridg-
ment. The whole matter of the church service, with the
going and coming, is dispatched in less than a dozen verses
in the'French, but occupies more than seventy in German,
and just here we read in the French:
Ci ne vueil je plus demorer,
Ni de noient fere lone conte,
Si con l'estoire le raceme.


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
261
Carados vrindinne, in the other l'amie Car-
aduel Briefbras.
The Scalachronica, by Sir Thomas Gray of
Heton, a chronicle of England and Scotland,
1066-1362, begun in 1355, gives the analysis
of many romances, and that of the adventure
of the Mantle in this form. There was sent
to Arthur's court the mantle of Karodes,
which was of such virtue that it would fit no
woman who was not willing that her husband
should know both her act and her thought.*
This was the occasion of much mirth, for the
mantle was either too short, or too long, or
too tight, for all the ladies except Karodes'
wife. And it was said that this mantle was
sent by the father of Karodes, a magician, to
prove the goodness of his son's wife.j"
Two fifteenth-century German versions of
the Mantle story give it a shape of their own.
In Fastnachtspiele aus dem fiinfzehnten Jahr-
hundert, II, 665, No 81, ' Der Luneten Man-
tel,' the amiable Lunet, so well and favorably
known in romances, takes the place of the
English boy and French varlet. The story
has the usual course. The mantle is unsuc-
cessfully tried by Arthur's queen, by the wife
of the Greek emperor, and by the queen of
Lorraine. The king of Spain, who announces
himself as the oldest man present, is willing
to excuse his wife, who is the youngest of the
royal ladies. She says, If we lack lands and
gold, " so sei wir doch an eren reich," offers
herself to the test with the fearlessness of in-
nocence, and comes off clear, to the delight of
her aged spouse. A meistergesang, Bruns,
* Nul femme que [ne] vouloit lesser sauoir a soun marry
soun fet et pense'. T. Wright, in Archaeologia Cambrensis,
January, 1863, p. 10. Mr Wright gives one of the texts of
Cort Mantel, with an English translation. We are further
told, in Scalachronica, that this mantle was afterwards made
into a chasuble, and that it is "to this day" preserved at
Glastonbury. Three versions of the fabliau testify that
Carados and his amie deposited the mantle in a Welsh ab-
bey. The Skikkju Ri'mur say that the lady presented it to
the cloister of Cologne; the Mottulssaga has simply a mon-
astery (and, indeed, the mantle, as described by some, must
have had a vocation that way from the beginning). "Item,
in the castel of Douer ye may see Gauwayn's skull and Cra-
dok's mantel:" Caxton, in his preface to Kyng Arthur,
1485, I, ii, in Southey's ed.; cited by Michel, Tristan, II,
181, and from him by Warnatsch.
t For this enchanter see Le Livre de Karados in Perceval
Beitrage zur kritischen Bearbeitung alter
Handschriften, p. 143,J 'Lanethen Mantel,'
again awards the prize to the young wife of
a very old knight. Laneth, a clean maid,
who is Arthur's niece, having made herself
poor by her bounty, is cast off by her uncle's
wife and accused of loose behavior. She
makes her trouble known to a dwarf, a good
friend of her father's, and receives from him a
mantle to take to Arthur's court: if anybody
huffs her, she is to put it to use. The queen
opens upon Laneth, as soon as she appears,
with language not unlike that which she em-
ploys of Cradock's wife in stanzas 33, 34 of
the ballad. The mantle is offered to any lady
that it will fit. In front it comes to the
queen's knee, and it drags on the ground be-
hind. Three hundred and fifty knights' la-
dies fare as ill as the sovereign.§
The Dean of Lismore's collection of Gaelic
poetry, made in the early part of the sixteenth
century, contains a ballad, obscure in places,
but clearly presenting the outlines of the Eng-
lish ballad or French fabliau.|| Finn, Diar-
maid, and four other heroes are drinking, with
their six wives. The women take too much,
and fall to boasting of their chastity. While
they are so engaged, a maid approaches who is
clad in a seamless robe of pure white. She sits
down by Finn, and he asks her what is the
virtue of the garment. She replies that her
seamless robe will completely cover none but
the spotless wife. Conan, a sort of Kay, says,
Give it to my wife at once, that we may learn
the truth of what they have been saying.
le Gallois, ed. Potvin, II, 118 ff. It is not said in the printed
copy that he sent the mantle [horn].
t Another copy, assigned to the end of the 14th century,
from the Kolmar MS., Bartsch, p. 373, No lxix (War-
natsch).
§ Warnatsch shows, p. 75 f, that the fastnachtspiel must
have been made up in part from some version of the Mantle
story which was also the source of the meisterlicd, and in
part from a meisterlied of the Horn, which will be men-
tioned further on.
|| The Dean of Lismore's Book, edited by Rev. Thomas
M'Lauchlan, p. 72 of the translation, | J of the original. Re-
peated in Campbell's Heroic Gaelic Ballads, p. 138f, 'The
Maid of the White Mantle' Mr Campbell remarks: "This
ballad, or the story of it, is known in Irish writings. It is
not remembered in Scotland now." Mr Wright cites this
poem, Archaeologia Cambrensis, p. 14 f, 39 f.


262
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
The robe shrinks into folds, and Conan is so
angry that he seizes his spear and kills his
wife.* Diarrnaid's wife tries, and the robe
clings about her hair; Oscar's, and it does not
reach to her middle; Maighinis, Finn's wife,
and it folds around her ears. MacRea's wife
only is completely covered. The 'daughter
of Deirg,' certainly a wife of Finn, and here
seemingly to be identified with Maighinis,
claims the robe: she has done nothing to be
ashamed of; she has erred only with Finn.
Finn curses her and womankind, "because of
her who came that day."
The probation by the Horn runs parallel
with that by the Mantle, with which it is
combined in the English ballad. Whether
this or that is the anterior creation it is not
possible to say, though the ' Lai du Corn ' is,
beyond question, as Ferdinand Wolf held, of a
more original stamp, fresher and more in the
popular vein than the fabliau of the Mantle, as
we have it.f The ' Lai du Corn,' preserved in
a single not very early manuscript (Digby 86,
Bodleian Library, " of the second half of the
thirteenth or beginning of the fourteenth cen-
tury "), may well belong, where Wolf puts it,
in the middle of the twelfth. Robert Bikez,
the jongleur who composed it, attributes the
first authorship to " Garadue," the hero, and
says that he himself derived the story from
the oral communication of an abbd. Arthur
has assembled thirty thousand knights at a
feast at Pentecost, and each of them is paired
with a lady. Before dinner there arrives a don-
zel, with an ivory horn adorned with four gold
bands and rich jewels. This horn has been
sent Arthur by Mangounz, king of Moraine.
The youth is told to take his place before the
king, who promises to knight him after din-
ner and give him a handsome present the next
* Cf. Arthur in the Lai du Corn and Fraw Triaterat
Horn, a little further on.
t Wolf at first speaks of the lai as being made over into
the fabliau, in regular court style, ganz nach hiilischer Weise,
about the middle of the 13th century; then goes on to say
that even if the author of the fabliau followed another ver-
sion of the story, he must have known the jongleur's poem,
because he has repeated some of the introductory lines of
the lai. This excellent scholar happened, for once, not to
observe that the first fourteen lines of the lai, excepting the
day; but he laughingly excuses himself, on
the ground that it is not proper for a squire to
eat at a knight's table, and retires. Arthur
sees that there is an inscription on the horn,
and desires that his "chapelein" may read it.
Everybody is eager to hear, but some repent
afterwards. The horn was made by a fairy,
who endued it with this quality, that no man
should drink of it without spilling, if his wife
had not been true in act and thought. Even
the queen hung her head, and so did all the
barons that had wives. The maids jested, and
looked at their lovers with "Now we shall
see." Arthur was offended, but ordered Kay
to fill. The king drank and spilled; seized a
knife, and was about to strike the queen, but
was withheld by his knights. Gawain gal-
lantly came to the queen's vindication. "Be
not such a churl," he said, "for there is no
married woman but has her foolish thought."
The queen demanded an ordeal by fire: if a
hair of her were burned, she would be torn by
horses. She confessed that the horn was in
so far right that she had once given a ring
to a youth who had killed a giant that had
accused Gawain of treason, etc. She thought
this youth would be a desirable addition to the
court. Arthur was not convinced: he would
make everybody try the horn now, king, duke,
and count, for he would not be the only one to
be shamed. Eleven kings, thirty counts, all
who essay, spill: they are very angry, and bid
the devil take him who brought and him who
sent the horn. When Arthur saw this, he be-
gan to laugh: he regarded the horn as a great
present, he said, and he would part with it to
nobody except the man that could drink out of
it. The queen blushed so prettily that he kissed
her three times, and asked her pardon for his
bad humor. The queen said, Let everybody
fourth, which is questionable, are in a longer metre than the
rest of the poem, in eights and sevens, not sixes, and the
first three of the lai, which agree with the first three of the
fabliau, in the eight-syllable verse of the latter; so that it
was not the author of the fabliau that borrowed. Warnatsch
(who has also made this last remark) has noted other agree-
ments between lai and fabliau, p. 61. Both of these ac-
knowledge their derivation from an earlier dit, estoire, not
having which we shall find it hard to determine by which
and from what the borrowing was done.


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
263
take the horn, small and great. There was a
knight who was the happiest man in all the
court, the least a braggart, the most mannerly,
and the most redoubtable after Gawain. His
name was Garadue, and he had a wife, mout
leal, who was a fairy for beauty, and surpassed
by none but the queen. Garadue looked at
her. She did not change color. "Drink," she
said; "indeed, you are at fault to hesitate."
She would never have husband but him: for
a woman should be a dove, and accept no sec-
ond mate. Garadue was naturally very much
pleased: he sprang to his feet, took the horm
and, crying Wassail! to the king, drank out
every drop. Arthur presented him with Ciren-
cester, and, for his wife's sake, with the horn,
which was exhibited there on great days.
The romance of Perceval le Gallois, by
Chrestien de Troyes and others (second half
of the twelfth century), describes Arthur,
like the fabliau, as putting off dinner till he
should hear of some strange news or adven-
ture. A knight rides into the hall) with an
ivory horn, gold-banded and richly jewelled,
hanging from his neck, and presents it to the
king. Have it filled with pure water, says
the bearer, and the water will turn to the best
wine in the world, enough for all who are
present. "A rich present!" exclaims Kay.
But no knight whose wife or love has be-
trayed him shall drink without spilling. "Or
empire vostre presens," says Kay. The king
has the horn filled, and does not heed Guen-
ever, who begs him not to drink, for it is
some enchantment, to shame honest folk.
"Then I pray God," says the queen, "that if
you try to drink you may be wet." The king
essays to drink, and Guenever has her prayer,
Kay has the same luck, and all the knights,*
till the horn comes to Carados (Brisid-Bras).
Carados, as in the lai, hesitates; his wife
(Guinon, Guimer) looks at him, and says,
Drink! He spills not a drop. Guenever and
* Montpellier MS.
t Perceval exhibits agreements, both as to phrase and
matter, now with the lai, now with the fabliau, and this
phenomenon will occur again and again. This suggests the
likelihood of a source which combined traits of both lai and
fabliau: Warnatsch, pp 62-64.
} So amended by Zingerle from Syrneyer lant. A third
many a dame hate nothing so much as her.
Perceval le Gallois, ed. Potvin, II, 216 ff,
v v 15,640-767. t
The story of ' Le Livre de Carados,' in Per-
ceval, is given in abridgment by the author
of Le Roman du Renard contrefait, writing
in the second half of the fourteenth century:
Tarbe\ Pontes de Champagne anteVieurs au
siecle de Francois Ier, Histoire de Quarados
Brun-Bras, p. 79 ff. The horn here becomes
a cup.
A meistergesang, entitled 'Dis ist Frauw
Tristerat Horn von Saphoien,' and found in
the same fifteenth-century manuscript as Der
Lanethen Mantel, Brans, as before, p. 139,
preserves many features of the lai. While
Arthur is at table with seven other kings and
their wives, a damsel comes, bringing an ivory
horn, with gold letters about the rim, a pres-
ent from Frau Tristerat of Savoy. The king
sends for a clerk-to read the inscription, and
declares he will begin the experiment. The
damsel prudently retires. Arthur is thoroughly
wet, and on the point of striking the queen,
but is prevented by a knight. The seven
kings then take the horn, one after the other.
Six of them fare like Arthur. The king of
Spain looks at his wife, fearing shame. She
encourages him to drink, saying, as in the
other meistergesang, If we are poor in goods,
we are rich in honor. Arthur presents him
with the horn, and adds cities and lands. An-
other copy of this piece was printed by Zin-
gerle, in Germania, V, 101, 'Das goldene
Horn.' The queen is aus der Syrenen lant.J
A fastnachtspiel gives substantially the
same form to the story: Keller, Nachlese, No
127, p. 183. Arthur invites seven kings and
queens to his court. His wife wishes him to
ask his sister, the Queen of Cyprus, also; but
she has offended him, and he cannot be pre-
vailed upon to do it. The Queen of Cyprus
sends the horn to Arthur by her maid as a gift
copy is cited as in the Kolmar MS., No 806, Bartsch,
Meisterlieder der Kolmarer Handschrift, p. 74 (Warnatsch).
A remarkable agreement between the French lai, 94, 97, 99-
102, and Wigamur 2623-30 convinces Warnatsch that the
source of this meisterlied must have been a Middle High
German rendering of some form of the Drinking-horn Test
closely resembling the lai. See Warnatsch, p. 66.


264
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
from a queen who is to be nameless, and in ful-
filling her charge the messenger describes her
lady simply as a sea princess. The inscrip-
tion is read aloud by one of Arthur's knights.
The King of Spain carries off the honors, and
receives in gift, besides the horn, a ducal crown,
and gold to boot. Arthur resolves that the
horn shall be forgotten, and no grudge borne
against the women, and proposes a dance,
which he leads off with his wife.*
We have Arthur joining in a dance under
nearly the same circumstances in an English
"bowrd" found in a MS. of about the middle
of the fifteenth century (Ashmolean Museum,
No 61) .The king has a bugle horn, which al-
ways stands before him, and often amuses him-
self by experimenting with it. Those who can-
not drink without spilling are set at a table
by themselves, with willow garlands on their
heads, and served with the best. Upon the oc-
casion of a visit from the Duke of Gloucester,
the king, wishing to entertain his guest with
an exhibition of the property of the horn,
says he will try all who are present. He be-
gins himself, as he was wont to do, but this
time spills. He takes the mishap merrily, and
says he may now join in a dance which the
"freyry" were to have after meat. 'The
Cokwolds Daunce,' Hartshorne's Ancient Met-
rical Tales, p. 209; Karajan, Friihlingsgabe
[Schatzgraber], p. 17; Hazlitt, Remains of
Early Popular Poetry, I, 38.f
Heinrich von dem Tiirlin narrates the epi-
* The king of Spain, who is again the poorest of all the
kings, p. 206, line 32, p. 214, line 22, is addressed by Arthur
as his nephew, p. 207, line 11, and p. 193, line 30. Carados
is called Arthur's nephew in Perceval (he is son of Arthur's
niece), e. g. 15,782, and Carados, his father, is Cnrados de
Vaigne, II, 117. It is said of Kalcgras's amie in the ' Man-
tle Rhymes,' in, 59, that many a lady looked down upon her.
This may be a chance expression, or possibly point to the
poverty which is attributed to the royal pair of Spain in
Fastnachtspiele, Nos 81, 127, and in Ftau Tiisterat Horn.
In Der Lancthen Mantel, Laneth is Arthur's niece, and
poor: see p. 261.
The fastnachtspiel has points in common with the fabliau,
and the assumption of a source which combined features of
both lai and fabliau is warrantable: Warnatsch, pp 66-68.
t This is a thoroughly dissolute piece, but not ambiguous.
It is also the most humorous of the whole series.
J Warnatsch shows that Heinrich cannot have derived
any part of his Trinkhornprobe from the Perceval of Chres-
sode of the probation by the Horn with many
variations of his own, among them the im-
portant one of subjecting the women to the
test as well as the men. J In his Cr6ne, put
at 1200-10, a misshapen, dwarfish knight,
whose skin is overgrown with scales, riding
on a monster who is fish before and dolphin
behind, with wings on its legs, presents him-
self to Arthur on Christmas Day as an envoy
from a sea king, who offers the British mon-
arch a gift on condition of his first granting
a boon. The gift is a cup, made by a necro-
mancer of Toledo, of which no man or woman
can drink who has been false to love, and it
is to be the king's if there shall be anybody
at the court who can stand the test. The
ladies are sent for, and the messenger gives
the cup first to them. They all spill. The
knights follow, Arthur first; and he, to the
general astonishment, bears the proof, which
no one else does except the sea king's messen-
ger. Caraduz § von Caz fails with the rest.
Diu Cr8ne, ed. Scholl, vv 466-3189.
The prose Tristan confines the proof to the
women, and transfers the scene to King Mark's
court. Morgan the Fay having sent the en-
chanted horn to Arthur's court by the hands
of a damsel, to avenge herself on Guenever,
two knights who had a spite against Mark
and Tristan intercept it, and cause the
horn to be taken to King Mark, who is in-
formed that no lady that has been false to her
lord can drink of it without spilling. Yseult
tien, characteristic agreements with Perceval being entirely
wanting. There are agreements with the lai, many more
with the fabliau; and Heinrich's poem, so far as it is not of
his own invention, he believes to be compounded from his
own version of the fabliau and some lost version of the Horn-
test : pp 111-114.
§ The principal variations of this name, of which the
Welsh Caradoc is assumed to be the original, are: Crad-
docke (English ballad) ; Carados, Caradox (Cort Mantel);
Karodes (Scnlacbronica) ; Caraduz (Crone, 2309, elsewhere)
Karadas; Carigras, Kaligras (Rfmur); Karodeus, Cara-
duel (Perceval, 12,466, 12,457, 12,491, but generally), Cara-
dos, -ot, or; Caraduel (Messire Gauvain, 3943); Garadue
(Lai du Corn); Karadin (Mottuls Saga). Garadue probably
= Caraduel, which, in Percival twice, and once in Messire
Gauvain, is used for Carados, through confusion with Ar-
thur's residence, Carduel, Cardoil. So Karadas is twice
put in the Crone, 16,726, 16,743, for Karidol = Cardoil.
Might not Karadin have been written for Karadiu?


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
265
spills, and the king says she deserves to die.
But, fortunately or unfortunately, all the rest
of the ladies save four are found to be in
the same plight as the queen. The courtiers,
resolved to make the best of a bad matter,
declare that they have no confidence in the
probation, and the king consents to treat the
horn as a deception, and acquits his wife.*
Ariosto has introduced the magical vessel
made by Morgan the Fay for Arthur's be-
hoof f into Orlando Furioso. A gentleman
tries it on his guests for ten years, and they
all spill but Rinaldo, who declines il periglioso
saggio: canto xlh, 70-73, 97-104; xlhI,
6-44. Upon Ariosto's narrative La Fontaine
founded the tale and the comedy of 'La Coupe
Enchantee,' Works ed. Moland, IV, 37, V,
361.
In a piece in the Wunderhorn, I, 389, ed.
1819, called 'Die Ausgleichung,' and purport-
ing to be from oral tradition, but reading like
an imitation, or at most a reconstruction, of a
meistergesang, the cup and mantle are made
to operate conjointly: the former to convict
a king and his knights, the other a queen
and her ladies, of unfaithfulness in love. Only
the youngest of the ladies can wear the man-
tle, and only the oldest of the knights, to
whom she is espoused, can drink from the
cup. This knight, on being presented with
the cup, turns into a dwarf; the lady, on
receiving the gift of the mantle, into a fay.
* Tristan of Hclie de Borron, I, 73 verso, in Rajna, Fonti
dell' Orlando Furioso, p. 498 ff. So in Malory's King Ar-
thur, Southey, I, 297, Wright, II, 64. The Italian Tristan,
La Tavola Ritonda, ed. Polidori, xlin, pp 157-160, makes
686 try, of whom only 13 prove to be innocent, and those in
spite of themselves. Another account exempts 2 out of 365:
Nannucci, Manuale, II, 168-171.
t Un vasello fatto da ber, qual gia, per fare accorto il suo
fratello del fallo di Ginevra, fe Morgana : xlin, 28; un bel
nappo d'or, di fuor di gemme, xlii, 98. The Orlando con-
curs with the prose Tristan as to the malice of Morgan, but
does not, with the Tristan, depart from prescription in mak-
ing the women drink. Warnatsch observes that the Orlando
agrees with the Horn Fastnachtspicl, and may with it follow
some lost version of the story: p. 69.
Before leaving these drinking tests, mention may be made
of Oberon's gold cup, which, upon his passing his right hand
three times round it and making the sign of the cross, fills
with wine enough for all the living and the dead ; but no one
can drink s'il n'est preudom, et nes et purs et sans pecie
They pour a drop of wine from the cup upon
the mantle, and give the mantle to the queen,
and the cup, empty, to the king. After this,
the king and all the world can drink with-
out inconvenience, and the mantle fits every
woman. But the stain on the mantle grows
bigger every year, and the cup gives out a
hollow sound like tin 1 An allegory, we may
suppose, and, so far as it is intelligible, of the
weakest sort.
Tegau Eurvron is spoken of in Welsh triads
as one of the three chaste ladies, and again
as one of the three fair ladies, of Arthur's
court.J She is called the wife of Caradawc
Vreichvras by various Welsh writers, and by
her surname of "Gold-breasted " she should be
so.§ If we may trust the author of The Welsh
Bards, Tegau was the possessor of three treas-
ures or rarities " which befitted none but her-
self," a mantle, a goblet, and a knife. The
mantle is mentioned in a triad,|| and is re-
ferred to as having the variable hue attributed
to it in our ballad and elsewhere. There are
three things, says the triad, of which no man
knows the color; the peacock's expanded tail,
the mantle of Tegau Eurvron, and the miser's
pence. Of this mantle, Jones, in whose list of
"Thirteen Rarities of Kingly Regalia" of the
Island of Britain it stands eleventh, says, No
one could put it on who had dishonored mar-
riage, nor a young damsel who had committed
incontinence; but it would cover a chaste
mortel: Huon de Bordeaux, ed. Guessard et Grandmaison,
p. 109 f, vv 3652-69.
} The Myvyrian Archeology of Wales, n, 13, triad 54 =
triad 103, p. 73 ; p. 17, triad 78 = triad 108, p. 73.
§ See the story in Le Livre de Carados, Ferceval le Gal-
lob, Fotvin, especially H, 214-16, w 15,577-638. "The
Rev. Evan Evans," says Percy, Reliqnes, IH, 349, ed. 1794,
"affirmed that the story of the Boy and the Mantle is taken
from what is related in some of the old Welsh MSS of Te-
gan Earfron, one of King Arthur's mistresses." This asper-
sion, which is even absurd, must have arisen from a misun-
derstanding on the part of the Bishop: no Welshman could
so err.
|| Myvyrian Archaeology, IH, 247», No 10, pointed out to
me by Professor Evans. The story of the 'Boy and the
Mantle,' says Warton, "is recorded in many manuscript
Welsh chronicles, as I learn from original letters of Llwyd,
in the Ashmolean Museum:" History of English Foetry, ed.
1871, i, 97, note 1.
84


266
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
woman from top to toe: Welsh Bards, II, 49.
The mantle certainly seems to be identified
by what is said of its color in the (not very
ancient) triad, and so must have the property
attributed to it by Jones, but one would be
glad to have had Jones cite chapter and verse
for his description.
There is a drinking-horn among the Thir-
teen Precious Things of the Island of Britain,
which, like the conjurer's bottle of our day,
will furnish any liquor that is called for, and
a knife which will serve four-and-twenty men
at meat " all at once." How this horn and this
knife should befit none but the chaste and love-
ly Tegau, it is not easy to comprehend. Mean-
while the horn and the knife are not the prop-
erty of Cradock's wife, in the English ballad:
the horn falls to Cradock of right, and the
knife was his from the beginning. Instead of
Tegau's mantle we have in another account
a mantle of Arthur, which is the familiar
cloak that allows the wearer to see everything
without himself being seen. Not much light,
therefore, but rather considerable mist, comes
from these Welsh traditions, of very uncertain
date and significance. It may be that some-
body who had heard of the three Welsh rari-
ties, and of the mantle and horn as being two
of them, supposed that the knife must have
similar virtues with the horn and mantle,
whence its appearance in our ballad; but no
proof has yet been given that the Welsh horn
and knife had ever a power of testing chas-
tity.*
Heinrich von dem Tiirlin, not satisfied with
* The horn is No 4 in Jones's list, and No 3 in a manu-
script of Justice Bosanquet; the knife is 13th in Jones and
. 6th in the other; the mantle of invisibility is 13th in the Bo-
sanquet series, and, under the title of Arthur's veil or mask,
1st in Jones. The mantle of Tegau Eurvron does not occur
in the Bosanquet MS. Jones says, "The original Welsh
account of the above regalia was transcribed from a tran-
script of Mr Edward Llwyd, the antiquary, who informs me
that he copied it from an old parchment MS. I have col-
lated this with two other MSS." Not a word of dates.
Jones's Welsh Bnrds, II, 47^49; Lady Charlotte Guest's
Mabinogion, II, 353-55.
Lady Charlotte Guest remarks that a boar's head in some
form appears as the armorial bearing of all of Caradawc's
name. Though must anxious to believe all that is said of
Caradawc, 1 am compelled to doubt whether this goes far
to prove that he owned the knife celebrated in the ballad.
testing Arthur's court first with the mantle,
and again with the horn, renews the experi-
ment with a Glove, in a couple of thousand
lines more of tedious imitation of ' Cort Man-
tel,' f Cr8ne, 22,990-24,719. This glove ren-
ders the right side of the body invisible, when
put on by man or woman free of blame, but
leaves in the other case some portion of that
side visible .and bare. A great many ladies
and knights don the glove, and all have rea-
son to regret the trial except Arthur and Ga-
wain.J
There is another German imitation of the
fabliau of the mantle, in the form (1) of a
farce of the fifteenth century and (2) of a
meistergesang printed in the sixteenth. In
these there is substituted for the mantle a
Crown that exposes the infidelity of husbands.
1. "Das Vasnachtspil mit der Kron." § A
"master" has been sent to Arthur's court
with a rich crown, which the King of Abian
wishes to present to whichever king or lord it
shall fit, and it will fit only those who have
not " lost their honor." The King of Orient
begins the trial, very much against his will:
the crown turns to ram's horns. The King
of Cyprus is obliged to follow, though he says
the devil is in the crown: the crown hangs
about his neck. Appeals are made to Arthur
that the trial may now stop, so that the knights
may devote themselves to the object for which
they had come together, the service and honor
of the ladies. But here Lanet, Arthur's sister
(so she is styled), interposes, and expresses
a hope that no honors are intended the queen,
t Heinrich seeks to put his wearisome invention off on
Chrestien de Troyes. Warnatsch argues with force against
any authorship but Heinrich's, pp 116 ff.
} Gawain had failed in the earlier trial, though he had no
fault in mind or body, except that he rated his favor with
women too high: 1996-2000.
In the first two probations a false heart is the corpus de-
licti; something is said of carnal offences, but not very dis-
tinctly.
The scope of the glove is of the widest. It takes cogniz-
ance of rede und gedanc in maids, were und gedanc in wives,
iugent und manheit, unzitht und zaqeheit, in men. One must
have known as little what one was convicted of as if one
had been in the hands of the Holy Office.
§ Fastnachtspiele aus dem funfzehnten Jahrhundert,
Zweiter Theil, p. 654, No 80.


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
267
for she is not worthy of them, having broken
her faith. Arthur is very angry, and says that
Lanet has by her injurious language forfeited
all her lands, and shall be expelled from
court. (Cf. Der Lanethen Mantel, p. 261.)
A knight begs the king to desist, for he who
heeds every tale that is told of his wife shall
never be easy.
2. The meistergesang 'Die Krone der Koni-
gin von Afion.' * While his majesty of Afion
is holding a great feast, a youth enters the
hall bearing a splendid crown, which has such
chaste things in it that no king can wear it
who haunts false love. The crown had been
secretly made by order of the queen. The
king wishes to buy the crown at any price, but
the youth informs him that it is to be given
free to the man who can wear it. The king
asks the favor of being the first to try the
crown: when put on his head it falls down to
his back. The King of Portugal is eager to
be next: the crown falls upon his shoulder.
The King of Holland at first refuses to put on
the crown, for there was magic in it, and it
was only meant to shame them: but he is
obliged to yield, and the crown goes to his
girdle. The King of Cyprus offers himself
to the adventure: the crown falls to his loins.
And so with eleven. But there was a " Young
Philips," King of England, who thought he
might carry off the prize. His wife was gray
and old and ugly, and quite willing, on this
account, to overlook e bisserle Falschheit, and
told him that he might spare himself. But
he would not be prevented; so they put the
crown on him, and it fitted to a hair. This
makes an edifying pendant to 'Der Luneten
Mantel,' p. 261.
Still another imitation is the Magical Bridge
* From Vulpius's Curiositaten, II, 463, in Erlach, I, 132,
after a primed copy of the beginning of the 16th century:
Wolff, Halle der VSlker, II, 243, from a Fliegendes Blatt of
the 16th century. Two copies are cited by title in Mone's
Anzeiger, VIII, 354 b, No 1; 378, No 165. Wolff prints
Asion.
t A man must be " clear as beryl." One of the knights
is tumbled into the water for having kissed a lady; but this
is according to the code, for he had done it without leave.
We learn from Perceval that kissing is permissible; marry,
not without the lady be willing. 'Die bruck zu Karidol' is
in the younger Titurel which Klingsor throws
over the Sibra. Knights and ladies assembled
at Arthur's court, if less than perfect,f on at-
tempting to ride over it are thrown off into
the water, or stumble and fall on the bridge:
ed. Hahn, p. 232 ff, st. 2337 ff. Hans Sachs
has told this story twice, with Virgil for the
magician: ed. Keller, Historia, Konig Artus
mit der ehbrecher-brugk, II, 262; Goedeke,
Dichtungen von Hans Sachs, 1,175. Kirchhof
follows Hans Sachs in a story in Wendun-
muth, ed. Osterley, II, 38.
Florimel's Girdle, in the fourth book of the
'Fairy Queen,' canto v, once more, is formed
on the same pattern.J
There might be further included in imita-
tions of the horn or mantle test several other
inventions which are clearly, as to form, mod-
elled on this original, but which have a dif-
ferent object: the valley from which no false
lover could escape till it had been entered by
one "qui de nulle chose auroit vers s'amie
fausd ne mespris, nS d'euvre ne de pensee nS
de talent," the prose Lancelot in Jonckbloet,
II, lxix (Warnatsch), Ferrario, Storia ed
Analisi, Lancilotto del Lago, III, 372, Le-
grand, Fabliaux, I, 156; the arch in Amadis,
which no man or woman can pass who has
been unfaithful to a first love, and again, the
sword which only the knight who loves his
lady best can draw, and the partly withered
garland which becomes completely fresh on
the head of the lady who best loves her hus-
band or lover, Amadfs de Gaula, l. ii, intro-
duccion, c. 1, c. 14, and ballad 1890 in Duran,
II, 665 ; the cup of congealed tears in Palmerin
of England, which liquefies in the hand of the
best knight and faithfulest lover, chapters 87-
89, II, 322 ff, ed. of London, 1807.
alluded to in 'Der Spiegel,' Meister Alswert, ed. Holland u.
Keller, p. 179, vv 10-13. (Goedeke.) A man who has trans-
ferred his devotion from an earlier love to the image of a
lady shown him in a mirror says the bridge would have
thrown him over.
} Florimel's girdle is a poor contrivance every way, and
most of all for practical purposes; for we are told in stanza
3 that it glees the virtue of chaste love to all who wear it,
and then that whosoever contrary doth prove cannot keep it
on. But what could one expect from a cast-off girdle of
Venus t


268
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
Besides those which have been spoken of,
not a few other criterions of chastity occur in
romantic tales.
Bed clothes and bed. 'Gil Brenton,' A, B;
the corresponding Swedish ballad, A, B, E;
Danish, Grundtvig, No 275: * see pp 64, 65,
of this volume.
A stepping-stone by the bed-side. 'Vesle
Aase Gaasepige,' Asbjarnsen og Moe, No 29:
see p. 66.
A chair in which no leal maiden can sit, or
will sit till bidden (?). 'Gil Brenton,' D, C.
Flowers [foliage]. 1. In the Sanskrit story
of Guhasena, the merchant's son, and Deva-
smita, this married pair, who are to be sepa-
rated for a time, receive from Shfva each a
red lotus: if either should be unfaithful, the
lotus in the hand of the other would fade,
but not otherwise: Katha Sarit Sagara, ch. 13,
Tawney, I, 86, Brockhaus, I, 137. 2. In the
Tales of a Parrot, a soldier, going into ser-
vice, receives from his wife a rose [flower,
nosegay], which will keep fresh as long as
she remains true: Rosen, Tuti-nameh, from
the Turkish version, I, 109; Wickerhauser,
also from the Turkish, p. 57; Iken, p. 30,f .
from the Persian of Kadiri. 3. So the knight
Margon in the French romance of Perceforest,
vol. IV, ch. 16 and 17. 4. In a Turkish tale
found in a manuscript collection called 'Joy
after Sorrow,' an architect or housewright,
having to leave home for want of employment,
is presented by his wife with a bunch of ever-
green of the same property. 5. An English
story of a wright reverts to the rose. A widow,
having nothing else to give with her daughter,
presents the bridegroom with a rose-garland,
which will hold its hue while his wife is " sta-
ble :" 'The Wright's Chaste Wife,' by Adam
of Cobsam, from a manuscript of about 1462,
ed. Furnivall.J
* Nightingales in Grundtvig, No 274, A, B: see p.
64. See, also, Uhland, Zur Geschichte der Dichtung, HI,
121 f.
t Neither the Sanskrit Shukasaptati nor Nakshabi's Per-
sian version, made early in the fourteenth century, has been
published. The Turkish version is said to have been made
in the second half of tho next century, for Bajazet II. Ka-
diri's is probably of the seventeenth century. An English
and Persian version (Kadiri's), 1801, has the tale at p. 43;
A shirt [mantle]. 1. In connection with
the same incidents there is substituted for the
unfading flower, in Gesta Romanorum, 69, a
shirt. This a knight's wife gives to a car-
penter or housewright who has married her
daughter, and it will not need washing, will
not tear, wear, or change color, as long as both
husband and wife are faithful, but will lose all
its virtues if either is untrue. The shirt is
given by a wife to a husband in several ver-
sions of an otherwise different story. 2. In
the German meistergesang and the Flemish
tale Alexander of Metz: Korner, Historische
Volkslieder, p. 49, No 8; Goedeke, Deutsche
Dichtung im Mittelalter, 2d ed., p. 569 ff;
'De Historia van Florentina,' etc., Van den
Bergh, De nederlandsche Volksromans, p. 52 f.
3. In the story 'Von dem Kbnig von Spa-
nien § und seiner Frau,' Miillenhoff, Sagen, u.
s. w., p. 586, No 607, a wife gives the shirt to
her husband the morning after the wedding:
it will always be white until she dies, when it
will turn black, or unless she misbehaves, in
which case it will be spotted. 4. 'Die getreue
Frau,' Plonnies, in Wolf's Zeitschrift fiir
deutsche Mythologie,' II, 377. An English
princess gives her consort, a Spanish prince,
at parting, a white shirt which will not spot
as long as she is faithful. 5. 'Die treue
Frau,' Curtze, Volksiiberlieferungen aus Wal-
deck, p. 146. A merchant's son, married to a
princess, goes away for a voyage; they change
rings and shirts, and neither shirt will soil
until one of the two shall be untrue. 6. 'Die
getreue Frau,' J. W. Wolf, Deutsche Haus-
marchen, at p. 102. A prince, going on a
voyage, gives his sword to his wife; as long as
the blade is not spotted, he is faithful. He
receives from the princess a mantle; as long
as it is white, her faith is inviolate.
A picture. For the rose, as in Perceforest,
Small's English, from a Hindustani version of Kadiri, 1875,
at p. 40.
} In the Contes a rire, p. 89, a sylph who loves a prince
gives him a flower and a vase which will blacken upon his
wife's proving unfaithful: Legrand, 1779, I, 78. I have
not seen this edition of the book, but presume that this tale
is entirely akin with the above.
§ Cf. the King of Spain, at pp. 261, 263. The agreement
may, or may not, be accidental.


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
269
there is substituted, in a story otherwise es-
sentially the same, a picture. A knight, com-
pelled to leave his wife, receives from a ma-
gician a picture of her, small enough to carry
in a box about his person, which will turn
yellow if she is tempted, pale if she wavers,
black if she yields, but will otherwise pre-
serve its fresh hues: Bandello, Part I, nov.
21. This tale, translated in Painter's Pal-
ace of Pleasure, 1567 (ed. Haslewood, II, 471,
nov. 28), furnished the plot for Massinger's
'Picture,' 1630. The miniature will keep its
color as long as the woman is innocent and
unattempted, will grow yellow if she is solic-
ited but unconquered, and black if she sur-
renders: Act I, Scene 1. Bandello's story is
also the foundation of Seneca's tale, ' Filer le
parfait amour,' with a wax image taking the
place of the picture: CEuvres Choisies, ed.
Charles et Cap, p. 95.*
A ring. The picture is exchanged for a ring
in a French tale derived, and in parts almost
translated, from Bandello's : the sixth in 'Les
Faveurs et les Disgraces de l'Amour,' etc., said
to have appeared in 1696.f A white stone
set in the ring may become yellow or black
'under circumstances. Such a ring Rimnild
gave Horn Child: when the stone should grow
•wan, her thoughts would have changed; should
it grow red, she is no more a maid: see p. 192.
A father, being required to leave three daugh-
ters, gives them each such a ring in Basile,
Pentamerone, m, 4. The rings are changed
into glass distaffs in 'L'Adroite Princesse,' an
imitation of this story by Mlle. Lhdritier de
Villaudon, which has sometimes been printed
with Perrault's tales: Perrault, Contes des
Fees, ed. Giraud, p. 239; Dunlop, ch. 13.
A mirror, in the History of Prince Zeyn
Alasnam, reflecting the image of a chaste
maid, will remain unblurred: Arabian Nights,
* All these examples of the probation by flowers, shirt, or
picture are noticed in Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Essai sur
les Fables Indiennes, p. 107 ff; or in Von der Hagen's Ge-
sammtabenteuer, III, lxxxivff; or in an article by Rein-
hold Kohler, of his usual excellence, in Jahrbuch fur roman-
ische und englische Literatur, VIII, 44 ff.
t Kohler, as above, p. 60 f.
{ There ia a stone in the Danish Vigoleis with the Gold
Wheel which no one could approach " who was not as clean
Scott, IV, 120,124; 1001 Nacht, Habicht, VI,
146, 150; etc. Virgil made a mirror of like
property; it exposed the woman that was
"new-fangle," wandelmiietic, by the ignition
of a "worm " in the glass: Meisterlieder der
Kolmarer Handschrift, Bartsch, p. 605 (War-
natsch). There is also one of these mirrors
in Primaleon, l. ii, cap. 27; Rajna, Le Fonti
dell' Orlando Furioso, p. 504, note 3. Alfred
de Musset, in ' Barberine,' substitutes a pocket-
mirror for the picture in Bandello, Part I, nov.
21: CEuvres Completes, III, 378 ff.
A harp, in the hands of an image, upon
the approach of a despucellSe, plays out of
tune and breaks a string: Perceval le Gallois,
II, 149, vv 13,365-72 (Rajna, as above).
A crystal brook, in the amiral's garden in
Flor and Blancheflor, when crossed by a vir-
gin remains pellucid, but in the other case be-
comes red, or turbid: ed. Du Mdril, p. 75, vv
1811-14; Bekker, Berlin Academy, XLTV,
26, vv 2069-72; Fleck, ed. Sommer, p. 148,
vv 4472-82; Swedish, ed. Klemming, p. 38,
1122-25; Lower Rhine, Haupt's Zeitschrift,
XXI, 321, vv 57-62; Middle Greek, Bekker,
Berlin Academy, 1845, p. 165, Wagner, Me-
diaeval Greek Texts, p. 40 f, vv 1339-48; etc.
In the English poem, Hartshorne's Ancient
Metrical Tales, p. 93, if a clean maid wash
her hands in the water, it remains quiet and
clear; but if one who has lost her purity do
this, the water will yell like mad and become
red as blood.
The stone Aptor, in Wigamur, vv 1100-
21, is red to the sight of clean man or woman,
but misty to others: Von der Hagen und
Biisching, Deutsche Gedichte des Mittelalters,
p. 12 (Warnatsch)4
A statue, in an Italian ballad, moved its
eyes when young women who had sacrificed
their honor were presented to it: Ferraro,
as when he came from his mother's body." Gawain could
touch it with his hand, Arthur often sat upon it, and Vigo-
leis was found sitting on it. Nyerup, Almindelig Morskabs-
lsesning i Danmark og Norge, p. 129, a chap-book of 1732.
The stone is not quite so strict in the German Volksbuch,
Marbach, No 18, p. 13 f, Simrock, III, 432 f. In the Ger-
man romance no man less than immaculate in all respects
can touch it: Wigalois, ed. Benecke, p. 57, vv 1485-88.


270
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
Canti popolari di Ferrara, Cento e Pontela-
goscuro, p. 84, 'II Conte Cagnolino.' There
was said to be a statue of Venus in Constan-
tinople which could not be approached by an
incontinent woman without a very shameful
exposure; and again, a pillar surmounted by
four horns, which turned round three times if
any Keparas came up to it.* Virgil, 'Filius,'
made a brass statue which no misbehaving
woman might touch, and a vicious one re-
ceived violent blows from it: Meisterlieder
der Kolmarer Handschrift, Bartsch, p. 604,
14th century. This statue would bite off the
fingers of an adulteress if they were put in its
mouth, according to a poem of the same cen-
tury published by Bartsch in Germania, IV,
237; and a third version makes the statue do
this to all perjurers, agreeing in other respects
with the second: Kolmarer Meisterlieder, as
before, p. 338. In the two last the offence of
the wife causes a horn to grow out of the hus-
band's forehead. Much of the story in these
poems is derived from the fifteenth tale of the
Shukasaptati, where a woman offers to pass
between the legs of a statue of a Yaksha,
which only an innocent one can do: Benfey,
Pantschatantra, I, 457.f
According to a popular belief in Austria,
says J. Grimm, you may know a clean maid
by her being able to blow out a candle with
one puff and to light it again with another.
The phrase was known in Spain: "Matar un
candil con un soplo y encenderlo con otro."
* Georgii Codini Excerpta de antiimitatibus Constantino-
politanis, in Corpus Scriptorum Historian Byzantine, XLV,
50 f, cited by Liebrecht, Germania, I, 264; De Originibus
Constantinopolitanis, cited by LUtcke, Von der Hagen's Ger-
mania, I, 252, referred to by Liebrecht: both anecdotes in
Banduri, Imperium Orientale, Anonymus de Ant. Const, p.
35, 96, p. 57, 162. The statue again in a note of Nic. Ale-
mannus to Procopius, Arcana, 1623, p. 83: cited by Mr
Wright, Archieologia Cambrensis, as above, p. 1". Mr
Wright also makes mention, p. 16, of the blind dog that
quidam Andreas (evidently a merry one) was exhibiting in
the seventeenth year of Justinian, which, among other clever
performances, ostendebat in utcro habentes et fornicarios et
adulteros et avaros et magnanimos — omnes cum-veritate:
Historia Miscclla, Eyssenhardt, p. 377 f, l. 18, c. 23; Cedre-
nus, in the Byzantine Corpus, XXXIII, 657, Theophanes, in
XXXVIII, 347 f.
t The Meisterlieder and the Indian tale are cited by War-
natsch. Virgil's statue was circumvented by an artifice
Grimm adds that it is an article of popular
faith in India that a virgin can make a ball
of water, or carry water in a sieve : Rechtsal-
terthiimer, p. 932.J
An ordeal for chastity is a feature in several
of the Greek romances. In Heliodorus's ^Ethi-
opica, x, 8, 9, victims to be offered to the sun
and moon, who must be pure, are obliged to
mount a brazier covered with a golden grat-
ing. The soles of those who are less than
perfect are burned. Theagenes and Chariclea
experience no inconvenience. The Clitophon
and Leucippe of Achilles Tatius, vm, 6, 13,
14, has a cave in the grove of Diana of Ephe-
sus, in which they shut up a woman. If it is a
virgin, a delicious melody is presently heard
from a syrinx, the doors open of themselves,
and the woman comes out crowned with pine
leaves; if not a virgin, a wail is heard, and
the woman is never seen again. There is also
a not perfectly convincing trial, by the Stygian
water, in § 12, which seems to be imitated in
the Hysmine and Hysminias of Eustathius
[Eumathius], vm, 7, XI, 17. In the temple
of Diana, at Artycomis, stands a statue of the
goddess, with bow in hand, and from about
her feet flows water like a roaring river. A
woman, crowned with laurel, being put in, she
will float quietly, if all is right; but should-
she not have kept her allegiance to Dian, the
goddess bends her bow as if to shoot at her
head, which causes the culprit to duck, and
the water carries off her wreath.§
which is employed in this tale of the Shukasaptati, and in
other oriental stories presumably derived from it; and so
was the well-known Bocca della Verita, Kaiserchronik, Mass-
mann, pp 448 f. The Bocca della Verita bit off the fingers
of perjurers, but took no particular cognizance of the un-
chaste. A barley-corn [grain of wheat], again, which stood
on end when any false oath was sworn over it, Julg, Mon-
golische Marcheusammlung, Die Geschichte des Ardschi-
Bordschi Chan, pp 250-52, cited by Benfey, Pantschatantra,
I, 458, and referred to by Warnatsch, does not belong with
special tests of chastity.
} The phrase looks more malicious than naif, whether
Austrian or Spanish, and implies, I fear, an exsulHicate and
blown surmise about female virtue; and so of the Indian
'Volksglaube.' The candle-test is said to bo in use for men
in Silesia: Warnatsch, citing Weiuhold, p. 58.
§ These are all noted in Liebrecht's Dunlop, pp 11,16, 33.
The spring, says the author of Hysmine, served as good a
purpose for Artycomis as the Hhine did for the Celts ; refer-


29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
271
It is prescribed in Numbers v, 11-31, that
any man jealous of his wife may bring her to
the priest, who shall, with and after various
ceremonies, give her a bitter drink of holy
water in which dust from the floor of the tab-
ernacle has been infused. If she have tres-
passed, her body shall swell and rot. In the
Pseudo-Matthew's Gospel, ch. xii, Joseph and
Mary successively take this aquam potationis
domini. No pretender to innocence could taste
this and then make seven turns round the al-
tar, without some sign of sin appearing in the
face. The experiment shows both to be fault-
less. So, with some variation, the sixteenth
chapter of the Protevangelium of James. This
trial is the subject of one of the Coventry Mys-
teries, No 14, p. 137 ff, ed. Halliwell, and no
doubt of other scripture plays. It is naturally
introduced into Wernher's Maria, Hoffmann,
Fundgruben, II, 188, line 26 ff, and probably
into other lives of the Virgin.
Herodotus relates, n, 111, that Pheron, son
of Sesostris, after a blindness of ten years' du-
ration, received an intimation from an oracle
that he would recover his sight upon following
a certain prescription, such as we are assured
is still thought well of in Egypt in cases of
ophthalmia. For this the cooperation of a
chaste woman was indispensable. Repeatedly
balked, the king finally regained his vision,
and collecting in a town many women of whom
he had vainly hoped aid, in which number his
queen was included, he set fire to the place
and burned both it and them, and then mar-
ried the woman to whom he was so much in-
debted. (First cited in the Gentleman's Mag-
azine, 1795, vol. 65, I, 114.) The coincidence
with foregoing tales is certainly curious, but
to all appearance accidental.*
The 'Boy and the Mantle' was printed
"verbatim" from his manuscript by Percy in
the Reliques, III, 3, ed. 1765. The copy at
p. 314 is of course the same "revised and al-
tered" by Percy, but has been sometimes mis-
taken for an independent one.
Translated by Herder, I, 219; Bodmer, I,
18; Bothe, p. 59.
Percy MS., p. 284: Hales and Furnivall, II, 304.
1 In the third day of May
to Carleile did come
A kind curteous child,
that cold much of wisdome.
2 A kirtle and a mantle
this child had vppon,
With brauches and ringes
full richelye bedone.
3 He had a sute of silke,
about his middle drawne;
Without he cold of curtesye,
he thought itt much shame.
4 'God speed thee, "King Arthur,
sitting att thy meate!
And the goodly Queene Gueneuer!
I canott her fforgett
5 'I tell you lords in this hall,
I hett you all heede,
Except you be the more surer,
is you for to dread.'
6 He plucked out of his potewer,
and longer wold not dwell,
He pulled forth a pretty mantle, •
betweene two nut-shells.
. 7 'Haue thou here, King Arthure,
haue thou heere of mee;
ring to a test of the legitimacy of children by swinging or dip-
ping them in the Rhine, which the "Celts " practiced, accord-
ing to a poem in the Anthology: Jacobs, II, 42 f, No 125;
Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthumer, p. 935 (Warnatsch).
* Besides sources specially referred to, there may be men-
tioned, as particularly useful for the history of these tests.
Legrand, Fabliaux, 1779, i, 60, 76-78; Dunlop's History of
Fiction, 1814, in many places, with Liebrecht's notes, 1851;
Grasse, Sagenkreise, 1842, pp 185-87; Von der Hagen's
Gesammtabenteuer, 1850, III, Ixxxiv-xc, cxxxvf.


272
29. THE BOY AND THE MANTLE
Giue itt to thy comely queene,
shapen as itt is alreadye.
8 'Itt shall neuer become that wiffe
that hath once done amisse:'
Then euery knight in the kings court
began to care for his.
9 Forth came dame Gueneuer,
to the mantle shee her bed;
The ladye shee was new-fangle,
but yett shee was affrayd.
10 When shee had taken the mantle,
shee stoode as she had beene madd;
It was from the top to the toe
as sheeres had itt shread.
11 One while was itt gaule,
another while was itt greene;
Another while was itt wadded;
ill itt did her beseeme.
12 Another while was it blacke,
and bore the worst hue;
'By my troth,' quoth King Arthur,
'I thinke thou be not true.'
13 Shee threw downe the mantle,
that bright was of blee,
Fast with a rudd redd
to her chamber can shee flee.
14 Shee curst the weauer and the walker
that clothe tJiat had wrought,
And bade a vengeance on his crowne
that hither hath itt brought.
15 'I had rather be in a wood,
vnder a greene tree,
Then in King Arthurs court
shamed for to bee.'
16 Kay called forth his ladye,
and bade her come neere;
Saies, ' Madam, and thou be guiltye,
I pray thee hold thee there.'
17 Forth came his ladye
shortlye and anon,
Boldlye to the mantle
then is shee gone.
18 When she had tane the mantle,
and cast it her about,
Then was shee bare
all aboue the buttocckes.
19 Then euery knight
that was in the kings court
Talked, laughed, and showted,
full oft att that sport.
20 Shee threw downe the mantle,
that bright was of blee,
Ffast with a red rudd
to her chamber can shee flee.
21 Forth came an old 'knight,
pattering ore a creede,
And he preferred to this little boy
twenty markes to his meede,
22 And all the time of the Christmasse
willinglye to ffeede;
For why, this mantle might
doe his wiffe some need.
23 When shee had tane the mantle,
of cloth that was made,
Shee had no more left on her
but a tassell and a threed:
Then euery knight in the kings court
bade euill might shee speed.
24 Shee threw downe the mantle,
that bright was of blee,
And fast with a redd rudd
to her chamber can shee flee.
25 Craddocke called forth his ladye,
and bade her come in;
Saith, 'Winne this mantle, ladye,
with a litle dinne.
26 'Winne this mantle, ladye,
and it shalbe thine
If thou neuer did amisse
since thou wast mine.'
27 Forth came Craddockes ladye
shortlye and anon,
But boldlye to the mantle
then is shee gone.


29. THE BOY
'THE MANTLE
28 When shee had tane the mantle,
and cast itt her about,
Vpp att her great toe
itt began to crinkle and crowt;
Shee said, ' Bowe downe, mantle,
and shame me not for nought.
29 'Once I did amisse,
I tell you certainlye,
When I kist Craddockes mouth
vnder a greene tree,
When I kist Craddockes mouth
before he marryed mee.'
30 When shee had her shreeuen,
and her sines shee had tolde,
The mantle stoode about her
right as shee wold;
31 Seemelye of coulour,
glittering like gold;
Then euery knight in Arthurs court
did her behold.
32 Then spake dame Gueneuer
to Arthur our king:
; She hath tane yonder mantle,
not with wright but with wronge!
33 'See you not yonder woman
that maketh her selfe soe clene?
I haue seene tane out of her bedd
of men fiueteene;
34 'Preists, clarkes, and wedded men,
from her by-deene;
Yett shee taketh the mantle,
and maketh her-selfe cleane!'
35 Then spake the litle boy
that kept the mantle in hold;
Sayes ' King, chasten thy wiffe;
of her words shee is to bold.
36 'Shee is a bitch and a witch,
and a whore bold;
King, in thine owne hall
thou art a cuchold.'
37 The litle boy stoode
looking ouer a dore;
He was ware of a wyld bore,
wold haue werryed a man.
38 He pulld forth a wood kniffe,
fast thither that he ran;
He brought in the bores head,
and quitted him like a man.
39 He brought in the bores head,
and was wonderous bold;
He said there was neuer a cucholds kniffe
carue itt that cold.
40 Some rubbed their kniues
vppon a whetstone;
Some threw them vnder the table,
and said they had none.
41 King Arthur and the child
stood looking them vpon;
All their kniues edges
turned backe againe.
42 Craddoccke had a litle kniue
of iron and of steele;
He birtled the bores head
wonderous weele,
That euery knight in the kingB court
had a morssell.
43 The litle boy had a home,
of red gold that ronge;
He said, 'there was noe cuckolde
shall drinke of my home,
But he shold itt sheede,
either behind or beforne.'
44 Some shedd on their shoulder,
and some on their knee;
He that cold not hitt his mouth
put it in his eye;
And he that was a cuckold,
euery man might him see.
45 Craddoccke wan the home
and the bores head;
His ladye wan the mantle
vnto her meede;
Euerye such a louely ladye,
God send her well to speede!
35


274
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
& is printed and, wherever it occurs.
2'. MS. might be read branches.
52. all heate. 64. 2 nut-shells.
84. his wiffe.
92. biled. "Query the le in the MS." Furnivall.
18*. Perhaps the last word was originally tout, as
Mr T. Wright has suggested.
19". lauged. 21*. 20 markes.
222. willignglye.
332. MS. perhaps has cleare altered to clene.
334. fiueteeene.
371. A litle.
372. Perhaps, as Percy suggested, two lines have
dropped out after this, and the two which
follow belong with the next stanza.
401. 4ls. kiues.
411. Arthus.
442. sone on.
30
KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
Percy MS., p. 24. Hales & Furnivall, I, 61; Madden's Syr Gawayne, p. 275.
The mutilation of the earlier pages of the
Percy manuscript leaves us in possession of
only one half of this ballad, and that half in
eight fragments, so that even the outline of the
story cannot be fully made out.* We have,
to be sure, the whole of a French poem which
must be regarded as the probable source of the
ballad, and, in view of the recklessness of the
destroyer Time, may take comfort; for there
are few things in this kind that the Middle
Ages have bequeathed which we could not
better spare. But the losses from the Eng-
lish ballad are still very regrettable, since
from what is in our hands we can see that the
story was treated in an original way, and so
much so that comparison does not stead us ma-
terially.
'King Arthur and King Cornwall' is appar-
ently an imitation, or a traditional variation,
* Half a page is pone in the manuscript between ' Robin
Hood's Death ' and the beginning of this ballad, and again
between the end of this ballad and the beginning of 'Sir
Lionel.' 'Robin Hood's Death,'judging by another copy,
is complete within two or three stanzas, and ' Sir Lionel' ap-
pears to lack nothing. We may suppose that quito half a
dozen stanzas are lost from both the beginning and the end
of King Arthur and King Cornwall.'
t British Museum (but now missing), King's Library, 16,
E, vm, fol. 131, recto: "Ci comence le liucre cumment
rharels de fraunce voiet in icrhusa/em Et pur parols sa feme
a constantinnoble pur verc roy hugon." First published by
of Charlemagne's Journey to Jerusalem and
Constantinople, a chanson de geste of complete
individuality and of remarkable interest. This
all but incomparable relic exists in only a
single manuscript,f and that ill written and
not older than the end of the thirteenth cen-
tury, while the poem itself may be assigned to
the beginning of the twelfth, if not to the lat-
ter part of the eleventh.J Subsequently, the
story, with modifications, was introduced into
the romance of Galien, and in this setting it
occurs in three forms, two manuscript of the fif-
teenth century, and the third a printed edition
of the date 1500. These are all in prose, but
betray by metrical remains imbedded in them
their descent from a romance in verse, which
there are reasons for putting at least as early
as the beginning of the fourteenth century.§
A very little of the story, and this little
Michel, London, 1836, and lately rce'dited, with due care, by
Koschwitz: Karls des Grossen Reise nach Jerusalem und
Constantinopel, Heilbronn, 1880; 2d ed., 1883.
X See the argument of Gaston Paris, Romania, XI, 7 ff;
and of Koschwitz, Karl des Grossen Reise, 2te Auflage,
Einlcitung, pp. xiv-xxxii.
§ Printed by Koschwitz in Sechs Bearbeitungen von Karls
des Grossen Reise, the last from a somewhat later edition,
pp. 40-133. The recovery of a metrical form of Galien is
looked for. In the view of Gaston Paris, the Pilgrimage
was made over (renouvele) at the end of the twelfth or the
beginning of the thirteenth century, and this ri/acimenlo


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
275
much changed, is found in Italian romances
of Charles's Journey to Spain and of Ogier the
Dane. The derivation from Galien is patent.*
The Journey of Charlemagne achieved great
popularity, as it needs must. It forms a sec-
tion of the Karlamagnus Saga, a prose trans-
lation into Norse of gestes of Charles and his
peers, made in the thirteenth century, and
probably for King Hakon the Old, though
this is not expressly said, as in the case of the
'Mantle.' Through the Norwegian version
the story of Charles's journey passed into the
other Scandinavian dialects. There is a Swed-
ish version, slightly defective, existing in a
manuscript earlier than 1450, and known to
be older than the manuscript, and a Danish
abridgment, thought to have been made from
the Swedish version, is preserved in a manu-
script dated 1480, which again is probably de-
rived from an elder. Like the ' Mantle,' the
Journey of Charlemagne is treated in Icelandic
Rfmur, the oldest manuscript being put at
about 1500. These Rhymes (Geiplur, Gabs,
Japes), though their basis is the Norwegian
saga, present variations from the existing man-
uscripts of this saga. There is also a Faroe
traditional ballad upon this theme,' Geipa-tat-
tur.' This ballad has much that is peculiar to
itself.f
Charlemagne's Journey was also turned
intercalated in Galien by some rhymer of the fourteenth.
See his 'Galien,' in Hist. Litt. de la France, XXVIII, 221-
239, for all that concerns the subject.
* II Viaggio di Carlo Magno in Ispagna, pubblicato per
enre di Antonio Ceruti, c u, II, 170: Rajna, TJggeri il
Danese nella letteratura romanzesca degl' Ituliani, Roma-
nia IV, 414 ff. A king of Portugal, of the faith of Apollo
and Mahound, takes the place of the king of Constantinople
in the former, and one Saracen or another in the several
versions of the second. G. Paris, in Romania, IX, 3, 10,
notes.
t The Norwegian version in Karlamagnus Saga ok Kappa
hans, ed. Unger, p. 466, the Seventh Part. Boih the Swed-
ish and Danish are given in Storm's Sagnkredsene om Karl
den Store, etc., Kristiania, 1874, pp. 228-245. For the
sources, see p. 160 if. The whole of the Danish Chronicle
of Charlemagne is printed in Brandt's Romantisk Digtning
fra Middelalderen, Copenhagen, 1877, the Journey to the
Holy Land, p. 146 ff. Brandt does not admit that the Dan-
ish chronicle was translated from Swedish: p. 347. The
'Geiplur,' 968 vv, and one version of ' Geipa-tiittur,' 340 vv,
are included in Koschwitz's Sechs Bearbeitungen, p. 139 ff,
into Welsh in the thirteenth century. Three
versions are known, of which the best is in the
Red Book of Hergest.J
Let us now see what is narrated in the
French poem.
One day when Charlemagne was at St
Denis he had put on his crown and sword,
and his wife had on a most beautiful crown,
too. Charles took her by the hand, under an
olive-tree, and asked her if she had ever seen
a king to whom crown and sword were so be-
coming. The empress was so unwise as to
reply that possibly he thought too well of
himself: she knew of a king who appeared
to even better advantage when he wore his
crown. Charles angrily demanded where this
king was to be found: they would wear their
crowns together, and if the French sided with
her, well; but if she had not spoken truth, he
would cut off her head. The empress en-
deavored to explain away what she had said:
the other king was simply richer, but not so
good a knight, etc. Charles bade her name
him, on her head. There being no escape, the
empress said she had heard much of Hugo, the
emperor of Greece and Constantinople. "By
my faith," said Charles, " you have made me
angry and lost my love, and are in a fair way
to lose your head, too. I will never rest till
I have seen this king."
p. 174 ff. For a discussion of them see KSlbing in Germania,
XX, 233-239, and as to the relations of the several versions,
etc., Koschwitz, in Romanische Studien, II, 1 ff, his Ueber-
lieferung und Sprache der Chanson du Voyage de Charle-
magne, and Sechs Bearbeitungen, Einleitung. The Faroe
ballad is though t to show traces in some places of Christiern
Pedersen's edition of the Danish chronicle, 1534 (Kolbing,
as above, 238, 239), or of stall prints founded on that. This
does not, however, necessarily put the ballad into the six-
teenth century. Might not Pedersen have had ballad au-
thority for such changes and additions as he made f It may
well be supposed that he had, and if what is peculiar to
Pedersen may have come from ballads, we must hesitate to
derive the ballads from Pedersen. It is, moreover, neither
strange nor unexampled that popular ballads should be af-
fected by tradition committed to print as well as by tradition
still floating in memory. The Faroe eppies of 'Greve Gen-
selin,' for example, as Grundtvig remarks, I, 223, note,
though undoubtedly original and independent of Danish,
evince acquaintance with Vedel's printed text.
J Given, with an English translation by Professor Rhys,
in Sechs Bearbeitungen, p. 1, p. 19.


276
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
The emperor, having made his offering at St
Denis, returned to Paris, taking with him his
twelve peers and some thousand of knights.
To these he announced that they were to ac-
company him to Jerusalem, to adore the cross
and the sepulchre, and that he would inciden-
tally look up a king that he had heard of.
They were to take with them seven hundred
camels, laden with gold and silver, and be pre-
pared for an absence of seven years.
Charlemagne gave his people a handsome
equipment, but not of arms. They left be-
hind them their lances and swords, and took
the pilgrim's staff and scrip. When they
came to a great plain it appeared that the
number was not less than eighty thousand:
but we do not have to drag this host through
the story, which concerns itself only with
Charles and his peers. They arrived at Jeru-
salem one fine day, selected their inns, and
went to the minster. Here Jesus and his
apostles had sung mass, and the chairs which
they had occupied were still there. Charles
seated himself in the middle one, his peers
on either side. A Jew came in, and, seeing
Charles, fell to trembling; so fierce was the
countenance of the emperor that he dared
not look at it, but fled from the church to
the patriarch, and begged to be baptized, for
God himself and the twelve apostles were
come. The patriarch went to the church, in
procession, with his clergy. Charles rose and
made a profound salutation, the priest and
the monarch embraced, and the patriarch in-
quired who it was that had assumed to enter
that church as he had done. "Charles is my
name," was the answer. "Twelve kings have
I conquered, and I am seeking a thirteenth
whom I have heard of. I have come to Jeru-
salem to adore the cross and the sepulchre."
The patriarch proving gracious, Charles went
on to ask for relics to take home with him.
"A plentet en avrez," says the patriarch ; "St
* There arc some variations in the list of relies in the
other versions. The Rfmur say " many," without specify-
ing.
t On the way from Jerusalem to Constantinople the
French, according to Galien, were waylaid by several thou-
sand Saracens. Three or four of the peers prepared for a
Simeon's arm, St Lazarus's head, St Ste-
phen's—" "Thanks!" "The sndarium, one
of the nails, the crown of thorns, the cup,
the dish, the knife, some of St Peter's beard,
some hairs from his head —" "Thanks!"
"Some of Mary's milk, of the holy shift —"
And all these Charles received.* He stayed
four months in Jerusalem, and began the
church of St Mary. He presented the pa-
triarch with a hundred mule-loads of gold and
silver, and asked "his leave and pardon " to
return to France: but first he would find out
the king whom his wife had praised. They
take the way through Jericho to gather palms.
The relics are so strong that every stream
they come to divides before them, every blind
man receives sight, the crooked are made
straight, and the dumb speak.f On reaching
Constantinople they have ample reason to be
impressed with the magnificence of the place.
Passing twenty thousand knights, who are
playing at chess and tables, dressed in pall
and ermine, with fur cloaks training at their
feet, and three thousand damsels in equally
sumptuous attire, who are disporting with
their lovers, they come to the king, who is
at that moment taking his day at the plough,
not on foot, goad in hand, but seated most
splendidly in a chair drawn by mules, and
holding a gold wand, the plough all gold, too;
none of this elegance, however, impjiiring the
straightness of his majesty's furrow. The
kings exchange greetings. Charles tells Hugo
that he is last from Jerusalem, and should be
glad to see him and his knights. Hugo makes
him free to stay a year, if he likes, unyokes
the oxen, and conducts his guests to the palace.
The palace is gorgeous in the extreme, and,
omitting other architectural details, it is cir-
cular, and so constructed as to turn like a
wheel when the wind strikes it from the west.
Charles thinks his own wealth not worth a
glove in comparison, and remembers how he
fight, though armed only with swords (" which they never or
only most reluctantly put off," Arsenal MS.), but Charles
and the rest felt a better confidence in the relies, and through
the prayers of the more prudent and pious of the company
their foes were turned into rocks and stones.


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
277
had threatened his wife. "Lordings," he says,
"many a palace have I seen, but none like this
had even Alexander, Constantine, or Caesar."
At that moment a strong wind arose which
set the palace in lively motion; the emperor
was fain to sit down on the floor; the twelve
peers were all upset, and as they lay on their
backs, with faces covered, said one to the
other, " This is a bad business: the doors are
open, and yet we can't get out!" But as
evening approached the wind subsided; the
Franks recovered their legs, and went to sup-
per. At the table they saw the queen and
the princess, a beautiful blonde, of whom Ol-
iver became at once enamored. After a most
royal repast, the king conducted Charles and
the twelve to a bed-chamber, in which there
were thirteen beds. It is doubtful whether
modern luxury can vie with the appointments
in any respect, and certain that we are hope-
lessly behind in one, for this room was lighted
by a carbuncle. But, again, there was one
luxury which Hugo did not allow them, and
tlns was privacy, even so much privacy as
thirteen can have. He had put a man in a
hollow place under a marble stair, to watch
them through a little hole.
The Franks, as it appears later, had drunk
heavily at supper, and this must be their ex-
cuse for giving themselves over, when in a
foreign country, to a usage or propensity
which they had no doubt indulged in at home,
and which is familiar in northern poetry and
saga, that of making brags (gabs, Anglo-Saxon
be6t, gilp*). Charles began: Let Hugo arm
his best man in two hauberks and two helms,
and set him on a charger: then, if he will lend
me his sword, I will with a blow cut through
helms, hauberks, and saddle, and if I let it
have its course, the blade shall never be recov-
* The heir of a Scandinavian king, or earl, at the feast
which solemnized his accession, drank a bragur-fuli, a chief's
cup or kind's toast, to the memory of his father, and then
made some important vow. This he did before he took his
father's seat. The quests then made vows. The custom
seems not to have been confined to these funeral banquets.
See Vigfusson, at the word B ragr. Charles and his peers
show their blood.
t Excepting the Welsh translation, which conforms to
the original, all other versions give Bernard's gab to Tur-
ered but by digging a spear's depth in the
ground. "Perdy," says the man in hiding,
"what a fool King Hugo was when he gave
you lodging!"
Roland followed: Tell Hugo to lend me his
horn, and I will go into yon plain and blow
such a blast that not a gate or a door in all
the city shall be left standing, and a good
man Hugo will be, if he faces me, not to have
his beard burned from his face and his fur robe
carried away. Again said the man under the
stair, " What a fool was King Hugo!"
The emperor next called upon Oliver, whose
gab was:
'Frenget li reis sa fille qui tant at bloi le peil,
En sa chambre nos metet en un lit en requeit;
Se jo n'ai testimoigne de li anuit cent feiz,
Demain perde la teste, par covent li otrei.'
"You will stop before that," said the spy;
"great shame have you spoken."
Archbishop Turpin's brag was next in order:
it would have been more in keeping for Tur-
pin of Hounslow Heath, and we have all seen
it performed in the travelling circus. While
three of the king's best horses are running at
full speed on the plain, he will overtake and
mount the foremost, passing the others, and
will keep four big apples in constant motion
from one hand to the other; if he lets one
fall, put out his eyes.f "A good brag this,"
is the comment of the simple scout (Vescolte'),
"and no shame to my lord."
William of Orange will take in one hand
a metal ball which thirty men have never been
able to stir, and will hurl it at the palace wall
and bring down more than forty toises of it.
"The king is a knave if he does not make
you try," says Vescolte.
The other eight gabs may be passed over,
pin, and most others Turpin's to Bernard. The Danish
chronicle assigns the "grand three-horse act" to Gerard;
the Faroe ballad omits it; the two manuscript Galiens at-
tribute it to Bernard [Berart] de Mondidicr, the printed Ga-
lien to Berenger. In these last the feat is, though enor-
mously weighted with armor, to leap over two horses and
come down on the back of the third so heavily as to break
his bones. There are, in one version or another, other dif-
ferences as to the feats.
*


278
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
save one. Bernard de Brusban says, "You
see that roaring stream? To-morrow I will
make it leave its bed, cover the fields, fill the
cellars of the city, drench the people, and drive
King Hugo into his highest tower, from which
he shall never come down without my leave."
"The man is mad," says the spy. "What a
fool King Hugo was! As soon as morning
dawns they shall all pack."
The-spy carries his report to his master
without a moment's delay. Hugo swears that
if the brags are not accomplished as made, his
guests shall lose their heads, and orders out a
hundred thousand men-at-arms to enforce his
resolution.
When the devout emperor of the west came
from mass the next morning (Hugo was evi-
dently not in a state of mind to go), he ad-
vanced to meet his brother of Constantinople,
olive branch in hand; but Hugo called out
from far off, "Charles, why did you make me
the butt of your brags and your scorns ?" and
repeated that all must be done, or thirteen
heads would fall. Charles replied that they
had drunk a good deal of wine the night be-
fore, and that it was the custom for the French
when they had gone to bed to allow them-
selves in jesting. He desired to speak with
his knights. When they were together, the
emperor said that they had drunk too much,
and had uttered what they ought not. He
caused the relics to be brought, and they all
fell to praying and beating their breasts, that
they might be saved from Hugo's wrath, when
lo, an angel appeared, who bade them not be
afraid ; they had committed a great folly yes-
terday, and must never brag again, but for
this time, " Go, begin, not one of them shall
fail." *
Charles returned to Hugo master of the sit-
uation. He repeated that they had drunk too
much wine the night before, and went on to
say that it was an outrage on Hugo's part to
set a spy in the room, and that they knew a
* In Galien, Hugo is exceedingly frightened by Charle-
magne's fierce demeanor and by what he is told by a recreant
Frenchman who is living in exile at his court, and rouses the
city for an assault on his guests, in which he loses two thou-
sand of his people. A parley ensues. Hugo will hear of no
land where such an act would be accounted
villainy: "but all shall be carried out; choose
who shall begin." Hugo said, Oliver; and let
him not fall short of his boast, or I will cut off
his head, and the other twelve shall share his
fate. The next morning, in pursuance of an
arrangement made between Oliver and the
princess, the king was informed that what
had been undertaken had been precisely dis-
charged. "The first has saved himself," says
Hugo; "by magic, I believe; now I wish to
know about the rest." "What next ?" says
Charlemagne. William of Orange was called
for, threw off his furs, lifted the huge ball
with one hand, hurled it at the wall, and
threw down more than forty toises. "They
are enchanters," said the king to his men.
"Now I should like to see if the rest will do
as much. If one of them fails, I will hang
them all to-morrow." "Do you want any
more of the gabs?" asked Charles. Hugo
called upon Bernard to do what he had threat-
ened. Bernard asked the prayers of the em-
peror, ran down to the water, and made the
sign of the cross. All the water left its bed,
spread over the fields, came into the city, filled
the cellars, drenched the people, and drove
King Hugo into his highest tower; Charles
and the peers being the while ensconced in an
old pine-tree, all praying for God's pity.
Charles in the tree heard Hugo in the tower
making his moan: he would give the emperor
all his treasure, would become his man and
hold his kingdom of him. The emperor was
moved, and prayed that the flood might stop,
and at once the water began to ebb. Hugo
was able to descend from his tower, and he
came to Charles, under an "ympe tree," and
repeated what he had uttered in the moment
of extremity. "Do you want the rest of the
gabs?" asked Charles. "Ne de ceste se-
maine," replied Hugo. "Then, since you are
my man," said the emperor, "we will make
a holiday and wear our crowns together."
accommodation unless the gabs are performed. "Content,"
says Charles, angrily, " they shall be, if you wish ;" but he
feels how great the peril is, and goes to church to invoke the
aid of heaven, which is vouchsafed.


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
279
When the French saw the two monarchs walk-
ing together, and Charles overtopping Hugo
by fifteen inches, they said the queen was a
fool to compare anybody with him.
After this promenade there was mass, at
which Turpin officiated, and then a grand
dinner. Hugo once more proffered all his
treasures to Charles, but Charles would not
take a denier. "We must be going," he said.
The French mounted their mules, and went
off in high spirits. Very happy was Charles
to have conquered such a king without a bat-
tle. Charles went directly to St Denis, and
performed his devotions. The nail and the
crown he deposited on the altar, distributed
the other relics over the kingdom, and for the
love of the sepulchre he gave up his anger
against the queen.
The story in the English ballad, so far as
it is to be collected from our eight fragments,
is that Arthur, represented as King of Lit-
tle Britain, while boasting to Gawain of his
round table, is told by Guenever that she
knows of one immeasurably finer; the very
trestle is worth his halls and his gold, and the
palace it stands in is worth all Little Britain
besides; but not a word will she say as to
where this table and this goodly building may
be. Arthur makes a vow never to sleep two
nights in one place till he sees that round
table; and, taking for companions Gawain,
Tristram, Sir Bredbeddle, and an otherwise un-
known Sir Marramiles, sets out on the quest.
* Arthur is said to have " socht to the ciete of Criste," in
'Golagros and Gawaue,' Madden's 'Syr Gawayne,' p. 143,
v. 802. The author probably followed the so-called Nen-
nius, c. 63.
t Cf. ' Young Beichan,' where the porter has also served
thirty years and three; 'The Greno Knight,' Percy MS.,
Hales and Furnivall, II, 62; the porter in Kilhwch and
Olwen, Mabinogion, II, 255 f.
} In Heinrich vom Tiirlin's Crone we have the following
passage, vv 3313-4888, very possibly to be found in some
French predecessor, which recalls the relations of Cornwall
King and Guenever. The queen's demeanor may be an imi-
tation of Charlemagne's (Arthur's) wife's bluntness, but the
liaison of which Cornwall boasts appears to bo vouched by
no other tradition, and must be regarded as the invention of
the author of this ballad.
Arthur and three comrades return half frozen from a hunt.
Arthur sits down at the fire to warm himself. The queen
taunts him : she knows a knight who rides, winter and sum-
The pilgrimage which, to save his dignity,
Charles makes a cover for his visit to the
rival king forms no part of Arthur's pro-
gramme.* The five assume a palmer's weed
simply for disguise, and travel east and west,
in many a strange country, only to arrive at
Cornwall, so very little a way from home.
The proud porter of Cornwall's gate, a min-
ion swain, befittingly clad in a suit of gold,
for his master is the richest king in Chris-
tendom, or yet in heathenness, is evidently
impressed with Arthur's bearing, as is quite
the rule in such cases : f he has been porter
thirty years and three, but [has never seen
the like]. Cornwall would naturally ask the
pilgrims some questions. From their mention-
ing some shrine of Our Lady he infers that
they have been in Britain, — Little Britain
we must suppose to be meant. Cornwall asks
if they ever knew King Arthur, and boasts
that he had lived seven years in Little Britain,
and had had a daughter by Arthur's wife,
now a lady of radiant beauty, and Arthur
has none such.J He then sends for his steed,
which he can ride three times as far in a day
as Arthur can any of his, and we may suppose
that he also exhibits to his guests a horn and
a sword of remarkable properties, and a Bur-
low-Beanie, or Billy-Blin, a seven-headed,
fire-breathing fiend whom he has in his ser-
vice. Arthur is then conducted to bed, and
the Billy-Blin, shut up, as far as we can make
out, in some sort of barrel, or other vessel,§
mer alike, in a simple shirt, chanting love-songs the while.
Arthur resolves to go out with the three the next night to
overhaul this hardy chevalier. The three attendants of the
king have an encounter with him and tare hard at his hands,
but Arthur has the advantage of the stranger, who reveals
himself to the king as Guenevcr's first love, by name Gaso-
zein, and shows a token which he had received from her.
§ Under tbrub chadler closed was hee. 29s.
The bunge of the trubchandler he burst in three. 432.
Being unable to make anything of thrub, trub, I am com-
pelled to conjecture the rub-chadler, that rub-chandler. The
fiend is certainly closed under a barrel or tub, and I suppose
a rubbish barrel or tub. Rubb, however derived, occurs in
Icelandic in the sense of rubbish, and chalder, however de-
rived, is a Scottish form of the familiar chaldron. Professor
Skeat, with great probability, suggests that chadler = chau-
deler, chaudiere. Caldaria lignea arc cited by Ducange.
Cad or kad is well known in the sense barrel, and cadiolus,


280
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
is set by Arthur's bed-side to hear and report
the talk of the pilgrims. Now, it would seem,
the knights make each their vow or brag.
Arthur's is that he will be the death of Corn-
wall King before he sees Little Britain. Ga-
wain, who represents Oliver, will have Corn-
wall's daughter home with him. Here there is
an unlucky gap. Tristram should undertake
to carry off the horn, Marramiles the steed,
and Sir Bredbeddle the sword. But first it
would be necessary to subdue the loathly fiend.
Bredbeddle goes to work without dallying,
bursts open the rub-chadler with his sword, and
fights the fire-breathing monster in a style that
is a joy to see; but sword, knife, and axe all
break, and he is left without a weapon. Yet
he had something better to fall back on, and
that was a little book which he had found by
the seaside, no doubt in the course of those
long travels which conducted the pilgrims from
Little Britain to Cornwall. It was probably
a book of Evangiles; our Lord had written it
with his hands and sealed it with his blood.
With this little book, which in a manner takes
the place of the relics in the French tale, for
the safety of the pilgrims and the accom-
plishment of their vows are secured through
it, Bredbeddle conjures the Burlow-beanie,
and shuts him up till wanted in a " wall of
stone," which reminds us of the place in which
Hugo's spy is concealed. He then reports to
Arthur, who has a great desire to see the
fiend in all his terrors, and, upon the king's
promising to stand firm, Bredbeddle makes the
fiend start out again, with his seven heads and
the fire flying out of his mouth. The Billy-
Blin is now entirely amenable to command:
Bredbeddle has only to " conjure " him to do
a thing, and it is done. First he fetches down
the steed. Marramiles, who perhaps had
vowed to bring off the horse, considers that
he is the man to ride him, but finds he can do
cadulus, are found in Ducange. Cadler, chadler, however,
cannot be called a likely derivative from cad.
In stanza 48 the fiend, after he has been ousted from
the " trubchandler," is told to " lie still in that wall of stone,"
which is perhaps his ordinary lair. The spy is concealed
under a flight of stone steps in the French poem; in "a large
hollow stone in the door outside" in the Welsh story; in a
hollow pillar in Galien and the Ri'mur; in a stone vault in
nothing with him, and has to call on Bredbed-
dle for help. The Billy-Blin is required to tell
how the steed is to be ridden, and reveals that
three strokes of a gold wand which stands in
Cornwall's study-window will make him spring
like spark from brand. And so it comes out
that Cornwall is a magician. Next the horn
has to be fetched, but, when brought, it. can-
not be sounded. For this a certain powder
is required. This the fiend procures, and
Tristram blows a blast which rends the horn
up to the midst.* Finally the Billy-Blin is
conjured to fetch the sword, and with this
sword Arthur goes and strikes off Cornwall's
head. So Arthur keeps his vow, and, so far
as we can see, all the rest are in a condition
to keep theirs.
The English ballad retains too little of the
French story to enable us to say what form of
it this little was derived from. The poem of
Galien would cover all that is borrowed as
well as the Journey of Charlemagne. It may
be regarded as an indication of late origin
that in this ballad Arthur is king of Little
Britain, that Bredbeddle and Marramiles are
made the fellows of Gawain and Tristram,
Bredbeddle carrying off all the honors, and
that Cornwall has had an intrigue with Ar-
thur's queen. The name Bredbeddle is found
elsewhere only in the late Percy version of
the romance of the Green Knight, Hales and
Furnivall, II, 56, which version alludes to a
custom of the Knights of the Bath, an order
said to have been instituted by Henry IV at
his coronation, in 1399.
The Faroe ballad, ' Geipa-tattur,' exists in
four versions: A, Svabo's manuscript collec-
tion, 1782, III, 1, 85 stanzas; B, Sandabog,
1822, p. 49, 140 stanzas; C, Fuglabog, c.
1840, p. 9,120 stanzas; D, Sydera version, ob-
tained by Hammershaimb, 1848,103 stanzas, f
It repeats the story of the Norse saga, with a
the Faroe ballad: Koschwitz, Karls Reise, p. 64; Sechs
Bearbeitungen, pp 29, 52, 85, 117, 153, 179.
* Roland's last blast splits his horn. See the citations by
G. Paris, in Romania, XI, 506 f.
t The first has been printed by Kolbing in Koschwitz's
Sechs Bearbeitungen, as already said. The four texts were
most kindly communicated to me by Professor Grnndtvig, a
short time before his lamentable death, copied by his own


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
281
moderate number of traditional accretions and
changes. The emperor, from his throne, asks
his champions where is his superior [equal].
They all drop their heads; no one ventures
to answer but the queen, who better had been
silent. "The emperor of Constantinople"
(Hakin, D), she says, "is thy superior." "If
he is not," answers Karl, "thou shalt burn on
bale." In B, when they have already started
for Constantinople, Turpin persuades them to
go rather to Jerusalem: in the other versions
it must be assumed that the holy city was on
the route. As Karl enters the church the
bells ring and the candles light of themselves,
C, D. There are thirteen seats in the choir:
Karl takes the one that Jesus had occupied,
and the peers those of the apostles. A heathen
tells the patriarch * that the Lord is come
down from heaven, C, D. The patriarch pro-
ceeds to the church, with no attendance but
his altar-book [singing from his altar-book];
he asks Karl what he has come for, and Karl
replies, to see the halidoms, A, C, D. In B
the patriarch presents himself to the emperor
at his lodging, and inquires his purpose; and,
learning that he is on his way to Constanti-
nople, for glory, advises him first to go to the
church, where the ways and means of success
are to be found. The patriarch gives Karl
some of the relics: the napkin on which Jesus
had wiped his hands, cups from which he had
drunk, etc. Karl, in A, C, now announces
that he is on his way to Constantinople; the
patriarch begs him not to go, for he will have
much to suffer. At the exterior gate of the
palace will be twelve white bears, ready to go
at him; the sight of his sword [of the holy
napkin, B] will cause them to fall stone-dead,
or at least harmless, B. At the gate next
within there will be twelve wolf-dogs f [and
further on twelve toads, B], which must be
hand in parallel columns, with a restoration of the order of
the stanzas, which is considerably disturbed in all, and a few
necessary emendations.
* Pol, A, C, Kortunatus, B, i. e. Koronatus (Grundtvig).
Coronatus = clericus, tonsura scu corona clericali donatus:
Ducange.
t The white bears and the wolf-dogs are found in another
Faroe ballad, as yet unprinted, 'Asmundar skeinkjari,'
disposed of in like wise: etc. The castle
stands on a hundred pillars, A, and is full of
ingenious contrivances: the floor goes up to
the sky, and the roof comes down to the
ground, B. Karl now sets out, with the pa-
triarch's blessing and escort. Before they
reach the palace they come upon three hun-
dred knights and ladies dancing, which also
had been foretold, and at the portals of the
palace they find and vanquish the formidable
beasts. The palace is to the full as splendid
and as artfully constructed as they had been
informed: the floor goes up and the roof comes
down, B; there are monstrous figures (?),
with horns at their mouths, and upon a wind
rising the horns all sound, the building begins
to revolve, and the Frenchmen jump up, each
clinging to the other, B, C, D. Karl remem-
bers what his wife had said, A, D.
Of the reception by the monarch of Con-
stantinople nothing further is said. We are
immediately taken to the bedroom, in which
there are twelve beds, with a thirteenth in
the middle, and also a stone arch, or vault, in-
side of which is a man with a candle. Karl
proposes that they shall choose feats, make
boasts, rouses [skemtar, jests, C]. These
would inevitably be more or less deranged and
corrupted in the course of tradition. A and C
have lost many. Karl's boast, dropped in B,
C, is that he will smite King Hakin, so that
the sword's point shall stick in the ground,
D; hit the emperor on the neck and knock
him off his horse, A. Roland, in all, will blow
the emperor's hair off his head with the blast
of his horn. Oliver's remains as in the French
poem. William of Orange's ball is changed
to a bolt. The exploit with the horses and
apples is assigned to Bernard in D, the only
version which preserves it, as in the Norse
saga; and, as in the saga again, it is Turpin,
where they are subdued by an arm-ring and "runc-gold :"
the white bears in a kindred ballad, Grundtvig, No 71, A
4, 5, 8, 9, C 6, 7, 13, quelled with a lily-twig; E 12, 18,
with runes; and in No 70, A 28, B 27, 30. The source
of this ballad is Fjolsvinnsmal, which has two watch-dogs
in 13, 14. 'Kilhwch and Olwen,' Mabiuogion, II, has
a similar story, and there are nine watch-dogs, at p. 277.
(Grundtvig.)
86


282
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
and not Bernard, who brings in the river upon
the town, and forces the king to take refuge
in the tower.
Early in the morning the spy reports in writ-
ing, and King Hakin, D, says that Karl and
his twelve peers shall burn on the bale, A, C,
D, if they cannot make good their boasts, B.
Karl's queen appears to him in his sleep, A,
and bids him think of last night's words. It
is the queen of Constantinople in B, C, D who
rouses Karl to a sense of his plight; in B she
tells him that the brags have been reported,
and that burning will be the penalty unless
they be achieved. Karl then sees that his
wife knew what she was saying, and vows to
give her Hildarheim and a scarlet cloak if he
gets home alive. He hastens to church; a
dove descends from heaven and sits on his
arm [in B a voice comes from heaven]; he is
assured that the boasts shall all be performed,
but never let such a thing be done again. In
A three of the feats are executed, in D four,
in C seven, Oliver's in each case strictly, and
Turpin's, naturally, last. The king in C does
the feat which is proposed by Eimer in the
saga. A and C end abruptly with Turpin's
exploit. In D Karl falls on his knees and
prays, and the water retires; Karl rides out
of Constantinople, followed three days on the
road by Koronatus, as Hakin is now called,
stanza 103: it is Karlamagnus that wears his
crown higher. B takes a turn of its own.
Roland, Olger and Oliver are called upon to
do their brags. Roland blows so that nobody
in Constantinople can keep his legs, and the
emperor falls into the mud, but he blows not
a hair off the emperor's head; Olger slings
the gold-bolt over the wall, but breaks off
none; Oliver gives a hundred kisses, as in the
saga. The emperor remarks each time, I hold
him no champion that performs his rouse that
* Romania, IX, 8 ff. The English ballad has also com-
bined two stories: that of the gabs with another in which
a magical horse, horn, and sword are made prize of by a
favored hero.
t The particular for which superiority is claimed will nat-
urally vary. The author of Charlemagne's Journey has the
good taste not to give prominence to simple riches, but in
Galien riches is from the beginning the point. So none
hath so much gold as Cornwall King. Solomon's fame is to
way. But Turpin's brag is thoroughly done;
the emperor is driven to the tower, and begs
Karl to turn off the water; no more feats shall
be exacted. Now the two kaisers walk in the
hall, conferring about tribute, which Karl
takes and rides away. When he reaches
home his queen welcomes him, and asks what
happened at Constantinople: "Hvat gekk
af?" "This," says Karl; " I know the truth
now; you shall be queen as before, and shall
have a voice in the rule."
It is manifest that Charlemagne's pilgrim-
age to Jerusalem and the visit to the king of
Constantinople, though somewhat intimately
combined in the old French geste, were origi-
nally distinct narratives. As far as we can
judge, nothing of the pilgrimage was retained
by the English ballad. We are not certain,
even, that it is Charlemagne's visit to Hugo
upon which the ballad was formed, though
the great popularity of the French poem makes
this altogether likely. As M. Gaston Paris
has said and shown,* the visit to Hugo is one
of a cycle of tale3 of which the framework
is this: that a king who regards himself as
the richest or most magnificent in the world
is told that there is somebody that outstrips
him, and undertakes a visit to his rival to de-
termine which surpasses the other, threaten-
ing death to the person who has disturbed his
self-complacency, in case the rival should turn
out to be his inferior. A familiar example
is afforded by the tale of Aboulcassem, the
first of the Mille et un Jours. Haroun Alras-
chid was incessantly boasting that no prince
in the world was so generous as he.f The
vizier Giafar humbly exhorted the caliph not
to praise himself, but to leave that to others.
The caliph, much piqued, demanded, Do you
then know anybody who compares with me?
Giafar felt compelled to reply that there was
exceed all the kings of the earth " for riches and for wis-
dom ; " and although the queen of Sheba came to prove him
with hard questions, she must have had the other matter also
in view, for she says. The half was not told me ; thy wisdom
and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard: 1 Kings,
x. Coming down to very late times, we observe that it is
the wealih of the Abbot of Canterbury which exposes him to
a visit from the king.


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
283
a young man at Basra, who, though in a pri-
vate station, was not inferior even to the
caliph in point of generosity. Haroun was
very angry, and, on Giafar's persisting in
what he had said, had the vizier arrested, and
finally resolved to go to Basra to see with
his own eyes: if Giafar should have spoken
the truth, he should be rewarded, but in the
other event he should forfeit his life.*
This story, it is true, shows no trace of the
gabs which Charlemagne and the peers make,
and which Hugo requires to be accomplished
on pain of death. The gabs are a well-known
North-European custom, and need not be
sought for further; but the requiring by one
king of certain feats to be executed by an-
other under a heavy penalty is a feature of a
large class of Eastern tales of which there has
already been occasion to speak: see 'The El-
fin Knight,' p. 11. The demand in these, how-
ever, is made not in person, but through an
ambassador. The combination of a personal
visit with a task to be performed under pen-
alty of death is seen in the VafpruSnismal,
where Odin, disguised as a traveller, seeks a
contest in knowledge with the wisest of the
giants. f
The story of the gabs has been retold in
two modern imitations: very indifferently by
Nivelle de la Chaussee, 'Le Roi Hugon,'
GEuvres, t. V, supplement, p. 66, ed. 1778,
and well by M. J. Chenier, 'Les Miracles,'
III, 259, ed. 1824. J Uhland treated the sub-
ject dramatically in a composition which has
not been published: Keller, Altfranzosische
Sagen, 1876, Inhalt (Koschwitz).
Percy MS., p. 24. Hales and Furnivall, I, 61; Madden's
Syr Gawayne, p. 275.
*****
1 [Saies, 'Come here, cuzen Gawaine so gay,]
My sisters sonne be yee;
Ffor you shall see one of the fairest round ta-
bles
That euer you see with your eye.'
2 Then bespake Lady Queen. Gueneuer,
And these were the words said shee:
* The tale in the Mille et un Jours is directly from the
Persian, but the Persian is in the preface said to be a ver-
sion from Indian, that is, Sanskrit. There are two Tatar
traditional versions in Radloff, IV, 120, 310, which are cited
by G. Paris.
t Cited by G. Paris, who refers also to King Gylfi's expe-
dition to Asgard (an imitation of Odin's to VaffruSnir), and
sees some resemblance to the revolving palace of King Hugo
in the vanishing mansion in which Gylfi is received in Gylfa-
ginning; and again to Thor's visit to the giant GeirroSr,
Skildskaparmal, 18, which terminates by the giant's flinging
a red-hot iron bar at Thor, who catches it and sends it back
through an iron pillar, through GeirroSr skulking behind
the pillar, through the wall of the house, and into the
ground, a fair matching of Charlemagne's gab. (The giant
GeirroSr, like Cornwall King, is skilled in magic.) The be-
ginning of Biterolf and Dietleib also recalls that of Charle-
magne's Journey. Biterolf, a Spanish king, hears from an
old palmer, who has seen many a hero among Christians
'1 know where a round table is, thou noble
\dng,
Is worth thy round table and other such
three.
3 'The trestie that stands vnder this round ta-
ble,' she said,
'Lowe downe to the mould,
It is worth thy round table, thou worthy ktngr,
Thy halls, and all thy gold.
4 'The place where this round table stands in,
and heathens, that none is the equal of Attila. Biterolf had
thought that he himself had no superior, and sets out with
eleven chosen knights to see Etzel's court with his own eyes.
Romania, IX, 9 f.
Jatmundr [HloBver], a haughty emperor in Saxon-land,
sitting on his throne one day, in the best humor with him-
self, asks Siguror, his prime minister, where is the monarch
that is his match. SigurSr demurs a little; the emperor
specifies his hawk, horse, and sword as quite incomparable.
That may be, says the counsellor, but his master's glory, to
be complete, requires a queen that is his peer. The sugges-
tion of a possible equal rouses the emperor's ire. "But
since you talk such folly, name one," he says. SigurSr
names the daughter of Hrdlfr [Hugo] of Constantinople,
and is sent to demand her in marriage. Magus saga jarls,
ed. Cederschiold, c. i: Wulff, Recherches sur les Sagas de
Magus et de Geirard, p. 14 f.
\ G. Paris, Histoire Foe'tique de Charlemagne, p. 344.


284
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
It is worth thy castle, thy gold, thy fee,
And all good Litle Britaine.'
5 'Where may that table be, lady?' qwoth hee,
'Or where may all that goodly building
be?'
'You shall it seeke,' shee says, 'till you it find,
For you shall neuer gett more of me.'
6 Then bespake him noble King Arthur,
These were the words said hee:
'He make mine avow to God,
And alsoe to the Trinity,
7 'He never sleepe one night there as I doe an-
other,
Till that round table I see:
Sir Marramiles and Sir Tristeram,
Fellowes that ye shall bee.
8
'Weele be clad in palmers weede,
Fiue palmers we will bee;
9 'There is noe outlandish man will vs abide,
Nor will vs come nye.'
Then they riued east and the" riued west,
In many a strange country.
10 Then they tranckled a litle further,
They saw a battle new sett:
'Now, by my faith,' saies noble King Arthur,
well .
* * * # *
11 But when he cam to this . . c . .
And to the palace gate,
Soe ready was ther a proud porter,
And met him soone therat.
12 Shooes of gold the porter had on,
And all his other rayment was vnto the
same:
'Now, by my faith,' saies noble King Arthur,
'Yonder is a minion swaine.'
13 Then bespake noble "King Arthur,
These were the words says hee:
'Come hither, thou proud porter,
I pray thee come hither to me.
14 'I haue two poore rings of my finger,
The better of them He giue to thee;
Tell who may be lord of this castle,' he
sayes,
'Or who is lord in this cuntry?'
15 'Cornewall King,' the porter sayes,
'There is none soe rich as hee;
Neither in christendome, nor yet in heathen-
nest,
None hath soe much gold as he.'
16 And then bespake him noble King Arthur,
These were the words sayes hee:
'I haue two poore rings of my finger,
The better of them He giue thee,
If thou wilt greete him well, Cornewall King,
And greete him well from me.
17 'Pray him for one nights lodging and two
meales meate,
For his love that dyed vppon a tree;
Of one ghesting and two meales meate,
For his loue that dyed vppon a tree.
18 'Of one ghesting, of two meales meate,
For his love that was of virgin borne,
And in the morning that we may scape away,
Either without scath or scorne.'
19 Then forth is gone this proud porter,
As fast as he cold hye,
And when he came befor Cornewall King,
He kneeled downe on his knee.
20 Sayes, ' I haue beene porter-man, at thy gate,
This thirty winter and three
• • • • •
*****
21
Our Lady was borne; then thought Cornewall
King
These palmers had beene in Brittaiwe.
22 Then bespake him Cornwall King,
These were the words he said there:
'Did you euer know a comely king,
His name was King Arthur?'


30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
285
23 And then bespake him noble King Arthur,
These were the words said hee:
'I doe not know that comly king,
But once my selfe I did him see.'
Then bespake Cornwall King againe,
These were the words said he:
24 Sayes, ' Seuen yeere I was clad and fed,
In Litle Brittaine, in a bower;
I had a daughter by King Arthurs wife,
That now is called my flower;
For King Arthur, that kindly cockward,
Hath none such in his bower.
25 'For I durst sweare, and saue my othe,
That same lady soe bright,
That a man that were laid on his death bed
Wold open his eyes on her to haue sight.'
'Now, by my faith,' sayes noble King Arthur,
'And that's a full faire wight!'
26 And then bespake Cornewall [King] againe,
And these were the words he said:
'Come hither, flue or three of my knights,
And feitch me downe my steed;
King Arthur, that foule cockeward,
Hath none such, if he had need.
27 'For I can ryde him as far on a day
As King Arthur can doe any of his on
three;
And is it not a pleasure for a king
When he shall ryde forth on his iourney?
28 'For the eyes that beene in his head,
Th6 glister as doth the gleed.'
'Now, by my faith,' says noble King Arthur,
'That is a well faire steed.'
• # * • •
29
'Nobody say ....
But one that's learned to speake.'
30 Then King Arthur to his bed was brought,
A greeiued man was hee;
And soe were all his fellowes with him,
From him the thought neuer to flee.
31 Then take they did that lodly groome,
And under the rub-chadler closed was hee,
And he was set by King Arthurs bed-side,
To heere theire talke and theire comuwye;
32 That he might come forth, and make procla-
mation,
Long before it was day;
It was more for King Cornwalls pleasure,
Then it was for King Arthurs pay.
33 And when King Arthur in his bed was laid,
These were the words said hee:
'Ile make mine avow to God,
And alsoe to the Trinity,
That He be the bane of Cornwall Kinge,
Litle Brittaine or euer I see!'
34 'It is an vnaduised vow,' saies Gawaine the
gay.
'As ever king hard make I;
But wee that beene flue christian men,
Of the christen faith are wee,
And we shall fight against anoynted king
And all his armorie.'
35 And then bespake him noble Arthur,
And these were the words said he:
'Why, if thou be afraid, Sir Gawaine the
gay.
Goe home, and drinke wine in thine owne
country.'
36 And then bespake Sir Gawaine the gay,
And these were the words said hee:
'Nay, seeing you have made such a hearty
vow,
Heere another vow make will I.
37 'Ile make mine avow to God,
And alsoe to the Trinity,
That I will haue yonder faire lady
To Litle Brittaine with mee.
38 'He hose her hourly to my heart,
And with her He worke my will;'
# # # * #
39
These were the words sayd hee:
'Befor I wold wrestle with yonder feend,
It is better be drowned in the sea.'


286
30. KING ARTHUR AND KING CORNWALL
40 And then bespoke Sir Bredbeddle,
And these were the words said he:
'Why, I will wrestle with yon lodly feend,
God, my gouernor thou wilt bee!'
41 Then bespake him noble Arthur,
And these were the words said he:
'What weapons wilt thou haue, thou gentle
knight?
I pray thee tell to me.'
42 He sayes, ' Collen brand He haue in my hand,
And a Millaine knife fast by me knee,
And a Danish axe fast in my hands,
That a sure weapon I thinke wilbe.'
43 Then with his Collen brand that he had in his
hand
The bunge of that rub-chandler he burst in
three;
With that start out a lodly feend,
With seuen heads, and one body.
44 The fyer towards the element flew,
Out of his mouth, where was great plentie;
The knight stoode in the middle and fought,
That it was great ioy to see.
45 Till his Collaine brand brake in his hand,
And his Millaine knife burst on his knee,
And then the Danish axe burst in his hand first,
That a sur weapon he thought shold be.
46 But now is the knight left without any weap-
ons,
And alacke! it was the more pitty;
But a surer weapon then he had one,
Had neuer lord in Christentye;
And all was but one litle booke,
He found it by the side of the sea.
47 He found it at the sea-side,
Wrucked upp in a floode;
Our "Lord had written it with his hands,
And sealed it with his bloode.
*****
49 And when he came to the \ings chamber,
He cold of his curtesie:
Says, ' Sleepe you, wake you, noble King Ar-
thur?
And euer Iesus waken yee!'
50 'Nay, I am not sleeping, I am waking,'
These were the words said hee;
'Ffor thee I haue card; how hast thou fared?
O gentle knight, let me see.'
51 The knight wrought the kin.gr his booke,
Bad him behold, reede and see;
And euer he found it on the backside of the
leafe
As noble Arthur wold wish it to be.
52 And then bespake him King Arthur,
'Alas! thow gentle knight, how may this
be,
That I might see him in the same licknesse
That he stood vnto thee?'
53 And then bespake him the Greene Knight,
These were the words said hee:
'If youle stand stifly in the battell stronge.
For I haue won all the victory.'
54 Then bespake him the king againe,
And these were the words said hee:
'If wee stand not stifly in this battell strong,
Wee are worthy to be hanged all on a tree.'
55 Then bespake him the Greene Knight,
These were the words said he:
Saies, ' I doe coniure thee, thou fowle feend.
In the .same licknesse thou stood vnto me.'
56 With that start out a lodly feend,
With seuen heads, and one body;
The fier towards the element flaugh,
Out of his mouth, where was great plenty.
'57 The knight stood in the middle p . . .
48 'That thou doe not s
But ly still in that wall of stone,
. Till I haue beene with noble King Arthur, 58 .
And told him what I haue done.'


288
31. THE MARRIAGE OP SIR GAWAIN
77 Then forth is gone noble King Arthur, 78 He put the head vpon a swords point,
As fast as he cold hye, .....
And strucken he hath off King Cornwalls .....
head, .....
And came againe by and by.
I1. The tops of the letters of this line were cut off
in binding. Percy thought it had stood
previously,
«ome here Cuze/i Gawaine so gay.
FurnivaU says " the bottoms of the letters left
suit better those in the text" as given.
4 and 5, 8 and 9, are joined in the MS.
104. Half a page is gone from the MS., or about
38 or 40 lines; and so after 20«, 284, 382,
474, 571, 681, 781.
142. they better.
17s, 181. The first two words are hard to make out,
and look like A vne.
182. boirne.
191. his gone.
202. The lower half of the letters is gone.
21. InMS.:
our Lady was borne
then thought cornewall King these palmers had
beene in Brittanie.
28*. ?MS. Only the upper part of the letters is
left.
312. under thrub cbadler.
35. After this stanza is written, in the left margin
of the MS., The 3d Part.
381. homly to my hurt. Madden read hourly.
391. The to]) line is pared away.
41s. they words.
432. of the trubchandler.
46'. then had he.
64. p', i. e. pro or per, me. Madden.
66. Attached to 65 in MS.
69*. ?MS.
765,6. Joined with 77 in MS.
& and Arabic numerals have been frequently
written out.
31
THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
Percy MS., p. 46. Hales & Furnivall, I, 105; Madden's Syr Gawayne, p. 288 ; Percy's Reliques, ed. 1794, III, 350.
We have here again half a ballad, in seven
fragments, but the essentials of the story,
which is well known from other versions, hap-
pen to be preserved, or may be inferred
Arthur, apparently some day after Christ-
mas, had been encountered at Tarn Wadling,*
in the forest of Inglewood, by a bold baron
* Still so called: near Aiketgate, Hesket. Lysons, Cum-
berland, p. 112.
armed with a club, who offered him the choice
of fighting, or ransoming himself by coming
back on New Year's day and bringing word
what women most desire. Arthur puts this
question in all quarters, and having collected
many answers, in which, possibly, he had little
confidence, he rides to keep his day. On the
way he meets a frightfully ugly woman; she
intimates that she could help him. Arthur
promises her Gawain in marriage, if she will,


31. THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
289
and she imparts to him the right answer. Ar-
thur finds the baron waiting for him at the
tarn, and presents first the answers which he
had collected and written down. These are
contemptuously rejected. Arthur then says
that he had met a lady on a moor,* who had
told him that a woman would have her will.
The baron says that the misshapen lady on
the moor was his sister, and he will burn her
if he can get hold of her. Upon Arthur's re-
turn he tells his knights that he has a wife for
one of them, and they ride with the king to
see her, or perhaps for her to make her choice.
When they see the bride, they decline the
match in vehement terms, all but Gawain,
who is somehow led to waive "a little foul
sight and misliking." She is bedded in all her
repulsiveness, and turns to a beautiful young
woman. To try Gawain's compliance further,
she asks him whether he will have her in this
likeness by night only or only by day. Putting
aside his own preference, Gawain leaves the
choice to her, and this is all that is needed to
keep her perpetually beautiful. For a step-
mother had witched her to go on the wild
moor in that fiendly shape until she should
meet some knight who would let her have all
her will. Her brother, under a like spell, was
to challenge men either to fight with him at
odds or to answer his hard question.
These incidents, with the variation that Ar-
thur (who does not show all his customary
chivalry in this ballad) waits for Gawain's
consent before he promises him in marriage,
are found in a romance, probably of the fif-
teenth century, printed in Madden's Syr Ga-
wayne, and somewhat hastily pronounced by
the editor to be "unquestionably the original
of the mutilated poem in the Percy folio." *
Arthur, while hunting in Ingleswood, stalked
and finally shot a great hart, which fell in a
fern-brake. While the king, alone and far
from his men, was engaged in making the
* 'The Weddynge of S' Gawen and Dame Ragnell,'
Rawlinson MS., C 86, Bodleian Library, the portion con-
taining the poem being paper, and indicating the close of
Henry VII's reign. The poem is in six-line stanzas, and,
with a leaf that is wanting, would amount to about 925
lines. Madden's Syr Gawayne, lxiv, Ixvii, 26, 298*-298y.
assay, there appeared a groom, bearing the
quaint name of Gromer Somer Joure,"}" who
grimly told him that he meant now to requite
him for having taken away his lands. Arthur
represented that it would be a shame to knight-
hood for an armed man to kill a man in green,
and offered him any satisfaction. The only
terms Gromer would grant were that Arthur
should come back alone to that place that day
twelvemonth, and then tell him what women
love best; not bringing the right answer, he
was to lose his head. The king gave his oath,
and they parted. The knights, summoned by
the king's bugle, found him in heavy cheer,
and the reason he would at first tell no man,
but after a while took Gawain into confidence.
Gawain advised that they two should ride
into strange country in different directions,
put the question to every man and woman
they met, and write the answers in a book.
This they did, and each made a large collec-
tion. Gawain thought they could not fail, but
the king was anxious, and considered that it
would be prudent to spend the only month
that was left in prosecuting the inquiry in the
region of Ingleswood. Gawain agreed that it
was good to be speering, and bade the king
doubt not that some of his saws should help
at need.
Arthur rode to Ingleswood, and met a lady,
riding on a richly-caparisoned palfrey, but
herself of a hideousness which beggars words;
nevertheless the items are not spared. She
came up to Arthur and told him that she
knew his counsel; none of his answers would
help. If he would grant her one thing, she
would warrant his life; otherwise, he must lose
his head. This one thing was that she should
be Gawain's wife. The king said this lay with
Gawain; he would do what he could, but it
were a pity to make Gawain wed so foul a lady.
"No matter," she rejoined, " though I be foul:
choice for a mate hath an owl. When thou
t Sir Gromer occurs in "The Turke and Gowin," Percy
MS., Hales and Furnivall, I, 102; Sir Grummore Grum-
morsum, "a good knight of Scotland," in Morte d'Arthur;
ed. Wright, I, 286 and elsewhere (Madden).
37


290
31. THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
comest to thine answer, I shall meet thee;
else art thou lost."
The king returned to Carlisle with a heart
no lighter, and the first man he saw was Ga-
wain, who asked how he had sped. Never so
ill: he had met a lady who had offered to save
his life, but she was the foulest he had ever
seen, and the condition was that Gawain
should be her husband. "Is that all?" said
Gawain. "I will wed her once and again,
though she were the devil; else were I no
friend." Well might the king exclaim, "Of
all knights thou bearest the flower!"
After five or six days more the time came
for the answer. The king had hardly ridden
a mile into the forest when he met the lady,
by name Dame Ragnell. He told her Gawain
should wed her, and demanded her answer.
"Some say this and some say that, but above
all things women desire to have the sover-
eignty ; tell this to the knight; he will curse
her that told thee, for his labor is lost." Ar-
thur, thus equipped, rode on as fast as he could
go, through mire and fen. Groruer was wait-
ing, and sternly demanded the answer. Ar-
thur offered his two books, for Dame Ragnell
had told him to save himself by any of those
answers if he could. "Nay, nay, king," said
Gromer, " thou art but a dead man." "Abide,
Sir Gromer, I have an answer shall make
all sure. Women desire sovereignty." "She
that told thee that was my sister, Dame Rag-
nell; I pray I may see her burn on a fire."
And so they parted.
Dame Ragnell was waiting for Arthur, too,
and would hear of nothing but immediate ful-
• See 'King Henry,' the next ballad.
t The Gaelic tale of ' The Hoodie ' offers a similar choice.
The hoodie, a species of crow, having married the youngest
of a farmer's three daughters, says to her, "Whether
wouldst thou rather that I should be a hoodie by day and a
man at night, or be a hoodie at night and a man by day?"
The woman maintains her proper sovereignty, and does not
leave the decision to him : " ' I would rather that thou wert a
man by day and a hoodie at night,' says she. After this he
was a splendid fellow by day, and a hoodie at night." Camp-
bell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, I, 63.
The having one shape by day and another by night is a
common feature in popular tales: as, to be a bear by day and
a man by night, Hrdlfr Kraki's Saga, c. 26, Asbjernsen og
Moe, Norske Folkeeventyr, No 41; a lion by day and a man
fillment of her bargain. She followed the king
to his court, and required him to produce Ga-
wain instantly, who came and plighted his
troth. The queen begged her to be married
privately, and early in the morning. Dame
Ragnell would consent to no such arrange-
ment. She would not go to church till high-
mass time, and she would dine in the open hall.
At her wedding she was dressed more splen-
didly than the queen, and she sat at the head
of the table at the dinner afterwards. There
her appetite was all but as horrible as her
person: she ate three capons, three curlews,
and great bake meats, all that was set before
her, less and more.*
A leaf is wanting now, but what followed
is easily imagined. She chided Gawain for
his offishness, and begged him to kiss her, at
least. "I will do more," said Gawain, and,
turning, beheld the fairest creature he ever
saw. But the transformed lady told him that
her beauty would not hold: he must choose
whether she should be fair by night and foul
by day, or fair by day and foul by night.f
Gawain said the choice was hard, and left all
to her. "Gramercy," said the lady, "thou
shalt have me fair both day and night." Then
she told him that her step-dame had turned
her into that monstrous shape by necromancy,
not to recover her own till the best knight
in England had wedded her and given her
sovereignty in all points.J A charming little
scene follows, vv 715-99, in which Arthur
visits Gawain in the morning, fearing lest
the fiend may have slain him. Something
of this may very likely have been in that
by night, Grimms, K. u. H. m., No 88; a crab by day and
a man by night, B. Schmidt, Griechische Miirchen, u. s. w.,
No 10; a snake by day and a man by night, Karadshitch,
Volksmarchen der Scrben, Nos 9, 10; a pumpkin by day
and a man by night, A. & A. Schott, Walachische Marchen,
No 23; a ring by day, a man by night, Mullenhoff, No 27,
p. 4B6, Karadshitch, No 6, Afanasief, VI, 189. Three
princes in ' Kung Lindorm,' Nicolovius, Folklifwet, p. 48 ft,
are cranes by day and men by night, the king himself being
man by day and worm by night. The double shape is some-
times implied though not mentioned.
} The brother, Gromer Somer Joure, was a victim of the
same necromancy; so the Carl of Carlile, Percy MS., Hales
& Furnivall, III, 291.


31. THE MABRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
29J
half page of the ballad which is lost after
stanza 48.
Gower and Chaucer both have this tale,
though with a different setting, and with the
variation, beyond doubt original in the story,
that the man whose life is saved by rightly
answering the question has himself to marry
the monstrous woman in return for her
prompting him.
Gower relates, Confessio Amantis, Book
First, 1,89-104, ed. Pauli, that Florent, nephew
of the emperor, as Gawain is of Arthur, slew
Branchus, a man of high rank. Branchus's
kin refrained from vengeance, out of fear
of the emperor; but a shrewd lady, grand-
mother to Branchus, undertook to compass
Florent's death in a way that should bring
blame upon nobody. She sent for Florent,
and told him that she would engage that he
should not be molested by the family of
Branchus if he could answer a question she
would ask. He was to have a proper allow-
ance of time to find the answer, but he was
also to agree that his life should be forfeited
unless his answer were right. Florent made
oath to this agreement, and sought the opin-
ions of the wisest people upon the subject, but
their opinions were in no accord. Consider-
ing, therefore, that he must default, he took
leave of the emperor, adjuring him to allow
no revenge to be taken if he lost his life, and
went to meet his fate. But on his way through
a forest he saw an ugly old woman, who called
to him to stop. This woman told him that he
was going to certain death, and asked what he
would give her to save him. He said, any-
thing she should ask, and she required of him
a promise of marriage. That he would not
give. "Ride on to your death, then," said she.
Florent began to reflect that the woman was
very old, and might be hidden away some-
where till she died, and that there was no other
chance of deliverance, and at last pledged his
word that he would marry her if it should turn
out that his life could be saved only through
* And whan that this matrone herde
The maner how this knight answerde,
She saide, Ha, treson, wo the be!
That hast thus told the privete
the answer that she should teach him. She
was perfectly willing that he should try all
other shifts first, but if they failed, then let
him say that women cared most to be sov-
ereign in love. Florent kept back this answer
as long as he could. None of his own replies
availed, and the lady who presided in judg-
ment at last told him that he could be allowed
but one more. Then he gave the old woman's
answer, and was discharged, with a curse on
her that told.*
The old woman was waiting for Florent,
and he now had full leisure to inspect all her
points; but he was a knight, and would hold
his troth. He set her on his horse before
him, rode by night and lay close by day, till he
came to his castle. There the ladies made an
attempt to attire her for the wedding, and she
was the fouler for their pains. They were
married that night. He turned away from the
bride; she prayed him not to be so discour-
teous. He turned toward her, with a great
moral effort, and saw (for the chamber was
full of light) a lady of eighteen, of unequalled
beauty. As he would have drawn her to him
she forbade, and said he must make his choice,
to have her such by day or by night. "Choose
for us both," was his reply. "Thanks,"
quoth she, " for since you have made me sov-
ereign, I shall be both night and day as I am
now." She explained that, having been daugh-
ter of the king of Sicily, her stepmother had
forshapen her, the spell to hold till she had
won the love and the sovei'eignty of what
knight passed all others in good name.
The scene of Chaucer's tale, The Wife of
Bath, returns to Arthur's court. One of the
bachelors of the household, when returning
from hawking, commits a rape, for which he
is condemned to death. But the queen and
other ladies intercede for him, and the king
leaves his life at the disposal of the queen.
The queen, like the shrewd lady in Gower, but
with no intent to trapan the young man, says
that his life shall depend upon his being able
Which alle women most desire:
I wolde that thou were a-fire!
So Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell, vv 474 f, and onr bal-
lad, stanzas 29, 30.


292
31. THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
to tell her what women most desire, and gives
him a year and a day to seek an answer. He
makes extensive inquiries, but there is no re-
gion in which two creatures can be found to
be of the same mind, and he turns homeward
very downcast.
On his way through a wood he saw a com-
pany of ladies dancing, and moved towards
them, in the hope that he might learn some-
thing. But ere he came the dancers had van-
ished, and all he found was the ugliest woman
conceivable sitting on the green. She asked
the knight what he wanted, and he told her
it was to know what women most desire.
"Plight me thy troth to do the next thing I
ask of thee, and I will tell thee." He gave his
word, and she whispered the secret in his ear.
The court assembled, the queen herself sit-
ting as justice, and the knight was commanded
to say what thing women love best. He made
his response triumphantly; there was no dis-
senting voice. But as soon as he was declared
to have ransomed his life, up sprang the old
woman he had met in the wood. She had
taught the man his answer, he had plighted
his word to do the first thing she asked of
him, and now she asked him to make her his
wife. The promise was not disputed, but the
poor youth begged her to make some other
request; to take all he had in the world, and
let him go. She would not yield, and they
were married the next day. When they have
gone to bed, the old wife, "smiling ever mo,"
rallies her husband for his indifference, and
lectures him for objecting to ugliness, age, and
vulgar birth, which things, she says, are a
great security for him, and then gives him his
election, to have her ugly and old as she is,
but true, or young and fair, with the possible
contingencies. The knight has the grace to
leave the decision to her. "Then I have the
sovereignty," she says, "and I will be both
fair and good; throw up the curtain and see."
* This was a melodrama by Favart, in four acts: reduced
in 1821 to one act, at the Gymnase.
t Chaucer's tale is commonly said to be derived from
Gower's, but without sufficient reason. Vv 6507-14, ed.
Tyrwhitt, are close to Dame Ragncll, 409-420. Gower
may have got his from some Example-book. I have not
Fair and young she was, and they lived to their
lives' end in perfect joy.
Chaucer has left out the step-mother and
her bewitchment, and saves, humbles, and re-
wards the young knight by the agency of a
good fairy; for the ugly old woman is evi-
dently such by her own will and for her own
purposes. She is " smiling ever mo," and has
the power, as she says, to set all right when-
ever she pleases. Her fate is not dependent
on the knight's compliance, though his is.
The Wife of Bath's Tale is made into a
ballad, or what is called a sonnet,' Of a Knight
and a Fair Virgin,' in The Crown Garland of
Golden Roses, compiled by Richard Johnson,
not far from 1600: see the Percy Society re-
print, edited by W. Chappell, vol. vi of the se-
ries, p. 68. Upon Chaucer's story is founded
Voltaire's tale, admirable in its way, of Ce qui
plait aux Dames, 1762; of which the author
writes, 1765, November 4, that it had had
great success at Fontainebleau in the form of
a comic opera, entitled La Fee Urgele.* The
amusing ballad of The Knight and Shep-
herd's Daughter has much in common with
the Wife of Bath's Tale, and might, if we
could trace its pedigree, go back to a common
origin al.f
Tales resembling the Marriage of Gawain
must have been widely spread during the
Middle Ages. The ballad of 'King Henry'
has much in common with the one now under
consideration, and Norse .and Gaelic connec-
tions, and is probably much earlier. At pres-
ent I can add only one parallel out of Eng-
lish, and that from an Icelandic saga.
Grfinr was on the verge of marriage with
Lopthaena, but a week before the appointed
day the bride was gone, and nobody knew
what had become of her. Her father had
given her a step-mother five years before, and
the step-mother had been far from kind; but
what then? Grfmr was restless and unhappy,
seen it remarked, and therefore will note, that Example-
books may have been known in England as early as 1000,
for Aelfric seems to speak slightingly of them in his treaiise
on the Old Testament. The Proverbs, he says, is a "big-
spellbdc, nd swilce g€ secga.%, ac wi'sdomes bigspell aud war-
nung wi5 dysig," etc.


31. THE MAERIAGE OP SIR GAWAIN
293
and got no tidings. A year of scarcity com-
ing, he left home with two of his people.
After an adventure with four trolls, he had a
fight with twelve men, in which, though they
were all slain, he lost his comrades and was very
badly wounded. As he lay on the ground,
looking only for death, a woman passed, if
so she might be called; for she was not taller
than a child of seven years, so stout that
Grfmr's arms would not go round her, mis-
shapen, bald, black, ugly, and disgusting in
every particular. She came up to Grfmr, and
asked him if he would accept his life from
her. "Hardly," said he, "you are so loath-
some." But life was precious, and he pres-
ently consented. She took him up and ran
with him, as if he were a babe, till she came
to a large cave; there she set him down, and
it seemed to Grfmr that she was uglier than
before. "Now pay me for saving your life,"
she said, "and kiss me." "I cannot," said
Grimr, "you look so diabolical." "Expect
no help, then, from me," said she, "and I see
that it will soon be all over with you."
"Since it must be, loath as I am," said Grfmr,
and went and kissed her; she seemed not so
bad to kiss as to look at. When night came
she made up a bed, and asked Grfmr whether
he would lie alone or with her. "Alone," he
answered. "Then," said she, "I shall take
no pains about healing your wounds." Grfmr
said he would rather lie with her, if he had no
other chance, and she bound up his wounds,
so that he seemed to feel no more of them. No
sooner was Grfmr abed than he fell asleep, and
when he woke, he saw lying by him almost the
fairest woman he had ever laid eyes on, and
marvellously like his true-love, Lopthaena. At
the bedside he saw lying the troll-casing which
she had worn; he jumped up and burned
this. The woman was very faint; he sprin-
kled her with water, and she came to, and
said, It is well for both of us; I saved thy
life first, and thou hast freed me from bon-
dage. It was indeed Lopthaena, whom the
step-mother had transformed into a horrible
shape, odious to men and trolls, which she
should never come out of till a man should
consent to three things, — which no man ever
would, — to accept his life at her hands, to
kiss her, and to share her bed. Grfms saga
loSinkinna, Rain, Fornaldar Sogur, II, 143-
52.
Sir Frederic Madden, in his annotations
upon this ballad, ' Syr Gawayne,' p. 359, re-
marks that Sir Steven, stanza 31, does not
occur in the Round Table romances; that Sir
Banier, 32, is probably a mistake for Beduer,
the king's constable; and that Sir Bore and
Sir Garrett, in the same stanza, are Sir Bors
de Gauves, brother of Lionel, and Gareth, or
Gaheriet, the younger brother of Gawain.
'The Marriage of Sir Gawaine,' as filled
out by Percy from the fragments in his man-
uscript, Reliques, 1765, III, 11, is translated
by Bodmer, I, 110; by Bothe, p. 75; by
Knortz, Lieder u. Romanzen Alt-Englands, p.
135.
1 Kinge Arthur Hues in merry Carleile,
And seemely is to see,
And there he hath with him Queene Gene-
r,
That bride soe bright of blee.
2 And there he hath with [him] Queene Gene-
ver,
That bride soe bright in bower,
And all his barons about him stoode,
That were both stifEe and stowre.
3 The king kept a royall Christmasse,
Of mirth and great honor,
And when
*****
4 'And bring me word what thing it is
That a woman [will] most desire;
This shalbe thy ransome, Arthur,' he sayes,
'For Ile haue noe other hier.'


31. THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
295
25 And he sayd, I have thee and thy land, Ar-
thur,
To doe as it pleaseth me,
For this is not thy ransome sure,
Therfore yeeld thee to me.
26 And then hespoke him nohle Arthur,
And bad him hold his hand:
'And giue me leaue to speake my mind
In defence of all my land.'
27 He said, As I came over a more,
I see a lady where shee sate
Betweene an oke and a green hollen;
Shee was clad in red scarlett.
28 And she says a woman will haue her will,
And this is all her cheef desire:
Doe me right, as thou art a baron of sckill,
This is thy ransome and all thy hyer.
29 He sayes, An early vengeance light on her!
She walkes on yonder more;
It was my sister that told thee this,
And she is a misshappen hore.
30 But heer He make mine avow to God
To doe her an euill turne,
For an euer I may thate fowle theefe get,
In a fyer I will her burne.
*****
31 Sir Lancelott and Sir Steven bold,
They rode with them that day,
And the formost of the company
There rode the steward Kay.
32 Soe did Sir Banier and Sir Bore,
Sir Garrett with them soe gay,
Soe did Sir Tristeram that gentle knight,
To the forrest fresh and gay.
33 And when he came to the greene forrest,
Vnderneath a greene holly tree,
Their sate that lady in red scarlet
That vnseemly was to see.
34 Sir Kay beheld this ladys face,
And looked vppon her swire;
'Whosoeuer kisses this lady,' he sayes,
'Of his kisse he stands in feare.'
35 Sir Kay beheld the lady againe,
And looked vpon her snout;
'Whosoeuer kisses this lady,' he saies,
'Of his kisse he stands in doubt.'
36 'Peace, cozere Kay,' then said Sir Gawaine,
'Amend thee of thy life;
For there is a knight amongst vs all
That must marry her to his wife.'
37 'What! wedd her to wiffe!' then said Sir Kay,
'In the diuells name anon!
Gett me a wiffe where-ere I may,
For I had rather be slaine!'
38 Then some tooke vp their hawkes in hast,
And some tooke vp their hounds,
And some sware they wold not marry her
For citty nor for towne.
39 And then be-spake him noble King Arthur,
And sware there by this day,
'For a litle foule sight and misliking
*****
40 Then shee said, Choose thee, gentle Gawaine,
Truth as I doe say,
Wether thou wilt haue me in this liknesse
In the night or else in the day.
41 And then bespake him gentle Gawaine,
Was one soe mild of moode,
Sayes, Well I know what I wold say,
God grant it may be good!
42 To haue thee fowle in the night
When I with thee shold play —
Yet I had rather, if I might,
Haue thee fowle in the day.
43 'What! when lords goe with ther feires,' shee
said,
'Both to the ale and wine,
Alas! then I must hyde my selfe,
I must not goe withinne.'
44 And then bespake him gentle Gawaine,
Said, Lady, that's but skill;
And because thou art my owne lady,
Thou shalt haue all thy will.


296
31. THE MARRIAGE OF SIR GAWAIN
45 Then she said, Blesed be thou, gentle Gawain,
This day that I thee see,
For as thou seest me att this time,
From hencforth I wilbe.
46 My father was an old knight,
And yett it chanced soe
That he marryed a younge lady
That brought me tc this woe.
47 Shee witched me, being a faire young lady,
To the greene forrest to dwell,
And there I must walke in womans liknesse,
Most like a feend of hell.
48 She witched my brother to a carlish b . . .
*****
49
'That looked soe foule, and that was wont
On the wild more to goe.'
50 'Come kisse her, brother Kay,' then said Sir
Gawaine,
'And amend the of thy liffe;
I sweare this is the same lady
That I marryed to my wiffe.'
51 Sir Kay kissed that lady bright,
Standing vpon his ffeete;
He swore, as he was trew knight,
The spice was neuer soe sweete.
52 'Well, cozen Gawaine,' sayes Sir Kay,
'Thy chance is fallen arright,
For thou hast gotten one of the fairest maids
I euer saw with my sight.'
53 'It is my fortune,' said Sir Gawaine;
'For my vnckle Arthurs sake
I am glad as grasse wold be of raine,
Great ioy that I may take.'
54 Sir Gawaine tooke the lady by the one
arme,
Sir Kay tooke her by the tother,
They led her straight to Khig Arthur,
As they were brother and brother.
55 King Arthur welcomed them there all,
And soe did Lady Geneuer his queene,
With all the knights of the Round Table,
Most seemly to be seene.
56 Kin^ Arthur beheld that lady faire
That was soe faire and bright,
He thanked Christ in Trinity
For Sir Gawaine that gentle knight.
57 Soe did the knights, both more and lesse,
Reioyced all that day
For the good chance that hapened was
To Sir Gawaine and his lady gay.
Is. Qqueene.
3s. Half a parje ffons from the MS., about 9
stanzas; and so after 131, 22s, 30*, 39*,
48l.
191. Perhaps sayes.
23". he fimde.
25Perhaps sayes. 262. Perhaps hands.
271. He altered from the in MS.
31. "The 2d Part" is written here in the left
margin of the MS. Furnivall.
342. her sniire.
37*. shaine.
412. with one.
43seires.
442. a skill. 45*. thou see
481. Carlist B . . .
& is printed and.


298
32. KING HENRY
went away, with a scream, and the whole
scene was repeated with Oisean. Then she
came to Diarmaid. "Thou art hideous," he
said, "and thy hair is down to thy heels, but
come in." When she had come in, she told
Diarmaid that she had been travelling over
ocean and sea for seven years, without being
housed, till he had admitted her. She asked
that she might come near the fire. "Come,"
said Diarmaid; but when she approached
everybody retreated, because she was so hide-
ous. She had not been long at the fire, when
she wished to be under Diarmaid's blanket.
"Thou art growing too bold," said he, " but
come." She came under the blanket, and he
turned a fold of it between them. "She was
not long thus, when he gave a start, and he
gazed at her, and he saw the finest drop of
blood that ever was, from the beginning of
the universe till the end of the world, at his
side."
Mr Campbell has a fragment of a Gaelic
ballad upon this story, vol. xvii., p. 212 of his
manuscript collection, 'Collun gun Cheann,' or
'The Headless Trunk,' twenty-two lines. In
this case, as the title imports, a body without
a head replaces the hideous, dirty, and un-
kempt draggle-tail who begs shelter of the
Finn successively and obtains her boon only
from Diarmaid. See Campbell's Gaelic Bal-
lads, p. ix.
The monstrous deformity of the woman is
a trait in the ballad of 'The Marriage of Sir
Gawain,' and related stories, and is described
in these with revolting details. Her exagger-
ated appetite also is found in the romance of
The Wedding of Sir Gawen and Dame Rag-
nell, see p. 290. The occasion on which she
exhibits it is there the wedding feast, and the
scene consequently resembles, even more close-
ly there than here, what we meet with in the
Danish ballads of 'Greve Genselin,' Grundt-
vig, No 16, I, 222, and ' Tord af Havsgaard,'
Grundtvig, No 1, I, 1, IV, 580 (== Kristensen,
'Thors Hammer,' I, 85, No 35) the latter
founded on the JJrymskviSa, or Hamarsheimt,
of the older Edda. In a Norwegian version
of 'Greve Genselin,' Grundtvig, IV, 732, the
feats of eating and drinking are performed not
by the bride, but by an old woman who acts
as bridesmaid, brurekvinne.*
A maid who submits, at a linden-worm's en-
treaty, to lie in the same bed with him, finds
a king's son by her side in the morning:
Grundtvig, ' Lindormen,' No 65, B, C, II, 213,
III, 839; Kristensen, I, 195, No 71; Afzelius,
III, 121, No 88; Arwidsson, II, 270, No 139;
Hazelius, Ur de nordiska Folkens Lif, p. 117,
and p. 149. In ' Ode und de Slang',' Miillen-
hoff, Sagen u. s. w., p. 383, a maid, without
much reluctance, lets a snake successively
come into the house, into her chamber, and
finally into her bed, upon which the snake
changes immediately into a prince.
Scott's copy is translated by Schubart, p.
127, and by Gerhard, p. 129; Jamieson's, with-
out the interpolations, after Aytoun, II, 22, by
Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 36.
1 Lat never a man a wooing wend
That lacketh thingis three;
A routh o gold, an open heart,
Ay fu o charity.
2 As this I speak of King Henry,
For he lay burd-alone;
An he's doen him to a jelly hunt's ha,
Was seven miles frae a town.
* The like by a carl in at a birth-feast, ' Kaellingen til Bar-
sel,' Kristensen, II, 341, No 100, Landstad, p. 666, No 96;
known also in Sweden. Again, by a fighting friar, 'Den
stridbare Munken,'Arwidsson, I, 417. 'Greve Genselin' is
3 He chas'd the deer now him before,
An the roe down by the den,
Till the fattest buck in a' the flock
King Henry he has slain.
4 O he has doen him to his ha,
To make him beerly cheer;
An in it came a griesly ghost,
Steed stappin i the fleer.
translated by Prior, I, 173, and by Jamieson, Illustrations of
Northern Antiquities, p. 310; 'Tord af Havsgaard' by Prior,
i,3.


32. KING HENRY
299
5 Her head hat the reef-tree o the house,
Her middle ye mot wel span;
He's thrown to her his gay mantle,
Says,' Lady, hap your lingcan.'
6 Her teeth was a' like teather stakes,
Her nose like club or rnell;
An 1 ken naething she 'peard to be,
But the fiend that wons in hell.
7 'Some meat, some meat, ye King Henry,
Some meat ye gie to me!'
'An what meat's in this house, lady,
An what ha I to gie?'
'O ye do kill your berry-brown steed,
An you bring him here to me.'
8 O whan he slew his berry-brown steed,
Wow but his heart was sair!
Shee eat him [a'] up, skin an bane,
Left naething but hide an hair.
9 'Mair meat, mair meat, ye King Henry,
Mair meat ye gi to me!'
'An what meat's in this house, lady,
An what ha I to gi?'
'O ye do kill your good gray-hounds,
An ye bring them a' to me.'
10 O whan he slew his good gray-hounds,
Wow but his heart was sair!
She eat them a' up, skin an bane,
Left naething but hide an hair.
11 'Mair meat, mair meat, ye King Henry,
Mair meat ye gi to me!'
'An what meat's i this house, lady,
An what ha I to gi?'
'O ye do kill your gay gos-hawks,
An ye bring them here to me.'
12 O whan he slew his gay gos-hawks,
Wow but his heart was sair!
She eat them a' up, skin an bane,
Left naething but feathers bare.
a. 135. shew. 191. will.
b. 1. The first stanza of the original of this copy,
as cited by Anderson, is:
Let never a man a wooing wend
That lacketh things three.
13 'Some drink, some drink, now, King Henry,
Some drink ye bring to me!'
'O what drink's i this house, lady.
That you 're nae welcome ti?'
'O ye sew up your horse's hide,
An bring in a drink to me.'
14 And he's sewd up the bloody hide,
A puncheon o wine put in;
She drank it a' up at a waught,
Left na ae drap ahin.
15 'A bed, a bed, now, King Henry,
A bed you mak to me!
For ye maun pu the heather green,
An mak a bed to me.'
16 O pu'd has he the heather green,
An made to her a bed,
An up has he taen his gay mantle,
An oer it has he spread.
17 'Tak aff your claiths, now, King Henry,
An lye down by my side!'
'O God forbid,' says King Henry,
'That ever the like betide;
That ever the fiend that wons in hell
Shoud streak down by my side.'
*****
18 Whan night was gane, and day was come,
An the sun shone throw the ha,
The fairest lady that ever was seen
Lay atween him an the wa.
19 'O well is me !' says King Henry,
'How lang 'll this last wi me?'
Then out it spake that fair lady,
'Even till the day you dee.
20 'For I've met wi mony a gentle knight
That's gien me sic a fill,
But never before wi a courteous knight
That ga me a' my will.'
A routh of gold, and open heart,
An fu o charity.
I4. And fu o courtesey.
21. And this was seen o.
2s. And he has taen him to a haunted hunt's ha.


33. KBMPY KAY
301
spectively. Some verses from this ballad have
been adopted into one form of a still more
unpleasant piece in the Campbell collection,
concerning a wife who was " the queen of all
sluts." *
Sharpe remarks: "This song my learned
readers will perceive to be of Scandinavian
origin, and that the wooer's name was probably
suggested by Sir Kaye's of the Round Table.
. . . The description of Bengoleer's daugh-
ter resembles that of the enchanted damsel
who appeared to courteous King Henrie." It
is among possibilities that the ballad was an
outgrowth from some form of the story of
The Marriage of Sir Gawain, in the Percy
version of which the "unseemly" lady is so
rudely commented on and rejected by Kay.
This unseemly lady, in The Wedding of
Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and her counter-
part in 'King Henry,' who is of superhu-
man height, show an extravagant voracity
which recalls the giantess in • Greve Gense-
lin.' In 'Greve Genselin,' a burlesque form
of an heroic ballad which is preserved in a
pure shape in three Faroe versions (Grundt-
vig, IV, 737-42), there are many kemps in-
vited to the wedding, and in a little dance
which is had the smallest kemp is fifteen ells
to [below] the knee, Grundtvig, No 16, A 26,
B 29, C 29. Kempy Kay has gigantic dimen-
sions in A 7, C 9, E 7: teeth like tether-
stakes, a nose three [nine, five] feet long,
three ells [nine yards] between his shoulders,
a span between his eyne.f Of the bride it
is said in A 12 that her finger nails were like
the teeth of a rake and her teeth like tether-
stakes. This is not decisive; it is her ugli-
ness, filthiness, and laziness that are made
most of. We may assume that she would be
in dimension and the shape of nature a match
for the kemp, but she does not comport herself
especially like a giantess.
If Kempy Kay be the original name of the
wooer, Knapperty and Chickmakin might
easily be derived from corrupt pronunciations
like Kampeky, Kimpaky.
A
Pitcairn's MSS, II, 125, as taken down by Mr Pitcairn
from the singing of his aunt, Mrs Gammell, who had learned
it in the neighborhood of Kincaid, Stirlingshire, when a
child, or about 1770. Scotish Ballads and Songs [James
Maidment], Edinburgh, 1859, p. 35; Sharpe's Ballad Book,
p. 81.
1 Kempy Kaye's a wooing gane,
Far, far ayont the sea,
And he has met with an auld, auld man,
His gudefaythir to be.
2 'It's I'm coming to court your daughter
dear,
And some part of your gear :'
'And by my sooth,' quoth Bengoleer,
'She 'll sare a man a wear.
* MSS, II, 294, " What a bad luck had I" = The Queen
of all Sluts, the same, p. 297. Stanzas 2, 3,4, of the former
are:
Then een in her head are like two rotten plumbs;
Turn her about and see how she glooms.
The teeth in her head were like harrow-pins;
Turn her about, and see how she girns.
3 'My dochter she's a thrifty lass,
She span seven year to me,
And if it were weel counted up,
Full three heire it would be.
4 'What's the matter wi you, my fair creature,
You look so pale and wan?
I'm sure you was once the fairest creature
That ever the sun shined on.
5 'Gae scrape yoursel, and gae scart yoursel,
And mak your bracket face clean,
For the wooers are to be here to nighte,
And your body's to be seen.'
6 Sae they scrapit her, and they scartit her,
Like the face of an aussy pan;
The hair in her head was like heathercrows,
The 1... s were in't thick as linseed bows.
A comparatively inoffensive version,' The Queen of Sluts,'
in Chambers' Scottish Songs, p. 454.
t The Carl of Carlile has the space of a large span be-
tween his brows, three yards over his shoulders, fingers like
tether-stakes, and fifty cubits of height. Percy MS., Hales
& Furnivall, III, 283 f, vv 179-187.


302
33. KEMPY KAY
Syne in cam Kempy Kay himself,
A clever and tall young man.
7 His teeth they were like tether-sticks,
His nose was three fit lang,
Between his shouthers was ells three,
And tween his eyne a span.
8 He led his dochter by the hand,
His dochter ben brought he:
• O is she not the fairest lass
That's in great Christendye?'
9 Uka hair intil her head
Was like a heather-cowe,
And ilka louse anunder it
Was like a bruckit ewe.
10 She had tauchy teeth and kaily lips,
And wide lugs, fou o hair;
B
a. Kinloch MSS, I, 65. b. Kitiloch's Ballad Book, p.
41. From the recitation of Mary Barr.
1 Kempy Kaye is a wooing gane,
Far ayont the sea,
And there he met wi auld Goling,
His gudefather to be, be,
His gudefather to be.
2 'Whar are ye gaun, O Kempy Kaye,
Whar are ye gaun sae sune?'
'O I am gaun to court a wife,
And think na ye that's weel dune?'
3 'An ye be gaun to court a wife,
As ye do tell to me,
'T is ye sall hae my Fusome Fug,
Your ae wife for to be.'
4 Whan auld Goling cam to the house,
He lookit thro a hole,
And there he saw the dirty drab
Just whisking oure the coal.
5 'Rise up, rise up my Fusome Fug,
And mak your foul face clean,
For the brawest wooer that ere ye saw
Is come develling doun the green.'
6 Up then rose the Fusome Fug,
To mak her foul face clean;
Her pouches fou o peasemeal-daighe
A' hinging down her spare.
11 Ilka eye intil her head
Was like a rotten plumbe,
And down browed was the queyne,
And sairly did she gloom.
12 Uka nail upon her hand
Was like an iron rake,
And ilka tooth intil her head
Was like a tether-stake.
* * * * *
13 She gied to him a gravat,
O the auld horse's sheet,
And he gied her a gay gold ring,
0 the auld couple-root.
And aye she cursed her mither
She had na water in.
7 She rampit out, and she rampit in,
She rampit but and ben;
The tittles and tattles that hang frae her tail
Wad muck an acre o land.
8 She had a neis upon her face
Was like an auld pat-fit;
Atween her neis bot an her mou
Was inch thick deep wi dirt.
9 She had twa een intil her head
War like twa rotten plums;
The heavy brows hung doun her face,
And O I vow she glooms!
10 He gied to her a braw silk napkin,
Was made o' an auld horse-brat:
'I ne'er wore a silk napkin a' my life,
But weel I wat Ise wear that'
11 He gied to her a braw gowd ring,
Was made frae an auld brass pan:
'I neer wore a gowd ring in a' my life,
But now I wat Ise wear ane.'
12 Whan thir twa lovers had met thegither,
O kissing to get their fill,
The slaver that hang atween their twa gabs
Wad hae tetherd a ten year auld bill.


33. KBMPY KAY
303
0
Motherwell's MS., p. 193. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ap-
pendix, p. xxiv, No XXX, the first stanza.
1 Kempy Kaye's a wooing gane.
And far beyond the sea, a wee
And there he met wi Drearylane,
His gay gudefather to be. a wee
2 'Gude een, gude een,' quo Drearylane,
'Gude een, gude een,' quo he, a wee
'I've come your dochter's love to win,
I kenna how it will do.' a wee
3 'My dochter she's a thrifty lass,
She's spun this gay seven year,
And if it come to gude guiding,
It will be half a heer.'
4 'Rise up, rise up, ye dirty slut,
And wash your foul face clean;
The wooers will be here the night
That suld been here yestreen.'
5 They took him ben to the fire en,
And set him on a chair;
D
1 The father came unto the door,
And keeked thro the key-hole, a wee
And there he saw his dochter Jean,
Sitting on a coal. a wee
2 They scartit her, and scrapit her,
Wi the hand o a rusty pan, a wee
Her father he did all his best
For to get her a man. a wee
3 She is to the stoups gane,
There is nae water in;
E
Campbell MSS, II, 122.
1 'Gut> een, gud een,' says Chickmakin,
'Ye 're welcome here,' says Drowsy Lane;
He looked on the lass that he loved best,
And thought she was wondrous fair.
6 The een that was in our bride's head
Was like twa rotten plooms;
She was a chaunler-chaftit quean,
And O but she did gloom!
7 The skin that was on our bride's breast
Was like a saffron bag,
And aye her hand was at her neek,
And riving up the scabs.
8 The hair that was on our bride's head
Was like a heather-cow,
And every louse that lookit out
Was like a brockit ewe.
9 Betwixd Kempy's shouthers was three ells,
His nose was nine feet lang,
His teeth they were like tether sticks,
Between his eyne a span.
10 So aye they kissed, and aye they clapped,
I wat they kissed weel;
The slaver that hang between their mouths
Wad hae tethered a twa year auld bill.
She's cursed the hands and ban'd the feet
That did na bring it in.
Out then spak her auld mither,
In her bed whare she lay:
'If there is nae water in the house,
Gae harl her thro the lin.'
5 O she is to the taipy tapples gane,
That stood for seven year,
And there she washed her foul face clean,
And dried it wi a huggar.
6 He's gien her a gay gold ring,
Just like a cable-rope,
And she's gien him a gay gravat,
Made out o the tail o a sark.
'I'm comd to court your daughter Jean,
And marry her wi yer will, a wee.'
2 'My daughter J ean's a thrifty lass,
She's spun these seven lang years to me,
Motherwell's MS., p. 192.
*****


304
33. KEMPY KAY
And gin she spin another seven,
She 'll munt a half an heir, a wee.'
3 Drowsy Lane, it's he's gane hame,
And keekit through the hole, a wee
And there he saw his daughter Jean
A reeking oer the coal. a wee
4 'Get up, get up, ye dirty bitch,
And wash yer foul face clean,
For they are to be here the night
That should hae been here yestreen.'
5 Up she rose, pat on her clothes,
She's washen her foul face clean;
She cursd the hands, she ban'd the feet,
That wadna bring the water in.
6 She rubbit hersel, she scrubbit hersel,
Wi the side of a rustit pan, a wee,
And in a little came Chickmakin,
A braw young lad indeed was he.
7 His teeth they were like tether-steeks,
His nose was five feet lang;
Between his shoulders was nine yards broad,
And between his een a span.
8 Ilka hair into his head
Was like a heather-cowe,
And ilka louse that lookit out
Was like a brookit ewe.
9 Thae twa kissd and thae twa clapt,
And thae twa kissd their fill,
And aye the slaver between them hang
Wad tetherd a ten-pund bull.
10 They twa kissd and they twa clapt,
And they gaed to their bed, a wee,
And at their head a knocking stane
And at their feet a m ell, a wee.
11 The auld wife she lay in her bed:
'And gin ye 'll do my bidding a wee,
And gin ye 'll do my bidding,' quoth she,
'Yees whirl her oer the lea, a wee.'
F
Campbell MSS, II, 101.
1 As I cam oer yon misty muir,
And oer yon grass-green hill,
There I saw a campy carle
Going to the mill.
And bar aye yer bower door weel weel,
And bar aye yer bower door weel.
2 I lookit in at her window,
And in at her hove hole,
And there I saw a fousome fag,
Cowering oer a coal.
3 'Get up, get up, ye fousome fag,
And make yer face fou clean;
For the wooers will be here the night,
And your body will be seen.'
4 He gave her a gay cravat,
'T was of an auld horse-sheet;
He gave her a gay goud ring,
'T was of an auld tree root.
5 He laid his arms about her neck,
They were like kipple-roots;
And aye he kissd her wi his lips,
They were like meller's hoops.
6 When they were laid in marriage bed,
And covered oer wi fail,
The knocking lnell below their heads
Did serve them wondrous weel.
7 Ilka pap into her breasts
Was like a saffron bag,
And aye his hand at her a. . e
Was tearing up the scabs.
8 Ilka hair into her head
Was like a heather-cow,
And ilka louse that lookit out
Was like a brookit ewe.


306
34. KEMP OWYNE
After 9 follows:
Ilka hair that -was on her head
Was like a heather cow,
And ilka louse that lookit out
"Was like a lintseed bow.
a4 succeeds, with Kempy Kaye for auld
Goling, and is necessarily transferred
if the reading Kempy Kaye is retained.
C. The order of the first five stanzas in the MS
is 1, 2, 5, 4, 3.
A wee is the burden after every second and
fourth verse, and so with D.
I1 \ In Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p.
xxiv, No xxx,
Kempy Kane's a wooin gane,
And far ayont the sea awee.
3s. years. 52. on a stool.
D. The first stanza is numbered 3 in the MS.,
the second 5, and there is space left, as if
for another, between 2 and 3.
E. A wee, originally a burden at tlie middle and
the end of the stanza, as in C, D, has been
adopted into the verse in 1, 2, 6, 10(?), 11,
in which stanzas the even lines are of four
accents instead of three. 2, 6 can be easily
restored, on the model «/C3, A 6.
5*. in the water.
G. 1,1, lis added as burden to every second and
fourth line; except l2, which adds high,
high, and 24, oidy I, I.
34
KEMP OWYNE
A. 'Kemp Owyne.' Buchan's Ballads of the North B. 'Kempion.' a. Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 29.
of Scotland, II, 78 ; Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 873; b. Scott's Minstrelsy, 1802, II, 93, from William Tyt-
'Kemp Owayne,'Motherwell's MS., p. 448. ler's Brown MS., No 9, "with corrections from a
recited fragment."
It is not, perhaps, material to explain how
Owain, "the king's son Urien," happens to
be awarded the adventure which here follows.
It is enough that his right is as good as that of
other knights to whom the same achievement
has been assigned, though the romance, or, as
the phrase used to be, " the book," says noth-
ing upon the subject. Owain's slaying the
fire-drake who was getting the better of the
lion may have led to his name becoming as-
sociated with the still more gallant exploit of
thrice kissing a fire-drake to effect a disen-
chantment. The ring in A 9 might more
plausibly be regarded as being a repetition of
that which Owain's lady gave him on leaving
her for a twelvemonth's outing, a ring which
would keep him from loss of blood, and also
from prison, sickness, and defeat in battle —
in short, preserve him against all the accidents
which the knight suggested might prevent
his holding his day — provided that he had it
by him and thought on her. Ritson, Ywaine
and Gawin, vv 1514-38.
But an Icelandic saga comes near enough to
the story of the ballad as given in A to show
where its connections lie. Alsol and a brother
and sister are all transformed by a stepmother,
a handsome woman, much younger than her
husband. Als6l's heavy weird is to be a
nondescript monster with a horse's tail, hoofs,
and mane, white eyes, big mouth, and huge
hands, and never to be released from the spell
till a king's son shall consent to kiss her.
One night when Hjalmter had landed on a
woody island, and it had fallen to him to keep
watch, he heard a great din and crashing in
the woods, so that the oaks trembled. Pres-
ently this monster came out of the thicket


34. KEMP OWYNE
307
with a fine sword in her hand, such as he had
not seen the like of. They had a colloquy,
and he asked her to let him have the sword.
She said he should not have it unless he
would kiss her. "I will not kiss thy snout,"
said Hjalmtfir, "for mayhap I should stick to
it." But something came into his mind which
made him think better of her offer, and he
said he was ready. "You must leap upon my
neck, then," she said, "when I throw up the
sword, and if you then hesitate, it will be your
death." She threw up the sword, he leaped
on her neck and kissed her, and she gave him
the sword, with an augury of victory and good
luck for him all his days. The retransforma-
tion does not occur on the spot, but further
on Hjalmt&r meets Als6l as a young lady at
the court of her brother, who has also been re-
stored to his proper form and station; every-
thing is explained; Hjalmter marries her, and
his foster-brother her sister. Hjalmters ok
Olvers Saga, cc 10, 22, Rafn, Fornaldar Sogur,
III, 473 ff, 514 ff.
In many tales of the sort a single kiss suffices
to undo the spell and reverse the transforma-
tion; in others, as in the ballad, three are
required. The triplication of the kiss has led
in A to a triplication of the talisman against
wounds. The popular genius was inventive
enough to vary the properties of the several
gifts, and we may believe that belt, ring, and
sword had originally each its peculiar quality.
The peril of touching fin or tail in A seems
to correspond to that in the saga of hesitating
when the sword is thrown up.
The Danish ballad, 'Jomfruen i Ornie-
ham,' from MSS of the sixteenth and the sev-
enteenth century, Grundtvig, No 59, II, 177,
resembles both the first version of the Scottish
ballad and the Icelandic saga in the points
that the maid offers gifts and is rehabilitated
by a kiss. The maid in her proper shape,
which, it appears, she may resume for a por-
tion of the day, stands at Sir Jenus's bedside
* The incident of a woman trying to move a man who
all the while is in a deep sleep, and of his servant reporting
what has been going on, can hardly have belonged to this
ballad from the beginning. It is exceedingly common in
popular tales: see ' The Red Bull of Norroway,' in Cham-
and offers him gifts — five silver-bowls, all the
gold in her kist, twelve foals, twelve boats —
and ends with saying, " Were I a swain, as
you are, I would betroth a maid." It is now
close upon midnight, and she hints that he
must be quick. But Jenus is fast asleep the
while; twelve strikes, and the maid instantly
turns into a little snake. The page, however,
has been awake, and he repeats to his master
all that has occurred.* Sir Jenus orders his
horse, rides along a hillside, and sees the lit-
tle snake in the grass. He bends over and
kisses it, and it turns to a courteous maid,
who thanks him, and offers him any boon he
may ask. He asks her to be his, and as she
has loved him before this, she has no difficulty
in plighting him her troth.
A maid transformed by a step-mother into
a tree is freed by being kissed by a man, in
'Jomfruen i Linden,' Grundtvig, II, 214, No
66, Kristensen, II, 90, No 31; 'Linden,' Afze-
lius, III, 114, 118, No 87. In 'Linden,'
Kristensen, I, 13, No 5, a combination of two
ballads, a prince cuts down the linden, which
changes to a linden-worm ; he kisses the worm,
and a young maid stands before him.
A knight bewitched into the shape of a troll
is restored by being kissed by a peasant's wife
thrice [once], ' Trolden og Bondens Hustru,'
Grundtvig, II, 142, No 52, A, B; a prince by
a kiss from a maid, ' Lindormen,' Grundtvig,
D. g. F., II, 211, No 65 A, 'Slangen og den
lille Pige,' Danske Folkeminder, 1861, p. 15.
The removal of a spell which compels
man or woman to appear continuously or al-
ternately as a monster, commonly a snake, by
three kisses or by one, is a regular feature in
the numerous German tales of Schlangenjung-
frauen, Weissefrauen. Often the man is afraid
to venture the third kiss, or even a single
one. See Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, No 13, No
222; Dobeneck, Des deutschen Mittelalters
Volksglauben, 1,18 = Grimm, No 13 ; Mone's
Anzeiger, III, 89, VII, 476; Panzer, Bayer-
bers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 3d ed., p. 99; Grimms,
'Das singende springende Ixiweneckerchen,' No 88, 'Der
Eisenhofen,' No 127, and the notes in vol. iii; Leakien u.
Brugman, Litauische V. l. u. Marchen, 'Vom weissen
Wolf,' No 23, p. 438, and Wollner's note, p. 571.


308
34. KEMP OWYNE
ische Sagen u. Brauche, I, 196, No 214;
Schonhuth, Die Burgen u. s. w. Badens u. der
Pfalz, I, 105; Stober, Die Sagen des Elsasses,
p. 346, No 277, p. 248, No 190 ; Curtze, Volks-
iiberlieferungen aus Waldeck, p. 198; Som-
mer, Sagen, Marchen u. Gebriiuche aus Sach-
sen u. Thuringen, p. 21, No 16; Schambach
u. Miiller, p. 104, No 132 ; Mullenhoff, p. 580,
No 597; Wolf, Hessische Sagen, No 46; etc.,
etc.: also, Kreutzwald, Ebstniscbe Marchen,
by Lowe, No 19, p. 270 f. So in some forms
of 'Beauty and the Beast:' Toppen, Aber-
glauben aus Masuren, p. 142; Mikulieic, Nar-
odne Pripovietke, p. 1, No 1; Afanasief, VII,
153, No 15; Coelho, Contos populares portu-
guezes, p. 69, No 29.*
Rivals or peers of Owain among romantic
knights are, first, Lanzelet, in Ulrich von Zat-
zikhoven's poem, who kisses a serpent on the
mouth once, which, after bathing in a spring
(see ' Tam Lin '), becomes the finest woman
ever seen : vv 7836-7939. Brandimarte, again,
in Orlando Innamorato, lib. n., c. xxvI,
stanzas 7-15 ; and Carduino, I Cantari di Car-
duino, Rajna, stanzas 49, 54 f, 61-64, pp 35-
41. Le Bel Inconnu is an involuntary in-
strument in such a disenchantment, for the
snake fascinates him first and kisses him with-
out his knowledge; he afterwards goes to
sleep, and finds a beautiful woman standing
at his head when he wakes: ed. Hippeau, p.
110 ff, v. 3101 ff. The English Libius Dis-
conius is kist or he it wist, and the dragon
at once turns to a beautiful woman: Percy
MS., Hales & Fumivall, II, 493 f; Ritson,
Romances, II, 84 f. Espertius, in Tiran le
Blanc, is so overcome with fear that he cannot
kiss the dragon, — a daughter of Hippocrates,
transformed by Diana, in the island of Lango,
— but Espertius not running away, as two
men before him had done, the dragon kisses
him with equally good effect: Caylus, Tiran
* But not in Mme Villeneuvo's or in Mme de Beaumont's
'La Belle et la Bete.'
t Lanzelet is cilcd by J. Grimm; Brandimarte by Walter
Scott; Carduino by G. Paris; Espertius by Dunlop; Ama-
dis d'Astra by Valentin Schmidt. Dunlop refers to a simi-
lar story in the sixth tale of the Contcs Amoureux de Jean
Flore, written towards the end of the fifteenth century.
le Blanc, II, 334-39. This particular disen-
chantment had not been accomplished down to
Sir John Mandeville's time, for he mentions
only the failures: Voyage and Travel, c. iv,
pp 28-31, ed. 1725. Amadis d'Astra touches
two dragons on the face and breast, and re-
stores them to young-ladyhood: Historia del
Principe Sferamundi, the 13th book of Amadis
of Gaul, P. II, c. xcvii, pp 458-462, Venice,
1610. This feat is shown by the details to be
only a variation of the story in Tiran le
Blancf
The Rev. Mr Lamb, of Norham, communi-
cated to Hutchinson, author of 'A View of
Northumberland,' a ballad entitled ' The Laid-
ley Worm of Spindleston Heughs,' with this
harmless preamble: "A song 500 years old,
made by the old Mountain Bard, Duncan Fra-
sier, living on Cheviot, A. D. 1270. From an
ancient manuscript." This composition of
Mr Lamb's— for nearly every line of it is his
— is not only based on popular tradition, but
evidently preserves some small fragments of a
popular ballad, and for this reason is given in
an Appendix. There is a copy deviating but
very little from the print in Kinloch's MSS, I,
187. It was obtained from the recitation of
an old woman in Berwickshire. J In this re-
cited version the Child of Wynd, or Childy
Wynd (Child O-wyne), has become Child o
Wane (Child O-wayn).
Mr R. H. Evans, in his preface to this bal-
lad, Old Ballads, 1810, IV, 241, says that Mr
Turner had informed him "that a lady up-
wards of seventy had heard her mother repeat
an older and nearly similar ballad."
A is translated by Rosa Warrens, Schot-
tische Volkslieder, p. 19; B b by Gerhard, p.
171, by Schubart, p. 110, by Knortz, Lieder
u. Romanzen Alt-Englands, p. 201. 'Jom-
fruen i Ormeham' by Prior, III, 135.
J "The Childe of Wane, as a protector of disconsolate
damsels, is still remembered by young girls at school in the
neighborhood of Bnmborough, who apply the title to any
boy who protects them from the assaults of their school-fel-
lows." (Kinlocb.)


310
34. KEMP OWYNE
4 O meickle dollour did she dree,
An ay the sat seas oer she swam;
An far mair dollour did she dree
On Eastmuir craigs, or them she clam;
An ay she cried for Kempion,
Gin he would come till her han.
5 Now word has gane to Kempion
That sich a beast was in his lan,
An ay be sure she would gae mad
Gin she gat nae help frae his han.
6 'Now by my sooth,' says Kempion,
'This fiery beast I ['ll] gang to see ;'
'An by my sooth,' says Segramour,
'My ae brother, I 'll gang you wi.'
7 O biggit ha they a bonny boat,
An they hae set her to the sea,
An Kempion an Segramour
The fiery beast ha gane to see:
A mile afore they reachd the shore,
I wot she gard the red fire flee.
8 'O Segramour, keep my boat afloat,
An lat her no the lan so near;
For the wicked beast she 'll sure gae mad,
An set fire to the land an mair.'
9 'O out o my stye I winna rise —
An it is na for the fear o thee —
Till Kempion, the kingis son,
Come to the craig an thrice kiss me.'
10 He's louted him oer the Eastmuir craig,
An he has gien her kisses ane;
Awa she gid, an again she came,
The fieryest beast that ever was seen.
11 'O out o my stye I winna rise —
An it is na for fear o thee —
Till Kempion, the kingis son,
Come to the craig an thrice kiss me.'
12 He louted him oer the Eastmuir craig,
An he has gien her kisses twa;
Awa she gid, an again she came,
The fieryest beast that ever you saw.
13 'O out o my stye I winna rise —
An it is na for fear o ye —
Till Kempion, the kingis son,
Come to the craig an thrice kiss me.'
14 He's louted him oer the Eastmuir craig,
An he has gien her kisses three;
Awa she gid, an again she came,
The fairest lady that ever coud be.
15 'An by my sooth,' say[s] Kempion,
'My ain true love — for this is she —
O was it wolf into the wood,
Or was it fish intill the sea,
Or was it man, or wile woman,
My true love, that misshapit thee?'
16 'It was na wolf into the wood,
Nor was it fish into the sea,
But it was my stepmother,
An wae an weary mot she be.
17 'O a heavier weird light her upon
Than ever fell on wile woman;
Her hair's grow rough, an her teeth's grow
lang,
An on her four feet sal she gang.
18 'Nane sall tack pitty her upon,
But in Wormie's Wood she sall ay won.
An relieved sall she never be.
Till St Mungo come oer the sea.'
A. Buchan gives 4-6 in two six-line stanzas.
There are a few trivial diversities between
MotlierwelVs manuscript, or my copy of it,
and his printed text, xohich conforms to
Buchan's.
B. a. Written in long or double lines in the man-
uscript.
2s, 42. or.
5s. a besure.
8*. landy mair
ll4. twice.
16s. wicked is inserted before stepmother,
seemingly by Javdeson.
b. The first stanza, as given by Anderson,
Nichols, Literary Illustrations, vn, 177, is:
'Come here, come here, ye freely feed,
And lay your head low on my knee;
The heaviest weird I will you read
That ever was read till a lady.'


34. KEMP OWYNE
311
1s. heaviest. I4. gaye ladye.
22. ye'se. 24. when ye.
31. I weird ye to a fiery beast.
5 = a44,-f a5l*: a 5s,4 omitted:
And aye she cried for Kempion,
Gin he would but cum to her hand;
Now word has gane to Kempion
That sicken a beast was in his land.
64. wi thee.
7 omits a* 4. 75. But a mile before.
76. Around them she.
82. oer near. 8s. will sure.
84. to a' the land and mair.
After 8 is inserted:
Syne has he bent an arblast bow,
And aimd an arrow at her head,
And swore if she didna quit the land,
Wi that same shaft to shoot her dead.
91. stythe. 92. awe o thee.
101. dizzy crag. 102. gien the monster.
II1. stythe. II2. And not for a' thy bow
nor thee.
121. Estmere craigs.
131. my den. 132. Nor flee it for the
feir o thee.
13s. Kempion, that courteous knight.
141. lofty craig. 144. loveliest lady eer.
151'2. After this is inserted:
They surely had a heart o stane,
Could put thee to such misery.
15*"° make a separate stanza.
15s, 161. warwolf in the wood.
154, 162. mermaid in the sea.
156. my ain true.
17\ weird shall light her on.
17*. Her hair shall grow . . . teeth grow.
182. In Wormeswood she aye shall won.
186,6. And sighing said that weary wight,
I doubt that day I 'll never see.
APPENDIX
THE LAIDLEY WORM OF SPINDLESTON
HEUGHS.
A View of Northumberland, by W. Hutchinson, Anno
1776, Newcastle, 1778, II, 162-64. Communicated by the
liev. Mr Lamb, of Norham.
Kinloch's account of the tradition in relation to
the queen, as it maintains itself in Berwickshire, is
quite in accord with German sagen about enchanted
ladies, innocent or guilty, and as such may be
worth giving: Kinloch MSS, I, 187.
"Though the ballad mentions that the queen was
transformed into 'a spiteful toad of monstrous
size,' and was doomed in that form to wend on the
earth until the end of the world, yet the tradition
of the country gives another account of the endur-
ance of her enchantment. It is said that in form of
a toad as big as a 'clockin hen' she is doomed to
expiate her guilt by confinement in a cavern in
Bamborough castle, in which she is to remain in her
enchanted shape until some one shall have the har-
dihood to break the spell by penetrating the cavern,
whose ' invisible' door only opens every seven years,
on Christmas eve. The adventurer, after entering
the cavern, must take the sword and horn of the
Childe of Wane, which hang on the wall, and hav-
ing unsheathed and resheathed the sword thrice, and
wound three blasts on the horn, he must kiss the
toad three times; upon which the enchantment will
be dissolved, and the queen will recover her human
form.
"Many adventurers, it is said, have attempted to
disenchant the queen, but have all failed, having
immediately fallen into a trance, something similar
to the princes in the Arabian tale who went in
search of the Talking Bird, Singing Tree, and Yel-
low Water. The last one, it is said, who made the
attempt was a countryman, about sixty years ago,
who, having watched on Christmas eve the opening
of the door, entered the cavern, took the sword and
horn from the wall, unsheathed and resheathed the
sword thrice, blew three blasts on the horn, and was
proceeding to the final disenchantment by kissing the
toad, which he had saluted twice, when, perceiving
the various strange sleepers to arise from the floor,
his courage failed, and he fled from the cavern, hav-
ing just attained the outside of the door when it
suddenly shut with a loud clap, catching hold of the
skirt of his coat, which was torn off and left in the
door.
And none since that time
To enter the cavern presume."


312
34. KEMP OWYNE
1 The king is gone from Bambrough castle,
Long may the princess mourn;
Long may she stand on the castle wall,
Looking for his return.
2 She has knotted the keys upon a string,
And with her she has them taen,
She has cast them oer her left shoulder,
And to the gate she is gane.
3 She tripped out, she tripped in,
She tript into the yard;
But it was more for the king's sake,
Than for the queen's regard.
4 It fell out on a day the king
Brought the queen with him home,
And all the lords in our country
To welcome them did come.
5 'O welcome, father,' the lady cries,
'Unto your halls and bowers;
And so are you, my stepmother,
For all that is here is yours.'
6 A lord said, wondering while she spake,
This princess of the North
Surpasses all of female kind
In beauty and in worth.
7 The envious queen replied: At least,
You might have excepted me;
In a few hours I will her bring
Down to a low degree.
8 I will her liken to a laidley worm,
That warps about the stone,
And not till Childy Wynd comes back
Shall she again be won.
9 The princess stood at the bower door,
Laughing, who could her blame?
But eer the next day's sun went down,
A long worm she became.
10 For seven miles east, and seven miles west,
And seven miles north and south,
No blade of grass or corn could grow,
So venomous was her mouth.
11 The milk of seven stately cows —
It was costly her to keep —
Was brought her daily, which she drank
Before she went to sleep.
12 At this day may be seen the cave
Which held her folded up,
And the stone trough, the very same
Out of which she did sup.
18 Word went east, and word went west,
And word is gone over the sea,
That a laidley worm in Spindleston Heughs
Would ruin the north country.
14 Word went east, and word went west,
And over the sea did go;
The Child of Wynd got wit of it,
Which filled his heart with woe.
15 He called straight his merry men all,
They thirty were and three:
'I wish I were at Spindleston,
This desperate worm to see.
16 'We have no time now here to waste,
Hence quickly let us sail;
My only sister Margaret,
Something, I fear, doth ail.'
17 They built a ship without delay,
With masts of the rown tree,
With fluttering sails of silk so fine,
And set her on the sea.
18 They went aboard; the wind with speed
Blew them along the deep;
At length they spied an huge square tower,
On a rock high and steep.
19 The sea was smooth, the weather clear;
When they approached nigher,
King Ida's castle they well knew,
And the banks of Bambroughshire.
20 The queen looked out at her bower-window,
To see what she could see;
There she espied a gallant ship,
Sailing upon the sea.
21 When she beheld the silken sails,
Full glancing in the sun,
To sink the ship she sent away
Her witch-wives every one.
22 Their spells were vain; the hags returned
To the queen in sorrowful mood,
Crying that witches have no power
Where there is rown-tree wood.
23 Her last effort, she sent a boat,
Which in the haven lay,
AVitb armed men to board the ship,
But they were driven away.
24 The worm leapt up, the worm leapt down,
She plaited round the stane;
And ay as the ship came to the land
She banged it off again.


35. ALLISON GROSS
313
25 The Child then ran out of her reach
The ship on Budle sand,
And jumping into the shallow sea,
Securely got to land.
26 And now he drew his berry-brown sword,
And laid it on her head,
And swore, if she did harm to him,
That he would strike her dead.
27 'O quit thy sword, and bend thy bow,
And give me kisses three;
For though I am a poisonous worm,
No hurt I will do to thee.
28 'O quit thy sword, and bend thy bow,
And give me kisses three;
If I am not won eer the sun go down,
Won I shall never be.'
29 He quitted his sword, he bent his bow,
He gave her kisses three;
She crept into a hole a worm,
But stept out a lady.
30 No cloathing had this lady fine,
To keep her from the cold;
He took his mantle from him about,
And round her did it fold.
31 He has taken his mantle from him about,
And it he wrapt her in,
And they are up to Bambrough castle,
As fast as they can win.
32 His absence and her serpent shape
The king had long deplored;
He now rejoiced to see them both
Again to him restored.
33 The queen they wanted, whom they found
All pale, and sore afraid,
Because she knew her power must yield
To Childy Wynd's, who said:
34 'Woe be to thee, thou wicked witch,
An ill death mayest thou dee;
As thou my sister hast likened,
So likened shalt thou be.
85 'I will turn you into a toad,
That on the ground doth wend,
And won, won shalt thou never be,
Till this world hath an end.'
36 Now on the sand near Ida's tower,
She crawls a loathsome toad,
And venom spits on every maid
She meets upon her road.
87 The virgins all of Bambrough town
Will swear that they have seen
This spiteful toad, of monstrous size,
Whilst walking they have been.
38 All folks believe within the shire
This story to be true,
And they all run to Spindleston,
The cave and trough to view.
39 This fact now Duncan Frasier,
Of Cheviot, sings in rhime,
Lest Bambroughshire men should forget
Some part of it in time.
28*. son.
35
ALLISON GROSS
'Allison Gross,' Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 40.
'Allison Gross' was printed by Jamie-
son, Popular Ballads, II, 187, without devia-
tion from the manuscript save in spelling.
In a Greek tale, a nereid, that is elf or fairy,
turns a youth who had refused to espouse her
into a snake, the curse to continue till he finds
another love who is as fair as she: 'Die
Schonste,' B. Schmidt, Griechische Marchen,
etc., No 10. This tale is a variety of ' Beauty
and the Beast,' one of the numerous wild
40


314
35. ALLISON GEOSS
growths from that ever charming French
story.*
An elf, a hill-troll, a mermaid, make a young
man offers of splendid gifts, to obtain his love
or the promise of his faith, in 'Elveskud,'
Grundtvig, No 47, many of the Danish and
two of the Norwegian copies; 'Hertig Magnus
och Elfvorna,' Afzelius, III, 172; 'Hr. Mag-
nus og Bjairgtrolden,' Grundtvig, No 48, Ar-
widsson, No 147 B; 'Herr Magnus och Hafs-
trollet,' Afzelius, No 95, Bugge, No 11; a
lind-worm, similarly, to a young woman,' Lin-
dormen,' Grundtvig, No 65. Magnus answers
the hill-troll that he should be glad to plight
faith with her were she like other women, but
she is the ugliest troll that could be found:
Grundtvig, II, 121, A 6, B 7; Arwidsson, II,
303, B 5; Afzelius, III, 169, st. 5, 173, st. 6.
This is like what we read in stanza 7 of our
ballad, but the answer is inevitable in any
such case. Magnus comes off scot-free.
The queen of the fairies undoing the spell
of the witch is a remarkable feature, not par-
alleled, so far as I know, in English or north-
ern tradition. The Greek nereids, however,
who do pretty much everything, good or bad,
that is ascribed to northern elves or fairies,
and even bear an appellation resembling that
by which fairies are spoken of in Scotland and
Ireland, "the good damsels," "the good la-
dies," have a queen who is described as taking
no part in the unfriendly acts of her subjects,
but as being kindly disposed towards mankind,
and even as repairing the mischief which sub-
ordinate sprites have done against her will.
If now the fairy queen might interpose in be-
half of men against her own kith and kin,
much more likely would she be to exert her-
self to thwart the malignity of a witch.f
The object of the witch's blowing thrice on
a grass-green horn in 82 is not clear, for noth-
ing comes of it. In the closely related ballad
which follows this, a witch uses a horn to
summon the sea-fishes, among whom there is
one who has been the victim of her spells.
The horn is appropriate. Witches were sup-
posed to blow horns when they joined the
wild hunt, and horn-blower, "hornblase," is
twice cited by Grimm as an equivalent to
witch: Deutsche Mythologie, p. 886.
Translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, No 19; by Rosa Warrens,
Schottische Volkslieder, No 7 ; Knortz, Lieder
und Romanzen Alt-Englands, No 9; Loeve-
Veimars, Ballades de l'Augleterre, p. 353.
1 O Allison Gross, that lives in yon towr,
The ugliest witch i the north country,
Has trysted me ae day up till her bowr,
An monny fair speech she made to me.
2 She stroaked my head, an she kembed my hair,
An she set me down saftly on her knee;
Says, Gin ye will be my lemman so true,
Sae monny braw things as I woud you gi.
3 She showd me a mantle o red scarlet,
Wi gouden flowrs an fringes fine;
Says, Gin ye will be my lemman so true,
This goodly gift it sal be thine.
4 'Awa, awa, ye ugly witch,
Haud far awa, an lat me be;
I never will be your lemman sae true.
An I wish I were out o your company.'
5 She neist brought a sark o the saftest silk,
Well wrought wi pearles about the ban;
Says, Gin you will be my ain true love,
This goodly gift you sal cornman.
6 She showd me a cup of the good red gold,
Well set wi jewls sae fair to see;
Says, Gin you will be my lemman sae true,
This goodly gift I will you gi.
* Of these Dr Reinhold Kohler has given me a note of
more than twenty. The French tale itself had, in all likeli-
hood, a popular foundation.
t B. Schmidt, Das Volksleben der Nengriechen, pp 100 f,
107, 123. Euphemistically the nereids are called jj xais
hpx6vTuraau, ?J KaAolt Kvpiia, j) Ka\6icap5ais, j) koK6tuxw,
their sovereign is fi fuyd
i Kupi, ij -*p«l>n), etc
.


36. THE LAILY WORM AND THE MACHREL OF THE SEA
316
sister are transformed in the Danish 'Natter-
galen,' Grundtvig, No 57. It is an aggrava-
tion of stepmother malice that the victim of
enchantment, however amiable and inoffen-
sive before, should become truculent and de-
structive; so with the brother of Gawain's
bride, and with the Carl of Carlile. The step-
mother is satisfactorily disposed of, as she is
in ' Kemp Owyne,' B, and the ' Laidly Worm
of Spindleston Heughs.'
1 'I was but seven year auld
When my mither she did die;
My father married the ae warst woman
The warld did ever see.
2 'For she has made me the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o the tree,
An my sister Masery she's made
The machrel of the sea.
3 'An every Saturday at noon
The machrel comes to me,
An she takes my laily head
An lays it on her knee,
She kaims it wi a siller kaim,
An washes't in the sea.
4 'Seven knights hae I slain,
Sin I lay at the fit of the tree,
An ye war na my ain father,
The eight ane ye should be.'
5 'Sing on your song, ye laily worm,
That ye did sing to me :'
'I never sung that song but what
I would it sing to thee.
6 'I was but seven year auld,
When my mither she did die;
My father married the ae warst woman
The warld did ever see.
7 'For she changed me to the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o the tree,
And my sister Masery
To the machrel of the sea.
8 'And every Saturday at noon
The machrel comes to me,
An she takes my laily head
An lays it on her knee,
An kames it wi a siller kame,
An washes it i the sea.
9 'Seven knights hae I slain,
Sin I lay at the fit o the tree,
An ye war na my ain father,
The eighth ane ye shoud be.'
10 He sent for his lady,
As fast as send could he:
'Whar is my son that ye sent frae me,
And my daughter, Lady Masery?'
11 'Your son is at our king's court,
Serving for meat an fee,
An your daughter's at our queen's court,
f
12 'Ye lie, ye ill woman,
Sae loud as I hear ye lie;
My son's the laily worm,
That lies at the fit o the tree,
And my daughter, Lady Masery,
Is the machrel of the sea!'
13 She has tane a siller wan,
An gien him strokes three,
And he has started up the bravest knight
That ever your eyes did see.
14 She has taen a small horn,
An loud an shrill blew she,
An a' the fish came her untill
But the proud machrel of the sea:
'Ye shapeit me ance an unseemly shape,
An ye's never mare shape me.'
15 He has sent to the wood
For whins and for hawthorn,
An he has taen that gay lady,
An there he did her burn.
22, 7". lays: but lies, 12*. 3*. ducks, but compare 83.


37. THOMAS RYMER
317
37
THOMAS RYMER
A. 'Thomas Rymer and Queen of Elfland,' Alexander
Fraser Ty tier's Brown MS., No 1.
B. 'Thomas the Rhymer,' Camphell MSS, II, 83.
C. 'Thomas the Rhymer,' Minstrelsy of the Scottish
Border, II, 251, 1802, "from a copy obtained from a
lady residing not far from Erceldoune, corrected and
enlarged by one in Mrs Brown's MS."
A IS one of the nine ballads transmitted to
Alexander Fraser Tytler by Mrs Brown in
April, 1800, as written down from her recol-
lection.* This copy was printed by Jamie-
son, II, 7, in his preface to ' True Thomas and
the Queen of Elfland.' B, never published as
yet, has been corrupted here and there, but
only by tradition. C being compounded of
A and another version, that portion which is
found in A is put in smaller type.
Thomas of Erceldoune, otherwise Thomas
the Rhymer, and in the popular style True
Thomas, has had a fame as a seer, which,
though progressively narrowed, is, after the
lapse of nearly or quite six centuries, far from
being extinguished. The common people
throughout the whole of Scotland, according
to Mr Robert Chambers (1870), continue to
regard him with veneration, and to preserve
a great number of his prophetic sayings, which
they habitually seek to connect with "dear
years " and other notable public events.f A
prediction of Thomas of Erceldoune's is re-
corded in a manuscript which is put at a date
before 1320, and he is referred to with other
soothsayers in the Scalacronica, a French
chronicle of English history begun in 1355.
Erceldoune is spoken of as a poet in Robert
Mannyng's translation of Langtoft's chronicle,
finished in 1338; and in the Auchinleck copy
of 'Sir Tristrem,' said to have been made
about 1350, a Thomas is said to have been
consulted at Erpeldoun touching the history
* Sec the letter of Dr Anderson to Bishop Percy, Decem-
ber 29, 1800, in Nichols's Illustrations of the Literary His-
tory of the Eighteenth Century, VII, 178 f.
t Chambers' Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1870, pp. 211-
of Tristrem. So that we seem safe in holding
that Thomas of Erceldoune had a reputation
both as prophet and poet in the earlier part of
the fourteenth century. The vaticinations of
Thomas are cited by various later chroniclers,
and had as much credit in England as in Scot-
land. "During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries," says Chambers, "to fab-
ricate a prophecy in the name of Thomas the
Rhymer appears to have been found a good
stroke of policy on many occasions. Thus
was his authority employed to countenance
the views of Edward III against Scottish inde-
pendence, to favor the ambitious views of the
Duke of Albany in the minority of James V,
and to sustain the spirits of the nation under
the harassing invasions of Henry VIII." Dur-
ing the Jacobite rising of 1745 the accom-
plishment of Thomas's as then unfulfilled pre-
dictions was looked for by many. His prophe-
cies, and those of other Scotch soothsayers,
were consulted, says Lord Hailes, "with a
weak if not criminal curiosity." Even as late
as the French revolutionary war a rhyme of
Thomas's caused much distress and consterna-
tion in the border counties of Scotland, where
people were fearing an invasion. The ' Whole
Prophecie' of Merlin, Thomas Rymour, and
others, collected and issued as early as 1603,
continued to be printed as a chap-book down
to the beginning of this century, when, says
Dr Murray, few farm-houses in Scotland were
without a copy of it.
224. See, also, Scott's Minstrelsy, IV, 110-116, 129-151,
ed. 1833. But, above all, Dr J. A. H. Murray's Introduc-
tion to The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Ercel-
doune, 1875.


318
37. THOMAS RYMER
All this might have been if Thomas of Er-
celdoune had been not more historical than
Merlin. But the name is known to have
belonged to a real person. Thomas Ryinor
de Ercildune is witness to a deed whereby
one Petrus de Haga obliges himself to make
a certain payment to the Abbey of Melrose.
Petrus de Haga is, in turn, witness to a char-
ter made by Richard de Moreville. Unluckily,
neither of these deeds is dated. But Moreville
was constable of Scotland from 1162 to 1189.
If we suppose Moreville's charter to have
been given towards 1189, and Haga to have
been then about twenty years old, and so
born about 1170, and further suppose Haga to
have made his grant to Melrose towards the
end of a life of threescore, or three score and
ten, the time of Thomas Rymer's signature
would be about 1230 or 1240. If Thomas
Rymer was then twenty years of age, his birth
would have been at 1210 or 1220. In the
year 1294 Thomas de Ercildoun, son and heir
of Thomas Rymour de Ercildoun, conveyed to
a religious house his inheritance of lands in
Ercildoun. With Thomas Rhymer in mind,
one naturally interprets Thomas Rymour as
the prophet and Thomas de Ercildoun as his
son. If Rymour was the surname of this fam-
ily,* it would have been better, for us at
least, if the surname had been subjoined to the
first Thomas also. As the language stands,
we are left to choose among several possibil-
ities. Thomas the Rhymer may have been
dead in 1294; Thomas Rymour, meaning the
same person, may have made this cession of
lands in 1294, and have survived still some
years. Thomas, the father, may, as Dr Mur-
ray suggests, have retired from the world, but
still be living, and it may be his son who re-
signs the lands. Blind Harry's Life of Wal-
lace makes Thomas Rimour to be alive down
to 129G or 1297. A story reported by Bower
in his continuation of Fordun, c. 1430, makes
Thomas to have predicted the death of Alex-
ander III in 1286, when, according to the pre-
* Hector Booco (1527) says the surname was Lcirmont,
but there is no evidence for this thut is of value. See Mur-
ray, p. xiii.
t The five copies have been edited by Dr J. A. H. Mur-
vious (necessarily very loose) calculation, the
seer would have been between sixty-six and
seventy-six. Neither of these last dates is es-
tablished by the strongest evidence, but there
is no reason for refusing to admit, at least, that
Thomas of Erceldoune may have been alive at
the latter epoch.
Thomas of Erceldoune's prophetic power
was a gift of the queen of the elves; the mod-
ern elves, equally those of northern Europe
and of Greece, resembling in respect to this
attribute the nymphs of the ancient Hellenic
mythology. How Thomas attained this grace
is set forth in the first of three fits of a poem
which bears his name. This poem has come
down in four somewhat defective copies : the
earliest written a little before the middle of
the fifteenth century, two others about 1450,
the fourth later. There is a still later manu
script copy of the second and third fits.f All
the manuscripts are English, but it is manifest
from the nature of the topics that the original
poem was the work of a Scotsman. All four of
the complete versions speak of an older story:
"gyff it be als the storye sayes, v. 83, ' als the
storye tellis full ryghte,' v. 123. The older
story, if any, must be the work of Thomas.
The circumstance that the poem, as we have
it, begins in the first person, and after a long
passage returns for a moment to the first per-
son, though most of the tale is told in the
third, is of no importance; nor would it have
been important if the whole narrative had
been put into Thomas's mouth, since that is
the simplest of literary artifices.
Thomas, having found favor with the queen
of Elfland, was taken with her to that country,
and there he remained more than three [seven]
years. Then the time came round when a trib-
ute had to be paid to hell, and as Thomas was
too likely to be chosen by the fiend, the elf
queen conducted him back to the world of
men. At the moment of parting Thomas de-
sires some token which may authenticate his
having spoken with her. She gives him the
ray, and printed by the Early English Text Society. A re-
constructed text by Dr Alois Brandl makes the second vol-
ume of a Sammlung englischer Denkmaler in kritischen
Ausgaben, Berlin, 18S0.


37. THOMAS RYMER
319
gift of soothsaying. He presses her to stay
and tell him some ferly. Upon this she be-
gins a train of predictions, which Thomas
more than once importunes her to continue.
The first two of these, the failure of Baliol's
party and the battle of Halidon Hill, 1333,
stand by themselves, but they are followed
by a series in chronological order, extending
from the battle of Falkirk to the battle of
Otterbourn, 1298-1388. The third fit, ex-
cepting, perhaps, a reference to Henry IV's
invasion of Scotland in 1401, seems to consist,
not of predictions made after the event, but of
"adaptations of legendary prophecies, tradi-
tionally preserved from far earlier times, and
furbished up anew at each period of national
trouble and distress, in expectation of their
fulfilment being at length at hand."*
The older " story," which is twice referred
to in the prologue to the prophecies of Thomas
of Erceldoune, was undoubtedly a romance
which narrated the adventure of Thomas with
the elf queen simply, without specification of
his prophecies. In all probability it concluded,
in accordance with the ordinary popular tradi-
tion, with Thomas's return to fairy-land after
a certain time passed in this world.f For the
story of Thomas and the Elf-queen is but an-
other version of what is related of Ogier le
Danois and Morgan the Fay. Six fairies made
gifts to Ogier at his birth. By the favor of
five he was to be the strongest, the bravest,
the most successful, the handsomest, the most
susceptible, of knights: Morgan's gift was
that, after a long and fatiguing career of glory,
he should live with her at her castle of Avalon,
* Murray, pp xxiv-xxvii. As might be expected, the
Latin texts corrupt the names of persons and of places, and
alter the results of battles. Dr Murray remarks : " The old-
est text makes the Scots win Halidon Hill, with the slaughter
of six thousand Englishmen, while the other texts, wise nf ter
the fact, makes the Scots lose, as they actually did." This,
and the consideration that a question about the conflict be-
tween the families of Bruce and Baliol would not be put
after 1400, when the Baliol line was extinct, disposes Dr
Murray to think that verses 326-56 of the second fit, with
perhaps the first fit, the conclusion of the poem, and an
indefinite portion of fit third, may have been written on the
eve of Halidon Hill, with a view to encourage tho Scots.
t The poem, vv 675-80, says only that Thomas and the
in the enjoyment of a still longer youth and
never wearying pleasures. When Ogier had
passed his hundredth year, Morgan took meas-
ures to carry out her promise. She had him
wrecked, while he was on a voyage to France,
on a loadstone rock conveniently near to Ava-
lon, which Avalon is a little way this side of the
terrestrial paradise. In due course he comes
to an orchard, and there he eats an apple, which
affects him so peculiarly that he looks for noth-
ing but death. He turns to the east, and sees
a beautiful lady, magnificently attired. He
takes her for the Virgin; she corrects his error,
and announces herself as Morgan the Fay.
She puts a ring on his finger which restores
his youth, and then places a crown on his
head which makes him forget all the past.
For two hundred years Ogier lived in such de-
lights as no worldly being can imagine, and the
two hundred years seemed to him but twenty.
Christendom was then in danger, and even
Morgan thought his presence was required in
the world. The crown being taken from his
head, the memory of the past revived, and
with it the desire to return to France. He
was sent back by the fairy, properly provided,
vanquished the foes of Christianity in a short
space, and after a time was brought back by
Morgan the Fay to Avalon. J
The fairy adventures of Thomas and of Ogier
have the essential points in common, and even
the particular trait that the fairy is taken to
be the Virgin. The occurrence of this trait
again in the ballad, viewed in connection with
the general similarity of the two, will leave
no doubt that the ballad had its source in the
lady did not part for ever and aye, but that she was to visit
him at Huntley banks.
X The relations of Thomas Rhymer and Ogier might, per-
haps, be cleared up by the poem of The Visions of Ogier
in Fairy Land. The book is thus described by Brnnct, ed.
1863, IV, 173: Le premier (second et troisil'me) livro des
visions d'Oger le Dannoys au royaulme de Fairic, Paris,
1542, pet. in-8, de 48ff. Brunct adds: A la suite de ce
poiime, dans l'excmplaire de la Bibliothcqnc impe'riale, so
trouve, Leliure des visions fantastiques, Paris, 1542, pet. in-8,
de 24 ff. The National Library is not now in possession of
the volume; nor have all the inquiries I have been able to
make, though most courteously aided in France, resulted, as
I hoped, in the finding of a copy.


320
37. THOMAS RYMER
romance. Yet it is an entirely popular ballad
as to style,* and must be of considerable age,
though the earliest version (A) can be traced
at furthest only into the first half of the last
century.
The scene of the meeting of Thomas with
the elf queen is Huntly Banks and the Eildon
Tree in versions B, C of the ballad, as in the
romance.f Neither of these is mentioned in
A, the reciter of which was an Aberdeen
woman. The elf-lady's costume and equip-
ment, minutely given in the romance (hence-
forth referred to as R), are reduced in the
ballad to a skirt of grass-green silk and a vel-
vet mantle, A, and a dapple-gray horse, B 2
(R 5), with nine and fifty bells on each tett of
its mane, A 2 (three bells on either side of the
bridle, R 9). J Thomas salutes the fairy as
queen of heaven, A 3, R 11. B 3 has suffered
a Protestant alteration which makes nonsense
of the following stanza. She corrects his mis-
take in all, and in B 4 tells him she is out
hunting, as in R 16. As C 5 stands, she chal-
lenges Thomas to kiss her, warning him at the
* Excepting the two satirical stanzas with which Scott's
version (C) concludes. "The repugnance of Thomas to be
debarred the use of falsehood when he should find it conve-
nient," may have, as Scott says, " a comic effect," but is,
for a ballad, a miserable conceit. Both ballad and romance
are serious.
t Eildon Tree, the site of which is supposed now to be
marked by the Eildon Tree Stone, stood, or should have
stood, on the slope of the eastern of the three Eildon Hills.
Huntly Banks are about half a mile to the west of the Eil-
don Stone, on the same hill-slope. Erceldoun, a village on
the Leader, two miles above its junction with the Tweed, is
all but visible from the Eildon Stone. Murray, pp l-lii.
} In B 2, absurdly, the lady holds nine bells in her hand.
Ringing or jingling bridles are ascribed to fairies, Tain Lin,
A 37, Cromek's Iicmains of Nithsdiile and Galloway Song,
p. 298 (" manes hung wi whustles that the win played on,"
p. 299). The fairy's saddle has a bordure of bells in the Eng-
lish Launfol, HnlliweU's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology,
p. 31, but not in Marie's lai. The dwarf-king Antiloie, in
Ulrich Von Eschenbach's Alexander, has bells on his bridle:
Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, I, 385. These bells, how-
ever, are not at all distinctive of fairies, but are the ordinary
decoration of elegant "outriders" in the Middle Ages, es-
pecially of women. In the romance of Richard Ccuur de
Lion, a messenger's trappings ring with five hundred bells.
Besides the bridle, bells were sometimes uttnched to the
horse's breastplate, to the saddle-bow, crupper, and stir-
rups. Conde Claros's steed has three hundred around his
breastplate. See Weber's Metrical Homanees, R. C. de
Lion, vv 1514-17, 5712-14, cited by T. Wright, History of
same time, unnaturally, and of course in con-
sequence of a corrupt reading, of the danger;
which Thomas defies, C 6. These two stanzas
in C represent the passage in the romance,
17-21, in which Thomas embraces the fairy
queen, and are wanting in A, B, though not to
be spared. It is contact with the fairy that
gives her the power to carry her paramour off;
for carry him off she does, and he is in great
fright at having to go. The ballad is no worse,
and the romance would have been much better,
for the omission of another passage, impressive
in itself, but incompatible with the proper
and original story. The elf-queen had told
Thomas that he would ruin her beauty, if he
had his will, and so it came to pass: her eyes
seemed out, her rich clothing was away, her
body was like the lead; and it is while thus
disfigured that she bids Thomas take leave of
sun and moon, so that his alarm is not without
reason.§ He must go with her for seven
years, A, B; only for a twelvemonth, R. She
takes him up behind her, A; she rides and he
runs, B; she leads him in at Eldon hill, R;
Domestic Manners in England, 214 f; Liebrecht, Gervasius,
p. 122; Kiilbing, Englische Studien, III, 105; Zupitza and
Varnhagen, Anglia, III, 371, IV, 417; and particularly A.
Schultz, Das hiifische Leben zur Zeit der Minnesinger, X,
235, 388-91.
§ The original I suppose to be the very cheerful tale of
Ogier, with which the author of Thomas of Erceldoune has
blended a very serious one, without any regard to the irrec-
oncilableness of the two. He is presently forced to undo
this melancholy transformation of the fairy, as we shall see.
Brandl, ' Thomas of Erceldoune,' p. 20, cites from Giraldus
Cambrensis, Iiinerarium Cambrise, I, 5, a story about one
Meilyr, a Welshman, the like of which our poet had in
mind. This Meilyr was a great soothsayer, and " owed his
skill to the following adventure :" Being in company one
evening with a girl for whom he had long had a passion,
desidcratis amplexibus atque deliciis cum indulsisset, staiim
loco puellae formosae formam quamdam villosam, hispidam
et hirautam, adcoque enormiter deformem invenit, quod in
ipso ejusdem aspectu dementire ccepit et insanire. Meilyr
recovered his reason after several years, through the merits
of the saints, but always kept up an intimacy with unclean
spirits, and by their help foretold the future. It is not said
that they gave him the tongue that never could lie, but no
other tongue could lie successfully in his presence: he al-
ways saw a little devil capering on it. He was able, by sim-
ilar indications, to point out the lies and errors of books.
The experiment being once tried of laying the Gospel of
John in his lap, every devil instantly decamped. Geoffrey
of Monmouth's history was substituted, and imps swarmed
all over the book and him, too.


37. THOMAS RYMER
321
they cross a water, he wading up to the knee,
B, R. The water is subterranean in R, and
for three days naught is heard but the sough-
ing of the flood. Then they come to an or-
chard, A, B, R, and Thomas, like to tyne for
lack of food, is about to pull fruit, but is told
that the fruit is cursed, A 9, B 8; * if he
plucks it, his soul goes to the fire of hell, R 35.
The fairy has made a provision of safe bread
and wine for him in the ballad, A 10, B 9,
but he has still to fast a while in the ro-
mance. C, which lacks this passage, makes
them ride till they reach a wide desert, and
leave living land behind, 9; and here (but
in A, B, and R in the vicinity of the orchard)
the fairy bids Thomas lay his head on her
knee, and she will show him rare sights. These
are the way to heaven, A 12, B 11, R 38 ; the
way to hell, A 13, B 10, R 41; the road to
Elfland, whither they are going, A 14. R does
not point out the road to Elfland, but the elf-
queen's castle on a high hill; and there are
two additional ferlies, the way to paradise and
the way to purgatory,f 39, 40. Thomas, in
A 15, is now admonished that he must hold
his tongue, for if he speaks a word he will
never get back to his own country; in B 44
he is told to answer none but the elf-queen,
whatever may be said to him, and this course
he takes in B 12. But before they proceed to
the castle the lady resumes all the beauty and
splendor which she had lost, and no explana-
tion is offered save the naive one in the Lans-
downe copy, that if she had not, the king, her
consort, would have known that she had been
in fault. Now follows in A 15 (as recited,
here 7), C 15, 16, the passage through the
subterranean water, which should come before
they reach the orchard, as in B 6, R 30, 31.
There is much exaggeration in the ballad:
* BB1!4 "It was a' that cureed fruit o thine beggared
man and woman in yourcountrie :" the fruit of the Forbid-
den Tree.
t Purgatory is omitted in the Cotton MS. of the romance,
as in the ballad.
} Ogier le Danois hardly exceeded the proportion of the
ordinary hyperbole of lovers: two hundred years seemed but
twenty. The British king Herla lived with the king of the
dwarfs more than two hundred years, and thought the time
but three days: Walter Mapes, Nugse Curialium, ed. Wright,
they wade through rivers in darkness and hear
the sea roaring, 0 15, A 7, as in R, but they
also wade through red blood to the knee, A 7,
0 16, and the crossing occupies not three days,
as in R 31, but forty days, A 7. In C they
now come to the garden. Stanzas 15, 16 are
out of place in 0, as just remarked, and 17 is
entirely perverted. The cursed fruit which
Thomas is not to touch in A 9, B 8, R 35, is
offered him by the elf-queen as his wages, and
will give him the tongue that can never lie,
— a gift which is made him in the romance at
the beginning of the second fit, when the fairy
is preparing to part with him. Stanzas 18,19
of C are certainly a modern, and as certainly
an ill-devised, interpolation. B has lost the
conclusion. In A, C, Thomas gets a fairy cos-
tume, and is not seen on earth again for seven
years.
The romance, after some description of the
life at the elf-castle, informs us that Thomas
lived there more than three years [Cambridge
MS., seven], and thought the time but a space
of three days, an almost moderate illusion
compared with the experience of other mor-
tals under analogous circumstances.J The
fairy queen then hurried him away, on the
eve of the day when the foul fiend was to
come to fetch his tribute. He was a mickle
man and hend, and there was every reason to
fear that he would be chosen. She brought
him again to Eldon Tree, and was bidding him
farewell. Thomas begged of her a token of
his conversation with her, and she gave him
the gift of true speaking. He urged her fur-
ther to tell him some ferly, and she made
him several predictions, but he would not let
her go without more and more. Finally, with
a promise to meet him on Huntly Banks when
she might, she left him under the tree.
p. 16 f (Liebrecht). The strongest case, I believe, is the ex-
quisite legend, versified by Trench, of the monk, with whom
three hundred years passed, while he was listening to a bird's
song — as he thought, less than three hours. For some of
the countless repetitions of the idea, see Pauli's Schimpf und
Ernst, ed. Oesterley, No 562, and notes, p. 537; Liebrecht's
Gervasius, p. 89; W. Hertz, Deutsche Sage im Elsass, pp
115-18, 263; A. Graf, La Leggenda del Paradiso Terrestre,
pp 26-29, 31-33, and notes; J. Koch, Die Siebenschlaferle-
gende, kap. ii.
41


322
37. THOMAS RYMER
Popular tradition, as Sir Walter Scott rep-
resents, held that, though Thomas was allowed
to revisit the earth after a seven years' so-
journ in fairy-land, he was under an obliga-
tion to go back to the elf-queen whenever she
should summon him. One day while he "was
making merry with his friends in the town of
Erceldoune, a person came running in, and
told, with marks of fear and astonishment,
that a hart and hind had left the neighbor-
ing forest, and were composedly and slowly
parading the street of the village. The pro-
phet instantly arose, left his habitation, and
followed the wonderful animals to the forest,
whence he was never seen to return." He is,
however, expected to come back again at some
future time.
What we learn from the adventures of
Thomas concerning the perils of dealing with
fairies, and the precautions to be observed,
agrees with the general teaching of tradition
upon the subject. In this matter there is
pretty much one rule for all "unco" folk, be
they fairies, dwarfs, water-sprites, devils, or
departed spirits, and, in a limited way, for
witches, too. Thomas, having kissed the elf-
queen's lips, must go with her. When the
dead Willy comes to ask back his faith and
troth of Margaret, and she says he must first
kiss her, cheek and chin, he replies, "If I
should kiss your red, red lips, your days would
not be long." * When Thomas is about to
* In an exquisite little ballad obtained by Tommaseo from
a peasant-girl of Kmpoli, I, 26, a lover who had visited hell,
and there met and kissed his mistress, is told by her that he
must not hope ever to go thence. How the lover escaped in
this instance is not explained. Such things happen sometimes,
but not often enough to encourage one to take the risk.
Sono stato all' inferno, e son tornato:
Misericordia, la gente che c'era!
Vera una stanza tutta illuminata,
E dentro v'era la speranza mia.
Quando mi vedde, gran festa mi fece,
E poi mi disse: Dolce aninia mia,
Non ti arricordi del tempo passato,
Quando tu mi dicevi, " annua mia?"
Ora, mio caro ben, baciami in bocca,
liaciami tanto ch'io contenta sia.
1 tanto saporita la tua bocca!
Di grazia saporisci anco la mia.
Ora, mio caro ben, che m'hai baciato,
Di qui non isperar d'andarne via.
t A 8, 9, R 34, 35. It was not that Thomas was about
pull fruit in the subterranean garden, or par-
adise, the elf bids him let be: all the plagues
of hell light on the fruit of this country;
"if thou pluck it, thy soul goes to the fire of
hell." f The queen had taken the precaution
of bringing some honest bread and wine with
her for Thomas's behoof. So when Burd El-
len's brother sets out to rescue his sister, who
had been carried off by the king of Elfiand,
his sage adviser enjoins him to eat and drink
nothing in fairy-land, whatever his hunger
or thirst; "for if he tasted or touched in
Elfiand, he must remain in the power of the
elves, and never see middle-eard again." J Ab-
stinence from speech is equally advisable, ac-
cording to our ballad and to other authority:
Gin ae word you should chance to speak, you
will neer get back to your ain countrie, A 15.
They've asked him questions, one and all, but
he answered none but that fair ladie, B 12.
What so any man to thee say, look thou an-
swer none but me, R 44.
That eating and drinking, personal contact,
exchange of speech, receiving of gifts, in any
abode of unearthly beings, including the dead,
will reduce a man to their fellowship and con-
dition might be enforced by a great number
of examples, and has already been abundantly
shown by Professor Wilhelm Miiller in his
beautiful essay, Zur Symbolik der deutschen
Volkssage.§ The popular belief of the north-
ern nations in this matter is more completely
to pluck fruit from the Forbidden Tree, though B under-
stands it so: cf. R 32, 33. The curse of this tree seem?,
however, to have affected all Paradise. In modern Greek
popular poetry Paradise occurs sometimes entirely in the
sense of Hades. See B. Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugrie-
chen, p. 249.
t Jamieson, in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, p.
398: 'Child Rowland and Burd Ellen.'
§ Niedersachsische Sagen und Marchen, Schambach und
Muller, p. 373. Shakspere has this: "They are fairies; he
that speaks to them shall die ; " Falstaff, in Merry Wives
of Windsor, V, 5. Ancient Greek tradition is not without
traces of the same ideas. It was Persephone's eating of the
pomegranate kernel that consigned her to the lower world, in
spite of Zeus and Demeter's opposition. The drinking of
Circe's brewago and the eating of lotus had an effect on the
companions of Ulysses such as is sometimes ascribed to the
food and drink of fairies, or other demons, that of producing
forgetfulness of home: Odyssey, x, 236, ix, 97. But it would
not be safe to build much on this. A Hebrew tale makes
the human wife of a demon charge a man who has come to


37. THOMAS RYMER
323
shown than anywhere else in Saxo's account
of King Gormo's visit to Guthmund, and it
will be enough to cite that. The Danish King
Gormo, having heard extraordinary things of
the riches of Geruth (the giant GeirroSr), de-
termines to verify the reports with his own
eyes, under the guidance of Thorkill, from
whom he has received them. The land of
Geruth is far to the northeast, beyond the sun
and stars, and within the realm of Chaos and
Old Night. It is, in fact, a very dismal and
terrific sort of Hades. The way to it lies
through the dominion of Guthmund, Geruth's
brother, which is described as a paradise, but
a paradise of the same dubious attractions as
that in Thomas of Erceldoune. Guthmund,
himself a giant, receives the travellers, a band
of about three hundred, very graciously, and
conducts them to his palace. Thorkill takes
his comrades apart, and puts them on their
guard: they must eat and drink nothing that
is offered them, but live on the provisions
which they have brought, must keep off from
the people of the place and not touch them;
if they partake of any of the food, they will
forget everything, and have to pass their lives
in this foul society. Guthmund complains
that they slight his hospitality, but Thorkill,
now and always, has an excuse ready. The
genial monarch offers Gormo one of his twelve
beautiful daughters in marriage, and their
choice of wives to all the rest of the train.
Most of the Danes like the proposition, but
Thorkill renews his warnings. Four take the
bait, and lose all recollection of the past.
Guthmund now commends the delicious fruits
of his garden, and tries every art to make the
king taste them. But he is again foiled by
Thorkill, and clearly perceiving that he has
met his match, transports the travellers over
the river which separates him and his brother,
and allows them to continue their journey.*
C is translated by Talvj, Versuch, etc., p.
552; by Doenniges, p. 64; by Arndt, Bliiten-
lese, p. 246; by Rosa Warrens, Schottische
Volkslieder, p. 14; by Knortz, Lieder u. Ro-
manzen, p. 1; by Edward Barry, Cycle popu-
laire de Robin Hood, p. 92; and by F. H.
Bothe, Janus, p. 122, after Barry.
A
Alexander Fraser Tytler's Brown MS., No 1 : Jamieson's
Popular Ballads, II, 7.
1 True Thomas lay oer yond grassy bank,
And he beheld a ladie gay,
A ladie that was brisk and bold,
Come riding oer the fernie brae.
2 Her skirt was of the grass-green silk,
Her mantel of the velvet fine,
At ilka tett of her horse's mane
Hung fifty silver bells and nine.
3 True Thomas he took off his hat,
And bowed him low down till his knee:
perform a certain service for the family not to eat or drink in
the house, or to take any present of her husband, exactly re-
peating the precautions observed in Grimm, Deutsche Sagen,
Nos 41, 49: Tendlau, Das Buch der Sagen und Legenden
jiidischer Vorzeit, p. 141. The children of Shem may prob-
ably have derived this trait in the story from the children
'All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For your peer on earth I never did see.'
4 'O no, O no, True Thomas,' she says,
'That name does not belong to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
And I'm come here for to visit thee.
* * * * *
5 'But ye maun go wi me now, Thomas,
True Thomas, ye maun go wi me,
For ye maun serve me seven years,
Thro weel or wae as may chance to be.'
6 She turned about her milk-white steed,
And took True Thomas up behind,
of Japhet. Aladdin, in the Arabian Nights, in to have a
care, above all things, that he does not touch the walls of
the subterranean chamber so much as with his clothes, or
he will die instantly. This again, by itself, is not very con-
clusive.
• Historia Danica, l. viii: Miiller et Velschow, I, 420-25.


324
37. THOMAS RYMER
And aye wheneer her bridle rang,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.
7 For forty days and forty nights
He wade thro red blude to the knee,
And he saw neither sun nor moon,
But heard the roaring of the sea.
8 O they rade on, and further on,
Until they came to a garden green:
'Light down, light down, ye ladie free,
Some of that fruit let me pull to thee.'
9 'O no, O no, True Thomas,' she says,
'That fruit maun not be touched by thee,
For a' the plagues that are in hell
Light on the fruit of this countrie.
10 'But I have a loaf here in my lap,
Likewise a bottle of claret wine,
And now ere we go farther on,
We 'll rest a while, and ye may dine.'
11 When he had eaten and drunk his fill,
'Lay down your head upon my knee,'
The lady sayd, ' ere we climb yon hill,
And I will show you fairlies three.
12 'O see not ye yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
13 'And see not ye that braid braid road,
That lies across yon lillie leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
14 'And see not ye that bonny road,
Which winds about the fernie brae?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Whe[re] you and I this night maun gae.
15 'But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever you may hear or see,
For gin ae word you should chance to speak.
You will neer get back to your ain coun-
trie.'
16 He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,
And a pair of shoes of velvet green,
And till seven years were past and gone
True Thomas on earth was never seen.
B
Campbell MSS, II, 83.
1 As Thomas lay on Huntlie banks —
A wat a weel bred man was he —
And there he spied a lady fair,
Coming riding down by the Eildon tree.
2 The horse she rode on was dapple gray,
And in her hand she held bells nine;
I thought I heard this fair lady say
These fair siller bells they should a' be
mine.
3 It's Thomas even forward went,
And lootit low down on his knee:
'Weel met thee save, my lady fair.
For thou 'rt the flower o this countrie.'
4 'O no, O no, Thomas,' she says,
'O no, O no, that can never be,
For I'm but a lady of an unco land,
Comd out a hunting, as ye may see.
5 'O harp and carp, Thomas,' she says,
'O harp and carp, and go wi me;
It's be seven years, Thomas, and a day,
Or you see man or woman in your ain coun-
trie.'
6 It's she has rode, and Thomas ran,
Until they cam to yon water clear;
He's coosten off his hose and shon,
And he's wooden the water up to the knee.
7 It's she has rode, and Thomas ran,
Until they cam to yon garden green;
He's put up his hand for to pull down ane,
For the lack o food he was like to tyne.
8 'Hold your hand, Thomas,' she says,
'Hold your hand, that must not be;
It was a' that cursed fruit o thine
Beggared man and woman in your countrie.
9 'But I have a loaf and a soup o wine,
And ye shall go and dine wi me;


37. THOMAS RYMER
325
And lay yer head down in my lap,
And I will tell ye farlies three.
10 'It's dont ye see yon hroad broad way.
That leadeth down by yon skerry fell?
It's ill's the man that dothe thereon gang,
For it leadeth him straight to the gates o
hell.
11 'It's dont ye see yon narrow way,
That leadeth down by yon lillie lea?
It's weel's the man that doth therein gang,
For it leads him straight to the heaven hie.'
0
Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 251, ed. 1802.
1 True Thomas lay on Huntlie bank,
A ferlie he spied wi' his ee,
And there be saw a lady bright,
Come riding down by the Eildon Tree.
2 Her shirt was o the grass-green silk,
Her mantle o the velvet fyne,
At ilka tett of her horse's mane
Hang fifty siller bells and nine.
3 True Thomas, he pulld afF his cap,
And louted low down to his knee:
'All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For thy peer on earth I never did see.'
4 'O no, O no, Thomas,' she said,
'That name does not belang to me;
I am but the queen of fair Ellland,
That am hither come to visit thee.
5 'Harp and carp, Thomas,' she said,
'Harp and carp along wi me,
And if ye dare to kiss my lips,
Sure of your bodie I will be.'
6 'Betide me weal, betide me woe,
That weird shall never daunton me ;'
Syne he has kissed her rosy lips,
All underneath the Eildon Tree.
7 'Now, ye maun go wi me,' she said,
'True Thomas, ye maun go wi me,
And ye maun serve me seven years,
Thro weal or woe, as may chance to be.'
*****
12 It's when she cam into the hall —
I wat a weel bred man was he —
They 've asked him question[s], one and all,
But he answered none but that fair ladie.
13 O they speerd at her where she did him get,
And she told them at the Eildon tree;
8 She mounted on her milk-white steed,
She's taen True Thomas up behind,
And aye wheneer her bridle rung,
The steed flew swifter than the wind.
9 0 they rade on, and farther on —
The steed gaed swifter than the wind —
Untill they reached a desart wide,
And living land was left behind.
10 'Light down, light down, now, True Thomas,
And lean your head upon my knee;
Abide and rest a little space,
And I will shew you ferlies three.
11 'O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires.
12 'And see not ye that braid braid road,
That lies across that lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to heaven.
13 'And see not ye that bonny road,
That winds about the fernie brae V
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where thou and I this night maun gae.
14 'But, Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,
Whatever ye may hear or see,
For, if you speak word in Elflyn land,
Ye 'll neer get back to your ain countrie.'
15 O they rade on, and farther on,
And they waded thro rivers aboon the knee,


326
37. THOMAS RYMER
And they saw neither sun nor moon,
But they heard the roaring of the sea.
16 It was mirk mirk night, and there was nae
stern light,
And they waded thro red blude to the knee;
For a' the blude that's shed on earth
Rins thro the springs o that countrie.
17 Syne they came on to a garden green,
And she pu'd an apple f rae a tree:
'Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,
It will give the tongue that can never lie.'
A. 7 stands 15 in the MS.
82. golden green, if my copy is right.
II2, * are ll3, 2 in the MS.: the order of words
is still not simple enough for a ballad.
14*. goe.
Jamieson has a few variations, which I
suppose to be his own.
I1. oer yonder bank. 34. your like. 44. And
I am come here to. 64. Her steed. 82.
Thornton MS., leaf 149, back, as printed by Dr. J. A. H.
Murray.
[A prologue of six stanzas, found only in the Thornton
MS., is omitted, as being, even if genuine, not to the present
purpose.]
1 AL8 I me wente pis endres daye,
Ffull faste in mynd makand my mone,
18 'My tongue is mine ain,' True Thomas said;
'A gudely gift ye wad gie to me!
I neither dought to buy nor sell,
At fair or tryst where I may be.
19 'I dought neither speak to prince or peer,
Nor ask of grace from fair ladye :'
'Now hold thy peace,' the lady said,
'For as I say, so must it be.'
20 He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,
And a pair of shoes of velvet green,
And till seven years were gane and past
True Thomas on earth was never seen.
garden, rightly. 102. clarry. II2. Lay
your head. 121. see you not ,12*.
there's few. 13. see ye not yon. 141.
see ye not. 142. Which winds.
B. 32. her knee. 3*. thou save.
12MS. perhaps unto.
131, 2 follow st. 12 without separation.
C. 201. a cloth.
If I solde sytt to domesdaye,
With my tonge to wrobbe and wrye,
Certanely pat lady gaye
Neuer bese scho askryede for mee.
Hir palfraye was a dappill graye,
Swylke one ne saghe I neuer none;
Als dose pe sonne on someres daye,
pat faire lady hir selfe scho schone.
6 Hir selle it was of roelle bone,
Ffull semely was pat syghte to see;
Stefly sett wt'tA precyous stones,
And compaste all with crapotee;
Stones of oryente, grete plente.
Hir hare abowte hir hede it hange;
Scho rade ouer pat lange lee;
A whylle scho blewe, a-noper scho sange.
Hir garthes of nobyll sylke pay were,
The bukylls were of berelle stone,
Hir steraps were of crystalle clere,
And all with perelle ouer-by-gone.
Hir payetrelle was of irale fyne,
Hir cropoure was of orphare,
In a mery mornynge of Maye,
By Huntle bankkes my selfe allone,
2 I herde pe jaye and pe throstelle,
The mawys menyde of hir songe,
pe wodewale beryde als a belle,
That alle pe wodc a-bowte me ronge.
3 Allonne in longynge thus als I lave,
Vndyre-nethe a semely tre,
[Saw] I whare a lady gaye
[Came ridand] ouer a longe lee.
APPENDIX.
THOMAS OFF ERSSELDOUNE.


37. THOMAS RYMER
327
And als clere golde hir brydill it scheme;
One aythir syde hange bellys three.
10 [Scho led three grehoundis in a leesshe,]
And seuene raches by hir fay rone;
Scho bare an home abowte hir haise,
And vndir hir belte full many a flone.
11 Thomas laye and sawe fat syghte,
Vndir-nethe ane semly tree;
He sayd, $one es Marye, moste of myghte,
fiat bare pat childe fat dyede for mee.
12 Bot if I speke with jone lady bryghte,
I hope myne herte will bryste in three;
Now sail I go with all my myghte,
Hir for to mete at Eldoune tree.
13 Thomas rathely vpe he rase,
And he rane ouer fat mountayne hye;
Gyff it be als the storye sayes,
He hir mette at Eldone tree.
And, als the storye tellis full ryghte,
Seuene sythis by hir he laye.
22 Scho sayd, Mane, the lykes thy playe:
Whate byrde in boure maye delle with the?
Thou merrys me all fis longe daye;
I pray the, Thomas, late me bee.
23 Thomas stode vpe in fat stede,
And he by-helde fat lady gave;
Hir hare it hange all ouer hir hede,
Hir eghne semede owte, fat are were graye.
24 And alle fe riche clothynge was a-waye,
pat be by-fore sawe in fat stede;
Hir a schanke blake, hir of er graye,
And all hir body lyke the lede.
25 Thomas laye, and sawe fat syghte,
Vndir-nethe fat grenewod tree.
14 He knelyde downe appone his knee,
Vndir-nethe fat grenwode spraye,
And sayd, Lufly ladye, rewe one mee,
Qwene of heuene, als fou wele maye 1
15 Then spake fat lady milde of thoghte:
Thomas, late swylke wordes bee;
Qwene of heuene ne am I noghte,
Ffor I tuke neuer so heghe degre.
16 Bote I ame of ane of er countree,
If I be payrelde moste of pryse;
I ryde aftyre this wylde fee;
My raches rynnys at my devyse.'
17 'If fou be parelde moste of pryse,
And here rydis thus in thy folye,
Of lufe, lady, als fou erte wyse,
fou gyffe me leue to lye the bye.'
18 Scho sayde, )>ou mane, fat ware folye;
I praye fe, Thomas, fou late me bee;
Ffor I saye fe full sekirlye,
J)at synne will for-doo all my beaute.
19 'Now, lufly ladye, rewe one mee,
And I will euer more wttA the duelle;
Here my trouthe I will the plyghte,
Whethir fou will in heuene or helle.'
20 'Mane of molde, fou will me marre,
But jitt fou sall hafe all thy will;
And trowe it wele, fou chewys fe werre,
Ffor alle my beaute will fou spylle.'
26 JJan said Thomas, Alias! alias!
In fay the fis es a dullfull syghte;
How arte fou fadyde fus in fe face,
J>at schane by-fore als f e sonne so bryght[e]!
27 Scho sayd, Thomas, take leue at sone and mon[e],
And als at lefe fat grewes on tree;
This twelmoneth sail fou witA me gone,
And medill-erthe sall fou none see.'
28 He knelyd downe appone his knee,
Vndir-nethe pat grenewod spraye,
And sayd, Lufly lady, rewe on mee,
Mylde qwene of heuene, als fou beste maye 1
29 'Alias 1' he sayd, 'and wa es mee 1
I trowe my dedis wyll wirke me care;
My saulle, Jhesu, by-teche I the,
Whedir-some fat euer my banes sall fare.'
30 Scho ledde hym in at Eldone hill,
Vndir-nethe a derne lee,
Whare it was dirke as mydnyght myrke,
And euer fe water till his knee.
31 The montenans of dayes three,
He herd bot swoghynge of fe flode;
At fe laste he sayde, Full wa es mee!
Almaste I dye, for fawte of f[ode.]
82 Scho lede hym in-till a faire herbere,
Whare frwte was g[ro]wan[d gret plentee];
Pere and appill, bothe ryppe fay were,
The date, and als the damasee.
21 Downe fane lyghte fat lady bryghte,
Vndir-nethe fat grenewode spraye;
33 J>e fygge, and alsso fe wyneberye,
The nyghtgales byggande on fair neste;


38. THE WEE WEE MAN
329
And pou arte mekill mane and hende;
I trowe full wele he wolde chese the.
58 'Ffor alle pe gold fat euer may bee,
Ffro hethyne vn-to fe worldis ende,
bou bese neuer be-trayede for mee;
)>erefore with me I rede thou wende.'
59 Scho broghte hym agayne to Eldone tree,
Vndir-nethe pat grenewode spraye;
In Huntlee bannkes es mery to bee,
Whare fowles synges bothe nyght and daye.
60 'Fferre owtt in jone mountane graye,
Thomas, my fawkone bygges a neste;
A fawconne es an erlis praye;
Ffor-thi in na place may he reste.
61 'Ffare well, Thomas, I wend my waye,
Ffor me by-houys ouer thir benttis browne:'
Loo here a fytt: more es to saye,
All of Thomas of Erselldowne.
FYTT II.
1 'Fare wele, Thomas, I wend my waye,
I may no lengare stande witA the:'
'Gyff me a tokynynge, lady gaye,
That I may saye I spake with the.'
2 'To harpe or carpe, whare-so fou gose,
Thomas, )>ou sail hafe )>e chose sothely :'
And he saide, Harpynge kepe I none,
Ffor tonge es chefe of mynstralsye.
3 'If pou will spelle, or tales telle,
Thomas, )>ou sail neuer lesynge lye;
Whare euer pou fare, by frythe or felle,
I praye the speke none euyll of me.
4 'Ffare wele, Thomas, witA-owttyne gyle,
I may no lengare duelle with the:'
'Lufly lady, habyde a while,
And telle pou me of some ferly.'
5 'Thomas, herkyne what I the saye :' etc.
Here begin the prophecies.
& and j are replaced by and and I.
21. throstyll cokke: throstell, Cambridge MS.
2s. menyde hir.
101. Wanting. She led, etc., Cambridge.
124, 18*. Lansdowne, elden; Cambridge, eldryn, el-
dryne.
162. prysse.
171. prysee. 17*. wysse.
434. me by. Cambridge, be me.
464. also.
Fytt 2.
21. pou gose. Cambridge, je gon.
38
THE WEE WEE MAN
A. a. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Herd's MSS, I, 158;
Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, I, 95.
B. Caw's Poetical Museum, p. 348.
C. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Scott's Minstrelsy, II, 234,
ed. 1802.
D. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Kinloch MSS, VII, 253.
E. a. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Motherwell's Note-Book,
fol. 40; Motherwell's MS., p. 195. b. Motherwell's
Minstrelsy, p. 343.
F. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Motherwell's MS., p. 68.
G. 'The Little Man,' Buchan's Ballads of the North
of Scotland, I, 263.
This extremely airy and sparkling little Scotish Songs, II, 139, are reprinted from
ballad varies but slightly in the half dozen Herd.
known copies. The one in the Musical Mu- Singularly enough, there is a poem in eight-
seum, No 370, p. 382, and that in Ritson's line stanzas, in a fourteenth-century manu-
42


330
38. THE WEE WEE MAN
script, which stands in somewhat the same
relation to this ballad as the poem of Thomas
of Erceldoune does to the ballad of Thomas
Rymer, but with the important difference
that there is no reason for deriving the ballad
from the poem in this instance. There seems
to have been an intention to make it, like
Thomas of Erceldoune, an introduction to a
A
Herd's MSS, 1,153, Herd's Ancient and Modern Scottish
Songs, 1776, I, 95.
1 As I was wa'king all alone,
Between a water and a wa,
And there I spy'd a wee wee man,
And he was the least that ere I saw.
2 His legs were scarce a shathmont's length,
And thick and thimher was his thigh;
Between his brows there was a span,
And between his shoulders there was three.
3 He took up a meikle stane,
And he flang't as far as I could see;
Though I had been a Wallace wight,
I couldna liften't to my knee.
4 'O wee wee man, but thou be strang!
O tell me where thy dwelling be?'
B
Caw's Poetical Museum, p. 348.
1 As I was walking by my lane,
Atween a water and a wa,
There sune I spied a wee wee man,
He was the least that eir I saw.
2 His legs were scant a shathmont's length,
And sma and limber was his thie;
Atween his shoulders was ae span,
About his middle war but three.
3 He has tane up a meikle stane,
And flang't as far as I cold see;
Ein thouch I had been Wallace wicht,
I dought na lift it to my knie.
string of prophecies which follows, but no
junction has been effected. This poem is
given in an appendix.
A is translated by Arndt, Bliitenlese, p.
210; B, with a few improvements from E b,
by Rosa Warrens, Schottische Volkslieder, p.
12.
'My dwelling's down at yon bonny bower;
O will you go with me and see?'
5 On we lap, and awa we rade,
Till we came to yon bonny green; •
We lighted down for to bait our horse,
And out there came a lady fine.
6 Four and twenty at her back,
And they were a' clad out in green;
Though the King of Scotland had been there,
The warst o them might hae been bis queen.
7 On we lap, and awa we rade,
Till we came to yon bonny ha,
Whare the roof was o the beaten gould,
And the floor was o the crista! a'.
8 When we came to the stair-foot,
Ladies were dancing, jimp and sma,
But in the twinkling of an eye,
My wee wee man was clean awa.
4 'O wee wee man, but ye be strang!
Tell me whar may thy dwelling be?
'I dwell beneth that bonnie bouir;
O will ye gae wi me and see?'
5 On we lap, and awa we rade,
Till we cam to a bonny green;
We lichted fyne to bait our steid,
And out there cam a lady sheen.
6 Wi four and twentie at her back,
A' comely cled in glistering green;
Thouch there the King of Scots had stude,
The warst micht weil hae been his queen.
7 On syne we past wi wondering cheir,
Till we cam to a bonny ha;


38. THE WEE WEE MAN
331
The roof was o the beaten gowd,
The flure was o the crystal a'.
8 When we cam there, wi wee wee knichts
War ladies dancing, jimp and sma,
But in the twinkling of an eie,
fiaith green and ha war clein awa.
c
Scott's Minstrelsy, II, 234, ed. 1802, incorporated wi!
'The Young Tamlane.' From recitation.
1 'T was down by Carterhaugh, father,
I walked beside the wa,
And there I saw a wee wee man,
The least that eer I saw.
2 His legs were skant a shathmont lang,
Yet umber was his thie;
Between his brows there was ae span,
And between his shoulders three.
3 He's taen and flung a meikle stane,
As far as I could see;
I could na, had I been Wallace wight,
Hae lifted it to my knee.
4 'O wee wee man, but ye be strang!
Where may thy dwelling be?'
'It's down beside yon bonny bower;
Fair lady, come and see.'
5 On we lap, and away we rade,
Down to a bonny green;
We lighted down to bait our steed,
And we saw the fairy queen.
6 With four and twenty at her back,
Of ladies clad in green;
Tho the King of Scotland had been there,
The worst might hae been his queen.
7 On we lap, and away we rade,
Down to a bonny ha;
The roof was o the beaten goud,
The floor was of chrystal a'.
8 And there were dancing on the floor,
Fair ladies jimp and sma;
But in the twinkling o an eye,
They sainted clean awa.
D
Kinloch MSS, VII, 253. From Mrs Elder.
1 As I gaed out to tak a walk,
Atween the water and the wa,
There I met wi a wee wee man,
The weest man that ere I saw.
2 Thick and short was his legs,
And sma and thin was his thie,
And atween his een a flee might gae,
And atween his shouthers were inches three.
3 And he has tunc up a muckle stane,
And thrown it farther than I cowd see;
If I had been as strong as ere Wallace was,
I cozfd na lift it to my knie.
4 'O,' quo I, 'but ye be strong!
And O where may your dwelling be?'
'It's down in to yon bonnie glen;
Gin ye dinna believe, ye can come and
see.'
5 And we rade on, and we sped on,
Till we cam to yon bonny glen,
And there we lichted and louted in,
And there we saw a dainty dame.
6 There was four and twenty wating on her,
And ilka ane was clad in green,
And he had been the king of fair Scotland,
The warst o them micht hae been his
queen.
7 There war pipers playing on ilka stair,
And ladies dancing in ilka ha,
But before ye cowd hae sadd what was that,
The house and wee manie was awa.


332
38. THE WEE WEE MAN
E
a. Motherwell's Note-Book, fol. 40, " from Agnes Lyle ;"
Motherwell's MS., p. 195, "from the recitation of Agnes
Laird, Kilbarchan." b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 343.
1 As I was walking mine alone,
Betwext the water and the wa,
There I spied a wee wee man,
He was the least ane that eer I saw.
2 His leg was scarse a shaftmont lang,
Both thick and nimble was his knee;
Between his eyes there was a span,
Betwixt his shoulders were ells three.
3 This wee wee man pulled up a stone,
He flang't as far as I could see;
Tho I had been like Wallace strong,
I wadna gotn't up to my knee.
F
Motherwell's MS., p. 68, "from the recitation of Mrs Wil-
son, of the Renfrewshire Tontine; now of the Caledonian
Hotel, Inverness."
1 As I was walking mine alane,
Between the water and the wa,
And oh there I spy'd a wee wee mannie,
The weeest mannie that ere I saw.
2 His legs they were na a gude inch lang,
And thick and nimble was his thie;
Between his een there was a span,
And between his shouthers there were ells
three.
3 I asked at this wee wee mannie
Whare his dwelling place might be;
The answer that he gied to me
Was, Cum alang, and ye shall see.
G
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 263.
1 As I gaed out to tak the air,
Between Midmar and bonny Craigha,
There I met a little wee man,
The less o him I never saw.
4 I said, Wee man, oh, but you 're strong!
Where is your dwelling, or where may't be?
'My dwelling's at yon bonnie green;
Fair lady, will ye go and see?'
5 On we lap, and awa we rade,
Until we came to yonder green;
We lichtit down to rest our steed,
And there cam out a lady soon.
6 Four and twenty at her back,
And every one of them was clad in green;
Altho he had been the King of Scotland,
The warst o them a' micht hae been his
queen.
7 There were pipers playing in every neuk,
And ladies dancing, jimp and sma,
And aye the owre-turn o their tune
Was 'Our wee wee man has been lang awa.'
4 So we 'll awa, and on we rade,
Till we cam to yon bonnie green;
We lichted down to bait our horse,
And up and started a lady syne.
5 Wi four and twenty at her back,
And they were a' weell clad in green;
Tho I had been a crowned king,
The warst o them might ha been my queen.
6 So we 'll awa, and on we rade,
Till we cam to yon bonnie hall;
The rafters were o the beaten gold,
And silver wire were the kebars all.
7 And there was mirth in every end,
And ladies dancing, ane and a,
And aye the owre-turn o their sang
Was 'The wee wee mannie's been lang
awa.'
2 His legs were but a finger lang,
And thick and nimle was his knee;
Between his brows there was a span,
Between his shoulders ells three.
3 He lifted a stane sax feet in hight,
He lifted it up till his right knee,
And fifty yards and mair, I'm sure,
I wyte he made the stane to flee.


38. THE WEE WEE MAN
333
4 'O little wee man, but ye be wight!
Tell me whar your dwelling be ;'
'I hae a bower, compactly built,
Madam, gin ye 'll cum and see.'
5 Sae on we lap, and awa we rade,
Till we come to yon little ha;
The kipples ware o the gude red gowd,
The reef was o the proseyla.
6 Pipers were playing, ladies dancing,
The ladies dancing, jimp and sma;
At ilka turning o the spring,
The little man was wearin's wa.
7 Out gat the lights, on cam the mist,
Ladies nor mannie mair coud see
I turnd about, and gae a look,
Just at the foot o' Benachie.
A. 2s. The printed copy has thighs.
4!. dwelling down.
There is a copy of this ballad in Cunning-
ham's Songs of Scotland, 1,303. Though
no confidence can be felt in the genuine-
ness of the "several variations from re-
citation and singing," with which Cun-
ningham says he sought to improve
Herd's version, the more considerable
ones are here noted.
1*. O there I met. 21. a shathmont lang.
3s. been a giant born. 41. ye 're wonder strong.
44. O ladie, gang wi me. 51. away we flew.
5s. to a valley green.
5s. down and he stamped his foot.
5*. And up there rose.
61. Wi four. 62. the glossy green.
V. stately ha.
8. And there were harpings loud and sweet,
And ladies dancing, jimp and sma;
He clapped his hands, and ere I wist,
He sank and saunted clean awa.
E. a. 41. your.
Motherwell has made one or two slight
changes in copying from his Note-Book
into his MS.
b. Besides some alterations of his own, Moth-
erwell has introduced readings from F.
2*. there were.
3s. as Wallace.
5*. lady sheen. 6l. Wi four.
62. And they were a' weel clad.
After 6 is inserted F 6, with the first line
changed to
So on we lap, and awa we rade.
APPENDIX.
This piece is found in Cotton MS., Julius, A, V,
the ninth article in the manuscript, fol. 175, r°,
(otherwise 180, r°). It is here given nearly as
printed by Mr Thomas Wright in his edition of the
Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, H, 452. It had
been previously printed in Ritson's Ancient Songs,
ed. 1829, L 40; Finlay's Scottish Ballads, II, 168;
the Retrospective Review, Second Series, II, 326.
The prophecies, omitted here, are given by all the
above.
1 Als y yod on ay Mounday
Bytwene Wyltinden and Walle,
Me ane aftere brade waye,
Ay litel man y mette withalle;
The leste that ever I sathe, [sothe] to say,
Oithere in boure, oithere in halle;
His robe was noithere grene na gray,
Bot alle yt was of riche palle.
On me he cald, and bad me bide;
Well stille y stode ay litel space;
Fra Lanchestre the parke syde
Yeen he come, wel fair his pase.
He hailsed me with mikel pride;
Ic haved wel mykel ferly wat he was;
I saide, Wel mote the bityde!
That litel man with large face.
I biheld that litel man
Bi the stretes als we gon gae;
His berd was eyde ay large span,
And glided als the fethere of pae;
His heved was wyte als any swan,
His hegehen ware gret and grai alsso;


334
38. THE WEE WEE MAN
Brues lange, wel I the can
Merke it to five inches and mae.
4 Armes scort, for sothe I saye,
Ay span seemed thaem to bee;
Handes brade, vytouten nay,
And fingeres lange, he scheued me.
Ay stan he toke op thare it lay,
And castid forth that I mothe see;
Ay merke-soote of large way
Bifor me strides he castid three.
5 Wel stille I stod als did the stane,
To loke him on thouth me nouthe lange;
His robe was alle golde bigane,
Wel craftlike maked, I underestande;
Botones asurd, everlke ane,
Fra his elbouthe on til his hande;
Eldelike man was he nane,
That in myn herte icke onderestande.
6 Til him I sayde ful sone on ane,
For forthirmare I wald him fraine,
Glalli wild 1 wit thi name,
And I wist wat me mouthe gaine;
Thou ert so litel of flesse and bane,
And so mikel of mithe and mayne;
Ware vones thou, litel man, at hame?
Wit of the I walde ful faine.
7 'Thoth I be litel and lith,
Am y nothe wytouten wane;
Fferli trained thou wat I hith,
Yat thou salt noth with my name.
My wonige stede ful wel es dyth,
Nou sone thou salt se at hame.'
Til him I sayde, For Godes mith,
Lat me forth myn erand gane.
8 'The thar noth of thin errand lette,
Thouth thou come ay stonde wit me;
Forthere salt thou noth bisette
Bi miles twa noythere bi three.'
Na linger durste I for him lette,
But forth ij fundid wyt that free;
Stintid vs broke no becke;
Ferlicke me thouth hu so mouth bee.
9 He vent forth, als ij you say,
In at ay yate, ij underestande;
Intil ay yate, wundouten nay;
It to se thouth me nouth lange.
The bankers on the binkes lay,
And fair lordes sette ij fonde;
In ilka ay him ij herd ay lay,
And levedys south meloude sange.
The meeting with the little man was on Monday. We
are now invited to listen to a tale told on Wednesday by
"a moody barn," who is presently addressed, in language
which, to be sure, fits the elf well enough, as "merry man,
that is so wight:" but things do not fay at all here.
10 Lithe, bothe yonge and aide:
Of ay worde ij will you saye,
A litel tale that me was tald
Erli on ay Wedenesdaye.
A mody barn, that was ful bald,
My frend that ij trained aye,
Al my yerning he me tald,
And yatid me als we went bi waye.
11 'Miri man, that es so wythe,
Of ay thinge gif me answere:
For him that mensked man wyt mith,
Wat sal worth of this were?' &c.
The orthography of this piece, if rightly rendered, is
peculiar, and it is certainly not consistent.
1*. saith for saw occurs in 23s.
Wright, Y cen: Retrosp. Rev., Yeen.
W., Merkes: R. R., Merke. fize.
W., everlkes: R. R., euerelke.
W., of their: R. R., of ye ()>e). i. wald.
W., That thou: R.R., yat.
dygh. 94. south me.
me loude.
W., thering: R. R., yering.
W., y atid: R. R., yatid.
2«.
8s.
6».
6>.
7<
7».
9*.
10T.
10s.


336
39. TAM LIN
A copy printed in Aberdeen, 1862, and said
to have been edited by the Rev. John Bur-
nett Pratt, of Cruden, Aberdeenshire, is made
up from Aytoun and Scott, with a number of
slight changes.*
'The Tayl of the jong Tamlene' is spoken
of as told among a company of shepherds, in
Vedderburn's Complaint of Scotland, 1549, p.
63 of Dr James A. H. Murray's edition for
the Early English Text Society. 'Thorn of
Lyn' is mentioned as a dance of the same
party, a little further on, Murray, p. 66, and
'Young Thomlin' is the name of an air in a
medley in " Wood's MS.," inserted, as David
Laing thought, between 1600 and 1620, and
printed in Forbes's Cantus, 1666 : Stenhouse's
ed. of The Scots Musical Museum, 1853, IV,
440. "A ballett of Thomalyn" is licensed
to Master John Wallye and Mistress Toye in
1558: Arber, Transcript of the Registers of
the Company of Stationers, I, 22; cited by
Furnivall, Captain Cox, &c, Ballad Society,
p. clxiv.
Sir Walter Scott relates a tradition of an
attempt to rescue a woman from fairydom
which recalls the ill success of many of the ef-
forts to disenchant White Ladies in Germany:
"The wife of a farmer in Lothian had been
carried off by the fairies, and, during the year
of probation, repeatedly appeared on Sunday,
in the midst of her children, combing their
hair. On one of these occasions she was ac-
costed by her husband; when she related to
him the unfortunate event which had sepa-
rated them, instructed him by what means he
might win her, and exhorted him to exert all
his courage, since her temporal and eternal
happiness depended on the success of his at-
tempt. The farmer, who ardently loved his
wife, set out at Halloween, and, in the midst
of a plot of furze, waited impatiently for the
Four an twenty gentlemen
Cam by on steeds o brown;
In his hand ilk bore a siller wand,
On his head a siller crown.
Four an twenty beltit knichts
On daiplit greys cam by;
Gowden their wands an crowns, whilk scanct
Like streamers in the sky.
procession of the fairies. At the ringing of
the fairy bridles, and the wild, unearthly
sound which accompanied the cavalcade, his
heart failed him, and he suffered the ghostly
train to pass by without interruption. When
the last had rode past, the whole troop van-
ished, with loud shouts of laughter and exul-
tation, among which he plainly discovered the
voice of his wife, lamenting that he had lost
her forever." The same author proceeds to
recount a real incident, which took place at
the town of North Berwick, within memory, of
a man who was prevented from undertaking,
or at least meditating, a similar rescue only by
shrewd and prompt practical measures on the
part of his minister.f
This fine ballad stands by itself, and is not,
as might have been expected, found in posses-
sion of any people but the Scottish. Yet it has
connections, through the principal feature in the
story, the retransformation of Tam Lin, with
Greek popular tradition older than Homer.
Something of the successive changes of shape
is met with in a Scandinavian ballad: 'Nat-
tergalen,' Grundtvig, II, 168, No 57; 'Den
fortrollade Prinsessan,' Afzelius, II, 67, No 41,
Atterbom, Poetisk Kalender, 1816, p. 44; Dy-
beck, Runa, 1844, p. 94, No 2; Axelson, Van-
dring i W ermlands Elfdal, p. 21, No 3 ; Linde-
man, Norske Fjeldmelodier, Tekstbilag til lste
Bind, p. 3, No 10.
Though many copies of this ballad have
been obtained from the mouth of the people,
all that are known are derived from flying
sheets, of which there is a Danish one dated
1721 and a Swedish of the year 1738. What
is of more account, the style of the piece, as we
have it, is not quite popular. Nevertheless,
the story is entirely of the popular stamp, and
so is the feature in it, which alone concerns us
materially. A nightingale relates to a knigbt
Four an twenty noble kings
Cam by on steeds o snaw,
But True Thomas, the gude Rhymer,
Was king outower them a'.
* "Tamlane: an old Scottish Border Ballad. Aberdeen,
Lewis and James Smith, 1862." I am indebted for a sight
of this copy, and for the information as to the editor, to Mr
Macmath.
t Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 221-24, ed. 1802.


39. TAM LIN
337
how she had once had a lover, but a step-
mother soon upset all that, and turned her
into a bird and her brother into a wolf. The
curse was not to be taken off the brother till
he drank of his step-dame's blood, and after
seven years he caught her, when she was tak-
ing a walk in a wood, tore out her heart, and
regained his human shape. The knight pro-
poses to the bird that she shall come and pass
the winter in his bower, and go back to the
wood in the summer: this, the nightingale
says, the step-mother had forbidden, as long
as she wore feathers. The knight seizes the
bird by the foot, takes her home to his bower,
and fastens the windows and doors. She
turns to all the marvellous beasts one ever
heard of, — to a lion, a bear, a variety of small
snakes, and at last to a loathsome lind-worm.
The knight makes a sufficient incision for blood
to come, and a maid stands on the floor as fair
as a flower. He now asks after her origin,
and she answers, Egypt's king was my fa-
ther, and its queen my mother; my brother
was doomed to rove the woods as a wolf. "If
Egypt's king," he rejoins, " was your father,
and its queen your mother, then for sure you
are my sister's daughter, who was doomed to
be a nightingale." *
We come much nearer, and indeed sur-
prisingly near, to the principal event of the
Scottish ballad in a Cretan fairy-tale, cited
from Chourmouzis by Bernhard Schmidt, f A
young peasant of the village Sgourokephali,
who was a good player on the rote, used to be
taken by the nereids into their grotto for the
sake of his music. He fell in love with one
of them, and, not knowing how to help him-
self, had recourse to an old woman of his vil-
lage. She gave him this advice: that just
before cock-crow he should seize his beloved
by the hair, and hold on, unterrified, till the
cock crew, whatever forms she should assume.
The peasant gave good heed, and the next
time he was taken into the cave fell to play-
ing, as usual, and the nereids to dancing. But
* Restoration from enchantment is effected by drinking
blood, in other ballads, as Grundtvig, No 55, II, 156, No 58,
II, 174; in No 56, II, 158, by a maid in falcon shape eating
of a bit of flesh which her lover had cm from his breast.
as cock-crow drew nigh, he put down his in-
strument, sprang upon the object of his pas-
sion, and grasped her by her locks. She in-
stantly changed shape; became a dog, a snake,
a camel, fire. But he kept his courage and
held on, and presently the cock crew, and the
nereids vanished all but one. His love re-
turned to her proper beauty, and went with
him to his home. After the lapse of a year
she bore a son, but in all this time never ut-
tered a word. The young husband was fain
to ask counsel of the old woman again, who
told him to heat the oven hot, and say to his
wife that if she would not speak he would
throw the boy into the oven. He acted upon
this prescription; the nereid cried out, Let go
my child, dog! tore the infant from his arms,
and vanished.
This Cretan tale, recovered from tradition
even later than our ballad, repeats all the im-
portant circumstances of the forced marriage
of Thetis with Peleus. Chiron, like the old
woman, suggested to his protegd that he
should lay hands on the nereid, and keep his
hold through whatever metamorphosis she
might make. He looked out for his oppor-
tunity and seized her; she turned to fire,
water, and a wild beast, but he did not let go
till she resumed her primitive shape. Thetis,
having borne a son, wished to make him im-
mortal ; to which end she buried him in fire
by night, to burn out his human elements, and
anointed him with ambrosia by day. Peleus
was not taken into counsel, but watched her,
and saw the boy gasping in the fire, which
made him call out; and Thetis, thus thwarted,
abandoned the child and went back to the
nereids. Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, III, 13,
5, 6.
The Cretan tale does not differ from the
one repeated by Apollodorus from earlier writ-
ers a couple of thousand years ago more than
two versions of a story gathered from oral
tradition in these days are apt to do. Whether
it has come down to our time from mouth to
t Volksleben der Neugriechen, pp 115-17, "from Chour-
mouzis, KpirrucA, p. 69 f, Athens, 1842." Chourmouzis heard
this story, about 1820 or 1830, from an old Cretan peasant,
who had heard it from his grandfather.
43


338
39. TAM LIN
mouth through twenty-five centuries or more,
or whether, having died out of the popular
memory, it was reintroduced through litera-
ture, is a question that cannot be decided with
certainty; but there will be nothing unlikely
in the former supposition to those who bear
in mind the tenacity of tradition among peo-
ple who have never known books.*
B 34,
First dip me in a stand of milk,
And then in a stand of water;
Haud me fast, let me na gae,
I 'll be your bairnie's father,
has an occult and very important significance
which has only very lately been pointed out,
and which modern reciters had completely lost
knowledge of, as appears by the disorder into
which the stanzas have fallen.f Immersion
in a liquid, generally water, but sometimes
milk, is a process requisite for passing from a
non-human shape, produced by enchantment,
back into the human, and also for returning
from the human to a non-human state, whether
produced by enchantment or original. We
have seen that the serpent which Lanzelet
kisses, in Ulrich's romance, is not by that sim-
ple though essential act instantly turned into
a woman. It is still necessary that she should
bathe in a spring (p. 308). In an Albanian
tale, ' Taubenliebe,' Hahn, No 102, II, 130, a
dove flies into a princess's window, and, re-
ceiving her caresses, asks, Do you love me?
The princess answering Yes, the dove says,
Then have a dish of milk ready to-morrow,
and you shall see what a handsome man I am.
* The silence of the Cretan fairy, as B. Schmidt has re-
marked, even seems to explain Sophocles calling the nuptials
of Pelens and Thetis " speechless," &$66yyovs ydfious- Soph-
ocles gives the transformations as being lion, snake, fire,
water: Scholia in Pindari Nemea, 111, 60; Schmidt, as be-
fore, p. 116, note. That a firm grip and a fearless one would
make any sea-god do your will would appear from the ad-
ditional instances of Menelaus and Proteus, in Odyssey, IV,
and of Hercules and Nereus, Apollodorus, II, 5,11, 4, Scho-
lia in Apollonii Argonaut., IV, 1396. Proteus masks as lion,
snake, panther, boar, running water, tree; Nereus as water,
fire, or, as Apollodorus says, in all sorts of shapes. Bacchus
was accustomed to transform himself when violence was
done him, but it is not recorded that he was ever brought to
terms like the watery divinities. See Mannhardt, Wald-und
Feldkulte, II, 60-64, who also well remarks that the tales
A dish of milk is ready the next morning; the
dove flies into the window, dips himself in the
milk, drops his feathers, and steps out a beau-
tiful youth. When it is time to go, the youth
dips in the milk, and flies off a dove. This
goes on every day for two years. A Greek
tale, 'Goldgerte,' Hahn, No 7, I, 97, has the
same transformation, with water for milk. Our
B 34 has well-water only.| Perhaps the bath
of milk occurred in one earlier version of our
ballad, the water-bath in another, and the two
accounts became blended in time.
The end of the mutations, in F 11, Gr 43,
is a naked man, and a mother-naked man iu
B 33, under the presumed right arrangement;
meaning by right arrangement, however, not
the original arrangement, but the most consis-
tent one for the actual form of the tradition.
Judging by analogy, the naked man should
issue from the bath of milk or of water; into
which he should have gone in one of his non-
human shapes, a dove, swan, or snake (for
which, too, a " stand " of milk or of water is a
more practicable bath than for a man). The
fragment C adds some slight probability to
this supposition. The last change there is
into " a dove but and a swan;" then Tam
Lin bids the maiden to let go, for he 'll "be
a perfect man :" this, nevertheless, he could
not well become without some further cere-
mony. A is the only version which has pre-
served an essentially correct process: Tam
Lin, when a burning gleed, is to be thrown
into well-water, from which he will step forth
a naked knight.§
At stated periods, which the ballads make
of the White Ladies, who, to be released from a ban, must
be kissed three times in various shapes, as toad, wolf, snake,
etc., have relation to these Greek traditions.
t The significance of the immersion in water is shown by
Mannhardt, Wald- u. Feldkulte, II, 64 ff. The disorder in
the stanzas of A at this place has of course been rectified.
In Scott's version, I, transformations are added at random
from C, after the dipping in milk and in water, which seems
indeed to have been regarded by the reciters only as a meas-
ure for cooling red-hot iron or the burning gleed, and not as
the act essential for restoration to the human nature.
} Possibly the holy water in D 17, Q 32, is a relic of the
water-bath.
§ In the MS. of B also the transformation into a het gad
of iron comes just before the direction to dip the object into
a stand of milk; but we have the turning into a mother.


39. TAM LIN
339
to be seven years, the fiend of hell is entitled
to take his teind, tithe, or kane from the peo-
ple of fairy-land : A 24, B 23, C 5, D 15, G 28,
H 15. The fiend prefers those that are fair
and fu o flesh, according to A, G; ane o flesh
and blood, D. H makes the queen fear for
herself ; "the koors they hae gane round about,
and I fear it will be mysel." H is not discord-
ant with popular tradition elsewhere, which
attributes to fairies the practice of abstracting
young children to serve as substitutes for
themselves in this tribute: Scott's Minstrelsy,
II, 220, 1802. D 15 says "the last here goes
to hell," which would certainly not be equita-
ble, and C "we're a' dung down to hell,"
where "all" must be meant only of the nat-
uralized members of the community. Poor
Alison Pearson, who lost her life in 1586 for
believing these things, testified that the tribute
was annual. Mr William Sympson, who had
been taken away by the fairies," bidd her sign
herself that she be not taken away, for the
teind of them are tane to hell everie year:"
Scott, as above, p. 208. The kindly queen
of the fairies * will not allow Thomas of Er-
celdoune to be exposed to this peril, and hur-
ries him back to earth the day before the
fiend comes for his due. Thomas is in pe-
culiar danger, for the reason given in A, G, R.
To morne of helle )>e foulle fende
Amange this folke will feche his fee;
And Jxra art mekill man and hende;
I trowe full wele he wolde chese the.
naked man several stanzas earlier. By reading, in 331, I 'll
turn, and putting 33 after 34, we should have the order of
events which we find in A.
That Tam Lin should go into water or milk as a dove or
snake, or in some other of his temporary forms, and come
out a man, is the only disposition which is consistent with the
order of the world to which he belongs. Mannhardt gives
us a most curious and interesting insight into some of the
laws of that world in Wald- u. Feldkulte, II, 64-70. The
wife of a Cashmere king, in a story there cited from Benfey's
Pantschatantra, I, 254, § 92, is delivered of a serpent, but is
reported to have borne a son. Another king offers his
daughter in marriage, and the Cashmere king, to keep his
secret, accepts the proposal. In due time the princess claims
her bridegroom, and they give her the snake. Though
greatly distressed, she accepts her lot, and takes the snake
about to the holy places, at the last of which she receives a
command to put the snake into the water-tank. As soon as
this is done the snake takes the form of a man. A woman's
giving birth to a snake was by no means a rare thing in
The elf-queen, A 42, B 40, would have taken
out Tam's twa gray een, had she known he
was to be borrowed, and have put in twa een
of tree, B 41, D 34, E 21, H 14; she would
have taken out his heart of flesh, and have
put in, B, D, E, a heart of stane, H of tree.
The taking out of the eyes would probably be
to deprive Tam of the faculty of recognizing
fairy folk thereafter. Mortals whose eves
have been touched with fairies' salve can see
them when they are to others invisible, and
such persons, upon distinguishing and saluting
fairies, have often had not simply this power
but their ordinary eyesight taken away: see
Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway
Song, p. 304, Thiele, Danmarks Folkesagn,
1843, II, 202, rv, etc. Grimm has given in-
stances of witches, Slavic, German, Norse and
Italian, taking out the heart of man (which
they are wont to devour), and replacing it in
some instances with straw, wood, or something
of the kind ; nor do the Roman witches appear
to have been behind later ones in this dealing:
Deutsche Mythologie, 904 f, and the note III,
312.
The fairy in the Lai de Lauval, v. 547,
rides on a white palfrey, and also two dam-
sels, her harbingers, v. 471; so the fairy prin-
cess in the English Launfal, Halliwell, Fairy
Mythology, p. 30. The fairy king and all his
knights and ladies ride on white steeds in King
Orfeo, Halliwell, as above, p. 41. The queen
of Elfland rides a milk-white steed in Thomas
Karat in the seventeenth centnry, and it was the rule in one
noble family that all the offspring should be in serpent form,
or at least have a serpent's head; but a bath in water turned
them into human shape. For elves and water nymphs who
have entered into connections with men in the form of women,
bathing in water is equally necessary for resuming their
previous shape, as appears from an ancient version of the
story of Melusina: Gervasius, ed. Liebrecht, p. 4f, and Vin-
centius Bellovacensis, Speculum Naturale, 2,127 (from He-
linandus), cited by Liebrecht, at p. 66.
A lad who had been changed into an ass by a couple of
witches recovers his shape merely by jumping into water and
rolling about in it: William of Malmesbury's Kings of
England, c. 10, cited by Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum
Naturale, iii, 109; Duntzcr, Liebrecht's Dunlop, p. 538. Sim-
ple illusions of magic, such as clods and wisps made to
appear swine to our eyes, are inevitably dissolved when the
unrealities touch water. Liebrecht's Gervasius, p. 65.
• Cf. 'Allison Gross.'


340
39. TAM LIN
Rymer, A, C; in B, and all copies of Thomas
of Erceldoune, her palfrey is dapple gray.
Tam Lin, A 28, B 27, etc., is distinguished
from all the rest of his " court" by being thus
mounted; all the other horses are black or
brown.
Tam Lane was taken by the fairies, accord-
ing to G 26, 27, while sleeping under an apple-
tree. In Sir Orfeo (ed. Zielke, v. 68) it was
the queen's sleeping under an ympe-tree that
led to her being carried off by the fairy king,
and the ympe-tree we may suppose to be some
kind of fruit tree, if not exclusively the apple.
Thomas of Erceldoune is lying under a semely
[derne, cumly] tree, when he sees the fairy
queen. The derivation of that poem from
Ogier le Danois shows that this must have
been an apple-tree. Special trees are consid-
ered in Greece dangerous to lie under in sum-
mer and at noon, as exposing one to be
taken by the nereids or fairies, especially
plane, poplar, fig, nut, and St John's bread:
Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugriechen, p. 119.
The elder and the linden are favorites of the
elves in Denmark.
The rencounter at the beginning between
Tam Lin and Janet (in the wood, D, F, G)
is repeated between Hind Etin [Young Akin]
and Margaret in 'Hind Etin,' further on.
Some Slavic ballads open in a similar way,
but there is nothing noteworthy in that: see
p. 41. "First they did call me Jack," etc.,
D 9, is a commonplace of frequent occur-
rence: see, e. g.,' The Knight and Shepherd's
Daughter.'
Some humorous verses, excellent in their
way, about one Tam o Lin are very well
known: as Tam o the Linn, Chambers, Scot-
tish Songs, p. 455, Popular Rhymes of Scot-
land, p. 33, ed. 1870; Sharpe's Ballads, new
ed., p. 44, p. 137, No XVI; Tommy Linn,
North Country Chorister, ed. Ritson, p. 3;
Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery
Tales, p. 271, ed. 1849 ; Thomas o Linn, Kin-
loch MSS, III, 45, V, 81; Tam o Lin, Camp-
bell MSS., II, 107. (Miss Joanna Baillie tried
her hand at an imitation, but the jocosity of
the real thing is not feminine.) A fool sings
this stanza from such a song in Wager's com-
edy, 'The longer thou livest, the more fool
thou art,' put at about 1568; see Furnivall,
Captain Cox, his Ballads and Books, p. cxxvii:
Tom a Lin and his wife, and his wiues mother,
They went ouer a bridge all three together;
The bridge was broken, and they fell in:
'The deuil go with all!' quoth Tom a Lin.
Mr Halliwell-Phillips (as above) says that
"an immense variety of songs and catches re-
lating to Tommy Linn are known throughout
the country." Brian o Lynn seems to be pop-
ular in Ireland: Lover's Legends and Stories
of Ireland, p. 260 f. There is no connection
between the song and the ballad beyond the
name: the song is no parody, no burlesque, of
the ballad, as it has been called.
"Carterhaugh is a plain at the confluence of
the Ettrick with the Yarrow, scarcely an Eng-
lish mile above the town of Selkirk, and on
this plain they show two or three rings on the
ground, where, they say, the stands of milk
and water stood, and upon which grass never
grows." Glenriddell MS.
Translated, after Scott, by Schubart, p. 139,
and Biisching's Wochentliche Nachrichten, I,
247 ; by Arndt, Bliitenlese, p. 212 ; after Ay-
toun, I, 7, by Rosa Warrens, Schottische
Volkslieder, No 8; by Knortz, Schottische
Balladen, No 17, apparently after Aytoun and
Allingham. The Danish 'Nattergalen' is
translated by Prior, III, 118, No 116.
Johnson's Museum, p. 423, No 411. Communicated by
Robert Burns.
101 forbid you, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tam Lin is there.
2 There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh
But they leave him a wad,
Either their rings, or green mantles,
Or else their maidenhead.


39.
TAM LIN
3 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has broded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she's awa to Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.
4 When she came to Carterhaugh
Tam Lin was at the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsel.
5 She had na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twa,
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says, Lady, thou's pu nae mae.
6 Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,
And why breaks thou the wand?
Or why comes thou to Carterhaugh
Withoutten my command?
7 'Carterhaugh, it is my ain,
My daddie gave it me;
I 'll come and gang by Carterhaugh,
And ask nae leave at thee.'
*****
8 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she is to her father's ha,
As fast as she can hie.
9 Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the ba,
And out then cam the fair Janet,
Ance the flower amang them a'.
10 Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the chess,
And out then cam the fair Janet,
As green as onie glass.
11 Out then spak an auld grey knight,
Lay oer the castle wa,
And says, Alas, fair Janet, for thee
But we 'll be blamed a'.
12 'Haud your tongue, ye auld fac'd knight,
Some ill death may ye die!
Father my bairn on whom I will,
I 'll father nane on thee.'
13 Out then spak her father dear,
And he spak meek and mild;
'And ever alas, sweet Janet,' he says,
'I think thou gaes wi child.'
14 'If that I gae wi child, father,
Mysel maun bear the blame;
There's neer a laird about your ha
Shall get the bairn's name.
15 'If my love were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfin grey,
I wad na gie my ain true-love
For nae lord that ye hae.
16 'The steed that my true-love rides on
Is lighter than the wind;
Wi siller he is shod before,
Wi burning gowd behind.'
17 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she's awa to Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.
18 When she cam to Carterhaugh,
Tam Lin was at the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsel.
19 She had na pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twa,
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says Lady, thou pu's nae mae.
20 Why pu's thou the rose, Janet,
Amang the groves sae green,
And a' to kill the bonie babe
That we gat us between?
21 'O tell me, tell me, Tam Lin,' she says,
'For's sake that died on tree,
If eer ye was in holy chapel,
Or christendom did see?'
22 'Roxbrugh he was my grandfather,
Took me with him to bide,


342
39. TAM LIN
And ance it fell upon a day
That wae did me betide.
23 'And ance it fell upon a day,
A cauld day and a snell,
When we were frae the hunting come,
That frae my horse I fell;
The Queen o Fairies she caught me,
In yon green hill to dwell.
24 'And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years
We pay a tiend to hell;
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I'm feard it be mysel.
25 'But the night is Halloween, lady,
The morn is Hallowday;
Then win me, win me, an ye will,
For weel I wat ye may.
26 'Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The fairy folk will ride,
And they that wad their true-love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide.'
27 'But how shall I thee ken, Tam Lin,
Or how my true-love know,
Amang sae mony unco knights
The like I never saw?'
28 'O first let pass the black, lady,
And syne let pass the brown,
But quickly run to the milk-white steed,
Pu ye his rider down.
29 'For I 'll ride on the milk-white steed,
And ay nearest the town;
Because I was an earthly knight
They gie me that renown.
30 'My right hand will be glovd, lady,
My left hand will be bare,
Cockt up shall my bonnet be,
And kaimd down shall my hair,
And thae's the takens I gie thee,
Nae doubt I will be there.
31 'They 'll turn me in your arms, lady,
Into an esk and adder;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
I am your bairn's father.
32 'They 'll turn me to a bear sae grim,
And then a lion bold;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
As ye shall love your child.
33 'Again they 'll turn me in your arms
To a red het gaud of airn;
But hold me fast, and fear me not,
I 'll do to you nae harm.
34 'And last they 'll turn me in your arms
Into the burning gleed;
Then throw me into well water,
0 throw me in wi speed.
35 'And then I 'll be your ain true-love,
1 'll turn a naked knight;
Then cover me wi your green mantle,
And cover me out o sight.'
36 Gloomy, gloomy was the night,
And eerie was the way,
As fair Jenny in her green mantle
To Miles Cross she did gae.
37 About the middle o the night
She heard the bridles ring;
This lady was as glad at that
As any earthly thing.
38 First she let the black pass by,
And syne she let the brown;
But quickly she ran to the milk-white steed,
And pu'd the rider down.
39 Sae weel she minded whae he did say,
And young Tam Lin did win;
Syne coverd him wi her green mantle,
As blythe's a bird in spring.
40 Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
Out of a bush o broom:
'Them that has gotten young Tam Lin
Has gotten a stately groom.'
41 Out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
And an angry woman was she:
'Shame betide her ill-far'd face,
And an ill death may she die,
For she's taen awa the boniest knight
In a' my companie.


39 TAM LIN
42 'But had I kend, Tam Lin,' she says,
'What now this night I see,
B
Glenriddell's MSS, vol. xi, No 17.
1 I forbid ye, maidens a',
That wear goud on your gear,
To come and gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tom Line is there.
2 There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh
But they leave him a wad.
Either their things or green mantles,
Or else their maidenhead.
3 But Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little above her knee,
And she has broded her yellow hair
A little above her bree,
And she has gaen for Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.
4 When she came to Carterhaugh
Tom Line was at the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsell.
5 She hadna pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae,
Till up then started young Tom Line,
Says, Lady, thou's pu nae mae.
6 Why pu's thou the rose, Janet?
Why breaks thou the wand?
Why comest thou to Carterhaugh
Withouthen my command?
7 'Fair Carterhaugh it is my ain,
My daddy gave it me;
I 'll come and gae by Carterhaugh,
And ask nae leave at thee.'
*****
8 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she is on to her father's ha,
As fast as she can hie.
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een,
And put in twa een o tree.'
9 Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the ba,
And out then came fair Janet,
The flowr amang them a'.
10 Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the chess,
Out then came fair Janet,
As green as ony glass.
11 Out spak an auld grey-headed knight,
Lay owre the castle wa,
And says, Alas, fair Janet,
For thee we 'll be blam'd a'.
12 'Had your tongue, you auld grey knight,
Some ill dead may ye die!
Father my bairn on whom I will,
I 'll father nane on thee.'
13 Out then spak her father dear,
He spak baith thick and milde;
'And ever alas, sweet Janet,' he says,
'I think ye gae wi childe.'
14 'li that I gae wi child, father,
Mysell bears a' the blame;
There's not a laird about your ha
Shall get the bairnie's name.
15 'H my lord were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfish grey,
I wad na gie my ain true-love
For nae lord that ye hae.'
16 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little aboon her knee,
And she has snooded her yellow hair
A little aboon her bree,
And she's away to Carterhaugh,
As fast as she can hie.
17 When she came to Carterhaugh,
Tom Line was at the well,
And there she faund his steed standing,
But away was himsell.
18 She hadna pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae,


39. TAM LIN
Then she did all was orderd her,
And sae recoverd him.
38 Then out then spak the Queen o Fairies,
Out o a bush o broom:
'They that hae gotten young Tom Line
Hae got a stately groom.'
39 Out than spak the Queen o Fairies,
Out o a bush of rye:
'Them that has gotten young Tom Line
Has the best knight in my company.
40 'Had I kend, Thomas,' she says,
'A lady wad hae borrowd thee,
I wad hae taen out thy twa grey een,
Put in twa een o tree.
41 'Had I but kend, Thomas,' she says,
'Before I came frae hame,
I had taen out that heart o flesh,
Put in a heart o stane.'
o
Herd, The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p.
*****
1 She's prickt hersell and prind hersell,
By the ae light o the moon,
And she's awa to Kertonha,
As fast as she can gang.
2 'What gars ye pu the rose, Jennet?
What gars ye break the tree?
What gars you gang to Kertonha
Without the leave of me?'
3 'Yes, I will pu the rose, Thomas,
And I will break the tree;
For Kertonha shoud be my ain,
Nor ask I leave of thee.'
4 'Full pleasant is the fairy land,
And happy there to dwell;
I am a fairy, lyth and limb,
Fair maiden, view me well.
5 'O pleasant is the fairy land,
How happy there to dwell!
But ay at every seven years end
We 're a' dung down to hell.
6 'The morn is good Halloween,
And our court a' will ride;
If ony maiden wins her man,
Then she may be his bride.
7 'But first ye 'll let the black gae by,
And then ye'll let the brown;
Then I 'll ride on a milk-white steed,
You 'll pu me to the ground.
8 'And first, I H grow into your arms
An esk but and an edder;
Had me fast, let me not gang,
I 'll be your bairn's father.
9 'Next, I 'll grow into your arms
A toad but and an eel;
Had me fast, let me not gang,
If you do love me leel.
10 'Last, I 'll grow into your arms
A dove but and a swan;
Then, maiden fair, you 'll let me go,
I 'll be a perfect man.'
* * * * *
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 532, a North Country version,
b. Maidment's New Book of Old Ballads, 1844, p. 54, from
the recitation of an old woman, o. Pitcairn's MSS, 1817-
25, III, p. 67: "procured by David Webster, Bookseller,
from tradition."
1 O all you ladies young and gay,
Who are so sweet and fair,
Do not go into Chaster's wood,
For Tomlin will be there.
2 Fair Margret sat in her bonny bower,
Sewing her silken seam,
And wished to be in Chaster's wood,
Among the leaves so green.
44


346
39. TAM LIN
3 She let her seam fall to her foot,
The needle to her toe,
And she has gone to Chaster's wood,
As fast as she could go.
4 When she began to pull the flowers,
She pulld both red and green;
Then by did come, and by did go,
Said, Fair maid, let aleene.
5 'O why pluck you the flowers, lady,
Or why climb you the tree?
Or why come ye to Chaster's wood
Without the leave of me?'
6 'O I will pull the flowers,' she said,
'Or I will break the tree,
For Chaster's wood it is my own,
I 'll no ask leave at thee.'
7 He took her by the milk-white hand,
And by the grass green sleeve,
And laid her low down on the flowers,
At her he asked no leave.
8 The lady blushed, and sourly frowned,
And she did think great shame;
Says, ' If you are a gentleman,
You will tell me your name.'
9 'First they did call me Jack,' he said,
'And then they called me John,
But since I lived in the fairy court
Tomlin has always been my name.
10 'So do not pluck that flower, lady,
That has these pimples gray;
They would destroy the bonny babe
That we've got in our play.'
11 'O tell me, Tomlin,' she said,
'And tell it to me soon,
Was you ever at good church-door,
Or got you christendoom?'
12 'O I have been at good church-door,
And aff her yetts within;
I was the Laird of Foulis's son,
The heir of all this land.
13 'But it fell once upon a day,
As hunting I did ride,
As I rode east and west yon hill
There woe did me betide.
14 'O drowsy, drowsy as I was!
Dead sleep upon me fell;
The Queen of Fairies she was there,
And took me to hersell.
15 'The Elfins is a pretty place,
In which I love to dwell,
But yet at every seven years' end
The last here goes to hell;
And as I am ane o flesh and blood,
I fear the next be mysell.
16 'The morn at even is Halloween;
Our fairy court will ride,
Throw England and Scotland both,
Throw al the world wide;
And if ye would me borrow,
At Rides Cross ye may bide.
17 'You may go into the Miles Moss,
Between twelve hours and one;
Take holy water in your hand,
And cast a compass round.
18 'The first court that comes along,
You 'll let them all pass by;
The next court that comes along,
Salute them reverently.
19 'The next court that comes along
Is clad in robes of green,
And it's the head court of them all,
For in it rides the queen.
20 'And I upon a milk-white steed,
With a gold star in my crown;
Because I am an earthly man
I'm next to the queen in renown.
21 'Then seize upon me with a spring,
Then to the ground I 'll fa,
And then you 'll hear a rueful cry
That Tomlin is awa.
22 'Then I 'll grow in your arms two
• Like to a savage wild;
But hold me fast, let me not go,
1 'm father of your child.


39. TAM LIN
23 'IH grow into your arms two
Like an adder or a snake;
But hold me fast, let me not go,
I 'll be your earthly maick.
24 'I 'll grow into your arms two
Like iron in strong fire;
But hold me fast, let me not go,
Then you 'll have your desire.'
25 She rid down to Miles Cross,
Between twelve hours and one,
Took holy water in her hand,
And cast a compass round.
26 The first court that came along,
She let them all pass by;
The next court that came along
Saluted reverently.
27 The next court that came along
Were clad in robes of green,
When Tomlin, on a milk-white steed,
She saw ride with the queen.
28 She seized him in her arms two,
He to the ground did fa,
And then she heard a ruefull cry
'Tomlin is now awa.'
29 He grew into her arms two
Like to a savage wild;
She held him fast, let him not go,
The father of her child.
30 He grew into her arms two
Like an adder or a snake;
She held him fast, let him not go,
He was her earthly maick.
31 He grew into her arms two
Like iron in hot fire;
She held him fast, let him not go,
He was her heart's desire.
32 Then sounded out throw elphin court,
With a loud shout and a cry,
That the pretty maid of Chaster's wood
That day had caught her prey.
33 'O stay, Tomlin,' cried Elphin Queen,
'Till I pay you your fee ;'
'His father has lands and rents enough,
He wants no fee from thee.'
34 'O had I known at early morn
Tomlin would from me gone,
I would have taken out his heart of flesh
Put in a heart of stone.'
E
Motherwell's Note-book, p. 13.
1 Lady Margabet is over gravel green,
And over gravel grey,
And she's awa to Charteris ha,
Lang lang three hour or day.
2 She hadna pu'd a flower, a flower,
A flower but only ane,
Till up and started young Tamlin,
Says, Lady, let alane.
3 She hadna pu'd a flower, a flower,
A flower but only twa,
Till up and started young Tamlene,
Atween her and the wa.
4 'How daur you pu my flower, madam?
How daur ye break my tree?
How daur ye come to Charter's ha,
Without the leave of me?'
5 'Weel I may pu the rose,' she said,
'But I daurna break the tree;
And Charter's ha is my father's,
And I'm his heir to be.'
6 'Ji Charteris ha be thy father's,
I was ance as gude mysell;
But as I came in by Lady Kirk,
And in by Lady Well,
7 'Deep and drowsy was the sleep
On my poor body fell;
By came the Queen of Faery,
Made me with her to dwell.
8 'But the morn at een is Halloween,
Our fairy foks a' do ride;
And she that will her true-love win,
At Blackstock she must bide.
9 'First let by the black,' he said,
'And syne let by the brown;


348
38. TAM LIN
But when you see the milk-white steed,
You 'll pull his rider down.
10 'You H pull him into J,hy arms,
Let his bricht bridle fa,
And he 'll fa low into your arms
Like stone in castle's wa.
11 'They 'll first shape him into your arms
An adder or a snake;
But hold him fast, let him not go,
He 'll be your world's make.
12 'They 'll next shape him into your arms
Like a wood black dog to bite;
Hold him fast, let him not go,
For he 'll be your heart's delight.
13 'They 'll next shape [him] into your arms
Like a red-het gaud o airn;
But hold him fast, let him not go,
He's the father o your bairn.
14 'They 'll next shape him into your arms
Like the laidliest worm of Ind;
But hold him fast, let him not go,
And cry aye "Young Tamlin."'
• • * • •
15 Lady Margaret first let by the black,
And syne let by the brown,
But when she saw the milk-white steed
She pulled the rider down.
16 She pulled him into her arms,
Let his bright bridle fa',
And he fell low into her arms,
Like stone in castle's wa,
17 They first shaped him into arms
An adder or a snake;
But she held him fast, let him not go,
For he'd be her warld's make.
18 They next shaped him into her arms
Like a wood black dog to bite;
But she held him fast, let him not go,
For he'd be her heart's delight
19 They next shaped him into her arms
Like a red-het gaud o airn;
But she held him fast, let him not go,
He'd be father o her bairn.
20 They next shaped him into her arms
Like the laidliest worm of Ind;
But she held him fast, let him not go,
And cried aye ' Young Tamlin.'
21 The Queen of Faery turned her horse about,
Says, Adieu to thee, Tamlene!
For if I had kent what I ken this night,
If I had kent it yestreen,
I wad hae taen out thy heart o flesh,
And put in a heart o stane.
P
Motherwell's MS., p. 64, from the recitation of widow
McCormick, February, 1825.
*****
1 She's taen her petticoat by the band,
Her mantle owre her arm,
And she's awa to Chester wood,
As fast as she could run.
3 She's taen her petticoat by the band,
Her mantle owre her aim,
And Lady Margaret's gane hame agen,
As fast as she could run.
4 Up starts Lady Margaret's sister,
An angry woman was she:
'If there ever was a woman wi child,
Margaret, you are wi!'
5 Up starts Lady Margaret's mother,
2 She scarsely pulled a rose, a rose, An angry woman was she:
She scarse pulled two or three, 'There grows ane herb in yon kirk-yard
Till up there starts Thomas That will scathe the babe away.'
On the Lady Margaret's knee.


39. TIM LIN
349
I
6 She took her petticoats by the band,
Her mantle owre her arm,
And she's gane to yon kirk-yard
As fast as she could run.
7 She scarcely pulled an herb, an herb,
She scarse pulled two or three,
Till up starts there Thomas
Upon this Lady Margret's knee.
8 'How dare ye pull a rose?' he says,
'How dare ye break the tree?
How dare ye pull this herb,' he says,
'To scathe my babe away?
9 'This night is Halloweve,' he said,
'Out court is going to waste,
And them that loves their true-love best
At Chester bridge they 'll meet.
10 'First let pass the black,' he says,
'And then let pass the brown,
But when ye meet the milk-white steed,
Pull ye the rider down.
11 'They 'll turn me to an eagle,' he says,
'And then into an ass;
Come, hold me fast, and fear me not,
The man that you love best.
12 'They 'll turn me to a flash of fire,
And then to a naked man;
Come, wrap you your mantle me about,
And then you 'll .have me won.'
13 She took her petticoats by the band,
Her mantle owre her arm,
And she's awa to Chester bridge,
As fast as she could run.
14 And first she did let pass the black,
And then let pass the brown,
But when she met the milk-white steed,
She pulled the rider down.
15 They turned him in her arms an eagle,
And then into an ass;
But she held him fast, and feared him not,
The man that she loved best.
16 They turned him into a flash of fire,
And then into a naked man;
But she wrapped her mantle him about,
And then she had him won.
17 'O wae be to ye, Lady Margaret,
And an ill death may you die,
For you've robbed me of the bravest knight
That eer rode in our company.'
G
Bnchan's MSS, I, 8; Motherwell's MS., p. 595.
1 Take warning, a' ye ladies fair,
That wear gowd on your hair,
Come never unto Charter's woods,
For Tam-a-line he's there.
2 Even about that knight's middle
O' siller bells are nine;
Nae ane comes to Charter wood,
And a maid returns again.
3 Lady Margaret sits in her bower door,
Sewing at her silken seam;
Aid she langd to gang to Charter woods,
To pou the roses green.
4 She hadna poud a rose, a rose,
Nor broken a branch but ane,
Till by it came him true Tam-a-line,
Says, Ladye, lat alane.
5 O why pou ye the rose, the rose?
Or why brake ye the tree?
Or why come ye to Charter woods,
Without leave askd of me?
6 'I will pou the rose, the rose,
And I will brake the tree;
Charter woods are a' my ain,
I 'll ask nae leave o thee.'
7 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
And by the grass-green sleeve,
And laid her low on gude green wood,
At her he spierd nae leave.
8 When he had got his wills of her,
His wills as he had taen,
He's taen her by the middle sma,
Set her to feet again,
9 She turnd her right and round about,
To spier her true-love's name,


350
39. TAM LIN
But naething heard she, nor naething saw,
As a' the woods grew dim.
10 Seven days she tarried there,
Saw neither sun nor meen;
At length, hy a sma glimmering light,
Came thro the wood her lane.
11 When she came to her father's court,
As fine as ony queen;
But when eight months were past and gane,
Got on the gown o' green.
12 Then out it speaks an eldren knight,
As he stood at the yett:
'Our king's daughter, she gaes wi bairn,
And we 'll get a' the wyte.'
13 'O had your tongue, ye eldren man,
And bring me not to shame;
Although that I do gang wi bairn,
Yese naeways get the blame.
14 'Were my love but an earthly man,
As he's an elfin knight,
I woudna gie my ain true love
For a' that's in my sight.'
15 Then out it speaks her brither dear,
He meant to do her harm:
'There is an herb in Charter wood
Will twine you an the bairn.'
16 She's taen her mantle her about,
Her coffer by the band,
And she is on to Charter wood,
As fast as she coud gang.
17 She hadna poud a rose, a rose,
Nor braken a branch but ane,
Till by it came him Tam-a-Line,
Says, Ladye, lat alane.
18 O why pou ye the pile, Margaret,
The pile o the gravil green,
For to destroy the bonny bairn
That we got us between?
19 O why pou ye the pile, Margaret,
The pile o the gravil gray,
For to destroy the bonny bairn
That we got in our play?
20 For if it be a knave-bairn.
He's heir o a' my land;
But if it be a lass-bairn,
In red gowd she shall gang.
21 'If my luve were an earthly man,
As he's an elfin rae,
I coud gang bound, love, for your sake,
A twalmonth and a day.'
22 'Indeed your love's an earthly man,
The same as well as thee,
And lang I've haunted Charter woods,
A' for your fair bodie.'
23 'O tell me, tell me, Tam-a-Line,
O tell, an tell me true,
Tell me this night, an mak nae lie,
What pedigree are you?'
24 'O I hae been at gude church-door,
An I've got Christendom;
I'm the Earl o' Forbes' eldest son,
An heir ower a' his land.
25 'When I was young, o three years old,
Muckle was made o me;
My step-mother put on my claithes,
An ill, ill sained she me.
26 'Ae fatal morning I went out,
Dreading nae injury,
And thinking lang, fell soun asleep,
Beneath an apple tree.
27 'Then by it came the Elfin Queen,
And laid her hand on me;
And from that time since ever I mind,
I've been in her companie.
28 'O Elfin it's a bonny place,
In it fain woud I dwell;
But ay at ilka seven years' end
They pay a tiend to hell,
And I'm sae fou o flesh an blude,
I'm sair feard for mysell.'
29 'O tell me, tell me, Tam-a-Line,
O tell, an tell me true;
Tell me this night, an mak nae lie,
What way I 'll borrow you?'


39. TAM LIN
30 'The morn is Halloweven night,
The elfin court will ride,
Through England, and thro a' Scotland,
And through the world wide.
31 'O they begin at sky setting,
Rides a' the evening tide;
And she that will her true-love borrow,
[At] Miles-corse will him bide.
32 'Ye 'll do you down to Miles-corse,
Between twall hours and ane,
And full your hands o holy water,
And cast your compass roun.
33 'Then the lirst.au court that comes you till
Is published king and queen;
The next an court that comes you till,
It is maidens mony ane.
34 'The next an court that comes you till
Is footmen, grooms and squires;
The next an court that comes you till
Is knights, and I 'll be there.
35 'I Tam-a-Line, on milk-white steed,
A goud star on my crown;
Because I was an earthly knight,
Got that for a renown.
36 'And out at my steed's right nostril,
He 'll breathe a fiery flame;
Ye 'll loot you low, and sain yoursel,
And ye 'll be busy then.
37 'Ye 'll take my horse then by the head,
And lat the bridal fa;
The Queen o' Elfin she 'll cry out,
True Tam-a-Line's awa.
38 'Then I 'll appear in your arms
Like the wolf that neer woud tame;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
Case we neer meet again.
39 'Then I 'll appear in your arms
Like the fire that burns sae bauld;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
I 'll be as iron cauld.
40 'Then I 'll appear in your arms
Like the adder an the snake;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
I am your warld's make.
41 'Then I 'll appear in your arms
Like to the deer sae wild;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
And I 'll father your child.
42 'And I 'll appear in your arms
Like to a silken string;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
Till ye see the fair morning.
43 'And I 'll appear in your arms
Like to a naked man;
Ye 'll had me fast, lat me not go,
And wi you 1'1l gae hame.'
44 Then she has done her to Miles-corse,
Between twall hours an ane,
And filled her hands o holy water,
And kiest her compass roun.
45 The first an court that came her till
Was published king and queen;
The niest an court that came her till
Was maidens mony ane.
46 The niest an court that came her till
Was footmen, grooms and squires;
The niest an court that came her till
Was knights, and he was there.
47 True Tam-a-Line, on milk-white steed,
A gowd star on his crown;
Because he was an earthly man,
Got that for a renown.
48 And out at the steed's right nostril,
He breathd a fiery flame;
She loots her low, an sains hersell,
And she was busy then.
49 She's taen the horse then by the head,
And loot the bridle fa;
The Queen o Elfin she cried out,
'True Tam-a-Line's awa.'
50 'Stay still, true Tam-a-Line,' she says,
'Till I pay you your fee :'
'His father wants not lands nor rents,
He 'll ask nae fee frae thee.'


39. TAM LIN
353
But when ye see the milk-white stead,
Grip fast and pull me down.
11 'Take me in yer arms, Janet,
An ask, an adder lang;
The grip ye get ye maun haud fast,
I 'll be father to your bairn.
12 'Take me in your arms, Janet,
An adder and a snake;
The grip ye get ye maun haud fast,
I 'll be your warld's make.'
13 Up bespak the Queen of Fairies,
She spak baith loud and high:
'Had I kend the day at noon
Tarn Lane had been won from me,
14 'I wad hae taen out his heart o flesh,
Put in a heart o tree,
That a' the maids o Middle Middle Mist
Should neer hae taen Tarn Lane frae me.'
15 Up bespaek the Queen of Fairies,
And she spak wi a loud yell:
'Aye at every seven year's end
We pay the kane to hell.
And the koors they hae gane round about,
And I fear it will be mysel.'
I
a. Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, II, 337, ed. 1833.
b. II, 228, ed. 1802.
1 'O I forbid ye, maidens a',
That wear gowd on your hair,
To come or gae by Carterhaugh,
For young Tamlane is there.
2 'There's nane that gaes by Carterhaugh
But maun leave him a wad,
Either gowd rings, or green mantles,
Or else their maidenheid.
3 'Now gowd rings ye may buy, maidens,
Green mantles ye may spin,
But, gin ye lose your maidenheid,
Ye 'll neer get that agen.'
4 But up then spak her, fair Janet,
The fairest o a' her kin:
'I 'll cum and gang to Carterhaugh,
And ask nae leave o him.'
5 Janet has kilted her green kirtle
A little abune her knee,
And she has braided her yellow hair
A little abune her bree.
6 And when she came to Carterhaugh,
She gaed beside the well,
And there she fand his steed standing,
But away was himsell.
7 She hadna pu'd a red red rose,
A rose but barely three,
Till up and starts a wee wee man,
At lady Janet's knee.
8 Says, Why pu ye the rose, Janet?
What gars ye break the tree 1
Or why come ye to Carterhaugh,
Withouten leave o me?
9 Says, Carterhaugh it is mine ain,
My daddie gave it me;
I 'll come and gang to Carterhaugh,
And ask nae leave o thee.
10 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
Among the leaves sae green,
And what they did I cannot tell,
The green leaves were between.
11 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
Among the roses red,
And what they did I cannot say,
She neer returnd a maid.
12 When she cam to her father's ha,
She looked pale and wan;
They thought she'd dreed some sair sickness,
Or been with some leman.
13 She didna comb her yellow hair
Nor make meikle o her head,
And ilka thing that lady took
Was like to be her deid.
45


354
39. TAM LIN
14 It's four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the ba;
Janet, the wightest of them anes,
Was faintest o them a'.
15 Four and twenty ladies fair
Were playing at the chess;
And out there came the fair Janet,
As green as any grass.
16 Out and spak an auld grey-headed knight,
Lay oer the castle wa:
'And ever, alas 1 for thee, Janet,
But we 'll be blamed a'!'
17 'Now haud your tongue, ye auld grey knight,
And an ill deid may ye die!
Father my bairn on whom I will,
I Ml father nane on thee.'
18 Out then spak her father dear,
And be spak meik and mild:
'And ever, alas! my sweet Janet,
I fear ye gae with child.'
19 'And if I be with child, father,
Mysell maun bear the blame;
There's neer a knight about your ha
Shall hue the bairnie's name.
20 'And if I be with child, father,
'T will prove a wondrous birth,
For weel I swear I'm not wi bairn
To any man on earth.
21 'If my love were an earthly knight,
As he's an elfin grey,
I wadna gie my ain true love
For nae lord that ye hae.'
22 She prinkd hersell and prinnd hersell,
By the ae light of the moon,
And she's away to Carterhaugh,
To speak wi young Tamlane.
23 And when she cam to Carterhaugh,
She gaed beside the well,
And there she saw the steed standing,
But away was himsell.
24 She hadna pu'd a double rose,
A rose but only twae,
When up and started young Tamlane,
Says, Lady, thou pu's nae mae.
25 Why pu ye the rose, Janet,
Within this garden grene,
And a' to kill the bonny babe
That we got us between?
26 'The truth ye 'll tell to me, Tamlane,
A word ye mauna lie;
Gin eer ye was in haly chapel,
Or sained in Christentie?'
27 'The truth I 'll tell to thee, Janet,
A word I winna lie;
A knight me got, and a lady me bore,
As well as they did thee.
28 'Randolph, Earl Murray, was my sire,
Dunbar, Earl March, is thine;
We loved when we were children small,
Which yet you well may mind.
29 'When I was a boy just turnd of nine,
My uncle sent for me,
To hunt and hawk, and ride with him,
And keep him companie.
30 'There came a wind out of the north,
A sharp wind and a snell,
And a deep sleep came over me,
And frae my horse I fell.
31 'The Queen of Fairies keppit me
In yon green hill to dwell,
And 1 'm a fairy, lyth and limb,
Fair ladye, view me well.
32 'Then would I never tire, Janet,
In Elfish land to dwell,
But aye, at every seven years,
They pay the teind to hell;
And I am sae fat and fair of flesh,
I fear't will be my sell.
33 'This night is Halloween, Janet,
The morn is Hallowday,
And gin ye dare your true love win,
Ye hae nae time to stay.
34 'The night it is good Halloween,
When fairy folk will ride,


39. TAM LIN
And they that wad their true-love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide.'
35 'But how shall I thee ken, Tamlane?
Or how shall I thee knaw,
Amang so many unearthly knights,
The like I never saw?'
36 'The first company that passes by,
Say na, and let them gae;
The next company that passes by,
Say na, and do right sae;
The third company that passes by,
Then I 'll be ane o thae.
37 'First let pass the black, Janet,
And syne let pass the brown,
But grip ye to the milk-white steed,
And pu the rider down.
38 'For I ride on the milk-white steed,
And aye nearest the town;
Because I was a christend knight,
They gave me that renown.
39 'My right hand will be gloved, Janet,
My left hand will be bare;
And these the tokens I gie thee,
Nae doubt I will be there.
40 'They H turn me in your arms, Janet,
An adder and a snake;
But had me fast, let me not pass,
Gin ye wad be my maik.
41 'They 'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
An adder and an ask;
They '11 turn me in your arms, Janet,
A bale that burns fast.
42 'They 'll turn me in your arms, Janet,
A red-hot gad o aim;
But haud me fast, let me not pass,
For I 'll do you no harm.
43 'First dip me in a stand o milk,
And then in a stand o water;
But had me fast, let me not pass,
I 'll be your bairn's father.
44 'And next they 'll shape me in your arms
A tod but and an eel;
But had me fast, nor let me gang,
As you do love me weel.
45 'They 'll shape me in your arms, Janet,
A dove but and a swan,
And last they 'll shape me in your arms
A mother-naked man;
Cast your green mantle over me,
I 'll be myself again.'
46 Gloomy, gloomy, was the night,
And eiry was the way,
As fair Janet, in her green mantle,
To Miles Cross she did gae.
47 About the dead hour o the night
She heard the bridles ring,
And Janet was as glad o that
As any earthly thing.
48 And first gaed by the black black steed,
And then gaed by the brown;
Bat fast she gript the milk-white steed,
And pu'd the rider down.
49 She pu'd him frae the milk-white steed,
And loot the bridle fa,
And up there raise an erlish cry,
'He's won amang us a'!'
50 They shaped him in fair Janet's arms
An esk but and an adder;
She held him fast in every shape,
To be her bairn's father.
51 They shaped him in her arms at last
A mother-naked man,
She wrapt him in her green mantle,
And sae her true love wan.
52 Up then spake the Queen o Fairies,
Out o a bush o broom:
'She that has borrowd young Tamlane
Has gotten a stately groom.'
53 Up then spake the Queen o Fairies,
Out o a bush o rye:
'She 's taen awa the bonniest knight
In a' my cumpanie.
54 'But had I kennd, Tamlane,' she says,
'A lady wad borrowd thee


356
39. TAM LIN
I wad taen out thy twa grey een, 56 'Had I but had the wit yestreen
Put in twa een o tree. That I hae coft the day,
I'd paid my kane seven times to hell
55 'Had I but kennd, Tamlane,' she says, Ere you'd been won away.'
'Before ye came frae hame,
I wad taen out your heart o flesh,
Put in a heart o stane.
A. Divided in the Museum into 45^ four-line
stanzas, without heed to rhyme or reason,
35, 6 making a stanza with 41,2, etc.
31. has belted. 42. Tom, elsewhere Tam.
17*. brie. 342. burning lead.
B. "An Old Song called Young Tom Line."
Written in twenty-six stanzas of four {three,
two~\ long, or double, lines.
19s. yon bonny babes.
26'2. and do right sae.
264. and let them gae. See 36.
26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 stand in MS.
31, 26, 27, 32, 28, 29, 33, 30.
D. b has 26 stanzas, c has 12. The first 12
stanzas of a and b and the 12 of c, and
again the first 22 stanzas of a and b, are
almost verbally the same, and a 23=:
b 24. b has but 26 stanzas.
a. 15 stands 24 in MS.
171. Miles Cross: b, Moss.
17s. the holy.
19". So (?) clad: b, is clad.
221. twa. 251. ride.
b. 44. let abeene. 6*. I 'll ask no.
7*. her down. 104. gotten in.
II1. to me. 11s. at a.
124. his land. 15s. and through.
166. if that. 16". Rides Cross, as in a.
17s. Take holy. 204. next the.
After 23:
'I 'll grow into your arms two
Like ice on frozen lake;
But hold me fast, let me not go,
Or from your goupen break.'
25. And it's next night into Miles Moss
Fair Margaret has gone,
When lo she stands beside Rides
Cross,
Between twelve hours and one.
26. There's holy water in her hand,
She casts a compass round,
And presently a fairy band
Comes riding oer the mound.
c. 1*, and always, Chester's wood.
31. the seam.
4*. let alane.
61. will pluck. 64. ask no.
94. has been.
II1. me, Tom o Lin.
124. his land.
E. 18, 19, 20 are not written out. We are di-
rected to understand them to be "as in pre-
ceding stanzas, making the necessary gram-
matical changes."
F. II2, 152. ass, somebody's blunder for ask.
G. 21". elfin gray, Motherwell, but see H, 7*.
261. Ay. 311. began.
582. Motherwell: far's the river Tay.
584. Motherwell: she gained.
Motherwell, as usual, seems to have mads
some slight changes in copying.
I. Scott's copy having been " prepared from a col-
lation of the printed copies," namely, those
in Johnson's Museum and Herd's Scottish
Songs, "with a very accurate one in Glen-
riddell's MS., and with several recitals from
tradition," what was not derived from tra-
dition, but from the Museum, GlenriddeU,
and Herd, is printed in smaller type.
a. 3, 20, not in b.
After 31 are omitted five stanzas of the copy
obtained by Scott " from a gentleman re-
siding near Langholni," and otliers, of the
same origin, after 46 and 47.
32 'But we that live in Fairy-land
No sickness know nor pain;
I quit my body when I will,
And take to it again.
33 'I quit my body when I please,
Or unto it repair;
We can inhabit at our ease
In either earth or air.


40. THE QUEEN OF ELFAN'S NOURICE
359
sometimes restore such a woman, with pay for
her services, after she has nursed their wretched
fry seven years. He had himself seen a woman
who had been abducted for this purpose, while
washing clothes on the bank of the Rhone.
She had to nurse the nix's son under the water
for that term, and then was sent back unhurt.
Otia Imperialia, III, 85, Liebrecht, p. 38.
Choice is naturally made of the healthiest and
handsomest mothers for this office. "A fine
young woman of Nithsdale, when first made a
mother, was sitting singing and rocking her
child, when a pretty lady came into her cot-
tage, covered with a fairy mantle. She car-
ried a beautiful child in her arms, swaddled in
green silk. 'Gie my bonnie thing a suck,'
said the fairy. The young woman, conscious
to whom the child belonged, took it kindly in
her arms, and laid it to her breast. The lady
instantly disappeared, saying, 'Nurse kin', an
ne'er want.' The young mother nurtured the
two babes, and was astonished, whenever she
awoke, at finding the richest suits of apparel
for both children, with meat of most delicious
flavor. This food tasted, says tradition, like
loaf mixed with wine and honey," etc. Cro-
mek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway
Song, p. 302.
1 I heard a cow low, a'bonnie cow low,
An a cow low down in yon glen;
Lang, lang will my young son greet
Or his mither bid him come ben.
2 I heard a cow low, a bonnie cow low,
An a cow low down in yon fauld;
Lang, lang will my young son greet
Or his mither take him frae cauld.
*****
3
Waken, Queen of Elfan,
An hear your nourice moan.'
4 '0 moan ye for your meat,
Or moan ye for your fee,
Or moan ye for the ither bounties
That ladies are wont to gie?'
5 'I moan na for my meat,
Nor moan I for my fee,
Nor moan I for the ither bounties
That ladies are wont to gie.
6
But I moan for my young son
I left in four nights auld.
7 'I moan na for my meat,
Nor yet for my fee,
But I mourn for Christen land,
It's there I fain would be.'
8 'O nurse my bairn, nourice,' she says,
'Till he stan at your knee,
An ye's win hame to Christen land,
Whar fain it's ye wad be.
9 'O keep my bairn, nourice,
Till he gang by the hauld,
An ye's win hame to your young son
Ye left in four nights auld.'
*****
10 'O nourice lay your head
Upo my knee:
See ye na that narrow road
Up by yon tree?
11
That's the road the righteous goes,
And that's the road to heaven.
12 'An see na ye that braid road,
Down by yon sunny fell?
Yon's the road the wicked gae,
An that's the road to hell.'
* * * # #


360
41. HIND ETIN
l1. an a bonnie cow low, with an crossed out. 7s. Christend.
22. yon fall: fauld in margin. 81. she says is probably the comment of the singer
6*. auld not in MS., supplied from 94. or reciter.
41
HIND ETIN
A. 'Young Akin,'Buchan's Ballads of the North of C. 'Young Hastings,' Buchan, Ballads of the North of
Scotland, I, 6. Motherwell's MS., p. 554. Scotland, ll, G7. 'Young Hastings the Groom,'
Motherwell's MS., p. 450; Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
B. 'Hynde Etin,' Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 287.
p. 228.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that this
ballad, like too many others, has suffered se-
verely by the accidents of tradition. A has
been not simply damaged by passing through
low mouths, but has been worked over by low
hands. Something considerable has been lost
from the story, and fine romantic features,
preserved in Norse and German ballads, have
been quite effaced.
Margaret, a king's daughter, A, an earl's
daughter, B, a lady of noble birth, C, as she
sits sewing in her bower door, hears a note in
Elmond's wood and wishes herself there, A.
The wood is Amon-shaw in C, Mulberry in
B: the Elmond (Ainond, Elfman ?) is proba-
bly significant. So far the heroine resembles
Lady Isabel in No 4, who, sewing in her bower,
hears an elf-horn, and cannot resist the en-
chanted tone. Margaret makes for the wood
as fast as she can go. The note that is heard
in A is mistaken in B for nuts: Margaret,
as she stands in her bower door, spies some
nuts growing in the wood, and wishes her-
self there. Arrived at the wood, Margaret, in
A as well as B, immediately takes to pulling
nuts.* The lady is carried off in C under
* This reading, nuts, may huvc subsequently made its way
into A iustead of rose, which it would he more ballad-like
for Margaret to be plucking, as the maid does in ' Tarn Lin,'
where also the passage A 3-6, B 2-4 occurs. Grimm sug-
gests a parallel to Tam Liu in the dwarf Laurin, who does
not allow trespassing in his rose-garden : Deutsche Mytholo-
cover of a magical mist, and the hero in all
is no ordinary hind.
Margaret has hardly pulled a nut, when she
is confronted by young Akin, A, otherwise,
and correctly, called Etin in B, a hind of giant
strength in both, who accuses her of trespass-
ing, and stops her. Akin pulls up the highest
tree in the wood and builds a bower, invisible
to passers-by, for their habitation. B, which
recognizes no influence of enchantment upon
the lady's will, as found in A, and no prepos-
session on her part, as in C, makes Hind Etin
pull up the biggest tree in the forest as well,
but it is to scoop out a cave many fathoms
deep, in which he confines Margaret till she
comes to terms, and consents to go home with
him, wherever that may be. Hastings, an-
other corruption of Etin, carries off the lady
on his horse to the wood, " where again their
loves are sworn," and there they take up
their abode in a cave of stone, C 9. Lady
Margaret lives with the etin seven years, and
bears him seven sons, A 9; many years, and
bears seven sons, B; ten years, and bears
seven bairns, C 6, 8, 9.f
Once upon a time the etin goes hunting!
gie, III, 130. But the resemblance seems not material, there
being no woman in the case. The pretence of trespass in
Tam Lin and Hind Etin is a simple commonplace, and we
have it in some Slavic forms of No 4, as at p. 41.
t B is defective in the middle and the end. "The re-
citer, unfortunately, could not remember more of the ballad,


362
41. HIND ETIN
74, I, xxxi, II, 79; U, a short fragment,
Danske Viser, V, x, xi.
Swedish. 'Den Bergtagna,' A, B, Afze-
lius, I, 1, No 1, II, 201. C, 'Bergkonun-
gen,' Afzelius, II, 22, No 35. D, E, ' Hen-
Elver, Bergakonungen,' Arwidsson, II, 277,
No 141 B, II, 275, No 141 A. F, 'Jungfrun
och Bergakonungen,' Arwidsson, II, 280, No
142. G, 'Agneta och Berganaannen,' Wig-
strom, Folkdiktning, p. 13. H, 'Jungfrun och
Bergamannen,' the same, p. 21. I, K, L, in
Cavallius and Stephens' manuscript collection
(K, L, fragments), given by Grundtvig, IV,
803. M, P. L. Borgstroms Folkvisor, No 11,
described by Grundtvig, IV, 802. N, Wer-
ner's Westergotlands Fornminnen, p. 93 f, two
stanzas.
Norwegian. A, B,* C, 'Liti Kersti,
som vart inkvervd,' Landstad, p. 431, No
42, p. 442, No 44, p. 446, No 45. D, 'Mar-
git Hjuxe, som vart inkvervd,' the same, p.
451, No 46. E, F, 'Malfri,' 'Antonetta,'
Grundtvig, IV, 801 f, the last evidently de-
rived from Denmark. G-P, nine versions com-
municated to Grundtvig by Professor Sophus
Bugge, and partially described in Danmarks
gamle Folkeviser, III, 808-10. Lindeman
gives the first stanza of A with airs No 214,
No 262 of his Fjeldmelodier, and perhaps
had different copies. Nos 323, 320 may also
have been versions of this ballad. C, rewrit-
ten, occurs in J. M. Moe og Ivar Morten-
sen's Norske Fornkvaede og Folkevisur, p. 16.
Mixed forms, in which the ballad proper is
blended with another, Landstad, No 43 =
Swedish, Arwidsson, No 145; eight, commu-
nicated by Bugge, Grundtvig, III, 810-13;
two others, IV, 483 f.f
Faroe. A, B, Grundtvig, IV, 803 f.
Icelandic. 'Rika alfs kvaefti,' Islenzk
fornkvaeSi, No 4.
Danish A, one of the three sixteenth-cen-
tury versions, tells how a knight, expressing a
* B, Landstad 44 (which has only this in common with
the Scottish ballad, that a hill-man carries a maid to his cave),
has much resemblance at the beginning to 'Kvindemorde-
ren,' Grundtvig, No 183, our No 4. See Grundtvig's note **
at III, 810. This is only what might be looked for, since
both ballads deal with abductions.
strong desire to obtain a king's daughter, is
overheard by a dwarf, who says this shall
never be. The dwarf pretends to bargain
with the knight for his services in forward-
ing the knight's object, but consults mean-
while with his mother how he may get the
lady for himself.J The mother tells him that
the princess will go to even-song, and the
dwarf writes runes on the way she must go
by, which compel her to come to the hill.
The dwarf holds out his hand and asks, How
came ye to this strange land? to which the
lady answers mournfully, I wot never how.
The dwarf says, You have pledged yourself to
a knight, and he has betrayed you with runes:
this eve you shall be the dwarf's guest. She
stayed there the night, and was taken back
to her mother in the morning. Eight years
went by; her hand was sought by five kings,
nine counts, but no one of them could get a
good answer. One day her mother asked,
Why are thy cheeks so faded? Why can
no one get thee? She then revealed that she
had been beguiled by the dwarf, and had
seven sons and a daughter in the hill, none of
whom she ever saw. She thought she was
alone, but the dwarf-king was listening. He
strikes her with an elf-rod, and bids her hie to
the hill after him. Late in the evening the
poor thing dons her cloak, knocks at her fa-
ther's door, and says good-night to the friends
that never will see her again, then sadly turns
to the hill. Her seven sons advance to meet
her, and ask why she told of their father.
Her tears run sore; she gives no answer; she
is dead ere midnight.
With A agrees another of the three old
Danish copies, B, and three modern ones, D,
M, N, have something of the opening scene
which characterizes A. So also Swedish C, L,
and the Icelandic ballad. In Swedish C, Proud
Margaret, who is daughter of a king of seven
kingdoms, will have none of her suitors (this
t It is not necessary, for purposes of the English ballad,
to notice these mixed forms.
} In 'Nakkens Svig,' C, Grundtvig, No 39, the merman
consults with his mother, and then, as also in oiher copies of
the ballad, transforms himself into a knight. See the trans-
lation by Prior, III, 269 ; Jaiuieson, Popular Ballads, I, 210;
Lewis, Tales of Wonder, I, 60.


41. HIND ETIN
363
circumstance comes too soon). A hill-king
asks his mother how he may get her. She
asks in return, What will you give me to
make her come of herself to the hill? He
promises red gold and chestf ills of pence; and
one Sunday morning Margaret, who has set
out to go to church, is made — by magical
operations, of course — to take the way to the
hill.
A second form begins a stage later: Danish
C, G, K, Swedish D, E, K, Norwegian A, C,
E, G, H, I (?), K, L, M (?) N (?), Faroe A,
B. We learn nothing of the device by which
the maid has been entrapped. Mother and
daughter are sitting in their bower, and the
mother asks her child why her cheeks are pale,
why milk is running from her breasts. She
answers that she has been working too hard;
that what is taken for milk is mead. The
mother retorts that other women do not suffer
from their industry; that mead is brown, and
milk is white. Hereupon the daughter re-
veals that she has been beguiled by an elf,
and, though living under her mother's roof,
has had eight or nine children (seven or eight
sons and a daughter; fifteen children, Faroe
A, B), none of whom she ever saw, since after
birth they were always transferred to the hill
(see, especially, Danish C, G, also A; Nor-
wegian H, I; Faroe A, B). The mother (who
disowns her, Danish C, G, Swedish D, E, Nor-
wegian K), in several versions, asks what gifts
she got for her honor. Among these was a
harp [horn, Norwegian L], which she was to
play when she was unhappy. The mother
asks for a piece, and the first tones bring the
elf, who reproaches the daughter for betraying
him: had she concealed their connection she
might still have lived at home, C; but now
she must go with him. She is kindly received
by her children. They give her a drink which
* The beauty of the Norse ballads should make an Eng-
lishman's heart wring for his loss. They aro. particularly
pretty here, where the forgetful draught is administered; as
Norwegian C, A:
Forth came her daughter, as jimp as a wand,
She dances a dance, with silver can in hand.
'0 where wast thou bred, and where wast thou born?
And where were thy maiden-garments shorn?'
makes her forget father and mother, heaven
and earth, moon and sun, and even makes her
think she was born in the hill, Danish C, G,
Swedish D, Norwegian A, C*
Danish G, K, Faroe A, B, take a tragic
turn: the woman dies in the first two the
night she comes to the hill. Danish 0, one
of the sixteenth-century versions, goes as far
as possible in the other direction. The elf-
king pats Maldf red's cheek, takes her in his
arms, gives her a queen's crown and name.
And this he did for the lily-wand,
He had himself christened and all his land!
A third series of versions offers the probable
type of the much-corrupted Scottish ballads,
and under this head come Danish E, F, H, I,
L-R, T; Swedish A, B, F-I, and also C, after
an introduction which belongs to the first
class; Norwegian D, F. The characteristic
feature is that the woman has been living
eight or nine years in the hill, and has there
borne her children, commonly seven sons and
a daughter. She sets out to go to matins,
and whether under the influence of runes, or
accidentally, or purposely, takes the way to
the hill. In a few cases it is clear that she
does not seek the hill-man or put herself in his
way, e. g., Danish N, Swedish G, but Swed-
ish A, H, N make her apply for admission at
the hill-door. In Danish I, N-R, T, Norwe-
gian F, it is not said that she was on her way
to church; she is in a field or in the hill. In
Swedish F she has been two years in the cave,
and it seems to her as if she had come yester-
day. After her eight or nine years with the
hill-man the woman longs to go home, Danish
E, F, I, Swedish A, F, I, Norwegian D; to go
to church, Danish L, M, N, P, T, Norwegian
F; for she had heard Denmark's bells, church
bells, Danish L-P, T, Swedish G, Norwegian
'In Norway was I bred, in Norway was I born,
And in Norway were my maiden-garments shorn.'
The ae first drink from the silver can she drank,
What stock she was come of she clean forgat.
'0 where wast thou bred, and where wast thou born?
And where were thy maiden-garments shorn?'
'In the hill was I bred, and there was I born,
In the hill were my maiden-garments shorn.'


364
41. HIND ETIN
D, F. She had heard these bells as she
watched the cradle, Danish T, P, Swedish G;
sat by the cradle and sang, T 4; compare
English C 7. She asks the hill-man's per-
mission, and it is granted on certain terms:
she is not to talk of him and her life in the
hill, Danish E, I, Swedish A, F, I, is to come
back, Danish F, must not stay longer than an
hour or two, Norwegian D ; she is not to wear
her gold, her best clothes, not to let out her
hair, not to go into her mother's pew at the
church, not to bow when the priest pronounces
the holy name, or make an offering, or go home
after service, etc., Danish I, L-P, T, Norwegian
F. All these last conditions she violates, nor
does she in the least heed the injunction not to
speak of the hill-man. The consequence is
that he summarily presents himself, whether
at the church or the paternal mansion, and or-
ders her back to the hill, sometimes striking
her on the ear or cheek so that blood runs, or
beating her with a rod, Danish E, I, L, M, S,
T, Swedish A, B, C, H, I, Norwegian F. In
a few versions, the hill-man tells her that her
children are crying for her, and she replies,
Let them cry; I will never go back to the
hill; Danish M, N, O, Norwegian F. In Dan-
ish E, Swedish G, a gold apple thrown into
her lap seems to compel her to return; more
commonly main force is used. She is carried
dead into the hill, or dies immediately on her
arrival, in Norwegian F, Danish T; she dies
of grief, according to traditional comment, in
Norwegian D. They give her a drink, and
her heart breaks, Swedish A, G, H, M; but
elsewhere the drink only induces forgetfulness,
Danish L, M, Swedish B, C, F.
Much of the story of 'Jomfruen og Dvaer-
gekongen ' recurs in the ballad of 'Agnete og
Havmanden,' which, for our purposes, may be
treated as a simple variation of the other.
The Norse forms are again numerous, but
all from broadsides dating, at most, a century
back, or from recent tradition.
Danish. 'Agnete og Havmanden,' Grundt-
• For reasons, doubtless sufficient, but to me unknown,
Grundtvig has not noticed two copies in Boisen's Nye og
gamle Viser, 10th edition, p. 192, p. 194. The former of
these is like A, with more resemblance here and there to
vig, No 38, A-D, II, 51 ff, 656 ff, III, 813 ff.
Copies of A are numerous, and two had been
previously printed; in Danske Viser, I, 313,
No 50, and "in Barfod's Brage og Idun, II,
264." E, Rask's Morskabslassning, III, 81,
Grundtvig, II, 659. F, one stanza, Grundtvig,
p. 660. G, H, the same, III, 816. I, Kris-
tensen, II, 75, No 28 C, Grundtvig, IV, 807.
K, Grundtvig, IV, 808*
Swedish. A, B, C, in Cavallius and
Stephens' imprinted collection, described by
Grundtvig, II, 661. D,' Agneta och Hafsman-
nen,' Eva VVigstrom's Folkdiktning, p. 9. E,
Bergstrom's Afzelius, II, 308. F, 'Skon
Anna och Hafskungen,' Aminson, Bidrag till
Sddermanlands aldre Kulturhistoria, in, 43.
G, ' Helena och Hafsmannen,' the same, p. 46.
Norwegian. A, Grundtvig, III, 817, prop-
erly Danish rather than Norwegian. B, a ver-
sion partly described at p. 818. C, Grundt-
vig, IV, 809, also more Danish than Norwe-
gian. All these communicated by Bugge.
Danish C, G, Norwegian A, have a hill-
man instead of a merman, and might as well
have been put with the other ballad. On the
other hand, the Danish versions M, N, O of
'The Maid and the Dwarf-King' call the maid
Agenet, and give the hill-man a name, Nek,
Netmand, Mekmand, which implies a watery
origin for him, and the fragments P, Q, R have
similar names, Nekmand, Negen, Laskkemand,
as also Agenete, and might as well have been
ranked with ' Agnes and the Merman.' In
'The Maid and the Dwarf-King,' Swedish L
(one stanza) the maid is taken by "Pel Elf-
ven " to the sea.
Agnes goes willingly with the merman to
the sea-bottom, Danish A, D, E, K, Swedish
A , D, E, Norwegian A, C. She lives there,
according to many versions, eight years, and
has seven children. As she is sitting and sing-
ing by the cradle one day, she hears the bells
of England, Danish A, C, D, E, H, I, K
Swedish D [church bells, bells, F, G], Nor-
wegian A, C. She asks if she may go to
other versions, and may be a made-up copy; the other,' Afr-
nete og Bjsergmauden, f ra Sauderjylland,' consists of stanzas
1-5 of C.


41. HIND ETIN
365
church, go home, and receives permission on
the same terms as in the other ballad. Her
mother asks her what gifts she had received,
Danish A, D, E, H, I, Swedish E, F, Nor-
wegian C. When the merman comes into the
church all the images turn their backs, Dan-
ish A, D, K, Swedish D, F, G, Norwegian A,
C; and, in some cases, for Agnes, too. He
tells her that the children are crying for her;
she refuses to go back, Danish A, C, D, I, K,
Swedish D, F, G (and apparently A. B, C),
Norwegian C. In Norwegian A the merman
strikes her on the cheek, and she returns; in
Danish I she is taken back quietly ; in Danish
C he gives her so sore an ail that she dies
presently; in Danish H she is taken away by
force, and poisoned by her children ; in Danish
K the merman says that if she stays with her
mother they must divide the children (five).
He takes two, she two, and each has to take
half of the odd one.
The Norse forms of 'Agnes and the Mer-
man' are conceded to have been derived from
Germany: see Grundtvig, IV, 812. Of the
German ballad, which is somewhat nearer to
the English, the following versions have been
noted:
A. 'Die schone Agniese,' Fiedler, Volks-
reime und Volkslieder in Anhalt-Dessau, p.
140, No 1= Mittler, No 553. B. ' Die schone
Agnese,' Parisius, Deutsche Volkslieder in der
Altmark und im Magdeburgischen gesammelt,
p. 29, No 8 B, from nearly the same region
as A. C. Parisius, p. 28, No 8 A, Pechau on
the Elbe. D. 'Die schone Angnina,' Erk's
Neue Sammlung, ii, 40, No 26 = Mittler, No
552, from the neighborhood of Magdeburg.
E. 'Die Schone Agnete,' Erk's Liederhort,
No 16% p. 47, Erk's Wunderhom, IV, 91,
from the neighborhood of Guben. F. 'Die
schone Dorothea,' Liederhort, No 16b, p. 48,
Gramzow in der Ukermark. G. 'Die schone
Hannale,' Liederhort, No 16, p. 44, Erk's
Wunderhorn, IV, 87, Silesia. H. ' Die schone
Hannele,' Hoffmann u. Richter, Schlesische
Volkslieder, p. 3, No 1 = Mittler, No 551,
Bohme, No 90 A, Breslau. 'Der Wasser-
mann,' Simrock, No 1, is a compounded copy.
A wild merman has become enamored of
the King of England's daughter, A, B, C, D.
He plates a bridge with gold ; she often walks
over the bridge; it sinks with her into the
water [the merman drags her down into the
water, H]. She stays below seven years, and
bears seven sons. One day [by the cradle,
C, G] she hears the bells of England, A 6, B,
C, D, F [bells, E, G, H], and longs to go to
church. She expresses this wish to the mer-
man, C, D, G, H. The merman says she must
take her seven sons with her, B, C, D; she
must come back, G, H. She takes her seven
sons by the hand, and goes with them to Eng-
land, A 5, B 7; cf. Scottish C 13, 14, A 22,
50. When she enters the church everything
in it bows, A, B, F. Her parents are there,
C, D; her father opens the pew, her mother
lays a cushion for her, G, H. As she goes
out of the church, there stands the merman,
A, B, E, F. Her parents take her home in
D, G, H. They seat her at the table, and
while she is eating, a gold apple falls into her
lap (cf.' The Maid and the Dwarf-King,' Dan.
ish E, Swedish G), which she begs her mother
to throw into the fire; the merman appears,
and asks if she wishes him burnt, G, H. The
merman, when he presents himself at the
church, asks whether the woman will go back
with him, or die where she is, and she prefers
death on the spot, A, B, E. In the other
case, he says that if she will not return, the
children must be divided, — three and three,
and half of the seventh to each; the mother
prefers the water to this. D has a peculiar
and not very happy trait. The merman fas-
tens a chain to his wife's foot before she goes
up, and, having been kept long waiting, draws
it in. But the people at the church have
taken off the chain, and he finds nothing at
the end of it. He asks whether she does not
wish to live with him; she replies, I will no
longer torment you, or fret myself to death.
The story of Agnes and the Merman occurs
in a VVendish ballad, with an introductory
scene found in the beautiful German ballad,
'Wassermanns Brant:' * Haupt und Schma-
• See five versions in Mittler, Nos 546-550. As Grundt-
vig remarks, what is one ballad in Wendiih is two in Ger-
man and three in Norse: D. g. F., IV, 810.


366
41. HIND ETIN
ler, I, 62, No 34. A maid begs that she may
be left to herself for a year, but her father
says it is time for her to be married. She
goes to her chamber, weeps and wrings her
hands. The merman comes and asks, Where
is my bride? They tell him that she is in
her chamber, weeping and wringing her hands.
The merman asks her the reason, and she an-
swers, They all say that you are the mer-
woman's son. He says he will build her a
bridge of pure silver and gold, and have her
driven over it with thirty carriages and forty
horses ; but ere she has half passed the bridge
it goes down to the bottom. She is seven
years below, has seven sons in as many years,
and is going with the eighth. She implores
her husband to permit her to go to church in
the upper world, and he consents, with the
proviso that she shall not stay for the bene-
diction. At church she sees her brother and
sister, who receive her kindly. She tells them
that she cannot stay till the benediction; * they
beg her to come home to dine with them. She
does wait till the benediction; the merman
rushes frantically about. As she leaves the
church and is saying good-by to her sister,
she meets the merman, who snatches the
youngest child from her (she appears to have
all seven with her), tears it in pieces, strangles
the rest, scatters their limbs on the road, and
hangs himself, asking, Does not your heart
grieve for your children? She answers, I grieve
for none but the youngest, f
A Slovenian ballad has the story with mod-
ifications, Achacel and Korytko, Slovdnake
Pesmi krajnskiga Naroda, I, 30,J 'Povodnji
m6sh;' given in abstract by Haupt and Schma-
ler, I, 339, note to No. 34. Mizika goes to a
dance, in spite of her mother's forbidding.
Her mother, in a rage, wishes that the mer-
man may fetch her. A young man who dances
with her whirls her round so furiously that
she complains, but he becomes still more vio-
* This trait, corresponding to the prohibition in the Norse
ballads of bowing when the holy name is pronounced, occurs
frequently in tradition, as might be expected. In a Swedish
merman-ballad, ' Necken,' Afzclius, III, 133, the nix, who
has attended to church the lady whom he is about to kidnap,
makes off with his best speed when the priest reads the ben-
ediction. See, further, Arnason's Islenzkar bjdSsogur, I,
lent. Mizika sees how it is, and exclaims,
The merman has come for me! The mer-
man flies out of the window with her, and
plunges into the water. She bears a son,
and asks leave to pay a visit to her mother;
and this is allowed on conditions, one of which
is that she shall not expose herself to a bene-
diction. She does not conform, and the mer-
man comes and says that her son is crying for
her. She refuses to go with him, and he tears
the boy in two, that each may have a half.
Two or three of the minuter correspond-
ences between the Scottish and the Norse or
German ballads, which have not been referred
to, may be indicated in conclusion. The hill-
man, in several Norwegian copies, as B, M,
carries off the lady on horseback, and so Has-
tings in C. In A 34-39, the returned sister,
being invited to dine, cannot eat a bit or drink
a drop. So, in 'The Maid and the Dwarf-
King,' Swedish G 15, 16, they set before
Agnes dishes four and five, dishes eight and
nine, but she can take nothing:
Agneta ej smakte en endaste bit.
Young Akin, in A 43, is found in the wood,
"tearing his yellow hair." The merman has
golden hair in Danish A 16, Swedish D 2, 19,
Norwegian A 17 (nothing very remarkable,
certainly), and in Danish D 31 wrings his
hands and is very unhappy, because Agnes re-
fuses to return. It is much more important
that in one of the Swedish copies of the mer-
man ballad, Grundtvig, II, 661a, we find a
trace of the 'Christendom' which is made
such an object in the Scottish ballads:
'Nay,' said the mother, 'now thou art mine,'
And christened her with water and with wine.
'The Maid and the Dwarf-King,' Danish
E, is translated by Prior, III, 338 ; Swedish A
by Stephens, Foreign Quarterly Review,
XXV, 35; Swedish C by Keightley, Fairy
73 f; Maurer's Islandische Volksagen, 19 f; Liebrecht, Ger-
vasius, p. 26, LVII, and p. 126, note (Grundtvig).
t The merfolk are apt to be ferocious, as compared with
hill-people, elves, etc. See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,
I, 409 f.
} I 79, of a second edition, which, says Vraz, has an ob-
jectionable fantastic spelling due to the publisher.


368 4i.
HTND ETIN
18 It fell upo another day,
This guid lord he thought lang,
And he is to the hunting gane,
Took wi him his dog and gun.
19 Wi how and arrow hy his side,
He's aff, single, alane,
And left his seven children to stay
Wi their mither at hame.
20 'O I will tell to you, mither,
Gin ye wadna angry be :'
'Speak on, speak on, my little wee boy,
Ye'se nae be quarrelld by me.'
21 'As we came frae the hynd-hunting,
We heard fine music ring :'
'My blessings on you, my bonny boy,
I wish I'd been there my lane.'
22 He's taen his mither by the hand,
His six brithers also,
And they are on thro Elmond's wood,
As fast as they coud go.
23 They wistna weel where they were gaen,
Wi the stratlins o their feet;
They wistna weel where they were gaen,
Till at her father's yate.
24 'I hae nae money in my pocket,
But royal rings hae three;
I 'll gie them you, my little young son.
And ye 'll walk there for me.
25 • Ye 'll gie the first to the proud porter,
And he will lat you in;
Ye 'll gie the next to the butler-boy,
And he will show you ben;
26 'Ye 'll gie the third to the minstrel
That plays before the king;
He 'll play success to the bonny boy
Came thro the wood him lane.'
27 He gae the first to the proud porter,
And he opend an let him in;
He gae the next to the butler-boy,
And he has shown him ben;
28 He gae the third to the minstrel
That playd before the king;
And he playd success to the bonny boy
Came thro the wood him lane.
29 Now when he came before the king,
Fell low down on his knee;
The king he turned round about,
And the saut tear blinded his ee.
30 'Win up, win up, my bonny boy,
Gang frae my companie;
Ye look sae like my dear daughter,
My heart will birst in three.'
31 'If I look like your dear daughter,
A wonder it is none;
If I look like your dear daughter,
I am her eldest son.'
32 'Will ye tell me, ye little wee boy,
Where may my Margaret be?'
'She's just now standing at your yates,
And my six brithers her wi.'
33 'O where are all my porter-boys
That I pay meat and fee.
To open my yates baith wide and braid?
Let her come in to me.'
34 When she came in before the king,
Fell low down on her knee;
'Win up, win up, my daughter dear,
This day ye 'll dine wi me.'
35 'Ae bit I canno eat, father,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Till I see my mither and sister dear,
For lang for them I think.'
36 When she came before the queen,
Fell low down on her knee;
'Win up, win up, my daughter dear
This day ye 'se dine wi me.'
37 'Ae bit I canno eat, mither,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Until I see my dear sister,
For lang for her I think.'
38 When that these two sisters met,
She haild her courteouslie;
'Come ben, come ben, my sister dear,
This day ye 'se dine wi me.'


41. HIND BTIN
39 'Ae bit I canno eat, sister,
Nor ae drop can I drink,
Until I see my dear husband,
For lang for him I think.'
40 'O where are all my rangers bold
That I pay meat and fee,
To search the forest far an wide,
And bring Akin to me?'
41 Out it speaks the little wee boy:
Na, na, this maunna be;
Without ye grant a free pardon,
I hope ye 'll nae him see.
42 'O here I grant a free pardon,
Well seald by my own han;
Ye may make search for Young Akin,
As soon as ever you can.'
43 They searchd the country wide and braid,
The forests far and near,
And found him into Elmond's wood,
Tearing his yellow hair.
44 'Win up, win up now, Young Akin,
Win up, and boun wi me;
We 're messengers come from the court,
The king wants you to see.'
45 'O lat him take frae me my head,
Or hang me on a tree;
For since I've lost my dear lady,
Life's no pleasure to me.'
46 'Your head will nae be touchd, Akin,
Nor hangd upon a tree;
Your lady's in her father's court,
And all he wants is thee.'
47 When he came in before the king,
Fell low down on his knee;
'Win up, win up now, Young Akin,
This day ye 'se dine wi me.'
48 But as they were at dinner set,
The boy asked a boun:
'I wish we were in the good church,
For to get christendoun.
49 'We hae lived in guid green wood
This seven years and ane;
But a' this time, since eer I mind,
Was never a church within.'
50 'Your asking's nae sae great, my boy,
But granted it shall be;
This day to guid church ye shall gang,
And your mither shall gang you wi.'
51 When unto the guid church she came,
She at the door did stan;
She was sae sair sunk down wi shame,
She coudna come farer ben.
52 Then out it speaks the parish priest,
And a sweet smile gae he:
'Come ben, come ben, my lily flower,
Present your babes to me.'
53 Charles, Vincent, Sam and Dick,
And likewise James and John;
They calld the eldest Young Akin,
Which was his father's name.
54 Then they staid in the royal court,
And livd wi mirth and glee,
And when her father was deceasd,
Heir of the crown was she.
B
Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 228.
1 May Margbet stood in her bouer door,
Kaiming doun her yellow hair;
She spied some nuts growin in the wud,
And wishd that she was there.
2 She has plaited her yellow locks
A little abune her bree,
And she has kilted her petticoats
A little below her knee,
And she's aff to Mulberry wud,
As fast as she could gae.
3 She had na pu'd a nut, a nut,
A nut but barely ane,
Till up started the Hynde Etin,
Says, Lady, let thae alane!
47


370
41. HIND ETIN
4 'Mulberry wuds are a' my ain;
My father gied them me,
To sport and play when I thought lang;
And they sall na be tane by thee.'
5 And ae she pu'd the tither berrie,
Na thinking o' the skaith,
And said, To wrang ye, Hynde Etin,
I wad be unco laith.
6 But he has tane her by the yellow locks,
And tied her till a tree,
And said, For slichting my commands,
An ill death sall ye dree.
7 He pu'd a tree out o the wud,
The biggest that was there,
And he howkit a cave monie fathoms deep,
And put May Margret there.
8 'Now rest ye there, ye saucie may;
My wuds are free for thee;
And gif I tak ye to mysell,
The better ye 'll like me.'
9 Na rest, na rest May Margret took,
Sleep she got never nane;
Her back lay on the cauld, cauld floor,
Her head upon a stane.
10 'O tak me out,' May Margret cried,
'O tak me hame to thee,
And I sall be your bounden page
Until the day I dee.'
11 He took her out o the dungeon deep,
And awa wi him she's gane;
But sad was the day an earl's dochter
Gaed hame wi Hynde Etin.
*****
12 It fell out ance upon a day
Hynde Etin's to the hunting gane,
And he has tane wi him his eldest son,
For to carry his game.
13 'O I wad ask ye something, father,
An ye wadna angry be ;'
'Ask on, ask on, my eldest son,
Ask onie thing at me.'
14 'My mother's cheeks are aft times weet,
Alas! they are seldom dry ;'
'Na wonder, na wonder, my eldest son,
Tho she should brast and die.
15 'For your mother was an earl's dochter,
Of noble birth and fame,
And now she's wife o Hynde Etin,
Wha neer got christendame.
16 'But we 'll shoot the laverock in the lift,
The buntlin on the tree,
And ye 'll tak them hame to your mother,
And see if she 'll comforted be.'
*****
17 'I wad ask ye something, mother,
An ye wadna angry be ;'
'Ask on, ask on, my eldest son,
Ask onie thing at me.'
18 'Your cheeks they are aft times weet,
Alas! they 're seldom dry ;'
'Na wonder, na wonder, my eldest son,
Tho I should brast and die.
19 'For I was ance an earl's dochter,
Of noble birth and fame,
And now I am the wife of Hynde Etin,
Wha neer got christendame.'
*****
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 67, com-
municated by Mr James Nicol, of Strichen; Motherwell's
Minstrelsy, p. 287; Motherwell's MS., p. 450.
1 'O well like I to ride in a mist,
And shoot in a northern win,
And far better a lady to steal,
That's come of a noble kin.'
2 Four an twenty fair ladies
Put on this lady's sheen,
And as mony young gentlemen
Did lead her ower the green.


372
42. CLERK COLVILL
and 'Clerk Colvill,' A (' Clark Colven ') is it, and, as she then exultingly tells him, sure
one of the two.* This ballad is not in Jamie- to grow worse until he is dead. He draws
son's Brown manuscript. Rewritten by Lewis, his sword on her, but she merrily springs into
A was published in Tales of Wonder, 1801, the water. He mounts his horse, rides home
II, 445, No 56. B, 1769, is the earliest printed tristful, alights heavily, and bids his mother
English copy, but a corresponding Danish bal- make his bed, for all is over with him.
lad antedates its publication by seventy-five C is at the beginning blended with verses
years. Of C, W. F., who communicated it to which belong to ' Willie and May Margaret,'
Notes and Queries, says: "I have reason to Jamieson, I, 135 (from Mrs Brown's recita-
believe that it is originally from the same tion), or 'The Drowned Lovers,' Buchan, I,
source as that from which Scott, and es- 140. In this ballad a mother adjures her son
pecially Jamieson, derived many of their best not to go wooing, under pain of her curse. He
ballads." This source should be no other than goes, nevertheless, and is drowned. It is obvi-
Mrs Brown, who certainly may have known ous, without remark, that the band and belt in
two versions of Clerk Colvill; but C is mark- C 1 do not suit the mother; neither does the
edly different from A. An Abbotsford man- phrase ' love Colin ' in the second stanza, f 0
uscript, entitled "Scottish Songs," has, at fol. 9-11 afford an important variation from the
3, a version which appears to have been made other versions. The mermaid appears at the
up from Lewis's copy, its original, A, and foot of the young man's bed, and offers him
Herd's, B. a choice between dying then and living with
All the English versions are deplorably im- her in the water. (See the Norwegian bal-
perfect, and C is corrupted, besides. The story lads at p. 377.)
which they afford is this. Clerk Colvill, newly Clerk Colvill is not, as his representative
married as we may infer, is solemnly entreated is or may be in other ballads, the guiltless and
by his gay lady never to go near a well-fared guileless object of the love or envy of a water-
may who haunts a certain spring or water, sprite or elf. His relations with the mermaid
It is clear that before his marriage he had began before his marriage with his gay lady,
been in the habit of resorting to this mer- and his death is the natural penalty of his
maid, as she is afterwards called, and equally desertion of the water-nymph ; for no point is
clear, from the impatient answer which he ren- better established than the fatal consequences
ders his dame, that he means to visit her again, of inconstancy in such connections. J His his-
His coming is hailed with pleasure by the tory, were it fully told, would closely resemble
mermaid, who, in the course of their interview, that of the Knight of Staufenberg, as narrated
does something which gives him a strange in a German poem of about the year 1300.§
pain in the head, — a pain only increased by The already very distinguished chevalier,
a prescription which she pretends will cure Peter Diemringer, of Staufenberg (in the Or-
• "From a MS. in my grandfather's writing, with the
following note: Copied from an old MS. in the possession of
Alexander Fraser Tytler." Note of Miss Mary Fraser Tyt-
ler. The first stanza agrees with that which is cited from
the original by Dr Anderson in Nichols's Illustrations, VII,
177, and the number of stanzas is the same.
Colvill, which has become familiar from Herd's copy, is
the correct form, and Colven, Colvin, a vulgarized one, which
in C lapses into Colin.
t Still, though these particular verses appear to have come
from 'The Drowned Lovers,' they may represent other
original ones which were to the same effect. See, further
on, the beginning of some Faroe versions.
} Hoc equidem a viris omni exceptione majoribus quotidie
scimus probatum, quod quosdam hujusmodi larvarum quas
fadas nominant amatores audivimus, et cum ad aliarum foe-
minarum matrimonia se transtulerunt, ante mortuos qnam
cum superinduciis carnali se copula immiscuerunt. Des
Gervasius von Tilbury Otia Imperialia (of about 1211), Lieb-
recht, p. 41.
§ Der Bitter von Stauffenberg, from a MS. of perhaps
1437, C. M. Engelhardt, Strassburg, 1823. Edited by Oskar
Janicke, in Altdeutsche Studien von O. Janicke, E. Stein-
meyer, W. Wilmanns, Berlin, 1871. Die Legende vom Kil-
ter Herrn Peter Diemringer von Staufenberg in der Ortenau,
reprint by F. Culemann of the Strassburg edition of Mar-
tin Schott, 1480-82. The old printed copy was made over
by Fischart in 1588 (Jobin, Strassburg, in that year), and
this 'ernewerte Beschreibung der alten Geschicht' is re-
hashed in seven ' Romanzen ' in Wunderhorn, I, 407-18, ed.
1806, 401-12, ed. 1853. Simrock, Die deutschen Volks-
biicher, HI, 1-48.


42. CLERK OOLVILL
373
tenau, Baden, four leagues from Strassburg),
when riding to mass one Whitsunday, saw a
lady of surpassing beauty, dressed with equal
magnificence, sitting on a rock by the wayside.
He became instantaneously enamored, and,
greeting the lady in terms expressive of his
admiration, received no discouraging reply.
The lady rose; the knight sprang from his
horse, took a hand which she offered, helped
her from the rock, and they sat down on the
grass. The knight asked how she came to be
there alone. The lady replied that she had
been waiting for him: ever since he could be-
stride a horse she had been devoted to him;
she had been his help and protection in tour-
neys and fights, in all climes and regions,
though he had never seen her. The knight
wished he might ever be hers. He could have
his wish, she said, and never know trouble or
sickness, on one condition, and that was that
he never should marry: if he did this, he would
die in three days. He vowed to be hers as
long as he lived; they exchanged kisses, and
then she bade him mount his horse and go to
mass. After the benediction he was to return
home, and when he was alone in his chamber,
and wished for her, she would come, and so
always; that privilege God had given her:
"swa ich wil, da" bin ich." They had their
meeting when he returned from church: he
redoubled his vows, she promised him all good
things, and the bounties which he received
from her overflowed upon all his friends and
comrades.
The knight now undertook a chivalrous
tour, to see such parts of the world as he had
not visited before. Wherever he went, the fair
lady had only to be wished for and she was by
him: there was no bound to her love or her
gifts. Upon his return he was beset by rela-
tives and friends, and urged to marry. He
put them off with excuses: he was too young
to sacrifice his freedom, and what not. They
returned to the charge before long, and set a
wise man of his kindred at him to beg a boon
of him. "Anything," he said, "but mar-
rying: rather cut me into strips than that."
Having silenced his advisers by this reply, he
went to his closet and wished for his lady.
She was full of sympathy, and thought it
might make his position a little easier if he
should tell his officious friends something of
the real case, how he had a wife who attended
him wherever he went and was the source of
all his prosperity; but he must not let them
persuade him, or what she had predicted would
surely come to pass.
At this time a king was to be chosen at
Frankfurt, and all the nobility flocked thither,
and among them Staufenberg, with a splendid
train. He, as usual, was first in all tourneys,
and made himself remarked for his liberal
gifts and his generous consideration of youth-
ful antagonists: his praise was in everybody's
mouth. The king sent for him, and offered
him an orphan niece of eighteen, with a rich
dowry. The knight excused himself as un-
worthy of such a match. The king said his
niece must accept such a husband as he pleased
to give, and many swore that Staufenberg was
a fool. Bishops, who were there in plenty,
asked him if he had a wife already. Staufen-
berg availed himself of the leave which had
been given him, and told his whole story, not
omitting that he was sure to die in three days
if he married. "Let me see the woman," said
one of the bishops. "She lets nobody see her
but me," answered Staufenberg. "Then it is
a devil," said another of the clergy, "and your
soul is lost forever." Staufenberg yielded, and
said he would do the king's will. He was
betrothed that very hour, and set out for Or-
tenau, where he had appointed the celebration
of the nuptials. When night came he wished
for the invisible lady. She appeared, and told
him with all gentleness that he must prepare
for the fate of which she had forewarned him,
a fate seemingly inevitable, and not the con-
sequence of her resentment. At the wedding
feast she would display her foot in sight of all
the guests: when he saw that, let him send
for the priest. The knight thought of what
the clergy had said, and that this might be a
che<it of the devil. The bride was brought
to Staufenberg, the feast was held, but at the
very beginning of it a foot whiter than ivory
was seen through the ceiling. Staufenberg
tore his hair and cried, Friends, ye have ruined


374
42. CLERK COLVILL
yourselves and me! He begged his bride and
all who had come with her to the wedding to
stay for his funeral, ordered a bed to be pre-
pared for him and a priest to be sent for. He
asked his brothers to give his bride all that he
had promised her. But she said no; his friends
should rather have all that she had brought;
she would have no other husband, and since
she had been the cause of his death she would
go into a cloister, where no eye should see
her: which she did after she had returned to
her own country.
A superscription to the old poem denomi-
nates Staufenberg's amphibious consort a mer-
fey, sea-fairy; but that description is not to
be strictly interpreted, no more than mer-fey,
or fata morgana, is in some other romantic
tales. There is nothing of the water-sprite in
her, nor is she spoken of by any such name
in the poem itself. The local legends of sixty
years ago,* and perhaps still, make her to have
been a proper water-nymph. She is first met
with by the young knight near a spring or a
brook, and it is in a piece of water that he
finds his death, and that on the evening of his
wedding day.
Clerk Colvill and the mermaid are repre-
sented by Sir Oluf and an elf in Scandinavian
ballads to the number of about seventy. The
oldest of these is derived from a Danish man-
uscript of 1550, two centuries and a half later
than the Staufenberg poem, but two earlier
than Clerk Colvill, the oldest ballad outside
of the Scandinavian series. Five other ver-
sions are of the date 1700, or earlier, the rest
from tradition of this century. No ballad
has received more attention from the heroic
Danish editor, whose study of 'Elveskud'
presents an admirably ordered synoptic view
of all the versions known up to 1881: Grundt-
vig, No 47, II, 109-19, 663-66 ; III, 824-25;
IV, 835-74-t
The Scandinavian versions are:
Faroe, four: A, 39 sts, B, 24 sts, C, 18 sts,
D, 23 sts, Grundtvig, IV, 849-52.
* Engelhardt, pp 6, 13 f: Sagen aus Baden and der Um-
gegend, Carlsruhe, 1834, pp 107-122.
t Separately printed, under the title, Elveskud, dansk,
svensk, norsk, faeresk, islandsk, skotsk, vendiak, bemisk,
Icelandic, twelve, differing slightly except
at the very end: A,' KvaeSi af Olafi Liljuros,'
24 sts, MS. of 1665; B, C, MS. of about 1700,
20 sts, 1 st.; D, 18 sts ; E, 17 sts; F, G, 16 sts;
H, 'dlafs kvaeSi,' 22 sts; I a, 18 sts; I b,
20 sts; K, 22 sts; L, 24 sts; M, 25 sts.
These in Islenzk fornkvaeSi, pp 4-10, A a
in full, but only the variations of the other
versions. I b, previously, 'Olafur og alfa-
maer,' Berggreen, Danske Folke-Sange og Me-
lodier, 2d ed., pp 56, 57, No 20 d; and M,
"Sn6t, p. 200."
Danish, twenty-six: 'Elveskud' A, 54 sts,
MS. of 1550, Grundtvig, II, 112; B, 25 sts,
Syv No 87 (1695), Danske Viser, I, 237,
Grundtvig, II, 114; C, 29 sts, the same, II,
115; D a, D b, 31, 15 sts, II, 116, 665;
E-G, 20, 16, 8 sts, II, 117-19; H, I, 32, 25
sts, II, 663-64; K, 29 sts, L, 15 sts, M, 27
sts, N, 16 sts, O, 33 sts, P, 22 sts, Q, 7 sts,
R, 22 sts, S, 32 sts, T, 27 sts, U, 25 sts,
V, 18 sts, X, 11 sts, Y, 11 sts, Z, 8 sts, J!,
23 sta, IV, 835-47 ; 0, 10 sts, Boisen, Nye og
gamle Viser, 1875, p. 191, No 98.
Swedish, eight: A, 15 sts,' Elf-Qvinnan och
Herr Olof,' MS. of seventeenth century, Af-
zelius, III, 165; B, 12 sts, ' Herr Olof i Elf-
vornas dans,' Afzelius, III, 160; C, 18 sts,
Afzelius, III, 162; D, 21 sts, ' Herr Olof och
Elfvorna,' Arwidsson, II, 304; E, 20 sts, Ar-
widsson, II, 307; F, 19 sts, Grundtvig, IV,
848; G, 12 sts, 'Herr Olof och Elffrun,'
Djurklou, p. 94; H, 8 sts, Afzelius, Sago-Hai-
der, ed. 1844, ii, 157.
Norwegian, eighteen: A, 39 sts, 'Olaf
Liljukrans,' Landstad, p. 355; B, 15 sts,
Landstad, p. 843; C-S, collections of Professor
Bugge, used in manuscript by Grundtvig; C,
36 sts, partly printed in Grundtvig, III, 824;
D, 23 sts, Grundtvig, III, 824-25, partly; E,
22 sts; F, 11 sts; G, 27 sts; H, 13 sts; I,
7 sts; K, 4 sts, two printed, ib., p. 824.$
Of these the Faroe versions are nearest to
the English. Olaf's mother asks him whither
he means to ride; his corselet is hanging in
tysk, fransk, italiensk, katalonsk, spansk, bretonsk Folke-
vise, i overblik ved Svend Grundtvig. Kjabenhavn, 1881.
} All the Norse versions are in two-line stanzas.


42. CLEEK COLVILL
375
the loft; A, C, D. "I am going to the heath,
to course the hind," he says. "You are not
going to course the hind; you are going to your
leman. White is your shirt, well is it washed,
but bloody shall it be when it is taken off,"
A, D. "God grant it be not as she bodes!"
exclaims Olaf, as he turns from his mother,
A. He rides to the hills and comes to an elf-
house. An elf comes out, braiding her hair,
and invites him to dance. "You need not
braid your hair for me; I have not come a-woo-
ing," he says. "I must quit the company of
elves, for to-morrow is my bridal." "If you
will have no more to do with elves, a sick
bridegroom shall you be! Would you rather
lie seven years in a sick-bed, or go to the
mould to-morrow?" He would rather go to
the mould to-morrow. The elf brought him
a drink, with an atter-corn, a poison grain,
floating in it: at the first draught his belt
burst A, B*. "Kiss me," she said, " before
you ride." He leaned over and kissed her,
though little mind had he to it: she was be-
guiling him, him so sick a man. His mother
came out to meet him: "Why are you so pale,
as if you had been in an elf-dance?" "I have
been in an elf-dance," he said,* went to bed,
turned his face to the wall, and was dead be-
fore midnight. His mother and his love (moy,
vfv) died thereupon.
Distinct evidence of previous converse with
elves is lacking in the Icelandic versions.
Olaf rides along the cliffs, and comes upon an
elf-house. One elf comes out with her hair
twined with gold, another with a silver tank-
ard, a third in a silver belt, and a fourth wel-
comes him by name. "Come into the booth
and drink with us." "I will not live with
elves," says Olaf; "rather will I believe in
God." The elf answers that he might do
both, excuses herself for a moment, and comes
back in a cloak, which hides a sword. "You
shall not go without giving us a kiss," she
* In 'Jomfruen og Dvaergekongen,' C 25, 26, Grundt-
vig, No 37, the woman who has been carried off to the hill,
wishing to die, asks that atter-corns may be put into her
drink. She evidently gets, however, only the villar-konn,
elvar-konn, of Landstad, Nos 42-45, which are of lethean
property. But in J. og D. F, we may infer an atter-corn,
though none is mentioned, from the effect of the draughts,
says. Olaf leans over his saddle-bow and
kisses her, with but half a heart, and she
thrusts the sword under his shoulder-blade
into the roots of his heart. He sees his heart's
blood under his horse's feet, and spurs home
to his mother. "Whence comest thou, my
son, and why so pale, as if thou hadst been in
an elf-dance (leik)?" "It boots not to hide
it from thee: an elf has beguiled me. Make
my bed, mother; bandage my side, sister."
He dies presently: there was more mourning
than mirth; three were borne to the grave
together.
Nearly all the Danish and Swedish ver-
sions, and a good number of the Norwegian,
interpose an affecting scene between the death
of the hero and that of his bride and his
mother. The bride, on her way to Olaf's
house, and on her arrival, is disconcerted and
alarmed by several ominous proceedings or
circumstances. She hears bells tolling; sees
people weeping; sees men come and go, but
not the bridegroom. She is put off for a time
with false explanations, but in the end dis-
covers the awful fact. Such a passage occurs
in the oldest Danish copy, which is also the
oldest known copy of the ballad. The im-
portance of this version is such that the story
requires to be given with some detail.
Oluf rode out before dawn, but it seemed to
him bright as day.f He rode to a hill where
dwarfs were dancing. A maid stepped out
from the dance, put her arm round his neck,
and asked him whither he would ride. "To
talk with my true-love," said he. "But first,"
said she, " you must dance with us." She then
went on to make him great offers if he would
plight himself to her: a horse that would
go to Rome and back in an hour, and a gold
saddle for it; a new corselet, having which
he never need fly from man; a sword such
as never was used in war. Such were all her
benches as if gold were laid in links, and such
which is that belt, stays, and sark successively burst. See
p. 363 f.
t So, also, Swedish A, F, Norwegian A, C. This is a
cantrip sleight of the elves. The Icelandic burden supposes
this illumination, "The low was burning red ; " and when
Olaf seeks to escape, in Norwegian A, C, E, G, I, K, he has
to make his way through the elf-flame, elvelogi.


42 CLERK COLVILL
379
Comte,' Luzel, I, f, fifty-seven and fifty-
nine two-line stanzas. B, 'Ann Aotro Nann,'
'Le Seigneur Nann,' Luzel, I, fifty-seven
stanzas.* D, ' Aotrou Nann hag ar Gorrigan,'
'Le Seigneur Nann et la Fee,' Villemarqud,
p. 25, ed. 1867, thirty-nine stanzas. E,' Mon-
sieur Nann,' Podsies populaires de la France,
MS., V, fol. 381, fifty-three verses. F, 'Sonen
Gertrud guet hi Vam,' 'Chant de Gertrude et
de sa Mere,' L. Kerardven [=Dufilhol], Gui-
onvac'h, Etudes sur la Bretagne, 2d ed., Paris,
1835, p. 362, p. 13, eleven four-line stanzas.
G, Rolland in Romania, XII, 117, a somewhat
abridged literal translation, in French.
The count [Nann] and bis wife were mar-
ried at the respective ages of thirteen and
twelve. The next year a son was born [a
boy and girl, D]. The young husband asked
the countess if she had a fancy for anything.
She owned that she should like a bit of game,
and he took his gun [lance] and went to the
wood. At the entrance of the wood he met
a fairy [a dwarf, E; a hind, G; saw a white
hind, which he pursued hotly till evening,
when he dismounted near a grotto to drink,
and there was a korrigan, sitting by the spring,
combing her hair with a gold comb, D]. The
fairy [dwarf, hind] said that she had long
been looking for him, A, B, C, E, G. "Now
that I have met you, you must marry me." f
"Marry you? Not I. I am married already."
"Choose either to die in three days or to lie
sick in bed seven [three] years" [and then
die, C]. He would rather die in three days,
for his wife is very young, and would suffer
greatly [he would rather die that instant than
wed a korrigan, D].
On reaching home the young man called
to his mother to make his bed; he should
* Luzel was in possession of other versions, but he assnres
us that every detail is contained in one or the other of these
three.
t B 13," You must marry me straightway, or give me
my weight in silver;" then, "or die in three days," etc. It
is not impossible that this stanza, entirely out of place in this
ballad, was derived from ' Le Comte des Chapelles,' Luzel,
p. 457, from which certain French versions have taken a part
of their story. See Luzel, the eighth and ninth stanzas, on
p. 461.
} B 50, "A white gown, or broget, or my violet petti-
coat?" Luzel says he does not understand broget, and in
never get up again. [His mother, in C 21,
says, Do not weep so: it is not every sick
man that dies, as in Danish A 22.] He re-
counted his meeting with the fairy, and begged
that his wife might not be informed of his
death.
The countess asked, What has happened to
my husband, that he does not come to see
me? She was told that he had gone to the
wood to get her something, A [to Paris, C ; to
the city, D]. Why were the men-servants
weeping? The best horse had been drowned
in bathing him, A, E; had been eaten by the
wolves, B; had broken his neck, C; had died,
F. They were not to weep ; others should be
bought. And why were the maids weeping?
Linen had been lost in washing, A, C, E, F;
the best silver cover had been stolen, F. They
must not weep; the loss would be supplied.
Why were the priests chanting? [the bells
tolling, E, F]. A poor person whom they
had lodged had died in the night, A-E [a
young prince had died, F]. What dress should
she wear for her churching, — red or blue?
D, F.J The custom had come in of wearing
black [she asks for red, they give her black,
F]. On arriving at the church, or cemetery,
she saw that the earth had been disturbed;
her pew was hung with black, B; why was
this? "I can no longer conceal it," said her
mother-in-law: "your husband is dead." She
died upon the spot, A, D. "Take my keys,
take care of my son; I will stay with his fa-
ther," B, C. "Your son is dead, your daughter
is dead," F. §
This ballad has spread, apparently from
Brittany, over all France. No distinct trace
of the fairy remains, however, except in a sin-
gle case. The versions that have been made
his Observations, prefixed to the volume, expresses a conjec-
ture that it must have been altered from droged, robe d'en-
fant, robe de femme, but we evidently want a color. Grundt-
vig remarks that broget would make sense in Danish, where
it means party-colored. Scotch broakit is black and white.
Icelandic brdk, tartan, party-colored cloth, is said to be from
Gaelic breac, versicolor (Vigfusson). This points to a suita-
ble meaning for Breton broget.
§ D adds: "It was a marvel to see, the night after hus-
band and wife had been buried, two oaks rise from the com-
mon tomb, and on their branches two white doves, which
sang there at daybreak, and then took flight for the skies."


42. CLERK COLVILL
381
It is Louis in A, I, J, V. He is king, or of the
royal family, F, M, N, O, Q, W, BB, CC, GG;
count, Y; Renaud le grand, H, Z. In A,
while he is walking in his meadows, he meets
Death, who asks him, peremptorily, Would
you rather die this very night, or languish
seven years? and he answers that he prefers
to die at once. Here there is a very plain
trace of the older fairy. He is mortally hurt,
•while hunting, by a wolf, B; by a boar, DD.
But in more than twenty versions he returns
from war, often with a horrible wound, "ap-
portant son coeur dans sa main," C; "tenant
ses tripes dans ses mains," N; "oque ses
tripes on sa main, sen estoumac on sen chapea,
sen cur covert de sen mentea," G ; etc. In F,
I, J he comes home in a dying state from
prison (to which he was consigned, according
to I, for robbing a church!). In these ver-
sions the story is confused with that of an-
other ballad, existing in Breton, and very
likely in French, 'Komt ar Chapel,' 'Le
Comte des Chapelles,' Luzel, I, or 'Le
Page de Louis XIII,' Villemarqud, Barzaz-
Breiz, p. 301. A fragment of a corresponding
Italian ballad is given by Nigra, Romania,
XI, 397, No 9.
Renaud, as it will be convenient to call the
hero, coming home triste et chagrin, F, P, U b,
o, triste et bien malau, Y, receives on his ar-
riving felicitations from his mother on account
of the birth of a son. He has no heart to
respond to these: "Ni de ma femme, ni de
mon fils, je ne saurais me rdjoui." He asks
that his bed may be made, with precautions
against his wife's hearing. At midnight he
is dead.
The wife, hearing the men-servants weep-
ing, asks her mother-in-law the cause. The
best horse [horses] has been found dead in
the stable, has strayed away, etc., B, D-S, GG.
"No matter for that," says the wife; "when
Renaud comes he will bring better," B, D-G,
L-Q, GG. The maids are heard weeping; why
is that? They have lost, or injured, sheets
in the washing, B, D, E, G, J. When Renaud
comes we shall have better, B, D, E, G. Or
a piece of plate has been lost or broken, A,
F, H, L, K, O. [It is children with the tooth-
ache, F, U a, b, c, d]. "What is this chant-
ing which I hear?" It is a procession, mak-
ing the tour of the house: B, D-F, L, P-X,
GG. "What gown shall I wear when I go to
church?" Black is the color for women at
their churching, B, F, I, L, M, O, P, V, Y;
black is more becoming, plus joli, plus con-
venant, plus consequent, A, D, H, K, N, R,
X, BB, DD, GG; "quittez le ros', quittez le
gris, prenez le noir, pour mieux choisir," etc.,
Q, W, U, E, S, T.
Besides these four questions, all of which
occur in Breton ballads, there are two which
are met with in many versions, always coming
before the last. "What is this pounding
(frapper, cogner, taper) which I hear?" It is
carpenters, or masons, repairing some part of
the house, D, E, K, L, N, P-U, W; A, V, X,
AA ; GG. "Why are the bells ringing?" For
a procession, or because a distinguished person-
age has come, has died, etc., A, B, F-L, Q, R,
W, Y, AA, DD, GG. On the way to church [or
cemetery] herdboys or others say to one an-
other, as the lady goes by, That is the wife
of the king, the seigneur, that was buried last
night, or the like; and the mother-in-law has
again to put aside the lady's question as to
what they were saying, D, E, G, H, L-P, S,
T, X, Y, FF, GG.
Flambeaux or candles are burning at the
church, E, V; a taper is presented to the
widow, M, or holy water, N, T, Z, GG;
the church is hung with black, D, O, FF;
the funeral is going on, AA, CC. "Whose is
this new monument?" "What a fine tomb!"
M, N, R, T, Z, GG. The scene in other cases
is transferred to the cemetery. "Why has
the earth been disturbed?" "What new mon-
ument is this?" A, DD; C, F, I, J, P. In B
the tomb is in the garden ; in L, S, X, BB the
place is not defined.
The young wife utters a piercing shriek,
C, D, K, L, N. Open earth, split tomb, split
tiles! A, B, Q, R, V, W, X, Y; I will stay
with my husband, will die with my husband,
will not go back, A, C, D, M, N, Q, R, S, X,
Y, Z, BB, CC, GG. She bids her mother
take her keys, B, C, G, L, M, P, Y, BB, CC,
GG, and commits her son [children] to her


382
42. CLERK COLVILL
kinsfolk, to bring up piously, B, G, I, J, L,
M, O, Z, BB, CC. In H, P, Q, W, X, Y the
earth opens, and in the last four it encloses
her. In K heaven is rent by her shriek, and
she sees her husband in light (who says,
strangely, that his mouth smacks of rot) ; he
bids her bring up the children as Christians.
Heaven opens to her prayer in AA, and a
voice cries, Wife, come up hither! In GG the
voice from heaven says, Go to your child: I
will keep your husband safe. There are other
variations.*
G, T, I say expressly that Renaud's wife
died the next day, or after hearing three
masses, or soon after. M, O, by a feeble
modern perversion, make her go into a con-
vent.
Italian ballads cover very much the same
ground as the French. The versions hitherto
published are:
A. 'La Lavandaia,' Cento, Ferraro, Canti
popolari di Ferrara, Cento e Pontelagoscuro,
p. 52, 16 verses, Romania, XI, 397, amended.
B. 'Il Cavaliere della bella Spada,' Pontelago-
scuro, Ferraro, p. 107, previously in Rivista di
Filologia romanza, II, 205, 28 verses, Roma-
nia, XI, 398. 0. Piedmont, communicated by
Nigra, with other versions, to Romania, XI,
394, No 4, 48 verses. D. Romania, XI, 393 f,
No 3,34 verses. E. Ib. p. 395, No 6, 42 verses.
F. Ib. p. 392 f, No 2, 46 verses. G. 'Conte
Anzolin,' Wolf, Volkslieder aus Venetien, p.
61, 57 verses. H. Romania, XI, 396, No 7,
38 verses. I. Ib. p. 394 f, No 5, 26 verses. J.
'II re Carlino,' Ferraro, Canti popolari mon-
ferrini, p. 34, 42 verses. K. Romania, XI,
392, No 1, 20 verses. L. 'Il Conte Angio-
lino,' Rovigno, Ive, Canti popolari istriani,
p. 344, 34 verses. M. 'Il Conte Cagnolino,'
* In C the mother-in-law tells her daughter, austerely:
Vous aurez plutot trouvd un mari
Que moi je n'aurai trouvci un tils.
So E, nearly. A mother makes a like remark to the be-
trothed of a dead son in the Danish ballad of 'Ebbe Tyge-
sen,' Grundtvig, Danske Ksempeviser og Folkesange, for-
nyede i gammel Stil, 1867, p. 122, St. 14. F and T conclude
with these words of the wife:
'Ma mere, dites au fossoyeur
Qu'il ereuse une fosse pour deux;
Pontelagoscuro, Ferraro, as above, p. 84, Ri-
vista di Filologia romanza,'II, 196, 36 verses.
All these are from recent tradition.
The name Rinaldo, Rinald, is found only in
I, C, and the latter has also Luis. Luis is the
name in E; Carlino, Carlin, in J, H; Angi-
olino, Anzolin, L, G; Cagnolino, M. The
rank is king in C, E, H-K; prince, D; count,
Q, L, M.
A and B, corrupted fragments though they
be, retain clear traces of the ancient form of
the story, and of the English variety of that
form. Under the bridge of the Rella [Dia-
mantina] a woman is washing clothes, gh' e
'na lavandera. A knight passes, B, and ap-
parently accosts the laundress. She moves
into the water, and the knight after her; the
knight embraces her, A. Dowy rade he
hame, el va a ca tiito moja, A. In B (pass-
ing over some verses which have intruded) he
has many knife-stabs, and his horse many also.f
He asks his mother to put him to bed and his
horse into the stable, and gives directions
about his funeral.
All of the story which precedes the hero's
return home is either omitted, D, F, J, K, L,
or abridged to a single stanza: ven da la cassa
lo re Rinald, ven da la cassa, I'd tut feri, C;
ven da la guerra re Rinaldo, ven da la guerra,
I'd tut feri, I, E, H; save that G, which like C
makes him to have been hunting (and to
have been bitten by a mad dog), adds that,
while he was hunting, his wife had given birth
to a boy. M has an entirely false beginning:
Count Cagnolino was disposed to marry, but
wished to be secure about his wife's previous
life. He had a marble statue in his garden
which moved its eyes when any girl that had
gone astray presented herself before it. The
'Et que l'espace y soit si grand
Que l'on y mette aussi l'enfant.'
The burial of father, mother, and child in a common
grave is found elsewhere in ballads, as in 'Redselille og
Medelvold,' Grundtvig, No 271, A 37, G 20, M 26, X 27.
t Shutting our eyes to other Romance versions, or, we
may say, opening them to Scandinavian ones, we might
see in these stabs the wounds made by the elf-knives in Dan-
ish D, G, H, N, O, R, X, Swedish G, Norwegian H, I.
See ' Don Joan y Don Ramon,' further on.


42. CLERK COLVILL
383
daughter of Captain Tartaglia having been
declined, for reason, and another young woman
espoused, Tartaglia killed the count while they
were hunting.
The wounded man, already feeling the ap-
proach of death, F, G, L, asks that his bed
may be made; he shall die before the morrow,
D, F, J; let not his wife know, F, G. The
wife asks why the men-servants, coachmen,
are weeping, and is told that they have
drowned [lost] some of the horses, C-J, M
[have burned the king's carriage, K]. We
will get others when the king comes, she an-
swers, C, D, H [when I get up, F, as in Bre-
ton A]. Why are the maids weeping? The
maids have lost sheets or towels in washing,
F, I, K; have scorched the shirts in ironing,
C, D, H. When the king comes, he will buy
or bring better, C, D, H [when I get up, F, as
in Breton A]. Why are the priests chant-
ing? For a great feast to-morrow, F. Why
are the carpenters at work? They are mak-
ing a cradle for your boy, C-E, H-K. Why
do the bells ring? A great lord is dead; in
honor of somebody or something; C, E-L.
Why does not Anzolin come to see me? He
has gone a-hunting, G, L. What dress shall
I put on to go to church? [When I get up
I shall put on red, F, I.] You in black and
I in gray, as in our country is the way, C-F,
H, I [H moda a Paris, by corruption of del
pais] ; I white, you gray, J ; you will look well
in black, M; put on red, or put on white, or
put on black for custom's sake, G.
The children in the street say, That is the
wife of the lord who was buried, or the peo-
ple look at the lady in a marked way, C, J, G,
M; and why is this? For the last time the
mother-in-law puts off the question. At the
church, under the family bench, there is a
grave new made, and now it has to be said
that the husband is buried there, C-K, M.
A conclusion is wanting in half of the bal-
lads, and what there is is corrupted in others.
The widow commends her boy to her hus-
* The ballad of 'Luggieri,' published by Salvatori in the
Rassegna Settimanale, Rome, June 22, 1879, and reprinted
by Nigra in Romania, XI, 391 (a variety of 'Rizzardo
bello,' Wolf, VolkslieUer aus Venetien, p. 62, No 83), appears
band's mother, G, M, and says she will die
with her dear one, D, E, J, M. In C, as in
French V, she wishes to speak to her hus-
band. If the dead ever spake to the quick,
she would speak once to her dear Liiis; if the
quick ever spake to the dead, she would speak
once to her dear husband. In G she bids the
grave unlock, that she may come into the
arms of her beloved, and then bids it close,
that in his arms she may stay: cf. French Y,
Q, X, R, AA.
The story of the Italian ballad, under the
title of 'II Conte Angiolino,' was given in
epitome by Luigi Carrer, in his Prose e Poe-
sie, Venice, 1838, IV, 81 f, before any copy
had been published (omitted in later editions).
According to Carrer's version, the lady, hear-
ing bells, and seeing from her windows the
church lighted up as for some office, extracts
the fact from her mother-in-law on the spot,
and then, going to the church and seeing her
husband's tomb, prays that it would open and
receive her.
A fragment of an Italian ballad given by
Nigra, Romania, XI, 396, No 8, describes
three card players, quarrelling over their game,
as passing from words to knives, and from
knives to pistols, and one of the party, the
king of Spain, as being wounded in the fray.
He rides home with a depressed air, and asks
his mother to make his bed, for he shall be
dead at midnight and his horse at dawn.
There is a confusion of two stories here, as
will be seen from Spanish ballads which are
to be spoken of. Both stories are mixed with
the original adventure of the mermaid in ' II
Cavaliere della bella spada,' already referred
to as B. In this last the knight has a hundred
and fifty stabs, and his horse ninety.*
Nigra has added to the valuable and beau-
tiful ballads furnished to Romania, XI, a tale
(p. 398) from the province of Turin, which
preserves the earlier portion of the Breton
story. A hunter comes upon a beautiful
woman under a rock. She requires him to
to me not to belong with 'Renaud,' but with the class of
'The Cruel Brother,' as already remarked of the Venetian
ballad at p. 142.


42. CLERK COLVILL
385
Don Joan rides off. Don Ramon's mother sees
her son coming through a field, gathering
plants to heal his wounds. "What is the mat-
ter?" she asks; "you are pale." "I have been
bled, and they made a mistake." "Ill luck
to the barber!" "Curse him not; it is the
last time. Between me and my horse we have
nine and twenty lance thrusts; the horse has
nine and I the rest. The horse will die to-
night and I in the morning. Bury him in the
best place in the stable, and me in St Eulalia;
lay a sword crosswise over my grave, and if
it is asked who killed me, let the answer be,
Don Joan de la cassada."
There are numerous Catalan versions, and
most of them add something to this story:
Mild, 2d ed., ' El guerrero mal herido,' p. 171,
No 210, A-F, ArG„ A„; Briz, III, 171 f, two
copies. These disagree considerably as to the
cause of the hero's death, and the names are
not constant. In Aj of Mila, as in the Bal-
earic ballad, Don Joan and Don Ramon are
coming from the chase, and have a passage at
lances; Don Joan is left dead, and Don Ra-
mon is little short of it. A, B, of Mila, tell
us that Don Pedro died on the field of battle
and Don Joan came home mortally wounded.
E says that Don Joan and Don Ramon come
from the chase, but Don Joan immediately
says that he comes from a great battle. It is
battle in F„ in E[ (with Gast6 returning), and
in both the Catalan copies of Briz, the hero
being Don Joan in the first of these last, and
in the other nameless. The wounded man
says he has been badly bled, Mila, A, B, A„
C„ Briz 2; he and his horse have lance wounds
fifty-nine, thirty-nine, twenty-nine, etc., the
horse nine and he the rest, Mila, A, B, E, Aw
Briz 1. His mother informs him that his wife
has borne a child, "a boy like the morning
star," Briz 1, and says that if he will go to
the best chamber he will find her surrounded
by dames and ladies. This gives him no pleas-
ure; he does not care for wife, nor dames, nor
ladies, nor boys, nor morning stars: Briz 1,
Mila, Af-Qi. He asks to have his bed made,
Mila, A-D, Bw Briz 1, 2, for he shall die at
• I do not entirely understand Professor Mila's arrange-
ment of those texts which he has not printed in full, and it
midnight and his horse at dawn, A-D, A[, Briz
2, and gives directions for his burial and that
of his horse. Let the bells toll when he is
dead, and when people ask for whom it is, the
answer will be, For Don Joan, Briz 1, Gast6,
Mila, E„ who was killed in battle. Let his
arms be put over the place where his horse is
buried, and when people ask whose arms they
are his mother will say, My son's, who died
in battle, Mila A, B,. Let a drawn sword be
laid across his grave, and let those that ask
who killed him be told, Don Joan, at the chase,
Mila, A, *
We have, probably, to do with two different
ballads here, versions A-F of Mila's 'Guerrero
mal herido,' and Briz's second, belonging with
'Don Joan y Don Ramon,' while A,^ of
Mila, and Briz's first, represent a ballad of the
Renaud class. It is, however, possible that
the first series may be imperfect copies of the
second.
'Don Joan y Don Ramon ' has agreements
with Italian B, A: in B, particularly, we note
the hundred and fifty stabs of the knight and
the ninety of his horse.
Portuguese. A good Portuguese version,
'D. Pedro e D. Leonarda,' in fifty short
verses, unfortunately lacking the conclusion,
has been lately communicated to Romania
(XI, 585) by Leite de Vasconcellos. Dom
Pedro went hunting, to be gone a year and a
day, but was compelled to return home owing
to a malady which seized him. His mother
greets him with the information that his wife
has given birth to a son. "Comfort and
cheer her," he says, " and for me make a bed,
which I shall never rise from." The wife
asks, Where is my husband, that he does not
come to see me ?" He has gone a-hunting
for a year and a day," replies the mother.
What is this commotion in the house ?" Only
visitors." But the bells are tolling! Could
it be for my husband?" No, no; it is for
a feast-day." When do women go to mass
after child-birth ?" Some in three weeks and
some in two, but a lady of your rank after
a year and a day." And what color do they
is very likely that more of his copies than I have cited exhibit
some of the traits specified.


386
42 CLERK COLVILL
wear ?" Some light blue and some a thou-
sand wonders, but you, as a lady of rank, will
go in mourning." The ballad stops abruptly
with a half-pettish, half-humorous imprecation
from the daughter-in-law against the mother
for keeping her shut up so long.
There is a Slavic ballad, which, like the ver-
sions that are so popular with the Romance
nations, abridges the first part of the story,
and makes the interest turn upon the gradual
discovery of the hero's death, but in other re-
spects agrees with northern tradition.
Bohemian. A a. Erben, p. 473, No 9,
Herman a Dornieka = Waldau, Bohmische
Granaten, I, 73, No 100; b. Celakowsky, I,
26 = Haupt u. Schmaler, I, 327. B. Erben,
p. 475. C. Moravian, Susil, p. 82, No 89 a,
• Nest'astna svatba,' ' The Doleful Wedding.'
D. Susil, p. 83, No 89 b. E. Slovak, Cela-
kowsky, I, 80.
Wendish. A. Haupt und Schmaler, I, 31,
No 3, 'Zrudny kwas,' 'The Doleful Wed-
ding.' B. II, 131, No 182, 'Plakajuen new-
esta,' 'The Weeping Bride' (the last eight
stanzas, the ten before being in no connec-
tion).
The hero on his wedding day is making
ready his horse to fetch the bride; for he is,
as in the Scandinavian ballads, not yet a mar-
ried man. His mother, Bohemian A, ascer-
taining his intention, begs him not to go him-
self with the bridal escort. Obviously she has
a premonition of misfortune. Herman will
never invite guests, and not go for them. The
mother, in an access of passion, exclaims, If
you go, may you break your neck, and never
come back! Here we are reminded of the
Faroe ballad. Bohemian C, D make the fore-
bodings to rise in Herman's mind, not in his
mother's. The mother opposes the match in
Bohemian E, and the sister wishes that he
may break his neck. Wendish A has nothing
of opposition or bodement before the start,
but the crows go winging about the young men
who are going for the bride, and caw a hor-
rible song, how the bridegroom shall fall from
his horse and break his neck. The train sets
off with a band of trumpets, drums, and
stringed instruments, or, Bohemian D, with a
discharge of a hundred muskets, and when
they come to a linden in a meadow Herman's
horse "breaks his foot," and the rider his
neck ; Bohemian D, when they come to a copse
in a meadow the hundred pieces are again
discharged, and Herman is mortally wounded.
His friends stand debating what they shall do.
The dying man bids them keep on : since the
bride cannot be his, she shall be his youngest
brother's, Bohemian A, C; cf. Danish L, O,
R, Norwegian C, F. The train arrives at the
bride's house; the bride comes out to greet
them, but, not seeing the bridegroom, inquires
affrightedly what has become of him. They
pretend that he has remained at home to see
to the tables. The mother is reluctant to give
them the bride, but finally yields. When the
train comes again to the linden in the mead,
Dorothy sees blood. It is Herman's! she
cries; but they assure her that it is the blood
of a deer that Herman had killed for the
feast. They reach Herman's house, where the
bride has an appalling reception, which need
not be particularized.
In Bohemian A, while they are at supper
(or at half-eve = three in the afternoon), a
death-bell is heard. Dorothy turns pale.
For whom are they tolling? Surely it is for
Herman. They tell her that Herman is lying
in his room with a bad headache, and that the
bell is ringing for a child. But she guesses
the truth, sinks down and dies, a. She wears
two knives in her hair, and thrusts one of
them into her heart, b. The two are buried
in one grave. In Bohemian B the bell sounds
for the first time as the first course is brought
on, and a second time when the second course
comes. The bride is told in each case that
the knell is for a child. Upon the third sound-
ing, when the third course is brought in, they
tell her that it is for Herman. She seizes
two knives and runs to the graveyard: with
one she digs herself a grave, and with the
other stabs herself. In the Wendish fragment
B, at the first and second course (there is no
bell) the bride asks where the bridegroom is,
and at the third repeats the question with
tears. She is told that he is ranging the
woods, killing game for his wedding. In-


42. CLERK COLVILL
387
Bohemian C the bell tolls while they are get-
ting the table ready. The bride asks if it is
for Herman, and is told that it is for a child.
When they sit down to table, the bells toll
again. For whom should this be? For
whom but Herman? She springs out of the
window, and the catastrophe is the same as in
Bohemian B. In D the bride hears the bell
as the train is approaching the house, and they
say it is for a child. On entering the court
she asks where Herman is. He is in the cel-
lar drawing wine for his guests. She asks
again for Herman as the company sits down
to table, and the answer is, In the chamber,
lying in a coffin. She springs from the table
and rushes to the chamber, seizing two golden
knives, one of which she plunges into her
heart. In Bohemian E, when the bride arrives
at John the bridegroom's house, and asks where
he is, they tell her she had better go to bed
till midnight. The moment she touches John
she springs out of bed, and cries, Dear people,
why have ye laid a living woman with a dead
man? They stand, saying, What shall we
give her, a white cap or a green chaplet?
"I have not deserved the white (widow's)
cap," she says; "I have deserved a green
chaplet." In Wendish A, when the bell first
knolls, the bride asks, Where is the bride-
groom? and they answer, In the new cham-
ber, putting on his fine clothes. A second
toll evokes a second inquiry; and they say he
is in the new room, putting on his sword.
The third time they conceal nothing: He fell
off his horse and broke his neck. "Then tear
off my fine clothes and dress me in white, that
I may mourn a year and a day, and go to
church in a green chaplet, and never forget
him that loved me!" It will be remembered
that the bride takes her own life in Norwe-
gian A, C, D, and in Swedish E, as she does
in Bohemian A b, B, C, D.
B is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, p. 305, No 48; by Doen-
niges, p. 25.
'Der Ritter von Staufenberg' is translated
by Jamieson, from the "Romanzen" in the
Wunderhorn,' in Illustrations of Northern
Antiquities, p. 257. Danish A by Prior, II,
301; B by Jamieson, Popular Ballads, I, 219,
and by Prior, II, 306, Buchanan, p. 52. 'The
Erl-King's Daughter,' "Danish," in Lewis's
Tales of Wonder, I, 53, No 10, is rendered
from Herder. Swedish A by Keightley, Fairy
Mythology, p. 84 ; B by Keightley, p. 82, and
by William and Mary Howitt, Literature and
Romance of Northern Europe, I, 269. There
is a version from Swedish by J. H. Dixon, in
Notes and Queries, 4th Series, I, 168. Bre-
ton D by Keightley, as above, p. 433, and by
Tom Taylor, Ballads and Songs of Brittany,
'Lord Nann and the Fairy,' p. 9. Bohemian
A b by Bowring, Cheskian Anthology, p. 69.
A
From a transcript from William Tytler's Brown MS.
1 Clark Colven* and his gay ladie.
As they walked to yon garden green,
A belt about her middle gimp,
Which cost Clark Colven crowns fifteen:
2 'O hearken weel now, my good lord,
O hearken weel to what I say;
When ye gang to the wall o Stream,
O gang nae neer the well-fared may.'
3 'O haud your tongue, my gay ladie,
Tak nae sic care o me;
For I nae saw a fair woman
I like so well as thee.'
4 He mounted on his berry-brown steed,
And merry, merry rade he on,
Till he came to the wall o Stream,
And there he saw the mermaiden.
5 'Te wash, ye wash, ye bonny may,
And ay's ye wash your sark o silk :'
'It's a' for you, ye gentle knight,
My skin is whiter than the milk.'
6 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
He's taen her by the sleeve sae green,


388
42. CLERK COLVILL
And he's forgotten his gay ladie,
And away with the fair maiden.
* * * * *
7 'Ohon, alas !' says Clark Colven,
'And aye sae sair's I mean my head!'
And merrily leugh the mermaiden,
'O win on till you be dead.
8 'But out ye tak your little pen-knife,
And frae my sark ye shear a gare;
Row that about your lovely head,
And the pain ye 'll never feel nae mair.'
9 Out he has taen his little pen-knife,
And frae her sark he's shorn a gare,
Rowed that about his lovely head,
But the pain increased mair and mair.
10 'Ohon, alas !' says Clark Colven,
'An aye sae sair's I mean my head!'
And merrily laughd the mermaiden,
'It will ay be war till ye be dead.'
11 Then out he drew his trusty blade,
And thought wi it to be her dead,
But she's become a fish again,
And merrily sprang into the fleed.
12 He's mounted on his berry-brown steed,
And dowy, dowy rade he home,
And heavily, heavily lighted down
When to his ladie's bower-door he came.
13 'Oh, mither, mither, mak my bed,
And, gentle ladie, lay me down;
Oh, brither, brither, unbend my bow,
'T will never be bent by me again.'
14 His mither she has made his bed,
His gentle ladie laid him down,
His brither he has unbent his bow,
'T was never bent by him again.
B
Herd's Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 302:
ed. 1776, i, 161.
1 Clekk Colvtll and his lusty dame
Were walking in the garden green;
The belt around her stately waist
Cost Clerk Colvill of pounds fifteen.
2 'O promise me now, Clerk Colvill,
Or it will cost ye muckle strife,
Ride never by the wells of Slane,
If ye wad live and brook your life.'
3 'Now speak nae mair, my lusty dame,
Now speak nae mair of that to me;
Did'I neer see a fair woman,
But I wad sin with her body?'
4 He's taen leave o his gay lady,
Nought minding what his lady said,
And he's rode by the wells of Slane,
Where washing was a bonny maid.
5 'Wash on, wash on, my bonny maid,
That wash sae clean your sark of silk ;'
'And weel fa you, fair gentleman,
Your body whiter than the milk.'
*****
6 Then loud, loud cry'd the Clerk Colvill,
'O my head it pains me sair ;'
'Then take, then take,' the maiden said,
'And frae my sark you 'll cut a gare.'
7 Then she's gied him a little bane-knife,
And frae her sark he cut a share;
She's ty'd it round his whey-white face,
But ay his head it aked mair.
8 Then louder cry'd the Clerk Colvill,
'O sairer, sairer akes my head ;'
'And sairer, sairer ever will,'
The maiden crys, 'till you be dead.'
9 Out then he drew his shining blade,
Thinking to stick her where she stood,
But she was vanishd to a fish,
And swam far off, a fair mermaid.
10 'O mother, mother, braid my hair;
My lusty lady, make my bed;
O brother, take my sword and spear,
For I have seen the false mermaid.'


42. CLERK COLVILL
389
0
Notes and Queries, 4th Series, VIII, 510, from the recita-
tion of a lady in Forfarshire.
1 Clerk Colin and his mother dear
Were in the garden green;
The hand that was about her neck
Cost Colin pounds fifteen;
The belt about her middle sae sma
Cost twice as much again.
6 An when he cam to the Clyde's water
He lichted lowly down.
An there he saw the mennaiden,
Washin silk upon a stane.
7 'Come down, come down, now, Clerk Colin,
Come down an [fish] wi me;
I 'll row ye in my arms twa,
An a foot I sanna jee.'
* * * * #
2 'Forbidden gin ye wad be, love Colin,
Forbidden gin ye wad be, 8 '0 mother, mother, mak my bed,
And gang nae mair to Clyde's water, And> sister> lay me doun,
To court yon gay ladie.' ^ brother, tak my bow an shoot,
For my shooting is done.'
3 'Forbid me frae your ha, mother,
Forbid me frae your bour, 9 He wasna weel laid in his bed,
But forbid me not frae yon ladie; Nor yet weel fa'en asleep,
She's fair as ony flour. When up an started the mermaiden,
Just at Clerk Colin's feet.
4 'Forbidden I winna be, mother,
Forbidden I winna be, 10 'Will ye lie there an die, Clerk Colin,
For I maun gang to Clyde's water, Will ye lie there an die?
To court yon gay ladie.' Or will ye gang to Clyde's water,
To fish in flood wi me?'
5 An he is on his saddle set,
As fast as he could win, H 'I will lie here an die,' he said,
An he is on to Clyde's water, 'I will lie here an die;
By the lee licht o the moon. In spite o a' the deils in hell
I will lie here an die.'
A. 7s. laugh; but we have laughd in 10s.
9*. Rowed seems to be written Round, possibly
Rowad.
14s. brother.
B. 5*. The edition of 1776 has body's.
C. 7. When they part he returns home, and on the
way his head becomes "wondrous sair :"
seemingly a comment of the reciter.
The Abbotsford copy in " Scottish Songs,"
fol. 3, has these readings, not found in
Lewis, the Brown MS., or Herd.
32. And dinna deave me wi your din: Lewis,
And haud, my Lady gay, your din.
6s. He's laid her on the flowery green.


390
43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
43
THE BROOMFIELD HILL
A. 'The Broomficld Hill.' a. Scott's Minstrelsy, III,
271, 1803. b. The same, II, 229, 1802.
B. 'I 'll wager, I 'll wager,' etc., Herd's Ancient and
Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 310.
C. 'Broomfield Hills,' Buchan's Ballads of the North
of Scotland, II, 291.
D. 'Lord John,' Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads,
p. 195.
B. Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, January, 1830, p. 7.
F. 'The Merry Broomfield, or The West Country
Wager.' a. Douce Ballads, III, fol. 64b. b. The
same, IV, fol. 10.
A SONG of 'Brume, brume on bil' is one
of those named in The Complaint of Scotland,
1549, p. 64 of Dr J. A. H. Murray's edition.
"The foot of the song " is sung, with others,
by Moros in Wager's "very merry and pithy
Comedy called The longer thou livest the
more fool thou art," c. 1568. 'Broom, broom
on hil' is also one of Captain Cox's " bunch
of ballets and songs, all auncient," No 53 of
the collection, 1575.* The lines that Moros
sings are:
Brome, brome on hill,
The gentle brome on hill, hill,
Brome, brome on Hive hill,
The gentle brome on Hive hill,
The brome stands on Hive hill a.
"A more sanguine antiquary than the ed-
itor," says Scott, "might perhaps endeavor to
identify this poem, which is of undoubted an-
tiquity, with the ' Broom, broom on hill' men-
tioned ... as forming part of. Captain Cox's
collection." Assuredly "Broom, broom on
hill," if that were all, would justify no such
* Furnivall, Captain Cox, his Ballads and Books, pp
cxxviif. Uitson cited the comedy in the dissertation prefixed
to his Ancient Songs, 1790, p. lx.
t Motherwell remarks, at page 42 of his Introduction,
"The song is popular still, and is often to be met with." It
was printed in a cheap American song-book, which I have
not been able to recover, under the title of 'The Green
Broomfield,' and with some cis-atlantic variations. Graham's
Illustrated Magazine, September, 1858, gives these stanzas:
"Then when she went to the green broom field,
Where her love was fast asleep,
identification, but the occurrence of Hive hill,
both in the burden which Moros sings and in
the eighth stanza of Scott's ballad, is a circum-
stance that would embolden even a very cau-
tious antiquary, if he had received Hive hill
from tradition, and was therefore unaffected
by a suspicion that this locality had been in-
troduced by an editor from the old song.f
Most of the versions give no explicit account
of the knight's prolonged sleep. He must
needs be asleep when the lady comes to him,
else there would be no story; but his heavy
slumber, not broken by all the efforts of his
horse and his hawk, is as a matter of course
not natural; es geht nicht zu mit rechten
dingen; the witch-wife of A 4 is at the bot-
tom of that. And yet the broom-flowers
strewed on his hals-bane in A 8, B 3, and the
roses in D 6, are only to be a sign that the
maid had been there and was gone. Consid-
ering the character of many of Buchan's ver-
sions, we cannot feel sure that C has not bor-
rowed the second and third stanzas from B,
and the witch-wife, in the sixth, from A; but
With a gray jooje-hawk and a green laurel bough,
And a green broom under his feet.
"And when he awoke from out his sleep,
An angry man was he;
He looked to the East, and he looked to the West,
And he wept for his sweetheart to see.
"Oh! where was you, my gray joose-hawk,
The hawk that I loved so dear,
That you did not awake me from out my sleep,
When my sweetheart was so near? M


43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
391
it would be extravagant to call in question the
genuineness of C as a whole. The eighth
stanza gives us the light which we require.
'Ye 'll pu the bloom frae aff the broom,
Strew't at his head and feet,
And aye the thicker that ye do strew,
The sounder he will sleep.'
The silver belt about the knight's head in
A 5 can hardly have to do with his sleeping,
and to me seems meaningless. It is possible
that roses are not used at random in D 6,
though, like the posie of pleasant perfume in
F 9, they serve only to prove that the lady
had been there. An excrescence on the dog-
rose, rosenschwamm, schlafkunz, kunz, schlaf-
apfel, it is believed in Germany, if laid under
a man's pillow, will make him sleep till it is
taken away. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie,
p. 1008, and Deutsches Worterbuch (Hilde-
brand), V, 2753 e.
C makes the lady hide in the broom to hear
what the knight will say when he wakes, and
in this point agrees with the broadside F, as
also in the comment made by the men on
their master in stanza 24; cf. F 16.
Mr J. W. Dixon has reprinted an Alder-
mary Churchyard copy of the broadside, dif-
fering as to four or five words only from F,
in Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the
Peasantry of England, p. 116, Percy Society,
Volume XVII. The editor remarks that A
is evidently taken from F; from which it is
clear that the pungent buckishness of the
broadside does not necessarily make an im-
pression. A smells of the broom ; F suggests
the groom.*
The sleep which is produced in A by strew-
ing the flower of the broom on a man's head
and feet, according to a witch's advice, is
brought about in two Norse ballads by means
not simply occult, but altogether preternatu-
ral; that is, by the power of runes. One of
these, 'Somn-runorna,' Arwidsson, II, 249,
No 133, is preserved in a manuscript of the
end of the seventeenth, or the beginning of the
eighteenth, century. The other, 'Sovnerun-
* The broadside is also copied into Buchan's MSS, II, 197.
erne,' Grundtvig, II, 337, No 81, was taken
down in 1847 from the singing of a woman
seventy-five years of age.
The Swedish ballad runs thus. There is a
damsel in our land who every night will sleep
with a man, and dance a maid in the morning.
The fame of this comes to the ears of the son
of the king of England, who orders his horse,
thinking to catch this damsel. When he ar-
rives at the castle gate, there stands the lady,
and asks him what is his haste. He frankly
answers that he expects to get a fair maid's
honor for his pains, and she bids him follow
her to the upper room. She lays sheets on
the bed, and writes strong runes on them.
The youth sits down on the bed, and is asleep
before he can stretch himself out. He sleeps
through that day, and the next, and into the
third. Then the lady rouses him. "Wake
up; you are sleeping your two eyes out." He
is still so heavy that he can hardly stir. He
offers her bis horse and saddle to report the
matter as he wishes. "Keep your horse," she
says; "shame fa such liars."
The Danish story is much the same. One
of a king's five sons goes to make trial of the
maid. She tells him to fasten his horse while
she goes before and unlocks; calls to her maid
to bring five feather-beds, feather-beds nine,
and write a sleep on each of them. He sleeps
through three days, and is roused the fourth,
with "Wake up, wake up; you have slept
away your pluck." He offers her a bribe, as
before, which she scornfully rejects, assuring
him that he will not be spared when she
comes among maids and knights.
A sleep produced by runes or gramarye is
one of the two main incidents of a tale in the
Gesta Romanorum, better known through the
other, which is the forfeit of flesh for money
not forthcoming at the day set, as in the Mer-
chant of Venice: Latin, Oesterley, No 195,
p. 603 ;t English, Harleian MS. 7333, No
40, printed by Douce, Illustrations of Shak-
spere, I, 281, Madden, p. 130, Herrtage, p.
158; German, No 68, of the printed edition
of 1489 (which I have not seen). A knight,
t The Anglo-Latin text in Harleian MS. 2270, No 48.


392
43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
who has a passion for an emperor's daughter,
engages to give a thousand [hundred] marks
for being once admitted to her bed. He in-
stantly falls asleep, and has to be roused in
the morning. Like terms are made for a sec-
ond night, and the man's lands have to be
pledged to raise the money. He sleeps as be-
fore, but stipulates for a third night at the
same price. A merchant lends him the thou-
sand marks, on condition that, if he breaks his
day, his creditor may take the money's weight
of flesh from his body. Feeling what a risk
he is now running, the knight consults a phi-
losopher, Virgil, in the English version. The
philosopher (who in the Latin version says he
ought to know, for he had helped the lady to
her trick) tells the knight that between the
sheet and coverlet of the bed there is a letter,
which causes the sleep; this he must find,
and, when found, cast far from the bed. The
knight follows these directions, and gets the
better of the lady, who conceives a reciprocal
passion for him, and delivers him, in the sequel,
from the fearful penalty of his bond by plead-
ing that the flesh must be taken without shed-
ding of blood.
The romance of Dolopathos, a variety of the
Seven Wise Masters, written about 1185, con-
siderably before the earliest date which has
hitherto been proposed for the compilation of
the Gesta, has this story, with variations, of
which only these require to be noted. The
lady has herself been a student in magic. She
is wooed of many; all comers are received,
and pay a hundred marks; any one who ac-
complishes his will may wed her the next day.
An enchanted feather of a screech-owl, laid
under the pillow, makes all who enter the bed
fall asleep at once, and many have been baf-
fled by this charm. At last a youth of high
birth, but small means, tries his fortune, and,
failing at the first essay, tries once more.
Thinking that the softness of his couch was
the cause of his falling asleep, he puts away
• Sy . . . bereytte keyn abende das bette met dcr czoberye
met der schryft nnd met des wylden mannes veddere, p. 145,
lines 8, 10-12; das quam alles von der czoyberye, das die
jangfrowe dy knaben alle beczobert hatte met schryft und
met bryven, dy sy en under dy hobt lcytc under dy kussen,
the pillow, and in this process the feather is
thrown out: Iohannis de Alta Silva Dolopa-
thos, ed. esterley, pp 57-59; Herbers, Li
Romans de Dolopathos, Brunet et Montaiglon,
vv 7096-7498, pp 244-59 ; Le Roux de Lincy,
in a sequel to Loiseleur-Deslongchamps's Es-
sai sur les Fables indiennes, pp 211 ff. This
form of the tale is found in German, in a fif-
teenth-century manuscript, from which it was
printed by Haupt in Altdeutsche Blatter, I,
143-49; but here the sleep is produced by the
use of both the means employed in the Gesta
and in Dolopathos, letter (runes) and feather,
"the wild man's feather." *
Magic is dropped, and a sleeping draught
administered, just as the man is going to bed,
in a version of the story in the Pecorone of
Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Giornata, IVs, Nov.
la (last quarter of the fourteenth century).
Upon the third trial the man, warned by a
friendly chambermaid not to drink, pours the
medicated wine into his bosom. The account
of Ser Giovanni is adopted in Les Adventures
d'Abdalla fils d'Hanif, etc., La Haye, 1713,
Bibliotheque de Romans, 1778, Janvier, I,
112-14, 143 f.
Ellin writes sleep-runes on the cushions on
which her husband is to sleep, in the Danish
ballad 'Fraendehaevn,' Grundtvig, No 4, A 33
[0 45].
In Icelandic tales a sleep-thorn f is em-
ployed, probably a thorn inscribed with runes.
The thorn is stuck into the clothes or into
the head (the ears, according to the popular
notion, Vigfusson), and the sleep lasts till the
thorn is taken out. Odin stuck such a thorn
into Brynhild's garments: Fafnismal, 43;
Sigrdrffumal, 7; Volsunga Saga, Fornaldar
Sogur, I, 166. The thorn is put into the
clothes also in the Icelandic fairy-tale, Maer-
foll, Maurer, Islandische Volkssagen, p. 286.
6m, to save herself from Helgi's violence,
and to punish his insolence, sticks him with a
sleep-thorn after he is dead drunk: Hrolfs
nnd met den veddern von den wylden rnchen liiten, lines 1-5.
Only one letter and one feather is employed in each case.
t Svefnforn, Danish sevntorn, or savnprcen: blundstalir,
sleep-staves, rods (if not letters, runes) in Sigrdrffumal, 2.


43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
393
Saga Kraka, Forn. S. I, 18 f, Torfams, p. 32.
Vilhjalmr sticks a sleep-thorn into Hrolfr, and
he lies as if dead so long as the thorn is in him:
Gaungu-Hrdlfs Saga, Forn. S., Ill, 303, 306.
A pillow of soporific quality, which Kamele,
by Isot's direction, puts under Kaedin's head,
assures her safety though she lies all night by
his side: Ulrich's continuation of Gottfried's
Tristan, vv 1668-99,1744-85; and Heinrich's
continuation, omitting the last circumstance,
vv 4861-4960 (J. Grimm).
The witch-woman, in the English ballad,
A 4, represents the philosopher in the Gesta,
and the wager in the other versions the fee
or fine exacted by the lady in the Gesta and
elsewhere.
An Italian ballad, a slight and unmeritable
thing, follows the story of Ser Giovanni, or
agrees with it, in respect to the sleeping-
draught. A man falls in with a girl at a
spring, and offers her a hundred ducats, or
scudi, per una nottina. The girl says that
she must consult her mother. The mother
advises her to accept the offer: she will give
the man a drug, and the money will serve for
a dowry. The man, roused in the morning,
counts out the money with one hand and
wipes his eyes with the other. When asked
why he is crying, he replies that the money
is not the loss he weeps for, and makes a sec-
ond offer of the same amount. The girl
wishes to refer the matter to her mother again,
but the gallant says the mother shall not
take him in a second time. One version (A)
ends somewhat more respectably: the girl de-
clares that, having come off with her honor
once, she will not again expose herself to
shame. A. Ferraro, Canti popolari monfer-
rini, 'La Ragazza onesta,' p. 66, No 47. B.
Ferraro, C. p. di Ferrara, Cento e Pontela-
goscuro, p. 53 (Cento) No 4, 'La Ragazza
onesta.' C. The same, p. 94 (Pontelagoscuro)
No 8, 'La Brunetta,' previously in Rivista di
Filologia Romanza, II, 200. D. Wolf, Volks-
lieder aus Venetien, p. 74, 'La Contadina
alla Fonte.' E. Bernoni, C. p. veneziani,
Puntata V, No 4, p. 6, 'La bella Brunetta.'
F. Bolza, Canzoni p. comasche, p. 677, No
57,' L'Amante deluso.' G. Ive, C. p. istriani,
p. 324, No 4, 'La Contadina alla Fonte.'
H. Ginandrea, C. p. marchigiani, p. 277, No
12, 'La Madre indegna.' I. Ferraro, C. p.
della Bassa Romagna, Rivista di Letteratura
popolare, p. 57, 'La Ragazza onesta.' J. Ca-
setti e Imbriani, C. p. della Provincie meridi-
onali, p. 1, No 1 (Chieti), the first sixteen
verses. K. Archivio per Tradizioni popolari,
I, 89, No 4, 'La FandCll e lu Cavalere,' the
first thirteen lines.
'The Sleepy Merchant,' a modern ballad,
in Kinloch's MSS, V, 26, was perhaps fash-
ioned on some traditional report of the story
in II Pecorone. The girl gives the merchant
a drink, and when the sun is up starts to her
feet, crying, " I'm a leal maiden yet!" The
merchant comes back, and gets another dram,
but " tooms it a' between the bolster and the
wa," and then sits up and sings.
A ballad found everywhere in Germany,
but always in what appears to be an extremely
defective form, must originally, one would
think, have had some connection with those
which we are considering. A hunter meets
a girl on the heath, and takes her with him to
his hut, where they pass the night. She rouses
him in the morning, and proclaims herself
still a maid. The hunter is so chagrined that
he is of a mind to kill her, but spares her life.
'Der Jager,' 'Der ernsthafte Jager,' 'Des
Jagers Verdruss,' 'Der Jager und die reine
Jungfrau,' 'Der verschlafene Jager:' Mein-
ert, p. 203; Wunderhorn, 1857, I, 274, Bir-
linger u. Crecelius, I, 190; Biisching a. von
der Hagen, p. 134, No 51; Nicolai, Alma-
nach, I, 77 (fragment); Erk u. Irmer, ii, 12,
No 15; Meier, p. 305, No 170; Prohle, No
54, p. 81; Fiedler, p. 175; Erk, Liederhort,
pp 377 f, Nos 174, 174"; Hoffmann u. Rich-
ter, p. 202, No 176; Ditfurth, Frankische
Volkslieder, II, 26 f, Nos 30, 31; Norrenberg,
Des dUJkener Fiedlers Liederbuch, No 16, p.
20; J. A. E. Kohler, Volksbrauch im Voigt-
lande, p. 307; Jeitteles, Volkslied in Steier-
mark, Archiv fur Lit. gesch., IX, 361, etc.;
Uhland, No 104, Niederdeutsches Liederbuch,
No 59, 'vermuthlich vom Eingang des 17.
50


394
43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
Jhd.' Of. Die Maeget, Flemish, Biisching u. A a is translated by Doenniges, p. 3; by
von der Hagen, p. 311; Willems, p. 160, No Gerhard, p. 146; by Arndt, Bliitenlese, p.
61* 226.
A
a. Scott's Minstrelsy, III, 271, ed. 1803. b. Sts. 8-14;
the same, II, 229, ed. 1802.
1 There was a knight and a lady bright,
Had a true tryste at the broom;
The ane gaed early in the morning,
The other in the afternoon.
2 And ay she sat in her mother's bower door,
And ay she made her mane:
'O whether should I gang to the Broomfield
Hill,
Or should I stay at hame?
3 'For if I gang to the Broomfield Hill,
My maidenhead is gone;
And if I chance to stay at hame,
My love will ca me mansworn.'
4 Up then spake a witch-woman,
Ay from the room aboon:
'O ye may gang to the Broomfield Hill,
And yet come maiden hame.
5 'For when ye gang to the Broomfield Hill,
Ye 'll find your love asleep,
With a silver belt about his head,
And a broom-cow at his feet.
6 'Take ye the blossom of the broom,
The blossom it smells sweet,
And strew it at your true-love's head,
And likewise at his feet.
7 'Take ye the rings off your fingers,
Put them on his right hand,
B
Herd, Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769, p. 310.
1 'I'll wager, I 'll wager, I 'll wager with you
Five hundred merks and ten,
• The first stanza of the German ballad occurs in a music-
book of 1622: Hoffmann u. Richter, p. 202, who add that the
ballad is extant in Dutch and Flemish.
To let him know, when he doth awake,
His love was at his command.'
8 She pu'd the broom flower on Hive Hill,
And strewd on's white hals-bane,
And that was to be wittering true
That maiden she had gane.
9 'O where were ye, my milk-white steed,
That I hae coft sae dear,
That wadna watch and waken me
When there was maiden here?'
10 'I stamped wi my foot, master,
And gard my bridle ring,
But na kin thing wald waken ye,
Till she was past and gane.'
11 'And wae betide ye, my gay goss-hawk,
That I did love sae dear,
That wadna watch and waken me
When there was maiden here.'
12 'I clapped wi my wings, master,
And aye my bells I rang,
And aye cry'd, Waken, waken, master,
Before the ladye gang.'
13 'But haste and haste, my gude white steed,
To come the maiden till,
Or a' the birds of gude green wood
Of your flesh shall have their fill.'
14 'Ye need na burst your gude white steed
Wi racing oer the howm;
Nae bird flies faster through the wood,
Than she fled through the broom.'
That a maid shanae go to yon bonny green
wood,
And a maiden return agen.'
2 'I 'll wager, I 'll wager, I 'll wager with you
Five hundred merks and ten,
That a maid shall go to yon bonny green wood,
And a maiden return agen.'


43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
*****
3 She's pu'd the blooms aff the broom-bush,
And strewd them on's white hass-bane:
'This is a sign whereby you may know
That a maiden was here, but she's gane.'
4 'O where was you, my good gray steed,
That I hae loed sae dear?
O why did you not awaken me
When my true love was here?'
5 'I stamped with my foot, master,
And gard my bridle ring,
But you wadnae waken from your sleep
Till your love was past and gane.'
6 'Now I may sing as dreary a sang
As the bird sung on the brier,
For my true love is far removd,
And I 'll neer see her mair.'
C
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 291.
1 There was a knight and lady bright
Set trysts amo the broom,
The one to come at morning ear,
The other at afternoon.
2 'I 'll wager a wager wi you,' he said,
'An hundred merks and ten,
That ye shall not go to Broomfield Hills,
Return a maiden again.'
3 'I 'll wager a wager wi you,' she said,
'A hundred pounds and ten,
That I will gang to Broomfield Hills,
A maiden return again.'
4 The lady stands in her bower door,
And thus she made her mane:
'O shall I gang to Broomfield Hills,
Or shall I stay at hame t
5 'If I do gang to Broomfield Hills,
A maid I 'll not return;
But if I stay from Broomfield Hills,
I 'll be a maid mis-sworn.'
6 Then out it speaks an auld witch-wife,
Sat in the bower aboon:
'O ye shall gang to Broomfield Hills,
Ye shall not stay at hame.
7 'But when ye gang to Broomfield Hills,
Walk nine times round and round;
Down below a bonny burn bank,
Ye 'll find your love sleeping sound.
8 'Ye 'll pu the bloom f rae aff the broom,
Strew't at his head and feet,
And aye the thicker that ye do strew,
The sounder he will sleep.
9 'The broach that is on your napkin,
Put it on his breast' bane,
To let him know, when he does wake,
That's true love's come and gane.
10 'The rings that are on your fingers,
Lay them down on a stane,
To let him know, when he does wake,
That's true love's come and gane.
11 'And when ye hae your work all done,
Ye 'll gang to a bush o' broom,
And then you 'll hear what he will say,
When he sees ye are gane.'
12 When she came to Broomfield Hills,
She walkd it nine times round,
And down below yon burn bank,
She found him sleeping sound.
13 She pu'd the bloom frae aff the broom,
Strew'd it at's head and feet,
And aye the thicker that she strewd,
The sounder he did sleep.
14 The broach that was on her napkin,
She put on his breast bane,
To let him know, when he did wake,
His love was come and gane.
15 The rings that were on her fingers,
She laid upon a stane,
To let him know, when he did wake,
His love was come and gane.
16 Now when she had her work all dune,
She went to a bush o broom,


396
43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
That she might hear what he did say,
When he saw she was gane.
17 'O where were ye, my guid grey hound,
That I paid for sae dear,
Ye didna waken me frae my sleep
When my time love was sae near?'
18 'I scraped wi my foot, master,
Till a' my collars rang,
But still the mair that I did scrape,
Waken woud ye nane.'
19 'Where were ye, my berry-brown steed,
That I paid for sae dear,
That ye woudna waken me out o my sleep
When my love was sae near?'
20 'I patted wi my foot, master,
Till a' my bridles rang,
21
22
23 'O where were ye, my merry young men,
That I pay meat and fee,
Ye woudna waken me out o' my sleep
When my love ye did see?'
24 'Ye '11 sleep mair on the night, master,
And wake mair on the day;
Gae sooner down to Broomfield Hills
When ye've sic pranks to play.
25 'If I had seen any armed men
Come riding over the hill —
But I saw but a fair lady
Come quietly you until.'
26 'O wae mat worth you, my young men,
That I pay meat and fee,
That ye woudna waken me frae sleep
When ye my love did see.
But still the mair that I did patt,
Waken woud ye nane.'
'O where were ye, my gay goss-hawk,
That I paid for sae dear,
That ye woudna waken me out o my sleep
When ye saw my love near?'
'I flapped wi my wings, master,
Till a' my bells they rang,
But still the mair that I did flap,
Waken woud ye nane.'
27 'O had I waked when she was nigh,
And o her got my will,
I shoudna cared upon the morn
Tho sma birds o her were fill.'
28 When she went out, right bitter wept,
But singing came she hame;
Says, I hae been at Broomfield Hills,
And maid returnd again.
D
Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, p. 195.
1 '1'll wager, I 'll wager,' says Lord John,
'A hundred merks and ten,
That ye winna gae to the bonnie broom-fields,
And a maid return again.'
2 'But I 'll lay a wager wi you, Lord John,
A' your merks oure again,
That I 'll gae alane to the bonnie broom-fields,
And a maid return again.'
3 Then Lord John mounted his grey steed,
And his hound wi his bells sae bricht,
And swiftly he rade to the bonny broom-
fields,
Wi his hawks, like a lord or knicht
4 'Now rest, now rest, my bonnie grey steed,
My lady will soon be here,
And I 'll lay my head aneath this rose sae red,
And the bonnie burn sae near.'
5 But sound, sound was the sleep he took,
For he slept till it was noon,
And his lady cam at day, left a taiken and
away,
Gaed as licht as a glint o the moon.
6 She strawed the roses on the ground,
Threw her mantle on the brier,
And the belt around her middle sae jimp,
As a taiken that she'd been there.
7 The rustling leaves flew round his head,
And rousd him frae his dream;


43. THE BROOMFIELD HILL
397
He saw by the roses, and mantle sae green,
That his love had been there and was gane.
8 'O whare was ye, my gude grey steed,
That I coft ye sae dear,
That ye didna waken your master,
Whan ye kend that his love was here?'
9 'I pautit wi my foot, master,
Garrd a' my bridles ring,
And still I cried, Waken, gude master,
For now is the hour and time.'
10 'Then whare was ye, my bonnie grey hound,
That I coft ye sae dear,
That ye didna waken your master,
Whan ye kend that his love was here?'
11 'I pautit wi my foot, master,
Garrd a' my bells to ring,
E
Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, January 1, 1830, p. 7.
1 'I'll wager, I 'll wager wi you, fair maid,
Five hunder punds and ten,
That a maid winna gae to the bonnie green
bower,
An a maid return back agen.'
2 'I 'll wager, I 'll wager wi you, kin' sir,
Five hunder punds and ten,
That a maid I'll gang to the bonnie green
bower,
An a maid return again.'
3 But when she cam to the bonnie green bower,
Her true-love was fast asleep;
Sumtimes she kist his rosie, rosie lips,
An his breath was wondrous sweet.
4 Sometimes she went to the crown o his head,
Sometimes to the soles o his feet,
Sometimes she kist bis rosie, rosie lips,
An his breath was wondrous sweet.
5 She's taen a ring frae ber finger,
Laid it upon his breast-bane;
It was for a token that she had been there,
That she had been there, but was gane.
And still I cried, Waken, gude master,
For now is the hour and time.'
12 'But whare was ye, my hawks, my hawks,
That I coft ye sae dear,
That ye didna waken your master,
Whan ye kend that his love was here?'
13 '0 wyte na me, now, my master dear,
I garrd a' my young hawks sing,
And still I cried, Waken, gude master,
For now is the hour and time.'
14 'Then be it sae, my wager gane,
'T will skaith frae meikle ill,
For gif I had found her in bonnie broom-
fields,
O her heart's blude ye'd drunken your
fill.'
6 'Where was you, where was ye, my merry-
men a',
That I do luve sae dear,
That ye didna waken me out o my sleep
When my true love was here?
7 'Where was ye, where was ye, my gay gos-
hawk,
That I do luve sae dear,
That ye didna waken me out o my sleep
Whan my true love was here?'
8 'Wi my wings I flaw, kin' sir,
An wi my bill I sang,
But ye woudna waken out o yer sleep
Till your true love was gane.'
9 'Where was ye, my bonnie grey steed,
That I do luve sae dear,
That ye didna waken me out o my sleep
When my true love was here?'
10 'I stampit wi my fit, maister,
And made my bridle ring,
But ye wadna waken out o yer sleep,
Till your true love was gane.'


44. THE TWA MAGICIANS 399
19 'Be chearful, be chearful, and do not repine, The money, the money, the money is mine,
For now't is as clear as the sun, The wager I fairly have won.'
A. b. 81. flower frae the bush. 8s. a witter true.
92. I did love.
II1. gray goshawk. II2. sae well.
11s. When my love was here hersell.
12*. Afore your true love gang.
13s. in good.
142"1. By running oer the howm;
Nae hare runs swifter oer the lea
Nor your love ran thro the broom.
E concludes with these stanzas, which do not belong
to this ballad:
11 'Rise up, rise up, my bonnie grey cock,
And craw when it is day,
An your neck sall be o the beaten gowd,
And your wings o the silver lay.'
12 But the cock provd fauss, and untrue he was,
And he crew three hour ower seen,
The lassie thocht it day, and sent her love
away,
An it was but a blink o the meen.
13 'If I had him but agen,' she says,
'O if I but had him agen,
The best grey cock that ever crew at morn
Should never bereave me o's charms.'
F. a. 82. fingers. II1, 131. Oh. 15*. I am.
b. 22. I pray you now, what.
31. Said he. 34. omits That.
4s. omits pure. 4*. And the . . . back
again.
52. • ten good. 5'. he strait. 5\ omits For.
61. his servants. 62. omits made.
64. his joy.
74. sleep had fast. 82. finger.
9s. in the midst. 94. what her lover.
101. Awaking he found. 102. of bearst.
10s. omits do. 11s. wake. 11*. and lover.
1212. I did. 12s. wake. 124. here and she.
13s. Why did you not wake.
141. I barked aloud when. 14s. that there
was my.
15s. I have. 15s. when she had been here.
154. had been surely mine.
161. omits should. 17s. to see.
181. lay. 18s. so I. 184. have returnd.
b has no imprint.
44
THE TWA MAGICIANS
Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 24; Motherwell's MS., p. 570.
A base-born cousin of a pretty ballad
known over all Southern Europe, and else-
where, and in especially graceful forms in
France.
The French ballad generally begins with
a young man's announcing that he has won a
mistress, and intends to pay her a visit on
Sunday, or to give her an aubade. She de-
clines his visit, or his music. To avoid him
she will turn, e. g., into a rose; then he will
turn bee, and kiss her. She will turn quail;
he sportsman, and bag her. She will turn
carp; he angler, and catch her. She will
turn hare ; and he hound. She will turn nun;


44. THE TWA MAGICIANS
401
water as a fish. He has a net that will take
the fish. She will turn to a hare; he to a
dog; she cannot escape him.
Polish. Very common. A a. Waclaw z
Oleska, p. 417, No 287; Konopka, p. 124. A
young man says, though he should ride night
and day for it, ride his horse's eyes out, the
maid must be his. She will turn to a bird,
and take to the thicket. But carpenters have
axes which can fell a wood. Then she will be
a fish, and take to the water. But fishermen
have nets which will find her. Then she will
become a wild duck, and swim on the lake.
Sportsmen have rifles to shoot ducks. Then
she will be a star in the sky, and give light
to the people. He has a feeling for the poor,
and will bring the star down to the earth by
his prayers. "I see," she says, "it's God's
ordinance; whithersoever I betake myself, you
are up with me; I will be yours after all."
Nearly the same mutations in other versions,
with some variety of introduction and ar-
rangement. A b. Kolberg, Lud, VI, 129, No
257. A o. "Przyjaciel ludu, 1836, rok 2,
No 34 ;" Lipinski, p. 135 ; Kolberg, Lud XII,
98, No 193. B. Pauli, Piesfii ludu polskiego,
I, 135. C. The same, p. 133. D. Kolberg,
Lud, XII, 99, No 194. E. Lud, IV, 19, No
137. F. Lud, XII, 97, No 192. G. Lud, II,
134, No 161. H. Lud, VI, 130, No 258.
I. Woicicki, I, 141, Waldbriihl, Slawische
Balalaika, p. 433. J. a, b. Roger, p. 147,
No 285, p. 148, No 286.
Servian. Karadshitch, I, 434, No 602;
Talvj, II, 100; Kapper, II, 208 ; Pellegrini,
p. 37. Rather than be her lover's, the maid
will turn into a gold-jug in a drinking-house;
he will be mine host. She will change into
a cup in a coffee-house; he will be cafetier.
She will become a quail, he a sportsman; a
fish, he a net. Pellegrini has still another
form, ' La fanciulla assediata,' p. 93. An old
man desires a maid. She will rather turn into
a lamb; he will turn into a wolf. She will
* The Schotts are reminded by their story that Wade puts
his son Weland in apprenticeship to Mimir Smith, and to
the dwarfs. They might have noted that the devil, in the
Wallachian tale, wishes to keep his prentice a second year,
as the dwarfs wish to do in the case of Weland. That little
become a quail ; he a hawk. She will change
into a rose; he into a goat, and tear off the
rose from the tree.
There can be little doubt that these ballads
are derived, or take their hint, from popular
tales, in which (1) a youth and maid, pursued
by a sorcerer, fiend, giant, ogre, are trans-
formed by the magical powers of one or the
other into such shapes as enable them to
elude, and finally to escape, apprehension;
or (2) a young fellow, who has been appren-
ticed to a sorcerer, fiend, etc., and has acquired
the black art by surreptitious reading in his
master's books, being pursued, as before, as-
sumes a variety of forms, and his master
others, adapted to the destruction of his in-
tended victim, until the tables are turned by
the fugitive's taking on the stronger figure and
despatching his adversary.
Specimens of the first kind are afforded by
Gonzenbach, Sicilianische Marchen,Nos 14,
15, 54, 55 ; Grimms, Nos 51, 56, 113; Schnel-
ler, No 27; PitrS, Fiabe, Novelle e Racconti
siciliani, No 15; Imbriani, Novellaja mila-
nese, No 27, N. fiorentana, No 29 ; Maspons y
Labr6s, Rondallayre, I, 85, II, 30; Cosquin,
Contes lorrains, in Romania, V, 354; Ral-
ston's Russian Folk-Tales, p. 129 f, from Afa-
nasief V, No 23; Bechstein, Marchenbuch, p.
75, ed. 1879, which combines both. Others
in Kohler's note to Gonzenbach, No 14, at II,
214.
Of the second kind, among very many, are
Straparola, viii, 5, see Grimms, III, 288, Lou-
veau et Larivey, II, 152; Grimms, Nos 68,
117; Miillenhoff, No 27, p. 466; Prbhle,
Miirchen fur die Jugend, No 26; Asbjarnsen
og Moe, No 57; Grundtvig, Gamle danske
Minder, 1854, Nos 255, 256; Hahn, Grie-
chische Marchen, No 68; the Breton tale
Koadalan, Luzel, in Revue Celtique, I, |Jf;
the Schotts, Walachische Maerchen, No 18; *
Woicicki, Klechdy, II, 26, No 4; Karad-
shitch, No 6; Afanasief, V, 95 f, No 22, VI,
trait comes, no doubt, from Weland's story; but we will not,
therefore, conclude that our smith is Weland Smith, and
his adventure with the lady founded upon that of Weland
with Nidung's daughter.


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
403
O bide, lady, bide,
And aye he bade her bide;
The rusty smith your leman shall be,
For a' your muckle pride.
7 Then she became a turtle dow,
To fly up in the air,
And he became another dow,
And they flew pair and pair.
O bide, lady, bide, &c.
8 She turnd hersell into an eel,
To swim into yon burn,
And he became a speckled trout,
To gie the eel a turn.
O bide, lady, bide, &c.
9 Then she became a duck, a duck,
To puddle in a peel,
And he became a rose-kaimd drake,
To gie the duck a dreel.
O bide, lady, bide, Ace.
10 She turnd hersell into a hare,
To rin upon yon hill,
And he became a gude grey-hound,
And boldly he did fill.
O bide, lady, bide, &c.
11 Then she became a gay grey mare,
And stood in yonder slack,
And he became a gilt saddle.
And sat upon her back.
Was she wae, he held her sae,
And still he bade her bide;
The rusty smith her leman was,
For a' her muckle pride.
12 Then she became a het girdle,
And he became a cake,
And a' the ways she turnd hersell,
The blacksmith was her make.
Was she wae, &c.
13 She turnd hersell into a ship,
To sail out ower the flood;
He ca'ed a nail intill her tail,
And syne the ship she stood.
Was she wae, &c.
14 Then she became a silken plaid,
And stretchd upon a bed,
And he became a green covering,
And gaind her maidenhead.
Was she wae, &c.
45
KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
A. 'Kinge John and Bishoppe,' Percy MS., p. 184; B. * King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,'broad-
Hales and Furnivall, I, 508. side printed for P. Brooksby.
The broadside B was printed, with trifling
variations, or corrections, in Pills to purge
Melancholy, IV, 29 (1719), and in Old Bal-
lads, II, 49 (1723). It is found in several of
the collections: Pepys, II, 128, No 112; Rox-
burghe, III, 883; Ouvry, No 47; the Bag-
ford; and it was among Heber's ballads.
Brooksby published from 1672 to 1695, and
* A New Ballad of Kiii£ John and the Abbot of Canter-
bury. To the Tune of The King and the Lord Abbot. With
B was "allowed" by Roger l'Estrange, who
was licenser from 1663 to 1685: Chappell,
The Roxburghe Ballads, I, xviii, xxiii. The
title of B is A new ballad of King John and
the Abbot of Canterbury, to the tune of ' The
King and the Lord Abbot.' * This older bal-
lad seems not to have come down.
There are at least two other broadsides ex-
allowance. Ro. L'Estrange. Printed for P. Brooksby at the
Golden Ball in Pye-corner.


404
45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
tant upon the same subject, both mentioned
by Percy, and both inferior even to B, and in
a far less popular style: 'The King and the
Bishop,' Pepys, I, 472, No 243, Roxburghe,
III, 170, Douce, fol. 110; and ' The Old Ab-
bot and King Olfrey,' Douce, II, fol. 169,
Pepys, II, 127, No 111, printed in Old Hal-
lads, II, 55.* In both of these the Shepherd
is the Bishop's brother, which he is not in B;
in A he is half-brother. Pepys's Penny Mer-
riments contain, I, 14, ' The pleasant History
of King Henry the Eighth and the Abbot of
Reading.' f This last may, without rashness,
be assumed to be a variation of 'King John
and the Abbot.'
Percy admitted 'King John and the Ab-
bot ' to his Reliques, II, 302, introducing many
lines from A "worth reviving," and many
improvements of his own,J and thus making
undeniably a very good ballad out of a very
poor one.
The story of this ballad was told in Scot-
land, some fifty years ago, of the Gudeman of
Ballengeigh, James the V, the hero of not a
few other tales. Once on a time, falling in
with the priest of Markinch (near Falkland),
and finding him a dullard, he gave the poor
man four questions to think of till they next
met, with an intimation that his benefice would
be lost were they not rightly answered. The
questions were those of our ballad, preceded
by Where is the middle of the earth? The
parson could make nothing of them, and was
forced to resort to a miller of the neighbor-
hood, who was reputed a clever fellow. When
called to answer the first question, the miller
put out his staff, and said, There, as your
* The King and the Bishop, or,
Unlearned Men hard matters out can find
When Learned Bishops Princes eyes do blind.
To the Tune of Chievy Chase. Printed for F. Coles, T.
Vere, and J. Wright (1655-80). Printed for J. Wright,
Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passenver.
The Old Abbot and King Olfrey. To the tunc of the
Shaking of the Sheets. Printed by and for A. M., and sold
by the booksellers of London.
J. Wright's date is 1650-82, T. Passinger's, 1670-82.
Chappell.
t Printed by J. M. for C. D., at the Stationers Armes
within Aldgate. C. D.is, no doubt, C. Dennison, who pub-
majesty will find by measuring. The others
were dealt with as in the ballad. The king
said that the miller should have the parson's
place, but the miller begged off from this in
favor of the incumbent. Small, Interesting
Roman Antiquities recently discovered in
Fife, p. 289 ff.
Riddle stories in which a forfeit is to be
paid by a vanquished party have incidentally
been referred to under No 1 and No 2. They
are a very extensive class. The oldest exam-
ple is that of Samson's riddle, with a stake of
thirty sheets (or shirts) and thirty change of
garments: Judges, xiv, 12ff. Another from
Semitic tradition is what is related of Solomon
and Hiram of Tyre, in Josephus against
Apion, i, 17, 18, and Antiquities, viii, 5. Af-
ter the manner of Amasis and the ^Ethio-
pian king in Plutarch (see p. 13), they send
one another riddles, with a heavy fine for fail-
ure, — in this case a pecuniary one. Solomon
at first poses Hiram; then Hiram guesses
Solomon's riddles, by the aid of Abdemon (or
the son of Abdemon), and in turn poses Solo-
mon with riddles devised by Abdemon.§
'Pa gronaliSheiSi,' Landstad, p. 369, is a
contest in riddles between two brothers (re-
freshingly original in some parts^), introduced
by three stanzas, in which it is agreed that
the defeated party shall forfeit his share of
their inheritance: and this the editor seems
to take quite seriously.
Death is the penalty attending defeat in
many of these wit-contests. Odin (VafpruS-
nismal), jealous of the giant VafpruSnir's
wisdom, wishes to put it to test. He enters
the giant's hall, assuming the name of Gagn-
lished 1685-89. See Chappell, The Roxburghe Ballads, I,
xix.
} Among these, St Bittel for St Andrew of A 26, with
the note, "meaning probably St Boiolph:" why "proba-
bly " 'i
§ This story serves ns a gloss on 2 Chronicles, ii, 13, 14,
where Hiram sends Solomon a cunning Tyrian, skilful to
find out every device which shall be put to him by the cun-
ning men of Jerusalem. The Queen of Sheba's hard ques-
tions to Solomon, not specified in 1 Kings, x, 1-13, were,
according to tradition, of the same general character as the
Indian ones spoken of at p. 12. Sec Hertz, Die Kiitsel der
Kijnigin von Saba, Zeitschrift fur deutsches Altermin,
XXVII, I s.


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
405
raSr, and announces the object of his visit.
The giant tells him he shall never go out
again unless he prove the wiser, asks a few
questions to see whether he be worth contend-
ing with, and, finding him so, proposes a de-
cisive trial, with their heads for the stake.
Odin now propounds, first, twelve questions,
mostly in cosmogony, and then five relating
to the future of the universe; and all these
the giant is perfectly competent to answer.
The very unfair question is then put, What
did Odin say in his son's ear ere Balder
mounted the funeral pile? Upon this Vaf-
pruSnir owns himself vanquished, and we may
be sure he was not spared by his antagonist.
The Hervarar saga contains a story which,
in its outlines, approximates to that of our
ballad until we come to the conclusion, where
there is no likeness. King HeiSrekr, after a
long career of blood, gave up war and took to
law-making. He chose his twelve wisest men
for judges, and swore, with one hand on the
head and the other on the bristles of a huge
hog which he had reared, that no man should
do such things that he should not get justice
from these twelve, while any one who pre-
ferred might clear himself by giving the king
riddles which he could not guess. There was
a man named Gestr, and surnamed the Blind,
a very bad and troublesome fellow, who had
withheld from HeiSrekr tribute that was due.
The king sent him word to come to him and
submit to the judgment of the twelve: if he
did not, the case would be tried with arms.
Neither of these courses pleased Gestr, who
was conscious of being very guilty: he took
the resolution of making offerings to Odin for
help. One night there was a knock. Gestr
went to the door, and saw a man, who an-
nounced his name as Gestr. After mutual
inquiries about the news, the stranger asked
whether Gestr the Blind was not in trouble
about something. Gestr the Blind explained
his plight fully, and the stranger said, "I
will go to the king and try what I can effect:
we will exchange looks and clothes." The
* These are proper riddles, and of a kind still current in
popular tradition. See, e. g., Svend Vonved, Grundtvig, I,
237 f. There are thirty-five, before the last, in the oldest
stranger, in the guise of Gestr, entered the
king's hall, and said, Sire, I am come to make
my peace. "Will you abide by the judgment
of my men of law ?" asked the king. "Are
there not other ways?" inquired Gestr.
"Yes : you shall give me riddles which I can-
not guess, and so purchase your peace." Gestr
assented, with feigned hesitation; chairs were
brought, and everybody looked to hear some-
thing fine. Gestr gave, and HeiSrekr promptly
answered, some thirty riddles.* Then said
Gestr: Tell thou me this only, since thou
thinkest to be wiser than all kings: What
said Odin in Balder's ear before he was borne
to the pile ?" Shame and cowardice," ex-
claimed HeiSrekr, "and all manner of pol-
troonery, jugglery, goblinry! no one knows
those words of thine save thou thyself, evil
and wretched wight!" So saying, HeiSrekr
drew Tyrfing, that never was bared but some-
body must fall, to cut down Gestr. The dis-
guised Odin changed to a hawk, and made for
the window, but did not escape before Hei-
Srekr's sword had docked the bird's tail. For
breaking his own truce Odin said HeiSrekr
should die by the hand of a slave, which came
to pass. Fornaldar Scigur, Rafn, I, 462 ff.
The same story has come down in a Faroe
ballad, 'Gatu rfma,' Hammershaimb, Faero-
iske Kvasder, No 4, p. 26 (and previously pub-
lished in the Antiquarisk Tidsskrift, 1849-
51, pp 75-78), translated by Dr Prior, I,
336 ff. Gest promises Odin twelve gold
marks to take his place. The riddles are an-
nounced as thirteen in number, but the ballad
is slightly defective, and among others the
last question, What were Odin's words to
Balder? is lost. Odin flies off in the shape of
a falcon; Hejdrek and all his men are burned
up.
A tale presenting the essential traits of our
ballad is cited in Vincent of Beauvais's Spec-
ulum Morale, i, 4, 10, at the end. We read,
he says, of a king, who, seeking a handle
for wrenching money out of a wealthy and
wise man, put him three questions, apparently
text, given, with a translation, by Vigfusson and Powell,
Corpus Poeticum Boreale, 'King Ileidrek's Riddles,' I,
86 ff.


406
45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
insoluble, intending to make him pay a large
sum for not answering them: 1, Where is the
middle point of the earth? 2, How much
water is there in the sea? 3, How great is
the mercy of God? On the appointed day,
having been brought from prison into the
presence to ransom himself if he could, the
respondent, by the advice of a certain philos-
opher, proceeded thus. He planted his staff
where he stood, and said, Here is the centre;
disprove it if you can. If you wish me to
measure the sea, stop the rivers, so that noth-
ing may flow in till I have done; then I will
give you the contents. To answer your third
question, I must borrow your robes and your
throne. Then mounting the throne, clothed
with the royal insignia, "Behold," said he,
"the height of the mercy of God: but now I
was a slave, now I am a king; but now poor,
and now rich; but now in prison and in
chains, and now at liberty," etc.
Of the same stamp is a story in the English
Gesta Romanorum, Madden, p. 55, No 19.
A knight was accused to the emperor by his
enemies, but not so as to give a plausible
ground for steps against him. The emperor
could hit upon no way but to put him ques-
tions, on pain of life and death. The ques-
tions were seven; the third and the sixth will
suffice: How many gallons of salt water been
in the sea? Answer: Let all the outpassings
of fresh water be stopped, and I shall tell
thee. How many days' journey beth in the
circle of the world? Answer: Only the space
of one day.
Much nearer to the ballad, and earlier than
either of the preceding, is the Strieker's tale
of Amis and the Bishop, in the Pfaffe Amis,
dated at about 1236. Amis, a learned and
bountiful priest in England, excited the envy
of his bishop, who sent for him, told him that
he lived in better style than his superior, and
demanded a subvention. The priest flatly
refused to give the bishop anything but a
good dinner. "Then you shall lose your
church," said the bishop in wrath. But the
priest, strong in a good conscience, felt small
concern about that: he said the bishop might
test his fitness with any examination he pleased.
That I will do, said the bishop, and gave
him five questions. "How much is there in
the sea?" "One tun," answered Amis; " and
if you think I am not right, stop all the rivers
that flow in, and I will measure it and con-
vince you." "Let the rivers run," said the
bishop. "How many days from Adam to our
time?" "Seven," said the parson; "for as
soon as seven are gone, they begin again."
The bishop, fast losing his temper, next
demanded "What is the exact middle of
the earth? Tell me, or lose your church."
"Why, my church stands on it," replied
Amis. "Let your men measure, and take the
church if it prove not so." The bishop de-
clined the task, and asked once more: How
far is it from earth to sky? and then: What
is the width of the sky? to which Amis re-
plied after the same fashion.
In this tale of the Strieker the parson an-
swers for himself, and not by deputy, and
none of the questions are those of our ballad.
But in a tale of Franco Sacchetti,* given in
two forms, Novella iva, we have both the abbot
and his humble representative, and an agree-
ment as to one of the questions. Bernabo Vis-
conti (f 1385) was offended with a rich abbot,
who had neglected some dogs that had been
entrusted to his care, and was minded to make
the abbot pay him a fine; but so far yielded
to the abbot's protest as to promise to release
him from all penalties if he could answer four
questions : How far is it from here to heaven?
How much water is there in the sea? What
is going on in hell? What is the value of my
person? A day was given to get up the an-
swers. The abbot went home, in the depths
of melancholy, and met on the way one of
his millers, who inquired what was the matter,
and, after receiving an explanation, offered to
take the abbot's place, disguising himself as
well as he could. The answers to the two
first questions are not the usual ones: huge
numbers are given, and the seigneur is told to
measure for himself, if not willing to accept
them. The answer to the fourth is twenty-
nine deniers; for our Lord was sold for thirty,
* Sacchetti's life extended beyond 1400, or perhaps be
yond 1410.


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
407
and you must be worth one less than he. Mes-
ser Bernabd said the miller should be abbot,
and the abbot miller, from that time forth.
Sacchetti says that others tell the story of a
pope and an abbot, adding one question. The
gardener of the monastery presents the abbot,
makes the usual answer to the second ques-
tion as to the water in the sea, and prizes
Christ's vicar at twenty-eight deniers.
The excellent old farce, "Ein Spil von
einem Kaiser und eim Apt," Fastnachtspiele
aus dem 15n Jahrhundert, 1,199, No 22, obliges
the abbot to answer three questions, or pay for
all the damages done in the course of a calam-
itous invasion. The abbot has a week's grace
allowed him. The questions are three: How
much water in the sea? How much is the
emperor worth? Whose luck came quickest?
The miller answers for the abbot: Three tubs,
if they are big enough; eight and twenty
pence; and he is the man whose luck came
quickest, for just before he was a miller, now
he is an abbot. The emperor says that, since
the miller has acted for the abbot, abbot he
shall be.
Very like this, as to the form of the story,
is the anecdote in Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst,
LV, p. 46, ed. Oesterley (c. 1522). A noble-
man, who is seeking an occasion to quarrel
with an abbot, tells him that he must answer
these questions in three davs, or be deposed:
What do you value me at? Where is the
middle of the world? How far apart are
good and bad luck? A swineherd answers for
him: Since Christ was sold for thirty pence,
I rate the emperor at twenty-nine and you at
twenty-eight; my church is the mid-point of
the world, and, if you will not believe me,
measure for yourself; good and bad luck are
but one night apart, for yesterday I was
a swineherd, to-day I am an abbot. Then,
says the nobleman, an abbot shall you stay.
With this agrees, say the Grimms, the tale
in Eyring's Proverbiorum Copia (1601), I,
165-168, III, 23-25.
* The form of the third question is slightly varied at
first i Cual es el error en que yo estoy pensando? But when
put to the herdsman the question is simply j En que' estoy
yo pensando? I was pointed to this story by Seidemann, in
Waldis, Esopus (1548), B. 3, Fabel 92,
Kurz, I, 382, agrees in general with Pauli:
but in place of the first two questions has
these three: How far is to heaven? How
deep is the sea? How many tubs will hold
all the sea-water? The answers are : A short
day's journey, for Christ ascended in the morn-
ing and was in heaven before night; a stone's
cast; one tub, if large enough.
Teofilo Folengo (1491-1544), as pointed
out by Kohler, has the story in the 8th canto
of his Orlandino; and here we find the third
question of our ballad. There are three be-
sides: How far from earth to heaven? From
the east to the west? — a modification of the
second question in the ballad; How many
drops of water in the seas about Italy? The
abbot's cook, Marcolf, answers to the first, One
leap, as proved by Satan's fall; to the second,
One day's journey, if the sun is to be trusted;
and insists that, for a correct count under the
third, all the rivers shall first be stopped. To
the fourth he makes the never-stale reply,
You think I am the abbot, but I am the cook.
Rainero says he shall remain abbot, and the
abbot the cook. (Stanzas 38, 39, 64-69, pp
186 f, 195 ff, London edition of 1775.)
A capital Spanish story,'Gramatica Parda,
Trueba, Cuentos Populares, p. 287, has all
three of the questions asked and answered as
in our ballad. There is a curate who sets up
to know everything, and the king, "el rey
que rabio," has found him out, and gives him
a month to make his three answers, with a
premium and a penalty. The curate is forced
to call in a despised goatherd, who also had
all along seen through the shallowness of the
priest. The king makes the goatherd " archi-
pampano" of Seville, and condemns the cu-
rate to wear the herdsman's garb and tend his
goats for a month.*
The first and third questions of the ballad
are found in the thirty-eighth tale of Le Grand
Parangon des Nouvelles Nouvelles of Nicolas
de Troyes, 1536 (ed. Mabille, p. 155ff); in
Archiv fiir Litteraturgeschichte, IX, 423. Trueba's C. P.
forms vol. 19 of Brockhaus's Coleccion de Autores Espa-
Soles.


408
45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
the PatraBuelo of Juan de Timoneda, 1576,
Pat. 14, Novelistas anteriores a Cervantes, in
the Rivadeneyra Biblioteca, p. 154 f; and in the
Herzog Heinrich Julius von Braunschweig's
comedy, Von einem Edelman welcher einem
Abt drey Fragen auffgegeben, 1594, ed. Hol-
land, p. 500 ff. The other question is as to
the centre of the earth, and the usual answers
are given by the abbot's miller, cook, servant,
except that in Timoneda the cook is so rational
as to say that the centre must be under the
king's feet, seeing that the world is as round
as a ball.* The question Where is the mid-
dle of the earth? is replaced by How many
stars are there in the sky? the other two re-
maining, in Balthasar Schupp, Schriften,
Franckfurt, 1701, I, 91 f (Kohler), and in
Gottlieb Cober (f 1717), Cabinet>prediger, 2r
Theil, No 65, p. 323 (Grater, Idunna u. Her-
mode, 1814, No 33, p. 131, and p. 87). The
abbot's miller gives a nuge number, and bids
the king (of France) verify it, if he wishes.
This last is no doubt the version of the story
referred to by the Grimms in their note to
K. u. H. marcben, No 152.
We encounter a slight variation, not for
the better, in L'filite des Contes du Sieur
d'Ouville (t 1656 or 1657), Rouen, 1699, I,
241; a la Haye, 1703, I, 296; ed. Ristelhuber,
1876, p. 46 (Kohler); Nouveaux Contes a
Rire, Cologne, 1709, p. 266; Contes a Rire,
Paris, 1781, I, 184. An ignorant and violent
nobleman threatens a parson, who plumes him-
self on a little astrology, that he will expose
him as an impostor if he does not answer four
questions: Where is the middle of the world?
What am I worth? What am I thinking?
What do I believe? The village miller an-
* The editor of the Grand Parangon, at p. xiii, cites from
an older source an anecdote of a king insisting upon being
told how much he ought to bring if offered for sale. While
his courtiers are giving flattering replies, a fool leaps forward
and savs, Twenty-nine deniers, and no more; for if you were
worth thirty, that would be autant que le tout-puissant Dicu
valut, quant il fut vendu. The king took this answer to
heart, and repented of his vanities. So an emperor is con-
verted by this reply from a man-at-arms, Van den verwen-
den Keyser, Jan van Hollant, c. 1400, Willems, Belgisch
Museum, X, 57 ; Thijm, p. 145. The like question and an-
swer, as a riddle, in a German MS. of the fifteenth century,
and in Questions enigmatiques, Lyon, 1619; Kohler, in
Weimarisches Jahrbuch, V, 354 ff.
swers for the curd. The reply to the third
question is, You are thinking more of your
own interest than of mine; the others as be-
fore. This story is retold, after tradition, by
C6nac Moncaut, Contes populaires de la Gas-
cogne, p. 50, of a marquis, archipnjtre, and
miller. The query, What am I thinking of?
with the answer, More of your interest than
of mine (which is not exactly in the popular
manner), is replaced by a logical puzzle, not
found elsewhere: Quel est le nombre qui se
trouve renfermd dans deux oeufs?
The King and the Abbot is preserved, in
modern German tradition, in this form. An
emperor, riding by a cloister, reads the in-
scription, We are two farthings poorer than
the emperor, and live free of cares. Wait
a bit, says the emperor, and I will give you
some cares. He sends for the abbot, and
says, Answer these three questions in three
days, or I will depose you. The questions are,
How deep is the sea? How many stars in the
sky? How far from good luck to bad? The
shepherd of the monastery gives the answers,
and is told, as in several cases before, If you
are the abbot, abbot you shall be. J. W.
Wolf, Hessische Sagen, p. 166, No 262, II.
'Gustav Adolf und der Abt von Benedikt-
beuern,' in Sepp's Altbayerischer Sagenschatz,
p. 554, No 153, is another form of the same
story, with a substitution of How far is it to
heaven? for the first question, and the an-
swers are given by a kitchie-boy.f In ' Hans
ohne Sorgen,' Meier, Deutsche Volksmarchen
aus Schwaben, p. 305, the questions are,
How far is it to heaven? How deep is the
sea? How many leaves has a linden? and
the shepherd again undertakes the answers.}
t In Prussia Frederick the Great plays the part of Gus-
tavus. Sepp, p. 558.
{ Another Swabian story, in Meier, No 28, p. 99, is a
mixed form. The Duke of Swabia reads " Hans sans cares"
over a miller's house-door, and says, " Bide a wee : if you have
no cares, I will give you some." The duke, to give the miller
a taste of what care is, says he must solve this riddle or lose
his mill: Come to me neither by day nor by night, neither
naked nor clothed, neither on foot nor on horseback. The
miller promises his man his daughter in marriage and the
mill in succession, if he will help him out of his dilemma.
The man at once says, Go on Mid-week, for Mid-week
is no day (Mitt-woeh ist ja gar kein Tag, wie Sonn-tag,
Mon-tag), neither is it night; and if you are to be neither


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
409
* Der Miiller ohne Sorgen,' Miillenhoff, p. 153,
208, is a mutilated variation of these. The
abbot disappears, and the questions are put
to the miller, who answers for himself. The
second question is How much does the moon
weigh? and the answer, Four quarters; if you
don't believe it, you must weigh for yourself.
We meet the miller sans souci again in a
Danish tale, which otherwise agrees entirely
with our ballad. The questions are answered
by the rich miller's herdsman: Grundtvig,
Gamle danske Minder, 1854, p. 112, No 111.
A Croatian version of the story is given by
Valyavets, ' Frater i turski car,' p. 262. The
Turkish tsar is disposed to expel all monks
from his dominions, but determines first to
send for an abbot to try his calibre. The
abbot is too much frightened to go, and his
cook, as in Foligno and Timoneda, takes his
place. The questions are, Where is the cen-
tre of the world? What is God doing now?
What am I thinking? The first and third
are disposed of in the usual way. When
called to answer the second, the cook said,
You can't see through the ceiling: we must
go out into the field. When they came to
the field, the cook said again, How can I see
when I am on such a small ass? Let me have
your horse. The sultan consented to exchange
beasts, and then the cook said, God is won-
dering that a sultan should be sitting on an
ass and a monk on a horse. The sultan was
pleased with the answers, and reasoning, If
the cook is so clever, what must the abbot be,
decided to let the monks alone. Afanasief,
who cites this story from Valyavets (Narod-
nuiya russkiya Skazki, VIII, 460), says that
he heard in the government of Voroneje a
story of a soldier who dressed himself as a
monk and presented himself before a tsar who
was in the habit of puzzling people with rid-
dles. The questions are, How many drops
in the sea? How many stars in the sky?
clothed nor bare, put on a fishing-net; and if yon are to go
neither on foot nor on horseback, ride to him on an ass. All
but the beginning of this is derived from the cycle of 'The
Clever Wench :' see No 2. Haltrich, Deutsche Volksmarchen
in Siebenbiirgen, No 45, which is also of this cycle, has taken
up a little of' Hans ohne Sorgen.' A church has an iuscrip-
What do I think? And the answer to the last
is, Thou thinkest, gosudar, that I am a monk,
but I am merely a soldier.*
A few tales, out of many remaining, may
be now briefly mentioned, on account of varia-
tions in the setting.
A prisoner is to be released if he can tell a
queen how much she is worth, the centre of
the world, and what she thinks. A peasant
changes clothes with the prisoner, and answers
pro more. Kurtzweiliger Zeitvertreiber durch
C. A. M. von W., 1668, p. 70 f, in Kohler,
Orient u. Occident, I, 43.
A scholar has done learning. His master
says he must now answer three questions, or
have his head taken off. The master's broth-
er, a miller, comes to his aid. The questions
are, How many ladders would reach to the
sky? Where is the middle of the world?
What is the world worth? Or, according to
another tradition, the two last are, How long
will it take to go round the world? What is
my thought? Campbell, Popular Tales of the
West Highlands, II, 391 f.
Eulenspiegel went to Prague, and adver-
tised himself on the doors of the churches and
lecture-rooms as a great master, capable of
answering questions that nobody else could
solve. To put him down, the rector and his
colleagues summoned Eulenspiegel to an ex-
amination before the university. Five ques-
tions were given him: How much water is
there in the sea? How many days from Adam
to now? Where is the middle of the world?
How far from earth to heaven? What is the
breadth of the sky? Lappenberg, Dr Thomas
Murners Ulenspiegel, p. 38, No 28; Howle-
glas, ed. Ouvry, p. 28.
A herdboy had a great fame for his shrewd
answers. The king did not believe in him,
but sent for him, and said, If you can an-
swer three questions that I shall put, I will
regard you as my own child, and you shall live
tion, Wir leben ohne Sorgen. This vexes the king, who
says as before, Just wait, and I will give you reason for
cares, p. 244, ed. 1856.
* These two stories were communicated to me by Mr
Ralston.


410
45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
in my palace. The questions are, How many
drops of water are there in the ocean? How
many stars in the sky? How many seconds
in eternity? The Grimms, K. u. H. marchen,
No 152, 'Das Hirtenbiiblein.'
Three questions are put to a counsellor of
the king's, of which the first two are, Where
does the sun rise? How far from heaven to
earth? The answers, by a shepherd, are ex-
traordinarily feeble. Jiidisches Maasiibuch,
cap. 126, cited from Helwigs Jiidische His-
torien, No 39, in the Grimms' note to Das
Hirtenbiiblein.
Three monks, who know everything, in the
course of their travels come to a sultan's do-
minions, and he invites them to turn Mussul-
mans. This they agree to do if he will an-
swer their questions. All the sultan's doctors
are convened, but can do nothing with the
monks' questions. The hodja (the court-fool)
is sent for. The first question, Where is the
middle of the earth? is answered as usual.
The second monk asks, How many stars are
there in the sky? The answer is, As many as
there are hairs on my ass. Have you counted?
ask the monks. Have you counted? rejoins
the fool. Answer me this, says the same
monk, and we shall see if your number is
right: How many hairs are there in my
beard ?" As many as in my ass's tail."
"Prove it." "My dear man, if you don't be-
lieve me, count yourself; or we will pull all
the hairs out of both, count them, and settle
the matter." The monks submit, and become
Mussulmans. Les plaisanteries de Nasr-eddin
Hodja, traduites du turc par J. A. Decourde-
manche, No 70, p. 59 ff.
The Turkish emperor sends word to Kaiser
Leopold that unless the emperor can answer
three questions he shall come down upon him
with all his Turks. The counsellors are sum-
moned, but there is no help in them. The
court-fool offers to get his master out of the
difficulty, if he may have the loan of crown
and sceptre. When the fool comes to Con-
stantinople, there lies the sultan in the win-
dow, and calls out, Are you the emperor, and
will you answer my questions? Where does
the world end ?" Here, where my horse is
standing." How far is it to heaven ?" One
day's journey, and no inn on the road." What
is God thinking of now ?" He is thinking
that I am one fool and you another." J. W.
Wolf, Hessische Sagen, p. 165, No 2621 *
For the literature, see especially the Grimms'
Kinder und Hausmiirchen, notes to No 152;
R. Kohler in Orient und Occident, I, 439—41;
Oesterley's note to Pauli's Schimpf und Ernst,
No 55, p. 479.
Translated, after Percy's Reliques, II, 302,
1765, by Bodmer, II, 111; by Doenniges,
p. 152; by Ritter, Arehiv fur das Studium
der neueren Sprachen, XXII, 222. Retold
by Burger, 'Der Kaiser und der Abt,' Got-
tinger Musenalmanach fur 1785, p. 177.
A
Percy MS., p. 184. Hales and Furnivall, I, 508.
1 Off an ancient story He tell you anon,
Of a notable prince thai was called Kirtg Iohn,
In England was borne, with maine and with
might;
Hee did much wrong and mainteined litle
right
2 This noble prince was vexed in veretye,
For he was angry with the Bishopp of Can-
terbury;
Ffor his house-keeping and his good cheere,
The rode post for him, as you shall heare.
3 They rode post for him verry hastilye;
The Ving sayd the bishopp kept a better house
then hee:
A hundred men euen, as I [have heard] say.
The bishopp kept in his house euerye day,
And fifty gold chaines, without any doubt,
In veluett coates waited the bishopp about.
* In the beginning there is a clear trace of the Oriental
tales of ' The Clever Lass' cycle.


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
411
4 The bishopp, he came to the court anon,
Before his prince that was called King Iohn.
As soone as the bishopp the "king did see,
'O,' qwoth the king, 'bishopp, thow art wel-
come to mee.
There is noe man soe welcome to towne
As thou that workes treason against my
crowne.'
5 'My leege,' qwoth the bishopp, ' I wold it were
knowne
I spend, yowr grace, nothing but that that's
my owne;
I trust yowr grace will doe me noe deare
For spending my owne trew gotten geere.'
6 'Yes,' quoth the king, 'bishopp, thou must
needs dye,
Eccept thou can answere mee questions three;
Thy head shalbe smitten quite from thy bodye,
And all thy liuing remayne vnto mee.
7 'First,' qwoth the king, ' tell me in this steade.
With this crowne of gold heere vpon my head,
Amongst my nobilitye, with ioy and much
mirth,
Lett me know within one pennye what I am
worth.
8 'Secondlye, tell me without any dowbt
How soone I may goe the whole world about;
And thirdly, tell mee or euer I stinte,
What is the thing, bishopp, that I doe thinke.
Twenty dayes pardon thoust haue trulye,
And come againe and answere mee.'
9 The bishopp bade the king god night att a
word;
He rode betwixt Cambridge and Oxenford,
But neuer a doctor there was soe wise
Cold shew him these questions or enterprise.
10 Wherewith the bishopp was nothing gladd,
But in his hart was heauy and sadd,
And hyed him home to a house in the coun-
trye,
To ease some part of his melanchollye.
11 His halfe-brother dwelt there, was feirce and
fell,
Noe better but a shepard to the bishoppe him-
sell;
The shepard came to the bishopp anon,
Saying, My Lord, you are welcome home!
12 'What ayles you,' qwoth the shepard,' that you
are soe sadd,
And had wonte to haue beene soe merry and
gladd?'
'Nothing,' qwoth the bishopp, 'I ayle att this
time;
Will not thee availe to know, brother mine.'
13 'Brother,' q?toth the shepeard, 'you haue
heard itt,
That a ff oole may teach a wisemane witt;
Say me therfore whatsoeuer you will,
And if I doe you noe good, He doe you noe ill.'
14 Q?wth the bishop: I haue beene att the court
anon,
Before my prince is called King Iohn,
And there he hath charged mee
Against his crowne with traitorye.
15 If I cannott answer his misterye,
Three questions hee hath propounded to mee,
He will haue my land soe faire and free,
And alsoe the head from my bodye.
16 The first question was, to tell him in that stead,
With the crowne of gold vpon his head,
Amongst his nobilitye, with ioy and much
mirth,
To lett him know within one penye what hee
is worth.
17 And secondlye, to tell him with-out any doubt
How soone he may goe the whole world about;
And thirdlye, to tell him, or ere I stint,
What is the thinge that he does thinke.
18 'Brother,' quoth the shepard, 'you are a man
of learninge;
What neede you stand in doubt of soe small a
thinge?
Lend me,' qwoth the shepard, 'yowr ministers
apparrell,
He ryde to the court and answere yowr quar-
rell.
19 'Lend me yowr serving men, say me not nay,
With all yowr best horsses that ryd on the
way;


412
45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
He to the court, this matter to stay;
He speake with King Iohn and heare what
heele say.'
20 The bishopp with speed prepared then
To sett forth the shepard with horsse and
man;
The shepard was liuely without any doubt;
I wott a royall companye came to the court
21 The shepard hee came to the court anon
Before [his] prince that was called King Iohn.
As soone as the king the shepard did see,
'O,' quoth the king, 'bishopp, thou art wel-
come to me.'
The shepard was soe like the bishopp his
brother,
The king cold not know the one from the
other.
22 Quoth the kin^, Bishopp, thou art welcome to
me
If thou can answer me my questions three.
Said the shepeard, If it please yowr grace,
Show mee what the first quest[i]on was.
23 'First,' qwoth the king, ' tell mee in this stead,
With the crowne of gold vpon my head,
Amongst my nobilitye, with ioy and much
mirth,
Within one pennye what I am worth.'
24 Quoth the shepard, To make yowr grace noe
offence,
I thinke you are worth nine and twenty pence;
For our Lord Iesus, that bought vs all,
For thirty pence was sold into thrall
Amongst the cursed Iewes, as I to you doe
showe;
But I know Christ was one penye better then
you.
25 Then the king laught, and swore by St An-
drew
He was not thought to bee of such a small
value.
'Secondly e, tell mee with-out any doubt
How soone I may goe the world round about'
26 Saies the shepard, It is noe time with yowr
grace to scorne,
But rise betime with the sun in the morne,
And follow his course till his vprising,
And then you may know without any leasing.
27 And this [to] yowr grace shall proue the same,
You are come to the same place from whence
you came;
[In] twenty-four houres, with-out any doubt
Yowr grace may the world goe round about;
The world round about euen as I doe say,
If with the sun you can goe the next way.'
28 'And thirdlye tell me or euer I stint
What is the thing, bishoppe, that I doe
thinke.'
'That shall I doe,' quoth the shepeard; 'for
veretye,
You thinke I am the bishopp of Canterburye.'
29 'Why, art not thou? the truth tell to me;
For I doe thinke soe,' quoth the king, 'by St
Marye.'
'Not soe,' quoth the shepeard; 'the truth
shalbe knowne,
I am his poore shepeard; my brother is att
home.'
30 'Why,' quoth the king, ' if itt soe bee,
He make thee bishopp here to mee.'
'Noe, Sir,' quoth the shepard, 'I pray you be
still,
For He not bee bishop but against my will;
For I am not fitt for any such deede,
For I can neither write nor reede.'
31 'Why then,' quoth the king, 'He giue thee
cleere
A pattent of three hundred pound a yeere;
That I will giue thee franke and free;
Take thee that, shepard, for coming to me.
32 'Free pardon He giue,' the kings grace said,
'To saue the bishopp, his land and his head;
With him nor thee He be nothing wrath;
Here is the pardon for him and thee both.'
33 Then the shepard he had noe more to say,
But tooke the pardon and rode his way:
When he came to the bishopps place,
The bishopp asket anon how all things was.
34 'Brother,' quoth the shepard, 'I haue well
sped,
For I haue saued both yowr land and your
head;
The king with you is nothing wrath,
For heere is the pardon for you and mee
both.'


45. KING JOHN AND THE BISHOP
413
35 Then the bishopes hart was of a merry
cheere:
'Brother, thy paines He quitt them cleare;
For I will giue thee a patent to thee and to
thine
Of fifty pound a yeere, land good and fine.'
36
r
'I will to thee noe longer croche nor creepe,
Nor He seme thee noe more to keepe thy
sheepe.'
37 Whereeuer wist you shepard before,
That had in his head witt such store
To pleasure a bishopp in such a like case,
To answer three questions to the kings grace?
Whereeuer wist you shepard gett cleare
Three hundred and fifty pound a yeere?
38 I neuer hard of his fellow before.
Nor I neuer shall: now I need to say noe
more.
I neuer knew shepeard that gott such a liuinge
But David, the shepeard, that was a king.
B
Broadside, printed for P. Brooksby, at the Golden Ball in
Pye-corner (1672-95).
1 I'll tell you a story, a story anon,
Of a noble prince, and his name was King
John;
For he was a prince, and a prince of great
might,
He held up great wrongs, he put down great
right.
Deny down, down hey, derry down
2 I 'll tell you a story, a story so merry,
Concerning the Abbot of Canterbury,
And of his house-keeping and high renown,
Which made him resort to fair London town.
3 'How now, father abbot? 'T is told unto me
That thou keepest a far better house than I;
And for [thy] house-keeping and high renown,
I fear thou has treason against my crown.'
4 'I hope, my liege, that you owe me no grudge
For spending of my true-gotten goods :'
'If thou dost not answer me questions three,
Thy head shall be taken from thy body.
5 'When I am set so high on my steed,
With my crown of gold upon my head,
Amongst all my nobility, with joy and much
mirth,
Thou must tell me to one penny what I am
worth.
6 'And the next question you must not flout,
How long I shall be riding the world about;
And the third question thou must not shrink,
But tell to me truly what I do think.'
7 'O these are hard questions for my shallow wit,
For I cannot answer your grace as yet;
But if you will give me but three days space,
I 'll do my endeavor to answer your grace.'
8 'O three days space I will thee give,
For that is the longest day thou hast to live.
And if thou dost not answer these questions
right,
Thy head shall be taken from thy body quite.'
9 And as the shepherd was going to his fold,
He spy'd the old abbot come riding along:
'How now, master abbot? You 'r welcome
home;
What news have you brought from good King
John?'
10 'Sad news, sad news I have thee to give,
For I have but three days space for to live;
If I do not answer him questions three,
My head will be taken from my body.
11 'When he is set so high on his steed,
With his crown of gold upon his head,
Amongst all his nobility, with joy and much
mirth,
I must tell him to one penny what he is worth.
12 'And the next question I must not flout,
How long he shall be riding the world about;
And the third question I must not shrink,
But tell him truly what he does think.'
13 'O master, did you never hear it yet,
That a fool may learn a wiseman wit?
Lend me but your horse and your apparel,
I 'll ride to fair London and answer the quar-
rel.'


46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBURN'S COURTSHIP
415
that 'Captain Wedderburn' was equally in
vogue in the north and the south of Scot-
land.
Jamieson writes to the Scots Magazine,
1803, p. 701: "Of this ballad I have got one
whole copy and part of another, and I re-
member a good deal of it as I have heard it
sung in Morayshire when I was a child." In
his Popular Ballads, II, 154, 1806, he says
that the copy which he prints was furnished
him from Mr Herd's MS. by the editor of the
Border Minstrelsy, and that he had himself
supplied a few readings of small importance
from his own recollection. There is some in-
accuracy here. The version given by Jamie-
son is rather B, with readings from A.
We have had of the questions six, A 11,12,
What is greener than the grass? in No 1, A 15,
C 13, D 5; What's higher than the tree? in
C 9, D 1; What's war than a woman's wiss?
(" than a woman was") A 15, C 13, D 5;
What's deeper than the sea? A 13, B 8, C 9,
D 1. Of the three dishes, A 8, 9, we have
the bird without a gall in Ein Spil von den
Freiheit, Fastnachtspiele aus dem 15° Jhdt,
II, 558, v. 23,* and the two others in the fol-
lowing song, from a manuscript assigned to
the fifteenth century, and also preserved in
several forms by oral tradition : f Sloane MS.,
No 2593, British Museum; Wright's Songs
* Followed by Virgil's riddle, Eel. iii, 104-5, Where is
he sky but three spans broad?
t Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales, p. 150;
Halliwell's Nursery Rhymes, No 375 ; Notes and Queries, 3d
Ser., IX, 401; 4th Ser., In, 501, 601; Macmillan's Maga-
zine, V, 248, by T. Hughes. The first of these runs:
I have four sisters beyond the sea,
Fara-mara, dictum, domine
And they did send four presents to me.
Partum, quartum, paradise, tempum,
Para-mara, dictum, domine
The first it was a bird without eer a bone,
The second was a cherry without eer a stone.
The third it was a blanket without eer a thread,
The fourth it was a book wbich no man could read.
How can there be a bird without eer a bone?
How can there be a cherry without eer a stone?
How can there be a blanket without eer a thread?
How can there be a book which no man can read?
and Carols, 1836, No 8; as printed for the
Warton Club, No xxix, p. 33.
I have a }ong suster fer bejondyn the se,
Many be the drowryis that che sente me.
Che sente me the cherye, withoutyn ony ston,
And so che dede [the] dowe, withoutyn ony bon.
Sche sente me the brere, withoutyn ony rynde,
Sche bad me love my lemman withoute longgyng.
How xuld ony cherye be withoute ston?
And how xuld ony dowe ben withoute bon?
How xuld any brere ben withoute rynde?
How xuld y love myn lemman without longyng?
Quan the cherye was a flour, than hadde it non
ston;
Quan the dowe was an ey, than hadde it non bon.
Quan the brere was onbred, than hadde it non
rynd;
Quan the mayden hajt that che lovit, che is without
longyng.
'Captain Wedderburn's Courtship,' or
'Lord Roslin's Daughter,' J is a counterpart
of the ballad in which a maid wins a husband
by guessing riddles. (See Nos 1 and 2, and
also the following ballad, for a lady who gives
When the bird's in the shell, there is no bone;
When the cherry's in the bud, there is no stone.
When the blanket's in the fleece, there is no thread;
When the book's in the press, no man can read.
The Minnesinger dames went far beyond our laird's
daughter in the way of requiring "ferlies" from their lov-
ers. Der Tanhuser and Boppe represent that their ladies
would be satisfied with nothing short of their turning the
course of rivers; bringing them the salamander, the basilisk,
the graal, Paris's apple; giving them a sight of Enoch and
Elijah in the body, a hearing of the sirens, etc. Von der
Hagen, Minnesinger, II, 91 f, 385 f.
} There were, no doubt, Grissels enough in the very dis-
tinguished family of the Sinclair* of Roslin to furnish one
for this ballad. I see two mentioned among the Sinclair*
of Herdmanstoun. Even a Wedderburn connection, as I am
informed, is not absolutely lacking. George Home of Wed-
derburn (t 1497), married the eldest daughter of John Sin-
clair of Herdmanstoun: Douglas's Peerage of Scotland, ed.
Wood, 1813, II, 174.


46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBUEN'S COURTSHIP
417
More deserving of perpetuation is the charm-
ing Persian story of Prince Calaf, in Pe"tis de
La Croix's 1001 Days (45e-82e jour), upon
which Carlo Gozzi founded his play of "La
Turandot," now best known through Schiller's
translation. Tourandocte's riddles are such as
we should call legitimate, and are three in
number. "What is the being that is found
in every land, is dear to all the world, and
cannot endure a fellow?" Calaf answers,
The sun. "What mother swallows the chil-
dren she has given birth to, as soon as they
have attained their growth?" The sea, says
Calaf, for the rivers that flow into it all came
from it. "What is the tree that has all its
leaves white on one side and black on the
other?" This tree, Calaf answers, is the year,
which is made up of days and nights.*
A third example of this hazardous wooing
is the story of The Fair One of the Castle,
the fourth in the Persian poem of The Seven
Figures (or Beauties), by Nisami of Gendsch
(f 1180). A Russian princess is shut up in
a castle made inaccessible by a talisman, and
every suitor must satisfy four conditions: he
must be a man of honor, vanquish the en-
chanted guards, take away the talisman, and
obtain the consent of her father. Many had es-
sayed their fortune, and their heads were now
arrayed on the pinnacles of the castle.f A
young prince had fulfilled the first three con-
ditions, but the father would not approve his
suit until he had solved the princess's riddles.
These are expressed symbolically, and an-
swered in the same way. The princess sends
the prince two pearls from her earring: he
at once takes her meaning,—life is like two
drops of water, — and returns the pearls with
three diamonds, to signify that joy — faith,
hope, and love — can prolong life. The prin-
cess now sends him three jewels in a box,
with sugar. The prince seizes the idea, — life
* Gozzi retains the first and third riddles, Schiller only the
third. By a happy idea, new riddles were introduced at the
successive performances of Schiller's play. Turandot ap-
pears as a traditional tale in Schneller's Marchen u. Sagen
aus Walschtirol, No 49, p. 132, " I tre Indoviuelli."
t The castle with walls and gate thus equipped, or a pal-
isade of stakes each crowned with a head, is all but a com-
monplace in such adventures. This grim stroke of fancy is
is blended with sensuous desire, — and pours
milk on the sugar, to intimate that as milk
dissolves sugar, so sensuous desire is quenched
by true love. After four such interchanges,
the princess seals her consent with a device
not less elegant than the others.}:
A popular tale of this class is current in
Russia, with this variation: that the hard-
hearted princess requires her lovers to give
her riddles, and those who cannot pose her
lose their heads. Foolish Ivan, the youngest
of three brothers, adventures after many have
failed. On his way to the trial he sees a
horse in a cornfield and drives it out with a
whip, and further on kills a snake with a
lance, saying in each case, Here's a riddle I
Confronted with the princess, he says to her,
As I came to you, I saw by the roadside what
was good; and in the good was good; so I set
to work, and with what was good I drove the
good from the good. The good fled from the
good out of the good. The princess pleads a
headache, and puts off her answer till the next
day, when Ivan gives her his second enigma:
As I came to you, I saw on the way what
was bad, and I struck the bad with a bad
thing, and of what was bad the bad died.
The princess, unable to solve these puzzles, is
obliged to accept foolish Ivan. (Afanasief,
Skazki, II, 225 ff, No 20, in Ralston's Songs
of the Russian People, p. 354 f.) Closely
related to this tale, and still nearer to one
another, are the Grimms' No 22, 'Das Rath-
sel' (see, also, the note in their third vol-
ume), and the West Highland story, 'The
Ridere (Knight) of Riddles,' Campbell, No
22, II, 27. In the former, as in the Russian
tale, it is the princess that must be puzzled
before she will yield her hand; in the latter,
an unmatchable beauty is to be had by no man
who does not put a question which her father
cannot solve.
best in 'La mule sanz frain,' where there are four hundred
stakes, all but one surmounted with a bloody head: Me'on,
Nouveau Recueil, I, 15, w 429-37. For these parlous prin-
cesses, of all sorts, see Grundtvig, ' Den farlige Jomfru,' IV,
43 ff, No 184.
} Von Hammer, Geschichte der schonen Redekiinste Per-
siens, p. 116, previously cited by von der Hagen, Gesammt-
abenleuer, III, lxii.
68


46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBURN'S COURTSHIP
419
lner snow." She meets a herdsman, and asks
where she can find these. The herdsman
offers to teach her these riddles in return for
her love, and she complying with these terms,
gives her the answers: The evergreen tree is
winter May, and sea-foam is summer snow.
Beitrage znr Kunde Preussens, I, 515 (Rhesa),
and Ausland, 1839, p. 1230.
The European tales, excepting the three
drolleries (and even they are perhaps to be re-
garded only as parodies of the others), must
be of Oriental derivation; but the far north
presents us with a similar story in the lay of
Alvfss, in the elder Edda. The dwarf Alvfss
comes to claim Freya for his bride by virtue
of a promise from the gods. Thor * says that
the bride is in his charge, and that he was
from home when the promise was made: at
any rate, Alvfss shall not have the maid unless
he can answer all the questions that shall be
put him. Thor then requires Alvfss to give
him the names of earth, heaven, moon, sun,
etc., ending with barley and the poor creature
small beer, in all the worlds; that is, in the
dialect of the gods, of mankind, giants, elves,
dwarfs, etc. Alvfss does this with such com-
pleteness as to extort Thor's admiration, but
is craftily detained in so doing till after sun-
rise, when Thor cries, You are taken in!
Above ground at dawn! and the dwarf turns
to stone.
Translated, in part, after Aytoun, by
Knortz, Schottische Balladen, p. 107.
A
a. Herd's MS., I, 161. b. The same, H, 100.
1 The laird of Bristoll's daughter was in the
woods walking,
And by came Captain Wetherbourn, a servant
to the king;
And he said to his livery man, Wer't not
against the law,
I would tak her to mine ain bed, and lay her
neist the wa.
2 'I'm into my father's woods, amongst my fa-
ther's trees,
0 kind sir, let mee walk alane, O kind sir, if
you please;
The butler's bell it will be rung, and I 'll be
mist awa:
1 'll lye into mine ain bed, neither at stock
nor wa.'
3 'O my bonny lady, the bed it's not be mine,
For I 'll command my servants for to call it
thine;
The hangings are silk satin, the sheets are hol-
land sma.
And we's baith lye in ae bed, but you's lye
neist the wa.
4 'And so, my bonny lady, — I do not know
your name, —
But my name's Captain Wetherburn, and I'm
a man of fame;
Tho your father and a' his men were here, I
would na stand in awe
To tak you to mine ain bed, and lay you neist
the wa.
5 'Oh my bonny, bonny lady, if you H gie me
your hand,
You shall hae drums and trumpets to sound at
your command;
Wi fifty men to guard you, sae weel their
swords can dra,
And wee's baith lye in ae bed, but you's lye
neist the wa.'
6 He's mounted her upon a steid, behind his
gentleman,
And he himself did walk afoot, to had his lady
on,
With his hand about her midle sae jimp, for
fear that she should fa;
She man lye in his bed, but she 'll not lye
neist the wa.
* Vigfusson objects to Thor being the interlocutor, though be the dwarf first met Thor (Wmgthor), whereupon Woden
that is the name in the MS., because cunuing does not suit (Wingi) came up." Corpus Poeticum Boreale, I, 81.
Thor's blunt character, and proposes Odin instead. "May


420
46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBURN'S COURTSHIP
7 He's taen her into Edinburgh, his landlady-
cam ben:
'And monny bonny ladys in Edinburgh hae I
seen,
But the like of this fine creature my eyes they
never sa;'
'O dame bring ben a down-bed, for she's lye
neist the wa.'
13 'Virgus is greener than the grass, heaven's
higher than the tree;
The deil's war than a woman's wish, hell's
deeper than the sea;
The cock sings first, on the Sugar Loaf the dew
down first does fa;
And ye man lye in my bed, betweest me and
the wa.'
8 'Hold your tongue, young man,' she said,' and
dinna trouble me,
Unless you get to my supper, and that is dishes
three;
Dishes three to my supper, tho I eat nane
at a',
Before I lye in your bed, but I winna lye neist
the wa.
14 'Hold your tongue, young man,' she said, ' I
pray you give it oer,
Unless you tell me questions, and that is ques-
tions four;
Tell me them as I shall ask them, and that is
twa by twa,
Before I lye in your bed, but I winna lye neist
the wa.
9 'You maun get to my supper a cherry but a
stane,
And you man get to my supper a capon but a
bane,
And you man get a gentle bird that flies want-
ing the ga,
Before I lye in your bed, but I 'll not lye neist
the wa.'
15 'You man get to me a plumb that does in win-
ter grow;
And likewise a silk mantle that never waft
gaed thro;
A sparrow's horn, a priest unborn, this night
to join us twa,
Before I lye in your bed, but I winna lye neist
the wa.'
10 'A cherry whan in blossom is a cherry but a
stane;
A capon when he's in the egg canna hae a
bane;
The dow it is a gentle bird that flies wanting
the ga;
And ye man lye in my bed, between me and
the wa.'
11 'Hold your tongue, young man,' she said,' and
dinna me perplex,
Unless you tell me questions, and that is ques-
tions six;
Tell me them as I shall ask them, and that is
twa by twa,
Before I lye in your bed, but I 'll not lye neist
the wa.
16 'There is a plumb in my father's yeard that
does in winter grow;
Likewise he has a silk mantle that never waft
gaed thro;
A sparrow's horn, it may be found, there's ane
in every tae,
There's ane upo the mouth of him, perhaps
there may be twa.
17 'The priest is standing at the door, just ready
to come in;
Nae man could sae that he was born, to lie it
is a sin;
For a wild boar bored his mother's side, he out
of it did fa;
And you man lye in my bed, between me and
the wa.'
12 'What is greener than the grass, what's higher
than the tree?
What's war than a woman's wiss, what's deeper
than the sea?
What bird sings first, arid whereupon the dew
down first does fa?
Before I lye in your bed, but I 'll not lye neist
the wa.'
18 Little kent Grizey Sinclair, that morning when
she raise,
'T was to be the hindermost of a' her single
days;
For now she's Captain Wetherburn's wife, a
man she never saw,
And she man lye in his bed, but she 'll not lye
neist the wa.


46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBURN'S COURTSHIP
421
B
a. Kinloch MSS, I, 83, from Mary Barr's recitation,
b. Lord Roslin's Daughter's Garland, o. Buehan's MSS,
II, 34. d. Jamieson's Popular Ballads, II, 159. e. Harris
MS., fol. 19 b, No 14, from Mrs Harris's recitation, f.
Notes and Queries, 2d S., IV, 170, "as sung among the peas-
antry of the Mearns," 1857.
1 The Lord of Rosslyn's daughter gaed through
the wud her lane,
And there she met Captain Wedderburn, a ser-
vant to the king.
He said unto his livery-man, Were't na agen
the law,
I wad tak her to my ain bed, and lay her at
the wa.
2 'I'm walking here my lane,' she says, 'amang
my father's trees;
And ye may lat me walk my lane, kind sir, now
gin ye please.
The supper-bell it will be rung, and I 'll be
missd awa;
Sae 1'1l na lie in your bed, at neither stock
nor wa.'
3 He said, My pretty lady, I pray lend me your
hand,
And ye 'll hae drums and trumpets always at
your command;
And fifty men to guard ye wi, that weel their
swords can draw;
Sae we 'll baith lie in ae bed, and ye 'll lie at
the wa.
4 'Haud awa frae me, kind sir, I pray let go my
hand;
The supper-bell it will be rung, nae langer
maun I stand.
My father he 'll na supper tak, gif I be missd
awa;
Sae I 'll na lie in your bed, at neither stock
nor wa.'
5 'O my name is Captain Wedderburn, my name
I 'll neer deny,
And I command ten thousand men, upo yon
mountains high.
Tho your father and his men were here, of
them I'd stand na awe,
But should tak ye to my ain bed, and lay ye
neist the wa.'
6 Then he lap aff his milk-white steed, and set
the lady <5n,
And a' the way he walkd on foot, he held her
by the hand;
He held her by the middle jimp, for fear that
she should fa;
Saying, I 'll tak ye to my ain bed, and lay thee
at the wa.
7 He took her to his quartering-house, his land-
lady looked ben,
Saying, Monie a pretty ladie in Edinbruch
I've seen;
But sic 'na pretty ladie is not into it a':
Gae, mak for her a fine down-bed, and lay her
at the wa.
8 'O haud awa frae me, kind sir, I pray ye lat
me be,
For I 'll na lie in your bed till I get dishes
three;
Dishes three maun be dressd for me, gif I
should eat them a',
Before I lie in your bed, at either stock or
wa.
9 ''T is I maun hae to my supper a chicken
without a bane;
And I maun hae to my supper a cherry with-
out a stane;
And I maun hae to my supper a bird without
a gaw,
Before I lie in your bed, at either stock or
wa.'
10 'Whan the chicken's in the shell, I am sure it
has na bane;
And whan the cherry's in the bloom, I wat it
has na stane;
The dove she is a genty bird, she flees without
a gaw;
Sae we 'll baith lie in ae bed, and ye 'll be at
the wa.'
11 'O haud awa frae me, kind sir, I pray ye give
me owre,
For I 'll na lie in your bed, till I get presents
four;
Presents four ye maun gie me, and that is twa
and twa,
Before I lie in your bed, at either stock or
wa.


424
46. CAPTAIN WEDDERBURN'S COURTSHIP
82. will not go to your bed till you dress
me.
8s. three you must do to me.
91. O I must have ... a cherry without
a stone.
92. a chicken without a bone.
101, 2. When the cherry is into the bloom I
am sure it hath no stone,
And when the chicken's in the shell
I'm sure it hath no bone.
10*. it is a gentle.
II2. I will not go till . . . till you answer
me questions.
11s. Questions four you must tell me.
121. You must get to me. 122. That the
wraft was neer ca'd.
12s, 4 and 16*,4 (and consequently 13*' 4,
17*' 4) are wrongly interchanged in
b, mixing up ferlies and questions.
a 12s'4, 13*,4, 14, 15, 1612, 16s,4 171,8,
17*,* = b 15*,4,16s'4,17,14,151'2,
12',4, 161'2, 13*'4.
132. the wraft was neer ca'd throw.
13*' 4. A sparrow's horn you well may get,
there's one on ilka pa.
141. standing at the door.
14s. A hole cut in his mother's side, he
from the same did fa.
162. And what . . . women's voice.
16s. What bird sings best, and wood buds
first, that dew does on them fa.
171. sky is higher. 172. worse than wo-
men's voice.
17s. the dew does on them fa.
182. the last night. 18s. now they both lie
in one bed.
c closely resembling b, the variations from
b are given.
c. 1. came omitted, v. 2; unto, v. 3.
2. into your bed, v. 4.
3. guard you . . . who well, v. 3; into
. . . thou 'It, v. 4.
51' 2. Then says, v. 1.
6. lighted from . . . this lady, v. 1 ; mid-
dle jimp, v. 3.
7. pretty fair, v. 2; as this, v. 3.
8. dress me, v. 3.
9. unto, vv 1, 2; O 1 must, v. 2.
10. in the bloom, v. 1; we both shall ly in,
v. 4.
11. will give oer, v. 1; to your . . . you
tell me, v. 2.
12. You must get to me . . . that waft, v.
2; bird sings first ... on them
does, v. 3.
13. sings first, v. 3.
14. in your . . . you tell me, v. 2; I 'll ly
in, v. 4.
15. What is . . . woman's, v. 2 ; I 'll ly in,
v. 4.
16. Death's greener than the grass, hell's
deeper than the seas,
The devil's worse than woman's voice,
sky's higher than the trees, vv 1, 2;
every paw, v. 3; thou shalt, v. 4.
18. the lady . . . rose, v. 1; It was to be
the very last, v. 2; they ly in ae, v. 4.
d. Follows the broadside (b, c) through the
first nine stanzas, with changes from
Jamieson's "own recollection," or inven-
tion, and one from A. 10 has certainly
arbitrary alterations. The remaining
eight stanzas are the corresponding ones
of A treated freely. The comparison
here is with b, readings from A in 11-18
not being noticed.
1s. serving men.
2s. mist awa, from A; so in 4*, a stanza
not in A.
5s. I'd have nae awe.
61. He lighted aff . . . this lady. 6'.
middle jimp. 64. To tak her to his
ain.
7'. sic a lovely face as thine. 74. Gae
mak her down.
8s. maun dress to me.
91. It's ye maun get. 9^ s. And ye maun
get.
101. It's whan the cherry is in the flirry.
102. in the egg.
10s. And sin the flood o Noah the dow she
had nae ga.
A, B d, 11,121,2, 131,s, 14,151,2.161-2 =
B b, c, 14,151'2, 161,2,11,121'*, 131,s
111. and gie your fleechin oer.
112. Unless you 'll find me ferlies, and that
is ferlies four.
11s. Ferlies four ye maun find me.
II4. Or I 'll never lie.
122. And get to me. 12s. doth first down.
124. Ye sall tell afore I lay me down be-
tween you and the wa.
132. has an Indian gown that waft.
13s. on cedar top the dew.
142. that gait me perplex. 14'. three times
twa.


426
47. PROUD LADY MARGARET
make the supposition far from incredible that
the Proud Lady Margaret of the first part of
the ballad may originally have been one of
the cruel princesses spoken of in the preface
to ' Captain Wedderburn's Courtship,' p. 417.
But the corrupt condition of the texts of A-D
forbids any confident opinion.
A dead mistress similarly admonishes her
lover, in a ballad from Brittany, given in
Ampere, Instructions relatives aux Poesies
populaires de la France, p. 36.
"Non, je ne dors ni ne soumeille,
Je sis dans l'enfer a bruler.
"Aupres de moi reste une place,
C'est pour vous, Piar', qu'on l'a gardee."
"Ha! dites-moi plustot, ma Jeanne,
Comment fair' pour n'y point aller?"
"II faut aller a la grand-messe,
Et aux vepres, sans y manquer.
"Faut point aller aux fileries,
Comm' vous aviez d'accoutume.
"Ne faut point embrasser les filles
Sur l ' bout du coffre au pied du lect."
So Beaurepaire, Etude, p. 53; Puymaigre,
'La Damnee,' Chants populaires, I, 115; V.
Smith, Chants du Velay et du Forez, Romania,
IV, 449 f,' La Concubine;' and Luzel, " Celui
qui alla voir sa maitresse en enfer," I, 44, 45.
In this last, a lover, -whose mistress has died,
goes into a monastery, where he prays contin-
ually that he may see her again. The devil
presents himself in the likeness of a young
man, and on condition of being something
gently considered takes him to hell. He sees
his mistress sitting in a fiery chair (cf. B, 30,
31), devoured by serpents night and day, and
is informed that fasts and masses on his part
will only make things worse. Like Dives, she
sends word to her sister not to do as she has
done. Some of these traits are found also in
one or another of the French versions.
Translated by Doenniges, p. 6, after Scott,
and by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 1,
after Aytoun, II, 62.
A
Scott's Minstrelsy, III, 275, ed. 1803. Communicated
"by Mr Hamilton, music-seller, Edinburgh, with whose
mother it had been a favorite."
1 'T was on a night, an evening bright,
When the dew began to fa,
Lady Margaret was walking up and down,
Looking oer her castle wa.
2 She looked east and she looked west,
To see what she could spy,
When a gallant knight came in her sight,
And to the gate drew nigh.
3 'You seem to be no gentleman,
You wear your boots so wide;
But you si'fin to be some cunning hunter,
You wear the horn so syde.'
4 'I am no cunning hunter,' he said,
'Nor neer intend to be;
But I am come to this castle
To seek the love of thee.
And if you do not grant me love,
This night for thee I 'll die.'
5 'If you should die for me, sir knight,
There's few for you will meane;
For mony a better has died for me,
Whose graves are growing green.
6 [' But ye maun read my riddle,' she said,
'And answer my questions three;
And but ye read them right,' she said,
'Gae stretch ye out and die.]
7 'Now what is the flower, the ae first flower,
Springs either on moor or dale?
And what is the bird, the bonnie bonnie bird,
Sings on the evening gale?'
8 'The primrose is the ae first flower
Springs either on moor or dale,


47. PROUD LADY MARGARET
427
And the thristlecock is the bonniest bird
Sings on the evening gale.'
9 [' But what's the little coin,' she said,
'Wald buy my castle bound?
And what's the little boat,' she said,
'Can sail the world all round ? ']
10 'O hey, how mony small pennies
Make thrice three thousand pound?
Or hey, how mony salt fishes
Swim a' the salt sea round?'
11 'I think you maun be my match,' she said,
'My match and something mair;
You are the first eer got the grant
Of love frae my father's heir.
12 'My father was lord of nine castles,
My mother lady of three;
My father was lord of nine castles,
And there's nane to heir but me.
13 'And round about a' thae castles
You may baith plow and saw,
And on the fifteenth day of May
The meadows they will maw.'
14 'O hald your tongue, Lady Margaret,' he said,
'For loud I hear you lie;
Your father was lord of nine castles,
Your mother was lady of three;
Your father was lord of nine castles,
But ye fa heir to but three.
15 'And round about a' thae castles
You may baith plow and saw,
But on the fifteenth day of May
The meadows will not maw.
16 'I am your brother Willie,' he said,
'I trow ye ken na me;
I came to humble your haughty heart,
Has gard sae mony die.'
17 'If ye be my brother Willie,' she said,
'As I trow weel ye be,
This night I 'll neither eat nor drink,
But gae alang wi thee.'
18 'O hold your tongue, Lady Margaret,' he said,
'Again I hear you lie;
For ye've unwashen hands and ye've un-
washen feet,
To gae to clay wi me.
19 'For the wee worms are my bedfellows,
And cauld clay is my sheets,
And when the stormy winds do blow,
My body lies and sleeps.'
B
a. Buchau's Ballads of the North of Scotland, I,
Motherwell's MS., p. 591. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy,
traduction, p. lxxxi.
1 There was a knight, in a summer's night,
Appeard in a lady's hall,
As she was walking up and down,
Looking oer her castle wall.
2 'God make you safe and free, fair maid,
God make you safe and free!'
'O sae fa you, ye courteous knight,
"What are your wills wi me?'
3 'My wills wi you are not sma, lady,
My wills wi you nae sma,
And since there's nane your bower within,
Ye 'se hae my secrets a'.
4 'For here am I a courtier,
A courtier come to thee,
And if ye winna grant your love,
All for your sake I 'll dee.'
5 'If that ye dee for me, sir knight,
Few for you will make meen;
For mony gude lord's done the same,
Their graves are growing green.'
6 'O winna ye pity me, fair maid,
O winna ye pity me?
0 winna ye pity a courteous knight,
Whose love is laid on thee?'
7 'Ye say ye are a courteous knight,
But I think ye are nane;
1 think ye 're but a millar bred,
By the colour o your claithing.


428
47. PROUD LADY MAltGARET
8 'You seem to be some false young man,
You wear your hat sae wide;
You seem to be some false young man,
You wear your boots sae side.'
9 'Indeed I am a courteous knight,
And of great pedigree;
Nae knight did mair for a lady bright
Than I will do for thee.
10 'O I 'll put smiths in your smithy,
To shoe for you a steed,
And I 'll put tailors in your bower,
To make for you a weed.
11 'I will put cooks in your kitchen,
And butlers in your ha,
And on the tap o your father's castle
I 'll big gude corn and saw.'
12 'If ye be a courteous knight,
As I trust not ye be,
Ye 'll answer some o the sma questions
That I will ask at thee.
13 'What is the fairest flower, tell me,
That grows in mire or dale?
Likewise, which is the sweetest bird
Sings next the nightingale?
Or what's the finest thing,' she says,
'That king or queen can wile?'
14 'The primrose is the fairest flower
That grows in mire or dale;
The mavis is the sweetest bird
Next to the nightingale;
And yellow gowd's the finest thing
That king or queen can wale.
15 'Ye hae asked many questions, lady,
I've you as many told ;'
'But how many pennies round
Make a hundred pounds in gold?
16 'How many of the small fishes
Do swim the salt seas round?
Or what's the seemliest sight you 'll see
Into a May morning?'
*****
17 'Berry-brown ale and a birken speal,
And wine in a horn green;
Amilk-white lace in a fair maid's dress
Looks gay in a May morning.'
18 'Mony's the questions I've askd at thee,
And ye've answerd them a';
Ye are mine, and I am thine,
Amo the sheets sae sma.
19 'You may be my match, kind sir,
You may be my match and more;
There neer was ane came sic a length
Wi my father's heir before.
20 'My father's lord o nine castles,
My mother she's lady ower three,
And there is nane to heir them all,
No never a ane but me;
Unless it be Willie, my ae brother,
But he's far ayont the sea.'
21 'If your father's laird o nine castles,
Yonr mother lady ower three,
I am Willie your ae brother,
Was far beyond the sea.'
22 'If ye be Willie, my ae brother,
As I doubt sair ye be,
But if it's true ye tell me now,
This night I 'll gang wi thee.'
23 'Ye've ower ill washen feet, Janet,
And ower ill washen hands,
And ower coarse robes on your body,
Alang wi me to gang.
24 'The worms they are my bed-fellows,
And the cauld clay my sheet,
And the higher that the wind does blaw,
The sounder I do sleep.
25 'My body's buried in Dumfermline,
And far beyond the sea,
But day nor night nae rest coud get,
All for the pride o thee.
26 'Leave aff your pride, jelly Janet,' he says,
'Use it not ony mair;
Or when ye come where 1 hae been
You will repent it sair.
27 'Cast aff, cast aff, sister,' he says,
'The gowd lace frae your crown;
For if ye gang where I hae been,
Ye 'll wear it laigher down.


47. PROUD LADY MARGARET
431
When you 're bracht hame to yon kirkyaird,
You 'll gie them a' thier leave.
14 'Ye come in to yonder kirk
Wi the goud plaits in your hair;
When you 're bracht hame to yon kirkyaird,
You will them a' forbear.'
15 He got her in her mither's hour,
Puttin goud plaits in her hair;
He left her in her father's gairden,
Mournin her sins sae sair.
E
Alex. Laing, Ancient Ballads and Songs, etc., etc., from
the recitation of old people. Never published. 1829. P. 6.
1 Fair Margret was a young ladye,
An come of high degree;
Fair Margret was a young ladye,
An proud as proud coud be.
2 Fair Margret was a rich ladye,
The king's cousin was she;
Fair Margaret was a rich ladye,
An vain as vain coud be.
3 She war'd her wealth on the gay cleedin
That comes frae yont the sea,
She spent her time frae morning till night
Adorning her fair bodye.
4 Ae night she sate in her stately ha,
Kaimin her yellow hair,
When in there cum like a gentle knight,
An a white scarf he did wear.
5 'O what's your will wi me, sir knight,
O what's your will wi me?
You 're the likest to my ae brother
That ever I did see.
6 'You 're the likest to my ae brother
That ever I hae seen,
But he's buried in Dunfermline kirk,
A month an mair bygane.'
7 'I'm the likest to your ae brother
That ever ye did see,
But I canna get rest into my grave,
A' for the pride of thee.
8 'Leave pride, Margret, leave pride, Margret,
Leave pride an vanity;
Ere ye see the sights that I hae seen,
Sair altered ye maun be.
9 'O ye come in at the kirk-door
Wi the gowd plaits in your hair;
But wud ye see what I hae seen,
Ye maun them a' forbear.
10 'O ye come in at the kirk-door
Wi the gowd prins i your sleeve;
But wad ye see what I hae seen,
Ye maun gie them a' their leave.
11 'Leave pride, Margret, leave pride, Margret,
Leave pride an vanity;
Ere ye see the sights that I hae seen,
Sair altered ye maun be.'
12 He got her in her stately ha,
Kaimin her yellow hair,
He left her on her sick sick bed,
Sheding the saut saut tear.
B 15s, *, 161, \ C 9s'4, 101'2 are rightly answers, not
questions: cf. A 9,10. D 6 furnishes the ques- C.
tion answered in B 17.
B. b. Motherwell begins at st. 25.
272. gowd band.
281, 291. kirk. 302. owergangs. E.
322. In the.
Kind Squire
32s. And naething.
in the title, and kind in
211; I suppose by mistake of my copyist.
16*. You 're (?).
172. the clay cold.
8*, 11s. E'er.


432
48. YOUNG ANDREW
48
YOUNG ANDREW
*
Percy MS., p. 292. Hales and Furnivall, II, 828.
'Young Andrew ' is known only from the
Percy manuscript. The story recalls both
'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,' No 4, and
'The Fair Flower of Northumberland,' No 9.
The lady, Helen, 25s, is bidden to take, and
does take, gold with her in stanzas 5-7, as in
No 4, English E 2, 3, D 7, Danish A 12, E 7,
9,1 5, L 5, 6, and nearly all the Polish copies,
and again in No 9, A 14. She is stripped of
her clothes and head-gear in 8-17, as in No 4,
English C-E, German G, H, and many of the
Polish versions. These are destined by Young
Andrew for his lady (" that dwells so far in a
strange country ") in 10,12,14, as by Ulinger
for his sister, and by Adelger for his mother,
in German G 18, H 15. In 15 the lady en-
treats Young Andrew to leave her her smock;
so in No 4, Polish L 8, " You brought me
from home in a green gown; take me back in a
shift of tow," and R 13, " You took me away
in red satin; let me go back at least in a
smock." 18 has the choice between dying
and going home again which is presented in
'Lady Isabel,' Polish AA 4, H 10, R 11, and
implied in 'The Fair Flower of Northumber-
land,' D 2-5 ; in A 25 of this last the choice is
between dying and being a paramour. In 20,
21, the lady says, " If my father ever catches
you, you 're sure to flower a gallows-tree,"
etc.; in No 4, Polish J 5, "If God would
grant me to reach the other bank, you know,
wretch, what death you would die." The
father is unrelenting in this ballad, v. 26, and
receives his daughter with severity in 'The
Fair Flower of Northumberland,' B 13, C 13.
The conclusion of 'Young Andrew' is muti-
lated and hard to make out. He seems to
have been pursued and caught, as John is
in the Polish ballads, O, P, T, etc., of No 4.
Why he was not promptly disposed of, and
how the wolf comes into the story, will proba-
bly never be known.
1 As I was cast in my ffirst sleepe,
A dreadffull draught in my mind I drew,
Ffor I was dreamed of a yong man,
Some men called him yonge Andrew.
2 The moone shone bright, and itt cast a ffayre
light,
Sayes shee, Welcome, my honey, my hart,
and my sweete!
For I haue loued thee this seuen long yeere,
And our chance itt was wee cold neuer meete.
4 Saies, Now, good sir, you haue had yo?<r
will,
You can demand no more of mee;
Good sir, remember what you said before,
And goe to the church and marry mee.
5 'Ffaire maid, I cannott doe as I wold;
• . • . •
Goe home and fett thy fathers redd gold,
And I'le goe to the church and marry
thee.
3 Then he tooke her in his armes two,
And kissed her both cheeke and chin,
And twise or thrise he pleased this may
Before they tow did part in twinn.
6 This ladye is gone to her (fathers hall,
And well she knew where his red gold lay,
And counted fforth five hundred pound,
Besides all other iuells and chaines:


48. YOUNG ANDREW
433
7 And brought itt all to younge Andrew,
Itt was well counted vpon his knee;
Then he tooke her by the lillye white hand,
And led her vp to an hill soe hye.
8 Shee had vpon a gowne of blacke veluett,
(A pittyffull sight after yee shall see:)
'Put of thy clothes, bonny wenche,' he sayes,
'For noe ffoote further thoust gang with
mee.'
9 But then shee put of her gowne of veluett,
With many a salt teare from her eye,
And in a kirtle of ffine breaden silke
Shee stood beffore young Andrews eye.
10 Sais, O put off thy kirtle of silke,
Ffor some and all shall goe with mee;
And to my owne lady I must itt beare,
Who I must needs loue better then thee.
11 Then shee put of her kirtle of silke,
With many a salt teare still ffrom her
eye;
In a peticoate of scarlett redd
Shee stood before young Andrewes eye.
12 Saies, O put of thy peticoate,
For some and all of itt shall goe with mee;
And to my owne lady I will itt beare,
WAich dwells soe ffarr in a strange coun-
trye
13 But then shee put of her peticoate,
With many a salt teare still from her eye,
And in a smocke of braue white silke
Shee stood before young Andrews eye.
14 Sales, O put of thy smocke of silke,
For some and all shall goe with mee;
Vnto my owne ladye I will itt beare,
That dwells soe ffarr in a strange coun-
trye.
15 Sayes, 0 remember, young Andrew,
Once of a woman you were borne;
And ffor tlutX birth that, Marye bore,
I pray you let my smocke be vpon!
16 'Yes, ffayre ladye, I know itt well,
Once of a woman I was borne;
Yett ffor noe birth that Mary bore,
Thy smocke shall not be left here vpon.'
17 But then shee put of her head-geere ffine;
Shee hadd billaments worth a hundred pound;
The hayre that was vpon this bony wench
head
Couered her bodye downe to the ground.
18 Then he pulled forth a Scottish brand,
And held itt there in his owne right hand;
Saies, Whether wilt thou dye vpon my swords
point, ladye,
Or thow wilt goe naked home againe?
19 'Liffe is sweet,' then, ' sir,' said shee,
'Therfore I pray you leaue mee with mine;
Before I wold dye on yowr swords point,
I had rather goe naked home againe.
20 'My ffather,' shee sayes, 'is a right good
erle
As any remaines in his countrye;
If euer he doe yowr body take,
Yom 'r sure to fflower a gallow tree.
21 'And I haue seuen brethren,' shee sayes,
'And they are all hardy men and bold;
Giff euer the doe yowr body take,
You must neuer gang quicke ouer the mold.'
22 'If yowr ffather be a right good erle
As any remaines in his owne countrye,
Tush! he shall neuer my body take,
I'le gang soe ffast ouer the sea.
23 'If you haue seuen brethren,' he sayes,
'If they be neuer soe hardy or bold,
Tush! they shall neuer my body take,
I'le gang soe ffast into the Scottish mold.'
24 Now this ladye is gone to her fathers hall,
When euery body their rest did take;
But the Erle w/iich was her ffather
Lay waken for his deere daughters sake.
25 'But who is that,' her ffather can say,
'That soe priuilye knowes the pinn?'
'It's Hellen, yowr owne deere daughter, ffa-
ther,
I pray you rise and lett me in.'
2G
'Noe, by my hood !' qrwth her ffather then,
'My [house] thoust neuer come within,
Without I had my red gold againe.'
55


434
48. YOUNG ANDREW
27 'Nay, your gold is gone, ffather !' said shee,
'Then naked thou came into this world,
And naked thou shalt returne againe.'
28 'Nay! God fforgaue his death, father,' shee
sayes,
'And soe I hope you will doe mee :'
'Away, away, thou cursed woman,
I pray God an ill death thou may dye!'
29 Shee stood soe long quacking on the ground
Till her hart itt burst in three;
And then shee ffell dead downe in a swoond,
And this was the end of this bonny ladye.
30 Ithe morning, when her ffather gott vpp,
A pittyffull sight there he might see;
His owne deere daughter was dead, without
clothes,
The teares they trickeled fast ffrom his eye.
31
Sais, Fye of gold, and ffye of ffee!
For I sett soe much by my red gold
That now itt hath lost both my daughter
and mee!'
32
But after this time he neere dought good
day,
But as flowers doth fade in the frost,
Soe he did wast and weare away.
33 But let vs leaue talking of this ladye,
And talke some more of young Andrew;
Ffor ffalse he was to this bonny ladye,
More pitty that he had not beene true.
34 He was not gone a mile into the wild forrest,
Or halfe a mile into the hart of Wales,
But there they cought him by such a braue
wyle
That hee must come to tell noe more tales.
*****
35
Ffull soone a wolfe did of him smell,
And shee came roaring like a beare,
And gaping like a ffeend of hell.
36 Soe they ffought together like two lyons,
And fire betweene them two glashet out;
The raught eche other such a great rappe,
That there young Andrew was slaine, well I
wott.
37 But now young Andrew he is dead,
But he was neuer buryed vnder mold,
For ther as the wolfe devoured him,
There lyes all this great erles gold.
1s. of one. 3s. 21?, 3"?. 30s. anyfollows without, but is crossed out
7*. to one. 17". 100!'.; 304. they teares. 334. itt had.
191. My liffe. Arabic numbers are in several cases ex-
252. tlmt pinn. pressed in letters.


49. THE TWA BROTHERS
437
belios, p. 606, No 11, Fauriel, I, 51, Passow,
p. 118, No 152; and again, Zambelios, p. 672,
No 94, Passow, p. 113, No 146. In the Dan-
ish ' Elveskud,' Grundtvig, II, 115, No 47, B
18, Ole would simply have the tragic truth
kept from his bride:
'Hearken, Sir Ole, of mickle pride,
How shall I answer thy young bride?'
'You must say I am gone to the wood,
To prove horse and hounds, if they be good.'
Such questions and answers as we have in
D 20, E 17, F 24, are of the commonest oc-
currence in popular poetry, and not unknown
to the poetry of art. Ballads of the • Ed-
ward' class end generally or always in this
way: see p. 168. We have again the partic-
ular question and answer which occur here in
'Lizie Wan' and in one version of 'The
Trooper and Fair Maid,' Jamieson's Popular
Ballads, II, 158. The question may be: When
will you come back? When shall you cease to
love me? When shall we be married? etc.;
and the answer: When apple-trees grow in the
seas ; when fishes fly and seas gang dry; when
all streams run together; when all swift
streams are still; when it snows roses and
rains wine; when all grass is rue; when the
nightingale sings on the sea and the cuckoo is
heard in winter; when poplars bear cherries
and oaks roses ; when feathers sink and stones
swim; when sand sown on a stone germi-
nates, etc., etc. See Virgil, Eel. i, 59-63; Ovid,
Met. xiii, 324-27; Wolf, Ueber die Lais, p.
433; 'Svend Vonved,' Grundtvig, I, 240, No
18, A, D; Buchan's Ballads of the North of
Scotland, 'Lord Jamie Douglas,' I, 232 f,
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Appendix, p. vii,
Kinloch, Finlay, etc.; Pills to Purge Melan-
choly, V,37 ; ' Der verwundete Knabe,' ' Die
verwundete Dame,' Mittler, Nos 49-53, Erk's
Liederhort, pp 111-115, Wunderhorn, IV,
358-63, Longard, p. 39, No 18, Prohle, Welt,
u. geist. Volkslieder, p. 12, No 6; Meinert,
pp 28, 60, 73; Uhland, p. 127, No 65; Wun-
derhorn (1857), II, 223, Reifferscheid, p. 23,
Liederhort, p. 345, Erk, Neue Sammlung, ii,
39, Kretzschmer, I, 143; Zuccalmaglio, pp
103, 153, 595; Peter, Volksthiimliches aus
Ost.-schlesien, I, 274; Ditfurth, II, 9, No 10;
Fiedler, p. 187; Des Turcken Vassnachtspiel,
Tieck's Deutsches Theater, I, 8; Uhland, Zur
Geschichte der Dichtung, III, 216 ff; Tigri,
Canti popolari toscani (I860), pp 230-242,
Nos 820, 822, 823, 832, 836-40, 857, 858,
862, 868; Visconti, Saggio dei Canti p. della
Provincia di Marritima e Campagna, p. 21,
No 18; Nino, Saggio di Canti p. sabinesi, p.
28 f, p. 30 f; Pitre, Saggi di Critica lettera-
ria, p. 25; Braga, Cantos p. do Archipelago
acoriano, p. 220; Mockesch, Romaniscbe Dich-
tungen, p. 6 f, No 2; Passow, p. 273 f, Nos
387, 388; B. Schmidt, Griechische Marchen,
etc., p. 154, No 10, and note, p. 253; Morosi,
Studi sui Dialetti greci della Terra d'Otranto,
p. 30, lxxv, p. 32, lxxix; Pellegrini, Canti p.
dei Greci di Cargese, p. 21; De Rada, Rap-
sodie d'un Poema albanese, p. 29; Haupt u.
Schmaler, Volkslieder der Wenden, I, 76, No
47, 1, 182, No 158, I, 299, No 300; Altmann,
Balalaika, Russische Volkslieder, p. 233, No
184; Golovatsky, Narodnyya Piesni galitzskoy
i ugorskoy Rusi, II, 585, No 18, III, i, 12, No
9 ; Maximovitch, Sbornik ukrainskikh Pyesen,
p. 7, No 1, p. 107, No 30; Dozon, Chansons
p. bulgares, p. 283, No 57; Bodenstedt, Die
poetische Ukraine, p. 46, No 14; Jordan,
Ueber kleinrussische Volkspoesie, Blatter fiir
lit. Unterhaltung, 1840, No 252, p. 1014
(Uhland); Rhesa, Ueber litthauische Volks-
poesie, in Beitrage zur Kunde Preussens, I,
523; Aigner, Ungarische Volksdichtungen,
pp 147, 149: etc.
A is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
skotske Folkeviser, p. 168; Afzelius, III, 7;
Grimm, Drei altschottische Lieder, p. 5;
Talvi, Charakteristik, p. 567; Rosa Warrens,
Schottische V. L. der Vorzeit, p. 91. Knortz,
Schottische Balladen, No 4, translates Ay-
toun, I, 193.


438
49. THE TWA BROTHERS
Sharpe's Ballad Book, p. 56, No 19.
Thebe were twa brethren in the north,
They went to the school thegither;
The one unto the other said,
Will you try a warsle afore?
They warsled up, they warsled down,
Till Sir John fell to the ground,
And there was a knife in Sir Willie's pouch,
Gied him a deadlie wound.
'Oh brither dear, take me on your back,
Carry me to yon burn clear,
And wash the blood from off my wound,
And it will bleed nae mair.'
He took him up upon his back,
Carried him to yon burn clear,
And washd the blood from off his wound,
But aye it bled the mair.
'Oh brither dear, take me on your back,
Carry me to yon kirk-yard,
And dig a grave baith wide and deep,
And lay my body there.'
6 He's taen him up upon his back,
Carried him to yon kirk-yard,
And dug a grave baith deep and wide,
And laid his body there.
7 'But what will I say to my father dear,
Gin he chance to say, Willie, whar's John?'
'Oh say that he 's to England gone,
To buy him a cask of wine.'
8 'And what will I say to my mother dear,
Gin she chance to say, Willie, whar's John ?*
'Oh say that he's to England gone,
To buy her a new silk gown.'
9 'And what will I say to my sister dear,
Gin she chance to say, Willie, whar's John?'
'Oh say that he's to England gone,
To buy her a wedding ring.'
10 'But what will I say to her you loe dear,
Gin she cry, Why tarries my John?'
'Oh tell her I lie in Kirk-land fair,
And home again will never come.'
Motherwell's MS., p. 259. From Widow McCormick,
January 19, 1825.
1 There was two little boys going to the school,
And twa little boys they be,
They met three brothers playing at the ba,
And ladies dansing hey.
2 'It's whether will ye play at the ba, brither,
Or else throw at the stone?'
'I am too little, I am too young,
O brother let me alone.'
3 He pulled out a little penknife,
That was baith sharp and sma,
He gave his brother a deadly wound
That was deep, long and sair.
4 He took the holland sark off his back,
He tore it frae breast to gare,
He laid it to the bloody wound,
That still bled mair and mair.
5 'It's take me on your back, brother,' he says,
'And carry me to yon kirk-yard,
And make me there a very fine grave,
That will be long and large.
6 'Lay my bible at my head,' he says,
'My chaunter at my feet,
My bow and arrows by my side,
And soundly I will sleep.
7 'When you go home, brother,' he says,
'My father will ask for me;
You may tell him I am in Saussif town,
Learning my lesson free.
8 'When you go home, brother,' he says,
'My mother will ask for me;
You may tell her I am in Sausaf town,
Aid I 'll come home merrily.
9 'When you go home, brother,' he says,
'Lady Margaret will ask for me;
You may tell her I'm dead and in grave laid,
And buried in Sausaff toun.'


440
49. THE TWA BROTHERS
18 She ran distraught, she wept, she sicht,
She wept the sma brids frae the tree,
She wept the starns adoun frae the lift,
She wept the fish out o the sea.
19 'O cease your weeping, my ain true-love,
Ye but disturb my rest;'
'Is that my ain true1 lover John,
The man that I loe best?'
20 ''T is naething but my ghaist,' he said,
'That's sent to comfort thee;
O cease your weeping, my true-love,
And't will gie peace to me.'
D
Jamieson's Popular Ballads, I, 59. From the recitation
of Mrs W. Arrott, of Aberbrothick.
1 'O will ye gae to the school, brother?
Or will ye gae to the ba?
Or will ye gae to the wood a-warslin,
To see whilk o's maun fa?'
2 'It 's I winna gae to the school, brother,
Nor will I gae to the ba;
But I will gae to the wood a-warslin,
And it is you maun fa.'
3 They warstled up, they warstled down,
The lee-lang simmer's day;
• . . . • . »
4 'O lift me up upon your back,
Tak me to yon wall fair;
You 'll wash my bluidy wounds oer and oer,
And syne they 'll bleed nae mair.
5 'And ye 'll tak aff my hollin sark,
And riv't frae gair to gair;
Ye 'll stap it in my bluidy wounds,
And syne they 'll bleed nae mair.'
6 He's lift.it his brother upon his back,
Taen Mm to yon wall fair;
He's washed his bluidy wounds oer and oer,
But ay they bled mair and mair.
7 And he's taen aff his hollin sark,
And riven't frae gair to gair;
He's stappit it in his bluidy wounds,
But ay they bled mair and mair.
8 'Ye 'll lift me up upon your back,
Tak me to Kirkland fair;
Ye 'll mak my greaf baith braid and lang,
And lay my body there.
9 'Ye 'll lay my arrows at my head,
My bent bow at my feet,
My sword and buckler at my side,
As I was wont to sleep.
10 'Whan ye gae hame to your father,
He 'll speer for his son John:
Say, ye left him into Kirkland fair,
Learning the school alone.
11 'When ye gae hame to my sister,
She 'll speer for her brother John:
Ye 'll say, ye left him in Kirkland fair,
The green grass growin aboon.
12 'Whan ye gae hame to my true-love,
She 'll speer for her lord John:
Ye 'll say, ye left him in Kirkland fair,
But hame ye fear he 'll never come.'
13 He's gane hame to his father;
He speered for his son John:
'It's I left him into Kirkland fair,
Learning the school alone.'
14 And whan he gaed hame to his sister,
She speered for her brother John:
'It's I left him into Kirkland fair,
The green grass growin aboon.'
15 And whan he gaed home to his true-love,
She speerd for her lord John:
'It's I left him into Kirkland fair,
And hame I fear he 'll never come.'
16 'But whaten bluid's that on your sword, Wil-
lie?
Sweet Willie, tell to me ;'
'O it is the bluid o my grey hounds,
They wadna rin for me.'
17 'It's nae the bluid o your hounds, Willie,
Their bluid was never so red;


442
49. THE TWA BROTHERS
15 'O thy hawk's blude was neer sae red,
Nor eer sae dear to me:
O what blude's this upon your dirk?
Dear Willie, tell to me ;'
'It is the blude of my ae brother,
O dule and wae is me!'
16 'O what will ye say to your father?
Dear Willie, tell to me ;'
'I 'll saddle my steed, and awa I 'll ride,
To dwell in some far countrie.'
17 'O when will ye come hame again?
Dear Willie, tell to me ;'
'When sun and mune4eap on yon hill,
And that will never be.'
18 She turnd hersel right round about,
And her heart burst into three:
'My ae best son is deid and gane,
And my tother ane I 'll neer see.'
F
Buchan's MSS, I, 57; Motherwell's MS., p. 662.
1 There were twa brothers in the east,
Went to the school o Ayr;
The one unto the other did say,
Come let us wrestle here.
2 They wrestled up and wrestled down,
Till John fell to the ground;
There being a knife in Willie's pocket,
Gae John his deadly wound.
3 'O is it for my gold, brother?
Or for my white monie?
Or is it for my lands sae braid,
That ye hae killed me?'
4 'It is not for your gold,' he said,
'Nor for your white monie;
It is by the hand o accident
That I hae killed thee.'
5 'Ye 'll take the shirt that's on my back,
Rive it frae gair to gair,
And try to stop my bloody wounds,
For they bleed wonderous sair.'
6 He's taen the shirt was on his back,
Reave it frae gare to gare,
And tried to stop his bleeding wounds,
But still they bled the mair.
7 'Ye 'll take me up upon your back,
Carry me to yon water clear,
And try to stop my bloody wounds,
For they run wonderous sair.'
8 He's taen him up upon his back,
Carried him to yon water clear,
And tried to stop his bleeding wounds,
But still they bled the mair.
9 'Ye 'll take me up upon your back,
Carry me to yon church-yard;
Ye 'll dig a grave baith wide and deep,
And then ye 'll lay me there.
10 'Ye 'll put a head-stane at my head,
Another at my feet,
Likewise a sod on my breast-bane,
The souner I may sleep.
11 'Whenever my father asks of thee,
Saying, What's become of John?
Ye 'll tell frae me, I'm ower the sea,
For a cargo of good wine.
12 'And when my sweetheart asks of thee,
Saying, What's become of John?
Ye 'll tell frae me, I'm ower the sea,
To buy a wedding gown.
13 'And when my sister asks of thee,
Saying, William, where is John?
Ye 'll tell frae me, I'm ower the sea,
To learn some merry sang.
14 'And when my mother asks of thee,
Saying, William, where is John?
Tell her I'm buried in green Fordland,
The grass growing ower my tomb.'
15 He's taen him up upon his back,
Carried him to yon church-yard,
And dug a grave baith wide and deep,
And he was buried there.
16 He laid a head-stane at his head,
Another at his feet,


50. THE BONNY HIND
445
begs her to go back to the convent, and say
nothing, bearing her sorrow as she may. This
she does. But every autumn the king makes
a feast, and invites to it all the nuns in the
cloister. Margaret is missed, and asked for.
Is she sick or dead? Why does she not come
to the feast, like other merry dames? The
wicked abbess answers, Your daughter is
neither sick nor dead; she goes with child,
like other merry dames. The king rides off
to the cloister, encounters his daughter, and
demands who is the father of her child. She
replies that she will sooner die than tell. The
king leaves her in wrath, but returns present-
ly, resolved to burn the convent, and Margaret
in it. Olaf comes from the wood, tired and
weary, sees the cloister burning, and quenches
the flames with his heart's blood.
The Icelandic ballad, 'Margretar kvaeSi,'
fslenzk FornkvaeSi, Grundtvig and Sigurosson,
No 14, has the same story. It is, however,
the man who brings on the discovery by ask-
ing the woman's parentage. The editors in-
form us that the same subject is treated in
an unprinted Icelandic ballad, less popular as
to style and stanza, in the Arne Magnussen
collection, 154.
The story of Kullervo, incorporated in what
is called the national epic of the Finns, the
Kalevala, has striking resemblances with the
ballads of the Bonny Hind class. While re-
turning home in his sledge from a somewhat
distant errand, Kullervo met three times a girl
who was travelling on snow-shoes, and invited
her to get in with him. She rejected his in-
vitation with fierceness, and the third time
he pulled her into the sledge by force. She
angrily bade him let her go, or she would dash
the sledge to pieces; but he won her over by
showing her rich things. The next morning
she asked what was his race and family; for
it seemed to her that he must come of a great
line. "No," he said, "neither of great nor
small. I am Kalervo's unhappy son. Tell
me of what stock art thou." "Of neither
great nor small," she answered. "I am Kal-
ervo's unhappy daughter." She was, in fact,
a long-lost sister of Kullervo's, who, when a
child, had gone to the wood for berries, and
had never found her way home. She had
wept the first day and the second; the third
and fourth, the fifth and sixth, she had tried
every way to kill herself. She broke out in
heart-piercing lamentations:
'O that I had died then, wretched!
0 that I had perished, weak one!
Had not lived to hear these horrors,
Had not lived this shame to suffer!'
So saying she sprang from the sledge into the
river, and found relief under the waters.
Kullervo, mad with anguish, went home to
his mother, and told her what had happened.
He asked only how he might die, — by wolf
or bear, by whale or sea-pike. His mother
vainly sought to soothe him. He consented
to live only till the wrongs of his parents had
been revenged. His mother tried to dissuade
him even from seeking a hero's death in fight.
'If thou die in battle, tell me,
What protection shall remain then
For the old age of thy father?'
'Let him die in any alley,
Lay his life down in the house-yard.'
'What protection shall remain then
For the old age of thy mother?'
'Let her die on any straw-truss;
Let her stifle in the stable.'
'Who shall then be left thy brother,
Who stand by him in mischances?'
'Let him pine away in the forest,
Let him drop down on the common.'
'Who shall then be left thy sister,
Who stand by her in mischances?'
'When she goes to the well for water,
Or to the washing, let her stumble.'
Kullervo had his fill of revenge. Meanwhile
father, brother, sister, and mother died, and
he came back to his home to find it empty
and cold. A voice from his mother's grave
seemed to direct him to go to the woqd for
food: obeying it, he came again to the pol-
luted spot, where grass or flowers would not
grow any more. He asked his sword would it
like to feed on guilty flesh and drink wicked
blood. The sword said, Why should I not
like to feed on guilty flesh and drink wicked
blood, I that feed on the flesh of the good


51. LIZIE WAN
447
'Sing O and O for my bonny hind,
Beneath yon hollin tree!'
13 'What needs you care for your bonny hyn?
For it you needna care;
There's aught score hyns in yonder park,
And five score hyns to spare.
14 'Four score of them are siller-shod,
Of thae ye may get three ;'
'But O and O for my bonny hyn,
Beneath yon hollin tree!'
15 'What needs you care for your bonny hyn?
For it you need na care;
'The Bonny Heyn,' I, 224.
32. Should be It's not for you a weed. Mother-
well.
4s. The third copy omits when.
*. he lifted, He gae her. Motherwell.
51'2. The second copy has they.
6*. All have courteth. Scott prints wi' thee, with
thee.
Take you the best, gi me the warst,
Since plenty is to spare.'
16 'I care na for your hyns, my lord,
I care na for your fee;
But O and O for my bonny hyn,
Beneath the hollin tree!'
17 'O were ye at your sister's bower,
Your sister fair to see,
Ye 'll think na mair o your bonny hyn
Beneath the hollin tree.'
*****
7 s. The third copy has tower.
10s,4. She's soakt it in her red heart's blood,
And twin'd herself of life. Motherwell.
13, 14. The first copy omits these stanzas.
51
LIZIE WAN
A. a. 'Lizie Wan,' Herd's MSS, I, 151; II, 78. b. B. 'Rosie Ann,' Motherwell's MS., p. 398.
Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, I, 91.
A, FIRST printed in Herd's Scottish Songs,
ed. 1776, is here given from his manuscript
copy. B is now printed for the first time.
A is translated by Grundtvig, Engelske og
Skotske Folkeviser, No 50, who subjoins a
Danish ballad,' Liden Ellen og hendes Broder,'
of similar character. Of this the editor had
three versions, differing but little, and all of
slight poetical value, and he prints one which
was committed to writing some sixty or sev-
enty years ago, with some readings from the
others. Liden Jensen, having killed Liden
Ellen in a wood, pretends to his mother that
she has gone off with some knights. He is
betrayed by blood on his clothes, confesses the
truth, and is condemned to be burned. 'Herr
Axel,' Arwidsson's Swedish collection, No 46,
I, 308, under similar circumstances, kills Stolts
Kirstin's two children, is asked by his mother
why his hands are bloody, pretends to have
slain a hind in the wood, and has his head
struck off by order of his father.
'Herr Peder og hans Soster,' an unpublished
Danish ballad, of which Grundtvig obtained
a single traditional version, has also a slight
resemblance to 'Lizie Wan.' Kirsten invites


51. LIZIE WAN
449
4 'A deal, a deal, dear mither,' she said,
'Great reason hae I to mane,
For there lyes a little habe in my side,
Between me and my brither John.'
5 Rosie she sat in her simmer bower,
Greiting and making great mane,
And wha came doun but her sister dear,
Saying, What ails thee, Rosie Ann?
6 'A deal, a deal, dear sister,' she said,
'Great reason hae I to mane,
For there lyes a little babe in my side,
Between me and my brither John.'
7 Rosie she sat in her simmer bower,
Weeping and making great mane,
And wha cam doun but her fause, fause
brither,
Saying, What ails thee, Rosie Ann?
8 'A deal, a deal, dear brither,' she said,
'Great reason hae I to cry,
For there lyes a little babe in my side,
Between yoursell and I.'
9 'Weel ye hae tauld father, and ye hae tauld
mither,
And ye hae tauld sister, a' three ;'
Syne he pulled out his wee penknife,
And he cut her fair bodie in three.
10 'O what blude is that on the point o your
knife,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'It is my horse's, that I did kill,
Dear mother and fair ladie.'
11 'The blude o your horse was neer sae red,
Dear son, come tell to me:'
'It is my grandfather's, that I hae killed,
Dear mother and fair ladie.'
12 'The blude o your grandfather was neer sae
fresh,
Dear son, come tell to me :'
'It is my sister's, that I did kill,
Dear mother and fair ladie.'
13 'What will ye do when your father comes
hame,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'I 'll set my foot on yon shipboard,
And I hope she 'll sail wi me.'
14 'What will ye do wi your bonny bonny young
wife,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'I 'll set her foot on some other ship,
And I hope she 'll follow me.'
15 'And what will ye do wi your wee son,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'I 'll leave him wi you, my dear mother,
To keep in remembrance of me.'
16 'What will ye do wi your houses and lands,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'I 'll leave them wi you, my dear mother,
To keep my own babie.'
17 'And whan will you return again,
Dear son, come tell to me?'
'When the sun and the mune meet on yon
hill,
And I hope that 'll neer be.'
B. Written without division into stanzas.
57


450
52. THE KING'S DOCHTEE LADY JEAN
52
THE KING'S DOCHTER LADY JEAN
A. a. 'The King's Dochter Lady Jean,' Motherwell's C. 'Castle Ha's Daughter,' Buchan's Ballads of the
MS., p. 657. b. 'Lady Jean,' Motherwell's Min- North of Scotland, I, 241.
strelsy, Appendix, p. xxi.
D. 'Bold Burnet's Daughter.' a. Buchan's MSS, I,
B. Motherwell's MS., p. 275; the first six lines in 120. b. The same, II, 141.
Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 189 f.
B IS the ballad referred to, and partly cited,
in Motherwell's preface to ' The Broom blooms
bonnie and says ib is fair,' Minstrelsy, p. 189.
This copy has been extremely injured by tra-
dition; so much so as not to be intelligible in
places except by comparison with A. The
act described in stanza 9 should be done by
the king's daughter's own hand; stanza 12
should be addressed by her to her sister;
stanza 13 is composed of fragments of two.
C and D have suffered worse, for they have
been corrupted and vulgarized.
At the beginning there is resemblance to
'Tam Lin' and to ' Hind Etin.'
A
a. Motherwell's MS., p. 657. From the recitation of
Mrs Storie, Lochwinnich. b. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, Ap-
pendix, p. xxi, No XXIII, one stanza.
1 The king's young dochter was sitting in her
window,
Sewing at her silken seam;
She lookt out o the bow-window,
And she saw the leaves growing green, my
luve,
And she saw the leaves growing green.
2 She stuck her needle into her sleeve,
Her seam down by her tae,
And she is awa to the merrie green-wood,
To pu the nit and slae.
3 She hadna pu't a nit at a',
A nit but scarcely three,
Till out and spak a braw young man,
Saying, How daur ye bow the tree?
4 'It's I will pu the nit,' she said,
'And I will bow the tree,
And I will come to the merrie green wud,
And na ax leive o thee.'
5 He took her by the middle sae snia,
And laid her on the gerss sae green,
And he has taen his will o her,
And he loot her up agen.
6 'Now syn ye hae got your will o me,
Pray tell to me your name;
For I am the king's young dochter,' she said,
'And this nicht I daurna gang hame.'
7 'Gif ye be the king's young dochter,' he said,
'I am his auldest son;
I wish I had died on some frem isle,
And never had come hame!
8 'The first time I came hame, Jeanie.
Thou was na here nor born;
I wish my pretty ship had sunk,
And I had been forlorn!
9 'The neist time I came hame, Jeanie,
Thou was sittin on the nourice knee;
And I wish my pretty ship had sunk,
And I had never seen thee!
10 'And the neist time I came hame, Jeanie,
I met thee here alane;


52. THE KING S DOCHTER LADY JEAN
451
I wish my pretty ship had sunk,
. And I had neer come hame!'
11 She put her hand down by her side,
And doun into her spare,
And she pou't out a wee pen-knife,
And she wounded hersell fu sair.
12 Hooly, hooly rase she up,
And hooly she gade hame,
Until she came to her father's parlour,
And there she did sick and mane.
13 'O sister, sister, mak my bed,
O the clean sheets and strae,
O sister, sister, mak my bed,
Down in the parlour below.'
14 Her father he came tripping down the stair,
His steps they were fu slow;
'I think, I think, Lady Jean,' he said,
'Te 're lying far ower low.'
15 'O late yestreen, as I came hame,
Down by yon castil wa,
O heavy, heavy was the stane
That on my briest did fa!'
16 Her mother she came tripping doun the stair,
Her steps they were fu slow;
'I think, I think, Lady Jean,' she said,
'Ye 're lying far ower low.'
17 'O late yestreen, as I cam hame,
Down by yon castil wa,
O heavy, heavy was the stane
That on my breast did fa!'
18 Her sister came tripping doun the stair,
Her steps they were fu slow;
'I think, I think, Lady Jean,' she said,
'Ye 're lying far ower low.'
18 'O late yestreen, as I cam hame,
Doun by yon castil wa,
O heavy, heavy was the stane
That on my breast did fa!'
19 Her brither he cam trippin doun the stair,
His steps they were fu slow;
He sank into his sister's arms,
And they died as white as snaw.
B
Motherwell's MS., p. 275; the first six lines in Mother-
well's Minstrelsy, p. 189. From Margery Johnston.
1 Lady Margaret sits in her bow-window,
Sewing her silken seam;
2 She's drapt the thimble at her tae,
And her scissars at her heel, 1
And she's awa to the merry green-wood,
To see the leaves grow green.
3 She had scarsely bowed a branch,
Or plucked a nut frae the tree,
Till up and starts a fair young man,
And a fair young man was he.
4 'How dare ye shake the leaves ?' he said,
'How dare ye break the tree?
How dare ye pluck the nuts,' he said,
'Without the leave of me?'
5
'Oh I know the merry green wood's my
ain,
And I 'll ask the leave of nane.'
6 He gript her by the middle sae sma,
He gently sat her down,
While the grass grew up on every side,
And the apple trees hang down.
7 She says, Young man, what is your name?
For ye've brought me to meikle shame;
For I am the king's youngest daughter,
And how shall I gae hame?
8 'If you 're the king's youngest daughter,
It's I'm his auldest son,
And heavy heavy is the deed, sister,
That you and I have done.'
9 He had a penknife in his hand,
Hang low down by his gair,


454
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
10 She's taen her mantle her middle about, 'Win up, win up, my daughter Janet,
And mourning went she hame, And welcome your brother here.'
And a' the way she sighd full sair,
Crying, Am I to blame! 12 Up she's taen her milk-white hand,
Streakd by his yellow hair,
11 Ben it came her father dear, Then turnd about her bonny face,
Stout stepping on the flear: And word spake never mair.
A. b. I2. fine silken.
1s. She luikit out at her braw bower win-
dow.
B. I1,2 and 2 are joined in the MS.
51,4 joined with 4. 54. no leave of thee, an
emendation by Motherwell, for rhyme.
94. He struck: an emendation.
10s'4 are joined with 9.
13*. That bruised by heart.
After 13 is written A stanza wanting.
D. The first three stanzas are not properly divided
in a, and in b the first fourteen lines not
divided at all.
a. II2. An stepping. 71. kind squire in both
copies.
b. 54. kin's.
91. Heal well, heal well on me, Lady Janet.
II2. Stout stepping.
12*. She turned.
53
YOUNG BEICHAN
A. 'Young Bicham,' Jamieson-Brovvn MS., fol. 13, c.
1783.
B. 'Young Brechin,' Glenriddell MSS, XI, 80, 1791.
C. 'Young Bckie.' a. Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 11,
c. 1783. b. Jamieson's Popular Ballads, II, 127.
D. 'Young Beachen,' Skene MSS, p. 70, 1802-1803.
E. 'Young Beichan and Susie Pye,' Jamieson's Popu-
lar Ballads, II, 117.
P. 'Susan Pye and Lord Beichan,' Pitcairn's MSS,
III, 159.
G. Communicated by Mr Alex. Laing, of Newburgh-
on-Tay.
H. 'Lord Beichan and Susie Pye,' Kinloch's Ancient
Scottish Ballads, p. 2G0.
I. Communicated by Mr David Loudon, Morham, Had-
dington.
J. Dr Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, ' Adversaria,' p-
85.
K. Communicated by Mr David Loudon.
L. The Loving Ballad of Lord Bate man. Illustrated
by George Cruikshank, 1839.
M. 'Young Bondwell,' Buchan's MSS, I, 18. J. H.
Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Bal-
lads, p. 1.
N. 'Susan Py, or Young Bichen's Garland.' a. Fal-
kirk, printed by T. Johnston, 1815. b. Stirling, M.
Randall.
A, B, D, F, and the fragment G now ap- C a is here given according to the manuscript,
pear for the first time in print, and the same without Jamieson's "collations." Of B and
is true of I, J, K, which are of less account. C b Jamieson says: This ballad and that


53. YOUN<
BEICHAN 455
which succeeds it are given from copies taken
from Mrs Brown's recitation,* collated with
two other copies procured from Scotland; one
in MS.; another, very good, one printed for
the stalls; a third, in the possession of the
late Reverend Jonathan Boucher, of Epsom,
taken from recitation in the north of England;
and a fourth, about one third as long as the
others, which the editor picked off an old wall
in Piccadilly. L, the only English copy, was
derived from the singing of a London vagrant.
It is, says Dixon, the common English broad-
sheet " turned into the dialect of Cockaigne." f
M was probably a broadside or stall copy, and
is certainly of that quality, but preserves a
very ancient traditional feature.
D and M, besides the name Linne, have in
common a repetition of the song, a trait which
we also find in one version of 'The Heir of
Linne;' J see Dixon's Scottish Traditional
Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 30, stanzas
2-6, Percy Society, vol. xvn.
In Bell's Ancient Poems, Ballads, and
Songs of the Peasantry of England, p. 68, it is
remarked that L, " the only ancient form in
which the ballad has existed in print," is one
of the publications mentioned in one of Thack-
eray's catalogues of broadsides. The 'Bate-
man,' in Thackeray's list, is the title of an
entirely different ballad, 'A Warning for
Maidens, or Young Bateman,' reprinted from
the Roxburghe collection by W. Chappell, III,
193.
"Young Beichan " is a favorite ballad, and
most deservedly. There are beautiful repeti-
tions of the story in the ballads of other na-
tions, and it has secondary affinities with the
• Mr Macmath has ascertained that Mrs Brown was born
in 1747. She learned most of her ballads before she was
twelve years old, or before 1759. ] 783, or a little earlier, is
the date when these copies were taken down from her sing-
ing or recitation.
t The Borderer's Table Book, VII, 21. Dixon says, a
little before, that the Stirling broadside of 'Lord Bateman'
varies but slightly from the English printed by Hoggett,
Durham, and Pitts, Catnach, and others, London. This is
not true of the Stirling broadside of 'Young Bichen :' see
N b- I did not notice, until too late, that I had not fur-
nished myself with the broadside ' Lord Bateman,' and have
been obliged to turn back the Cruikshank copy into ordi-
nary orthography.
extensive cycle of 'Hind Horn,' the parts of
the principal actors in the one being inverted
in the other.
The hero's name is mostly Beichan, with
slight modifications like Bekie, C, Bicham, A,
Brechin, B; in L, Bateman ; in M, Bondwell.
The heroine is Susan Pye in ten of the four-
teen versions; label in C; Essels, evidently
a variety of Isbel, in M, which has peculiar
relations with C; Sophia in K, L.
Beichan is London born in A, D, [E], H, I,
N, English born in B; London city is his own,
A 6, B 7, F 7, or he has a hall there, I 7, N
27 f.; half Northumberland belongs to him, L;
he is lord of the towers of Line, D 9, C 5, M 5,
which are in London, D 15 f, but are trans-
ferred by reciters to the water of Tay, M 29, .
and to Glasgow, or the vicinity, H 20. H,
though it starts with calling him London born,
speaks of him thereafter as a Scottish lord, 12,
18, 31.§
Beichan has an Englishman's desire strange
countries for to see, A, D, [E], I, L, N. In
0, M he goes abroad, Quentin Durward fash-
ion, not to gratify his taste for travel, but to
serve for meat and fee. F makes him go to
the Holy Land, without specifying his motive,
but we may fairly suppose it religious. C
sends him no further than France, and M to
an unnamed foreign land. He becomes the
slave of a Moor or Turk, A, B, D, H, I, L, N,
or a "Prudent," F, who treats him cruelly.
They bore his shoulders and put in a " tree,"
and make him draw carts, like horse or ox, A,
B, D, [E], H; draw plough and harrow, F,
plough and cart, N; or tread the wine-press,
1. This is because he is a staunch Christian,
} We have this repetition in two other ballads of the
Skene MSS besides D; see p. 316 of this volume, sts 1-9;
also in ' The Lord of Learne,' Percy MS., Hales and Furni-
vall, I, 192 f, vv 269-304.
§ "An old woman who died in Errol, Carse of Gowrie,
about twenty years ago, aged nearly ninety years, was wont
invariably to sing this ballad: 'Young Lundie was in
Brechin born.' Lundie is an estate now belonging to the
Earl of Camperdoun, north from Dundee." A. Laing, note
to Q. That is to say, the old woman's world was Forfar-
shire.
Mr Logan had heard in Scotland a version in which the
hero was called Lord Bangol: A Pedlar's Pack, p. 15.


456
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
and would never bend a knee to Mahound or
Termagant, E, or onie of their stocks, H,
or gods, I. They cast him into a dungeon,
where he can neither hear nor see, and he
is nigh perishing with hunger. This, also, is
done in H 5, on account of his perseverance
in Christianity; but in C, M he is imprisoned
for falling in love with the king's daughter, or
other lovely may.
From his prison Beichan makes his moan
(not to a stock or a stone, but to the Queen
of Heaven, D 4). His hounds go masterless,
his hawks flee from tree to tree, his younger
brother will heir his lands, and he shall never
see home again, E, H. If a lady [earl] would
borrow him, he would run at her stirrup [foot,
bridle]; if a widow [auld wife] would borrow
him, he would become her son; and if a maid
would borrow him, he would wed her with a
ring, C, D, M, B.* The only daughter of the
Moor, Turk, or king (of a 'Savoyen,' B 5,
perhaps a corruption of Saracen), already in-
terested in the captive, or immediately be-
coming so upon hearing Beichan's song, asks
him if he has lands and means at home to
maintain a lady that should set him free, and
is told that he has ample estates, all of which
he would bestow on such a lady, A, B, E, F,
H, L, N. She steals the keys and delivers
the prisoner, 0, D, E, I, J, L, M, N; refreshes
him with bread and wine [wine], A, D, E, F,
J 4, K 3, B, H, L; supplies him with money,
0 9, H 15, M 12, N 14, and with a ship, F 9,
H 18, L 9; to which C, M add a horse and
hounds [and hawks, M]. She bids him mind
on the lady's love that freed him out of pine,
A 8, D 12, [E 13], M 14, N 15, and in E 16
breaks a ring from her finger, and gives half
of it to Beichan to assist his memory. There
is a solemn vow, or at least a clear understand-
ing, that they are to marry within seven years,
A 9, B 9, E 12 f., H 17, 19, L 8, N 11 [three
years, C 11].
When seven years are at an end, or even
before, Susan Pye feels a longing, or a mis-
• Cf.' The Fair Flower of Northumt)erland,' B 2, E 2,
pp 115 f.
t She does not get away without exciting the solicitude
giving, which impels her to go in search of the
object of her affections, and she sets her foot
on good shipboard, and turns her back on her
own country, A 10, B 10, D 15, L. 10, N 23.f
C and M preserve here a highly important fea-
ture which is wanting in the other versions.
Isbel, or Essels, is roused from her sleep by
the Billy Blin, C 14, by a woman in green,
a fairy, M 15, who makes known to her that
that very day, or the morn, is Bekie's [Bond-
well's] wedding day. She is directed to attire
herself and her maids very splendidly, and go
to the strand; a vessel will come sailing to
her, and they are to go on board. The Billy
Blin will row her over the sea, C 19 ; she will
stroke the ship with a wand, and take God to
be her pilot, M 19. Thus, by miraculous in-
tervention, she arrives at the nick of time.
Beichan's fickleness is not accounted for in
most of the versions. He soon forgot his de-
liverer and courted another, he was young,
and thought not upon Susan Pye, say H, N.
C, on the contrary, tells us that Beichan had
not been a twelvemonth in his own country,
when he was forced to marry a duke's daugh-
ter or lose all his land. E and K intimate that
he acts under constraint; the wedding has
lasted three and thirty days, and he will not
bed with his bride for love of one beyond the
sea, E 21, K 1.J
On landing, Susan Pye falls in with a shep-
herd feeding his flock, E, K [a boy watering
his steeds, M]. She asks, Whose are these
sheep, these kye, these castles ? and is told they
are Lord Beichan's, G. She asks the news,
and is informed that there is a wedding in
yonder hall that has lasted thirty days and
three, E, K, or that there is to be a wedding
on the morn, M; it seems to be a matter gen-
erally known, N. In other versions she comes
directly to Young Beichan's hall, and is first
informed by the porter, A, B, F, H, L, or the
fact is confirmed by the porter, E, M, N; she
hears the music within, and divines, C. She
bribes the porter to bid the bridegroom come
or wrath of her father, F, M, J, N, and in the first two h*J
to use artifice.
} A point borrowed, it well may be, from ' Hind Horn,
E 5 f, A 10.


53. YOUNG BEICHAN
457
and speak to her, A, B, C, D, J, N; send her
down bread and wine, and not forget the lady
who brought him out of prison, B, F, H, J,
K, L. In E 26 she sends up her half ring to
the bridegroom [a ring in N 40, but not till
Beichan has declined to come down].
The porter falls on his knee and informs
his master that the fairest and richest lady
that eyes ever saw is at the gate [ladies, C,
M]. The bride, or the bride's mother more
commonly, reproves the porter for his graceless
speech; he might have excepted the bride, or
her mother, or both: " Gin she be braw with-
out, we's be as braw within." But the porter
is compelled by truth to persist in his alle-
gation; fair as they may be, they were never
to compare with yon lady, B, D, E, H, M.
Beichan takes the table with his foot and
makes the cups and cans to flee, B 18, D 23,
F 28, G 3, H 47, J 5, N 42; * he exclaims
that it can be none but Susie Pye, A, B, D,
G, H, I [Burd Isbel, C], and clears the stair,
fifteen steps, thirty steps, in three bounds,
A 19, D 24, N 43. His old love reproaches
him for his forgetfulness, A, C, D, M, N ; f
she asks back her faith and troth, B 21.
Beichan bids the forenoon bride's mother take
back her daughter: he will double her dowry,
A 22, D 27, E 39; she came on horseback,
she shall go back in chariots, coaches, three,
B 22, D 27J [H 49, in chariot free]. He
* So Torello's wife upsets the table, in Boccaccio's story:
see p. 198. One of her Slavic kinswomen jumps over four
tables and lights on a fifth.
t In C 34, M 49, she is recognized by one of the hounds
which she had given him. So Bos, seigneur de Be'nac, who
breaks a ring with his wife, goes to the East, and is prisoner
among the Saracens seven years, on coming back is recog-
nized only by his greyhound: Magasin Pittoresquc, VI,
56 b. It is scarcely necessary to scent the Odyssey here.
| Ridiculously changed in J 6, K 6, L 20, to a coach and
three, reminding us of that master-stroke in Thackeray's
ballad of 'Little Billec,' "a captain of a seventy-three."
'Little Billee,' by the way, is really like an old ballad, fallen
on evil days and evil tongues; whereas the serious imitations
of traditional ballads are not the least like, and yet, in their
way, are often not less ludicrous.
§ In M, to make everything pleasant, Bondwell offers the
bride five hundred pounds to marry his cousin John. She
says, Keep your money; John was my first love. So Bond-
well is married at early morn, nnd John in the afternoon.
|| Harleian MS. 2277, from which the life of Beket, in
long couplets, was printed by Mr W. II. Black for the
Percy Society, in 1845. The story of Gilbert Beket is con-
marries Susie Pye, having her baptized by the
name of Lady Jean, A, B, D, [E], F, I, J.§
This story of Beichan, or Bekie, agrees in
the general outline, and also in some details,
with a well-known legend about Gilbert Beket,
father of St Thomas. The earlier and more
authentic biographies lack this particular bit
of romance, but the legend nevertheless goes
back to a date not much later than a century
after the death of the saint, being found in a
poetical narrative preserved in a manuscript
of about 1300.||
We learn from this legend that Gilbert
Beket, in his youth, assumed the cross and
went to the Holy Laud, accompanied only by
one Richard, his servant. They "did their pil-
grimage" in holy places, and at last, with other
Christians, were made captive by the Saracens
and put in strong prison. They suffered great
hardship and ignominy in the service of the
Saracen prince Admiraud. But Gilbert found
more grace than the rest; he was promoted
to serve the prince at meat (in his chains), and
the prince often would ask him about England
and the English faith. Admiraud's only daugh-
ter fell in love with Gilbert, and when she
saw her time, in turn asked him the like ques-
tions. Gilbert told her that he was born in
London; told her of the belief of Christians,
and of the endless bliss that should be their
meed. The maid asked him if he was ready
tained in the first 150 vv. The style of this composition en-
tirely resembles that of Robert of Gloucester, and portions
of the life of Beket are identical with the Chronicle;
whence Mr Black plausibly argues that both are by the
same hand. The account of Beket's parentage is interpo-
lated into Edward Grim's Life, in Cotton MS. Vitellius,
C, xu, from which it is printed by Robertson, Materials for
the History of Thomas Beckct, II, 453 ff. It is found in
Bromton's Chronicle, Twysden, Scriptores X, columns 1052-
55, and in the First Quadrilogus, Paris, 1495, from which
it is reprinted by Migne, Patrologite Cursus Completus,
CXC, cols 346 ff. The tale has been accepted by many writ-
ers who would have been better historians for a little reading
of romances. Augustin Thierry sees in Thomas Beket a
Saxon contending in high place, for the interests and with
the natural hatred of his race, against Norman Henry, just
as he finds in the yeoman Robin Hood a leader of Saxon
serfs engaged in irregular war with Norman Richard. But
both of St Thomas's parents were Norman; the father of
Rouen, the mother of Caen. The legend was introduced by
Lawrence Wade, following John of Exeter, into a metrical
life of Beket of about the year 1500: see the poem in Eng-
lische Studien, III, 417, edited by Horstmann.,
58


53. YOUNG BEICHAN
459
end lacks some of the main points of these
stones, and the ballad, in one version or an-
other, has them, as will be seen by referring
to what has been said under ' Hind Horn,' pp
194 ff. Bekie and Beket go to the East, like
Henry and Reinfiit of Brunswick, the Noble
Moringer, the good Gerhard, Messer Torello,
the Sire de Crequi, Alexander of Metz, and
others. Like the larger part of these, they are
made prisoners by the Saracens. He will not
bow the knee to Mahound; neither will the
Sire de Crequi, though he die for it.* Beichan
is made to draw cart, plough, harrow, like a
beast. So Henry of Brunswick in a Swedish
and a Danish ballad,f and Alexander von
Metz, or the Graf von Rom, in his most beau-
tiful and touching story.J Henry of Bruns-
wick is set free by a "heathen" lady in the
Danish ballad. In one version of Beichan, E,
the lady on parting with her love breaks her
ring and gives him one half, as Henry, or his
wife, Reinfrit, Gerhard, Crequi, and others do.
At this point in the story the woman pursues
the man, and parts are inverted. Susan Pye is
warned that Beichan is to be married the next
day, in C by a Billy-Blin, in M by a woman in
green, or fairy, and is conveyed to Beichan's
castle or hall with miraculous despatch, just as
Henry and others are warned, and are trans-
ported to their homes by devil, angel, or nec-
romancer. In E and N the old love is identi-
fied by a half ring or ring, as in so many of
the stories of the class of Henry the Lion.
Norse, Spanish, and Italian ballads preserve
a story essentially the same as that of ' Young
Beichan.'
Scandinavian.
Danish. 'Stolt Ellensborg,' Grundtvig, IV,
herself for his liberation. She promises to effect his free-
dom if he will marry her. This he agrees to. She releases
him from his chains without her father's knowledge, and
flies with him to his native land.
* Nor Guarinos in the Spanish ballad, Duran, No 402, I,
265; Wolf and Hofmann, Primavera, II, 321. Guariuos is
very cruelly treated, but it ;s his horse, not he, that has to
draw carts. For the Sire de Crequi see also Dinaux, Trou-
veres, III, 161 ff (Holder).
t And in 'Der Herr von Falkenstein,' a variety of the
story, Meier, Deutsche Sagen aus Schwaben, p. 319, No 362.
A Christian undergoes the same hardship in Schoppner, Sa-
genbucb, III, 127, No 1076. For other cases of the won-
238, No 218, nine versions, A-G, from man-
uscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, H, I, from recent tradition. B is
previously printed (with alterations) in Lev-
ninger, 'Jomfrue Ellensborg,' I, 66, No 12,
Danske Viser, III, 268, No 213; I, ' Stalt El-
len henter sin Faestemand' is in Kristensen,
I, 89, No 36. Of the older texts, A, B, C are
absolutely pure and true to tradition, D-G re-
touched or made over.
Icelandic, of the seventeenth century,
Grundtvig, as above, p. 259, M.
Swedish, from Cavallius and Stephens'
collection, Grundtvig, p. 255, K.
Faroe, taken down in 1827, Grundtvig, p.
256, L.
Norwegian, 'Herre Per i Riki,' Landstad,
p. 596, No 76, N.
The variations of these twelve versions are
insignificant. The names Herr Peder den
Rige and Ellensborg [Ellen] are found in
nearly all. It comes into Sir Peter's mind
that he ought to go to Jerusalem to expiate
his sins, and he asks his betrothed, Ellens-
borg, how long she will wait for him. She
will wait eight years, and marry no other,
though the king should woo her [seven, L;
nine, M, " If I do not come then, break the
engagement; " eight, and not more, N]. The
time passes and Peter does not come back.
Ellensborg goes to the strand. Traders come
steering in, and she is asked to buy of their
ware, — sendal, linen, and silk green as leek.
She cares not for these things; have they not
seen her sister's son [brother], for whom she
is grieving to death? They know nothing of
her sister's son, but well they know Sir Peter
the rich: he has betrothed a lady in the 0s-
derful deliverance of captive knights, not previously men-
tioned by me, see Hocker, in Wolf's Zeitschrift fur deutsche
Mythologie, I, 306.
} A meisterlied of Alexander von Metz, of the second half
of the fifteenth century, Korner, Historische Volkslieder, p.
49; the ballad ' Der Graf von Rom,' or 'Der Graf im
Pfluge,' Uhland, p. 784, No 299, printed as early as 1493;
De Historie van Floreniina, Huysvrouwe van Alexander van
Mets, 1621, van den Bergh, De nederlandsche Volksro-
mans, p. 52. And see Goedeke, Deutsche Dichtung im Mit-
telalter, pp 569, 574; Uhland, Schriften zur Geschichte der
Dichtung, IV, 297-309; Danske Viser, V, 67.


460
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
ter-king's realm ; * a heathen woman, " and
you never came into his mind," E 18; he is
to be married to-morrow, K 6. A wee swain
tells her, M 14, 16, that he sits in Austurnki
drinking the ale of forgetfulness, and will
never come home; he shall not drink long,
says she. Ellensborg asks her brother to un-
dertake a voyage for her; he will go with
her if she will wait till summer; rather than
"wait till summer she will go alone, A, D, G.
She asks fraternal advice about going in search
of her lover, A, E, the advice of her uncles,
I', asks the loan of a ship, B, C, F, H, N. She
is told that such a thing would be a shame;
she had better take another lover; the ob-
ject is not worth the trouble; the voyage is
bad for a man and worse for a woman. Her
maids give her advice that is more to her
mind, E, but are as prudent as the rest in the
later I. She attires herself like a knight,
clips her maids' hair, B, H, I, L, M, and puts
them into men's clothes, D, L; sets herself to
steer and the maids to row, A-G, L.f
The voyage is less than two months, B, C, E;
less than three months, I; quite three months,
L. It is the first day of the bridal when she
lands, B 22, E 24, N 14; in B Ellensborg
learns this from a boy who is walking on the
sand. Sword at side, she enters the hall where
Peter is drinking his bridal. Peter, can in
hand, rises and says, Bless your eyes, my sis-
ter's son ; welcome to this strange land. In B
he asks, How are my father and mother? and
she tells him that his father lies dead on his
bier, his mother in sick-bed. In L, waiting for
no greeting, she says, Well you sit at the board
with your wife! Are all lords wont thus to
keep their faith? The bride's mother, D, G,
the heathen bride, E, an unnamed person,
probably the bride, A, B, F, N, says, That is
not your sister's son, but much more like a
woman; her hair is like spun gold, and braided
up under a silk cap.
A tells us, and so F, G, that it was two
* 0ster-kongens rige, 0sterige, 0sterland, Austmki, un-
derstood by Grundtvig as Garfiari'ki, the Scandinavian-Rus-
sian kingdom of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Austmki
is used vaguely, but especially of the east of Europe, Ilussia,
Austria, sometimes including Turkey (Vigfusson).
months before Ellensborg could speak to Peter
privately. Then, on a Yule day, when he was
going to church, she said, It does not occur to
you that you gave me your troth. Sir Peter
stood as if women had shorn his hair, and
recollected all as if it had been yesterday. In
B-E, H, I, L, M, N, this incident has, perhaps,
dropped out. In these immediately, as in A
F, G, after this interview, Sir Peter, recalled
to his senses or to his fidelity, conceives the
purpose of flying with Ellensborg. Good peo-
ple, he says, knights and swains, ladies and
maids, follow my bride to bed, while I take
my sister's son over the meads, through the
wood, B-E, H, I, N. In A , F, Sir Peter asks
the bride how long she will bide while lie
takes his nephew across the kingdom; in G
begs the boon that, since his sister's son is
going, he may ride with him, just accompany
him to the strand and take leave of him; in
L, M, hopes she will not be angry if he con-
voys his nephew three days on his way. (It is
at this point in C, H, I, L, that the bride says
it is no sister's son, but a woman.) The bride
remarks that there are knights and swains enow
to escort his sister's son, and that he might
more fitly stay where he is, but Sir Peter
persists that he will see his nephew off in per-
son.
Sir Peter and Ellensborg go aboard the
ship, he crying, You will see me. no more!
When they are at sea Ellensborg lets out her
hair, A, B, C, H; she wishes that the aban-
doned bride may now feel the grief which she
herself had borne for years. The proceeding
is less covert in I, L, M than in the other
versions.
As Ellensborg and Peter are making for the
ship in D 30, 31 (and G 36, 37, borrowed from
D), she says, Tell me, Sir Peter, why would
you deceive me so? Sir Peter answers that
he never meant to deceive her; it was the
lady of 0sterland that did it; she had changed
his mind. A magical change is meant. This
t In Swedish K, as she pushes off from land, she ex-
claims:
'Gud Fader i Himmelens rike
Skall vara min styresman!'
Cf. M 28:
And she's taen God her pilot to be.


53. YOUNG BEICHAN
461
agrees with what is said in A 24, 25 (also F,
G-), that when Ellensborg got Peter alone to
herself, and said, You do not remember that
you plighted your troth to me, everything
came back to him as if it had happened yes-
terday. And again in the Faroe copy, L 49,
Ellensborg, from the prow, cries to Ingibjorg
on the strand, Farewell to thee with thy elf-
ways, viS tftt elvargangi! I have taken to
myself my true love that I lent thee so long;
implying that Sir Peter had been detained
by Circean arts, by a sleepy drench of 6min-
nis ol, or ale of forgetfulness, Icelandic M 14,
which, in the light of the other ballads, is to
be understood literally, and not figuratively.
The feature of a man being made, by magical
or other means, to forget a first love who had
done and suffered much for him, and being
suddenly restored to consciousness and his
original predilection, is of the commonest oc-
currence in traditional tales.*
Our English ballad affords no other positive
trace of external interference with the hero's
will than the far-fetched allegation in C that
the choice before him was to accept a duke's
daughter or forfeit his lands. The explana-
tion of his inconstancy in H, N, that young
men ever were fickle found, is vulgar, and also
insufficient, for Beichan returns to his old love
per saltum, like one from whose eyes scales
have fallen and from whose back a weight has
been taken, not tamely, like a facile youth
that has swerved. E and K, as already said,
distinctly recognize that Beichan was not act-
ing with free mind, and, for myself, I have
little doubt that, if we could go back far
enough, we should find that he had all along
been faithful at heart.
Spanish. A. 'El Conde Sol,' Duran, Ro-
* See ' The Red Bull of Norroway,' Chambers, Popular
Rhymes of Scotland, 1870, p. 99; 'Mesterma,'Asbjernsen
og Moe, No 46; 'Hass-Fru,' Cavallius och Stephens, No
14; Powell, Icelandic Legends, Second Series, p. 377; the
Grimms, Nos 56, 113, 186, 193; Pentamerone, n, 7, nl, 9;
Gonzenbach, Nos 14, 54, 55, and Kohler's note; Hahn, Grie-
chische u. Albanesische Maichen, No 54; Carleton, Traits
and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, 10th ed., I, 23; Camp-
bell, West Highland Tales, I, 25, No 2, and Kohler's notes
in Orient u. Occident, II, 103-114, etc., etc.
t This passage leads the editors of Primavera to remark,
mancero, I, 180, No 327, from tradition in An-
dalusia, by the editor; Wolf and Hofmann,
Primavera, II, 48, No 135. In this most beau-
tiful romance the County Sol, named general
in great wars between Spain and Portugal,
and leaving a young wife dissolved in tears,
tells her that she is free to marry if he does
not come back in six years. Six pass, and
eight, and more than ten, yet the county does
not return, nor does there come news of him.
His wife implores and obtains leave of her
father to go in search of her husband. She
traverses France and Italy, land and sea, ancl
is on the point of giving up hope, when one
day she sees a herdsman pasturing cows.
Whose are these cows? she asks. The County
Sol's, is the answer. And whose these wheat-
fields, these ewes, these gardens, and that pal-
ace? whose the horses I hear neigh? The
County Sol's, is the answer in each cascf
And who that lady that a man folds in his
arms? The lady is betrothed to him and the
county is to marry her. The countess changes
her silken robe for the herdsman's sackcloth,
and goes to ask an alms at the county's gate.
Beyond all hope, the county comes out him-
self to bring it. "Whence comest thou, pil-
grim?" he asks. She was born in Spain.
"How didst thou make thy way hither?"
She came to seek her husband, footing the
thorns by land, risking the perils of the sea;
and when she found him he was about to
marry, he had forgotten his faithful wife.
"Pilgrim, thou art surely the devil, come to
try me." "No devil," she said, "but thy
wife indeed, and therefore come to seek thee."
Upon this, without a moment's tarrying, the
county ordered his horse, took up his wife,
and made his best speed to his native castle.
II, 52, that' El Conde Sol' shows distinct traits of ' Le Chat
BotteV Similar questions are asked in English G, the other
Spanish versions, and the Italian, and in nearly all the
Greek ballads referred to on pp 199, 200; always under the
same circumstances, and to bring about the discovery which
gives the turn to the story. The questions in 'Le Chat
Botte" are introduced for an entirely different purpose, and
cannot rationally suggest a borrowing on either side. The
hasty note would certainly have been erased by the very dis-
tinguished editors upon a moment's consideration.


53 YOUNG BEICHAN
463
more powerful?" She is not fairer, but more
powerful: she makes rosemary flower on the
edge of her sleeve, changes the sea into wine
and fish into flesh. Bujeaud, I, 203. In ' La
Femme Abandonnde,' Puymaigre, I, 72, the
lover is married to a Fleming:
Elle fait venir le aoleil
A minuit dans sa chambre,
Elle fait bouiller la marmite
Sans feu et sans rente.
In a Canadian version, 'Entre Paris et Saint-
Denis,' Gagnon, p. 303, the deserted woman
is a king's daughter, and the new love,
Ell' fait neiger, ell' fait greler,
Ell' fait le vent qui vente.
E11' fait reluire le soleil
A minuit dans sa chambre.
EH' fait pousser le romarin
Sur le bord de la manche.
Puymaigre notes that there is a version very
near to the Canadian in the sixth volume of
Poesies populaires de la France, cinquieme re-
cueil, Ardennes, No 2.*
A broadside ballad, 'The Turkish Lady,'
'The Turkish Lady and the English Slave,'
printed in Logan's Pedlar's Pack, p. 16, Chris-
tie, I, 247, from singing, and preserved also in
the Kinloch MSS, V, 53, I, 263, from Eliza-
beth Beattie's recitation, simply relates how
a Turkish pirate's daughter fell in love with
an Englishman, her slave, offered to release
him if he would turn Turk, but chose the bet-
ter part of flying with him to Bristol, and
becoming herself a Christian brave.
A
Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 13.
1 In London city was Bicham born,
He longd strange countries for to see,
But he was taen by a savage Moor,
Who handld him right cruely.
2 For thro his shoulder he put a bore,
An thro the bore has pitten a tree,
* Puymaifrre finds also some resemblance in his 'Petite
Rosalie,' I, 74: see his note.
Sir William Stanley, passing through Con-
stantinople, is condemned to die for his re-
ligion. A lady, walking under the prison
walls, hears his lament, and begs his life of
the Turk. She would make him her husband,
and bring him to adore Mahomet. She offers
to set the prisoner free if he will marry her,
but he has a wife and children on English
ground. The lady is sorry, but generously
gives Stanley five hundred pounds to carry
him to his own country. Sir William Stan-
ley's Garland, Halliwell's Palatine Anthology,
pp 277 f.
Two Magyars have been shut up in a dun-
geon by the sultan, and have not seen sun,
moon, or stars for seven years. The sultan's
daughter hears their moan, and offers to free
them if they will take her to Hungary. This
they promise to do. She gets the keys, takes
money, opens the doors, and the three make
off. They are followed; one of the Magyars
kills all the pursuers but one, who is left to
carry back the news. It is now proposed that
there shall be a duel to determine who shall
have the lady. She begs them rather to cut
off her head than to fight about her. Szilagyi
Niklas says he has a love at home, and leaves
the sultan's daughter to his comrade, Hagy-
masi Laszl6. Aigner, Ungarische Volksdich-
tungen, p. 93: see p. 107 of this volume.
C b is translated by Loeve-Veimars, p. 330;
E by Cesare Cantu, Documenti alia Storia
Universale, Torino, 1858, Tomo V°, Parte
IIP, p. 796; E, as retouched by Allingham,
by Knortz, L. u. R. Alt-Englands, p. 18.
An he's gard bim draw the carts o wine,
Where horse and oxen had wont to be.
3 He's casten [him] in a dungeon deep,
Where he coud neither hear nor see;
He's shut him up in a prison strong,
An he's handld him right cruely.
4 O this Moor he had but ae daughter,
I wot her name was Shusy Pye;
She's doen her to the prison-house,
And she's calld Young Bicham one word by.


464
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
5 'O hae ye ony lands or rents,
Or citys in your am country,
Coud free you out of prison strong,
An coud mantain a lady free?'
6 'O London city is my own,
An other citys twa or three,
Coud loose me out o prison strong,
An coud mantain a lady free.'
7 O she has bribed her father's men
Wi meikle goud and white money,
She's gotten the key o the prison doors,
An she has set Young Bicham free.
8 She's gi'n him a loaf o good white bread,
But an a flask o Spanish wine,
An she bad him mind on the ladie's love
That sae kindly freed him out o pine.
9 'Go set your foot on good ship-board,
An haste you back to your ain country,
An before that seven years has an end,
Come back again, love, and marry me.'
10 It was long or seven years had an end
She longd fu sair her love to see;
She's set her foot on good ship-board,
An turnd her back on her ain country.
11 She's saild up, so has she doun,
Till she came to the other side;
She's landed at Young Bicham's gates,
An I hop this day she sal be his bride.
12 'Is this Young Bicham's gates ?' says she,
'Or is that noble prince within?'
'He's up the stairs wi his bonny bride,
An monny a lord and lady wi him.'
13 'O has he taen a bonny bride,
An has he clean forgotten me!'
An sighing said that gay lady,
I wish I were in my ain country!
14 But she's pitten her han in her pocket,
An gin the porter guineas three;
Says, Take ye that, ye proud porter,
An bid the bridegroom speak to me.
15 O whan the porter came up the stair,
He's fa'n low down upon his knee:
'Won up, won up, ye proud porter,
An what makes a' this courtesy?'
16 'O I've been porter at your gates
This mair nor seven years an three,
But there is a lady at them now
The like of whom I never did see.
17 'For on every finger she has a ring,
An on the mid-finger she has three,
An there's as meikle goud aboon her brow
As woud buy an earldome o lan to me.'
18 Then up it started Young Bicham,
An sware so loud by Our Lady,
'It can be nane but Shusy Pye,
That has come oer the sea to me.'
19 O quickly ran he down the stair,
O fifteen steps he has made but three;
He's tane his bonny love in his arms.
An a wot he kissd her tenderly.
20 'O hae you tane a bonny bride?
An hae you quite forsaken me?
An hae ye quite forgotten her
That gae you life an liberty?'
21 She's lookit oer her left shoulder
To hide the tears stood in her ee;
'Now fare thee well, Young Bieham,' she says,
'1 'll strive to think nae mair on thee.'
22 'Take back your daughter, madam,' he says,
'An a double dowry I 'll gi her wi;
For I maun marry my first true love,
That's done and suffered so much for me.'
23 He's take his bonny love by the han,
And led her to yon fountain stane;
He's changd her name frae Shusy Pye,
An he's cald her his bonny love, Lady Jane.


466
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
21 0 when these lovers two did meet,
The tear it blinded baith their ee;
'Gie me my faith and troth,' she says,
'For now fain hame wad I be.'
22 'Tak hame your daughter, madam,' he says,
'She's neer a bit the war o me;
Except a kiss o her bonny lips,
Of her body I am free;
She came to me on a single horse,
Now I 'll send her hame in chariots three.'
23 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
And he's led her to a yard o stane;
He's changed her name frae Susan Pye,
And calld her lusty Lady Jane.
c
a. Jamieson-Brown MS., fol. 11. b. Jamieson's Popular
Ballads, II, 127.
1 Young Bekie was as brave a knight
As ever saild the sea;
An he's doen him to the court of France,
To serve for meat and fee.
2 He had nae been i the court of France
A twelvemonth nor sae long,
Til he fell in love with the king's daughter,
An was thrown in prison strong.
3 The king he had but ae daughter,
Burd Isbel was her name;
An she has to the prison-house gane,
To hear the prisoner's mane.
4 'O gin a lady woud borrow me,
At her stirrup-foot I woud rin;
Or gin a widow wad borrow me,
I woud swear to be her son.
5 'Or gin a virgin woud borrow me,
I woud wed her wi a ring;
I'd gi her ha's, I'd gie her bowers,
The bonny towrs o Linne.'
6 O barefoot, barefoot gaed she but,
An barefoot came she ben;
It was no for want o hose an shoone,
Nor time to put them on.
7 But a' for fear that her father dear
Had heard her making din:
She's stown the keys o the prison-house dor
An latten the prisoner gang.
8 O whan she saw him, Young Bekie,
Her heart was wondrous sair!
For the mice but an the bold rottons
Had eaten his yallow hair.
9 She's gien him a shaver for his beard,
A comber till his hair,
Five hunder pound in his pocket,
To spen, an nae to spair.
10 She's gien him a steed was good in need,
An a saddle o royal bone,
A leash o hounds o ae litter,
An Hector called one.
11 Atween this twa a vow was made,
'T was made full solemnly,
That or three years was come an gane,
Well married they shoud be.
12 He had nae been in's ain country
A twelvemonth till an end,
Till he's forcd to marry a duke's daughter,
Or than lose a' his land.
13 'Ohon, alas !' says Young Beckie,
'I know not what to dee;
For I canno win to Burd Isbel,
And she kensnae to come to me.'
14 O it fell once upon a day
Burd Isbel fell asleep,
An up it starts the Belly Blin,
An stood at her bed-feet.
15 'O waken, waken, Burd Isbel,
How [can] you sleep so soun,
Whan this is Bekie's wedding day,
An the marriage gain on?


468
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
D
Skene MSS, p. 70. North of Scotland, 1802-3.
1 Young Beachen was born in fair London,
And foreign lands he langed to see;'
He was taen by the savage Moor,
An the used liim most cruellie.
2 Through his showlder they pat a bore,
And through the bore the pat a tree;
They made him trail their ousen carts,
And they used him most cruellie.
3 The savage Moor had ae daughter,
I wat her name was Susan Pay;
An she is to the prison house,
To hear the prisoner's moan.
4 He made na his moan to a stocke,
He made na it to a stone,
But it was to the Queen of Heaven
That he made his moan.
5 'Gin a lady wad borrow me,
I at her foot wad run;
An a widdow wad borrow me,
I wad become her son.
6 'But an a maid wad borrow me,
I wad wed her wi a ring;
I wad make her lady of haas and bowers,
An of the high towers of Line.'
7 'Sing oer yer sang, Young Beachen,' she says,
'Sing oer yer sang to me ;'
'I never sang that sang, lady,
But I wad sing to thee.
8 'Gin a lady wad borrow me,
I at her foot wad run;
An a widdow wad borrow me,
I wad become her son.
9 'But an a maid wad borrow me,
I wad wed her wi a ring;
I wad make her lady of haas and bowers,
An of the high towers of Line.'
10 Saftly, [saftly] gaed she but,
An saftlly gaed she ben,
It was na for want of hose nor shoon,
Nor time to pet them on.
11
An she has staen the keys of the prison,
An latten Young Beachen gang.
12 She gae him a leaf of her white bread,
An a bottle of her wine,
She bad him mind on the lady's love
That freed him out of pine.
33 She gae him a steed was guid in need,
A saddle of the bane,
Five hundred pown in his pocket,
Bad him gae speeding hame.
14 An a leash of guid grayhounds,
»
15 Whan seven lang years were come and g
Shusie Pay thought lang,
An she is on to fair London,
As fast as she could gang.
16 Whan she cam to Young Beachen's gate,
'Is Young Beachan at hame,
Or is he in this countrie?'
17 'He is at hame, is hear,' they said,
An sighan says her Susie Pay,
Has he quite forgotten me?
18 On every finger she had a ring,
On the middle finger three;
She gae the porter ane of them:
'Get a word o your lord to me.'
19 He gaed up the stair,
Fell low down on his knee:
'Win up, my proud porter,
What is your will wi me?'
20 'I hae been porter at yer gate
This thirty year and three;
The fairst lady is at yer gate
Mine eyes did ever see.'
21 Out spak the bride's mither,
An a haghty woman was she:


53. YOUNG BEICHAN
471
38 Then out and spak the forenoon bride:
'My lord, your love it changeth soon;
This morning I was made your bride,
And another chose ere it be noon.'
39 O hold thy tongue, thou forenoon bride,
Ye're neer a whit the worse for me,
And whan ye return to your own countrie,
A double dower I 'll send with thee.'
40 He's taen Susie Pye by the white band,
And gently led her up and down,
And ay as he kist her red rosy lips,
'Ye 're welcome, jewel, to your own.'
41 He '• taen her by the milk-white band,
And led her to yon fountain stane;
He's changed her name from Susie Pye,
And he 's call'd her his bonny love, Lady Jane.
F
Pitcairn's MSS, III, 159, 1817-25. From the recitation of
Widow Stevenson, aged seventy-three: "East Country."
1 In the lands where Lord Beichan was born,
Amang the stately steps of stane,
He wore the goud at his left shoulder,
But to the Holy Land he's gane.
2 He was na lang in the Holy Land,
Amang the Prudents that was black,
He was na lang in the Holy Land,
Till the Prudent did Lord Beichan tak.
3 The gard him draw baith pleugh and harrow,
And horse and oxen twa or three;
They cast him in a dark dungeon,
Whare he coud neither hear nor see.
4 The Prudent had a fair daughter,
I wot they ca'd her Susy Pye,
And all the keys in that city
Hang at that lady by and bye.
5 It once fell out upon a day
That into the prison she did gae,
And whan she cam to the prison door,
She kneeled low down on her knee.
6 'O hae ye ony lands, Beichan,
Or hae ye ony castles hie,
Whar ye wad tak a young thing to,
If out of prison I wad let thee?'
7 'Fair London's mine, dear lady,' he said,
'And other places twa or three,
Whar I wad tak a young thing to,
If out of prison ye wad let me.'
8 O she has opened the prison door,
And other places twa or three,
And gien him bread, and wine to drink,
In her own chamber privately.
9 O then she built a bonny ship,
And she has set it on the main,
And she has built a bonny ship,
It's for to tak Lord Beichan hame.
10 O she's gaen murning up and down,
And she 's gaen murnin to the sea,
Then to her father she has gane in,
Wha spak to her right angrily.
11 'O do ye mourn for the goud, daughter,
Or do ye mourn for the whyte monie?
Or do ye mourn for the English squire?
I wat I will gar hang him hie.'
12 'I neither mourn for the goud, father,
Nor do I for the whyte monie,
Nor do I for the English squire;
And I care na tho ye hang him hie.
13 'But I hae promised an errand to go,
Seven lang miles ayont the sea,
And blythe and merry I never will be
Untill that errand you let me.'
14 'That errand, daughter, you may gang,
Seven long miles beyond the sea,
Since blythe and merry you 'll neer be
Untill that errand I 'll let thee.'
15 O she has built a bonny ship,
And she has set it in the sea,
And she has built a bonny Ship,
It's all for to tak her a long journie.
16 And she's sailed a' the summer day,
I wat the wind blew wondrous fair;
In sight of fair London she has come,
And till Lord Beichan's yett she walked.


474
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
20 Then whan he cam to Glasgow town,
A happy, happy man was he;
The ladies a' around him thrangd,
To see him come frae slaverie.
21 His mother she had died o sorrow,
And a' his brothers were dead but he;
His lands they a' were lying waste,
In ruins were his castles free.
22 Na porter there stood at his yett,
Na human creature he could see,
Except the screeching owls and bats,
Had he to bear him companie.
23 But gowd will gar the castles grow,
And he had gowd and jewels free,
And soon the pages around him thrangd,
To serve him on their bended knee.
24 His hall was hung wi silk and satin,
His table rung wi mirth and glee,
He soon forgot the lady fair
That lowsd him out o slaverie.
25 Lord Beichan courted a lady gay,
To heir wi him his lands sae free,
Neer thinking that a lady fair
Was on her way frae Grand Turkie.
26 For Susie Pye could get na rest,
Nor day nor nicht could happy be,
Still thinking on the Scottish lord,
Till she was sick and like to dee.
27 But she has builded a bonnie ship,
Weel mannd wi seamen o hie degree,
And secretly she stept on board,
And bid adieu to her ain countrie.
28 But whan she cam to the Scottish shore,
The bells were ringing sae merrilie;
It was Lord Beichan's wedding day,
Wi a lady fair o hie degree.
29 But sic a vessel was never seen;
The very masts were tappd wi gold,
Her sails were made o the satin fine,
Maist beautiful for to behold.
30 But whan the lady cam on shore,
Attended wi her pages three,
Her shoon were of the beaten gowd,
And she a lady of great beautie.
31 Then to the skipper she did say,
'Can ye this answer gie to me?
Where are Lord Beichan's lands sae braid?
He surely lives in this countrie.'
32 Then up bespak the skipper bold,
For he could speak the Turkish tongue:
'Lord Beichan lives not far away;
This is the day of his wedding.'
33 'If ye will guide me to Beichan's yetts,
I will ye well reward.' said she;
Then she and all her pages went,
A very gallant companie.
34 When she cam to Lord Beichan's yetts,
She tirld gently at the pin;
Sae ready was the proud porter
To let the wedding guests come in.
35 'Is this Lord Beichan's house,' she says,
'Or is that noble lord within?'
'Yes, he is gane into the hall,
With his brave bride and monie ane.'
36 'Te 'll bid him send me a piece of bread,
Bot and a cup of his best wine;
And bid him mind the lady's love
That ance did lowse him out o pyne.'
37 Then in and cam the porter bold,
I wat he gae three shouts and three:
'The fairest lady stands at your yetts
That ever my twa een did see.'
38 Then up bespak the bride's mither,
I wat an angry woman was she:
'You micht hae excepted our bonnie bride,
Tho she'd been three times as fair as she.'
39 'My dame, your daughter's fair enough,
And aye the fairer mot she be!
But the fairest time that eer she was,
She 'll na compare wi this ladie.
40 'She has a gowd ring on ilka finger,
And on her mid-finger she has three;
She has as meikle gowd upon her head
As wad buy an earldom o land to thee.


53. YOUNG BEICHAN
475
41 'My lord, she begs some o your bread,
Bot and a cup o your best wine,
And bids you mind the lady's love
That ance did lowse ye out o pyne.'
42 Then up and started Lord Beichan,
I wat he made the table flee:
'I wad gie a' my yearlie rent
'T were Susie Pye come owre the sea.'
43 Syne up bespak the bride's mother,
She was never heard to speak sae free:
'Ye 'll no forsake my ae dochter,
Tho Susie Pye has crossd the sea?'
44 'Tak hame, tak hame, your dochter, madam,
For she is neer the waur o me;
She cam to me on horseback riding,
And she sall gang hame in chariot free.'
45 He's tane Susie Pye by the milk-white hand,
And led her thro his halls sae hie:
'Ye 're now Lord Beichan's lawful wife,
And thrice ye 're welcome unto me.'
46 Lord Beichan prepard for another wedding,
Wi baith their hearts sae fu o glee;
Says, 'I 'll range na mair in foreign lands,
Sin Susie Pye has crossd the sea.
47 'Fy! gar a' our cooks mak ready,
And fy! gar a' our pipers play,
And fy! gar trumpets gae thro the toun,
That Lord Beichan's wedded twice in a
day!'
I
Communicated by Mr David Louden, as recited by Mrs
Podds, Morham, Haddington, the reciter being above sev-
enty in 1873.
1 In London was Young Bechin born,
Foreign nations he longed to see;
He passed through many kingdoms great,
At length he came unto Turkie.
2 He viewed the fashions of that land,
The ways of worship viewed he,
But unto any of their gods
He would not so much as bow the knee.
3 On every shoulder they made a bore,
In every bore they put a tree,
Then they made him the winepress tread,
And all in spite of his fair bodie.
4 They put him into a deep dungeon,
Where he could neither hear nor see,
And for seven years they kept him there,
Till for hunger he was like to die.
5 Stephen, their king, had a daughter fair,
Yet never a man to her came nigh;
And every day she took the air,
Near to his prison she passed by.
6 One day she heard Young Bechin sing
A song that pleased her so well,
No rest she got till she came to him,
All in his lonely prison cell.
7 'I have a hall in London town,
With other buildings two or three,
And I 'll give them all to the ladye fair
That from this dungeon shall set me free.'
8 She stole the keys from her dad's head,
And if she oped one door ay she opened
three,
Till she Young Bechin could find out,
He was locked up so curiouslie.
*****
9 'I've been a porter at your gate
This thirty years now, ay and three;
There stands a ladye at your gate,
The like of her I neer did see.
10 'On every finger she has a ring.
On the mid-finger she has three;
She's as much gold about her brow
As would an earldom buy to me.'
*****
11 He's taen her by the milk-white hand,
He gently led her through the green;
He changed her name from Susie Pie,
An he's called her lovely Ladye Jean.


476
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
J
Dr Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, " Adversaria," p. 85.
From tradition.
* # # * *
1 She's taen the keys frae her fadder's coffer,
Tho he keeps them most sacredlie,
And she has opend the prison strong,
And set Young Beichan at libertie.
*****
2
'Gae up the eountrie, my chile,' she says,
'Till your fadder's wrath be turned from
thee.'
*****
3 She's put her han intill her purse,
And gave the porter guineas three;
Says, 'Tak ye that, ye proud porter,
And tell your master to speak wi me.
4 'Ye 'll bid him bring a shower o his best love,
But and a bottle o his wine,
And do to me as I did to him in time past,
And brought him out o muckle pine.'
5 He's taen the table wi his foot,
And he has keppit it wi his knee:
'I 'll wager my life and a' my lan,
It's Susan Pie come ower the sea.
6 'Rise up, rise up, my bonnie bride,
Ye 're neither better nor waur for me;
Ye cam to me on a horse and saddle,
But ye may gang back in a coach and three.'
K
Communicated by Mr Pavid Louden, as obtained from
Mrs Dickson, Rentonhall.
*****
1 'There is a marriage in yonder hall,
Has lasted thirty days and three;
The bridegroom winna bed the bride,
For the sake of one that's owre the sea.'
*****
2 'What news, what news, my brave young por-
ter?
What news, what news have ye for me?'
'As beautiful a ladye stands at your gate
As eer my two eyes yet did see.'
3 'A slice of bread to her get ready,
And a bottle of the best of wine;
Not to forget that fair young ladye
Who did release thee out of close confine.'
4 Lord Bechin in a passion flew,
And rent himself like a sword in three,
Saying, 'I would give all my father's riches
If my Sophia was 'cross the sea.'
5 Up spoke the young bride's mother,
Who never was heard to speak so free,
Saying, 'I hope you 'll not forget my only
daughter,
Though yotir Sophia be 'cross the sea.'
6 'I own a bride I've wed your daughter,
She's nothing else the worse of me;
She came to me on a horse and saddle,
She may go back in a coach and three.'
L
The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Illustrated by
George Cruikshank. 1839.
1 Lord Bateman was a noble lord,
A noble lord of high degree;
He shipped himself all aboard of a ship,
Some foreign country for to see.
2 He sailed east, he sailed west,
Until he came to famed Turkey,
Where he was taken and put to prison,
Until his life was quite weary.
3 All in this prison there grew a tree,
0 there it grew so stout and strong!
Where he was chained all by the middle,
Until his life was almost gone.


478
53. YOUNG BEICHAN
M
Buchan's MSS, I, 18. J. H. Dixon, Scottish Traditional
Versions of Ancient Ballads, p. 1.
1 Yocno Bonwell was a squire's ae son,
And a squire's ae son was he;
He went abroad to a foreign land,
To serve for meat and fee.
2 He hndna been in that country
A twalmonth and a day,
Till he was cast in prison strong,
For the sake of a lovely may.
3 '0 if my father get word of this,
At hame in his ain country,
He 'll send red gowd for my relief,
And a bag o white money.
4 'O gin an earl woud borrow me,
At his bridle I woud rin;
Or gin a widow woud borrow me,
I'd swear to be her son.
5 'Or gin a may woud borrow me,
I'd wed her wi a ring,
Iufeft her wi the ha's and bowers
0 the bonny towers o Linne.'
6 But it fell ance upon a day
Dame Essels she thought lang,
And she is to the jail-house door,
To hear Young Bondwell's sang.
7 'Sing on, sing on, my bonny Bondwcll,
The sang ye sang just now :'
'I never sang the san;;, lady,
But I woud war't on you.
8 'O gin my father get word o this,
At hnme in his ain country,
He 'll send red gowd for my relief,
And a bag o white money.
9 'O gin an earl woud borrow me,
At his bridle I woud rin;
Or gin a widow would borrow me,
I'd swear to be her son.
10 'Or gin a may woud borrow me,
i woud wed her wi a ring,
Infeft her wi the ha's and bowers
0 the bonny towers o Linne.'
11 She's stole the keys o the jail-house door,
Where under the bed they lay;
She's opend to him the jail-houso door,
And set Young Bondwcll free.
12 She gae 'in a steed was swift in need,
A saddle o royal ben,
A hundcr pund o pennies round,
Bade him gae roav an spend.
13 A couple o honnds o ae litter,
And Cain they ca'd the one;
Twa gay gos-hawks she gae likeways,
To keep him onthought lang.
14 When mony days were past and gane,
Dame Essels thought fell lang,
And she is to her lonely bower,
To shorten her wi a sang.
15 The sang had such a melody,
It lulld her fast asleep;
Up starts a woman, clad in green,
And stood at her bed-feet.
16 'Win up, win up, Dame Essels,' she says,
'This day ye sleep ower lang;
The morn is the squire's wedding day,
In the bonny towers o Linne.
17 'Ye 'll dress yoursell in the robes o green,
Your maids in robes sae fair,
And ye 'll put girdles about their middles,
Sae costly, rich and rare.
18 'Ye 'll take your maries alang wi you,
Till ye come to yon strand;
There ye 'll see a ship, wi sails all up,
Come sailing to dry land.
19 'Ye 'l1 take a wand into your hand,
Ye 'l1 stroke her round about,
And ye 'll take God your pilot to be,
To drown ye '1l take nae doubt.'
20 Then up it raise her Dame Essels,
Sought water to wash her hands,
Bnt aye the faster that she washd,
The tears they trickling ran.
21 Then in it came her father dear,
And in the floor steps he:
'What ails Dame Essels, my daughter dear,
Ye weeji sae bitterlie?
22 'Want ye a small fish frae the flood,
Or turtle frae the sea?
Or is there man in a' my realm
This day has offended thee?'
23 'I want nae small fish frae the flood,
Nor turtle frae the sea;
But Young Bondwell, your ain prisoner.
This day has offended me.'
24 Her father turnd him round about,
A solemn oath sware he:
'If this be true ye tell mc now
High hanged he shall be.
25 'To-morrow morning he shall bo
Hung high upon a tree:'
Dame Essels whisperd to hersel,
'Father, ye've made a lie.'


486
ADDITIONS AND CORKECTIONS
maids. Had you told me this before, I would have laid
you in the water, says the mother. The maid rides on
till she comes to her father's gate. Then she cries to
her father to open, for his youngest daughter is with-
out. The father not bestirring himself, she swims the
moat, and, the door not being open, goes through the
glass. The next day she dries her clothes.
30 a, 37 a. There is a Low German version of the
first class, A-P, in Spee, Volksthiimliches vom Nieder-
rhein, Kbln, 1875, Zweites Heft, p. 3, ' Schbndili,' 50
▼v. (Kohler.)
AA. Schondili's parents died when she was a child.
Schon-Albert, knowing this, rides to her. She attires
herself in silk, with a gold crown on her hair, and he
swings her on to his horse. They ride three days and
nights, with nothing to eat or drink. She asks whether
it is not meal-time; he replies that they are coining to
a linden, where they will eat and drink. Seven women
are hanging on the tree. He gives her the wale of tree,
river, and sword. She chooses the sword; would Lie
loath to spot his coat; whips off his head before the coat
is half off. The head says there is a pipe in the sad-
dle; she thinks no good can come of playing a murder-
er's pipe. She meets first the father, then the mother;
they think that must be Schbn-Albert's horse. That
may be, she says; I have not seen him since yesterday.
She sets the pipe to her mouth, when she reaches her
father's gate, and the murderers come like hares on the
wind.
BB. Alfred Miiller, Volkslieder aus deal Erzgebirge,
p. 92, 'Schbn Ulrich' [und Trautendelein], 36 vv.
(Kohler.) Like T, without the song.
CC. A. Schlosser, Deutsche Volkslieder aus Steier-
mark, 1881, p. 338, No 309, 'Der Ritter und die
Maid.' (Kohler: not yet seen by me.)
DD. Curt Miindel, Els'assische Volkslieder, p. 12,
No 10, a fragment of fifteen verses. As Anna sits by
the Rhine combing her hair, Heinrich comes along on
his horse, sees her weep, and asks why. It is not for
gold and not for goods, but because she is to die that
day. Heinrich draws his sword, runs her through, and
rides home. He is asked why his sword is red, and says
he has killed two doves. They say the dove must be
Anna.
32 b. H, line 10. Read: umbrunnen.
39 a, line 1. Read: contributed by Hoffmann.
39 a, third paragraph. Kozlowski, Lud, p. 54, No 15,
furnishes a second and inferior but still important form
of A (Masovian).
A b. Ligar (afterwards Jasia, Golo) bids Kasia take
all she has. She has already done this, and is ready
to range the world with him. Suddenly she asks, after
they have been some time on their way, What is that
yonder so green? Jasia replies, Our house, to which
we are going. They go on further, and Kasia again
inquires abruptly, What is that yonder so white V
"That is my eight wives, and you shall be the ninth:
you are to die, and will be the tenth." "Where is
the gold, the maidens' gold?" "In the linden, Ka-
sia, in the linden; plenty of it." "Let me not die so
wretchedly; let me draw your sword for once." She
drew the sword, and with one stroke Jasia's head was
off.
39 b. To the Polish versions are further to be added:
NN, Piosnki wiesniacze znad Dzwiny, p. 41, No 51;
OO, Roger, p. 78, No 138; PP, Roger, p. 69, No 125;
QQ, ib., p. 79, No 140 ; RR, p. 81, No 142; SS, p. 79,
No 139. The last three are imperfect, and QQ, RR,
have a beginning which belongs elsewhere. Jasia sug-
gests to Kasia to get the key of the new room from her
mother by pretending headache, and bids her take gold
enough, NN, OO. They go off while• her mother thinks
that Kasia is sleeping, NN, OO, QQ. They come to a
wood, NN, PP (which is corrupt here), SS; first or
last, to a deep stream, NN, OO, QQ, SS; it is red sea
in RR, as in J. Jasia bids Kasia return to her mother,
NN (twice), RR ; bids her take off her rich clothes,
OO, to which she answers that she has not come here
for that. John throws her into the water, NN, OO,
QQ, SS, from a bridge in the second and third. Her
apron catches on a stake or post; she begs John for
help, and gets for answer, " I did not throw you in to
help you: you may go to the bottom," OO. She swims
to a stake, to which she clings, and John hews her in
three, QQ. Fishermen draw out the body, and carry
it to the church, NN, OO. She apostrophizes her hair
in QQ, SS, as in O, I, J, and in the same absurd terms
in QQ as in J. John is pursued and cut to pieces in
OO, also broken on the wheel. PP closely resembles
German ballads of the third class. Katie shouts three
times: at her first cry the grass curls up ; at the second
the river overflows; the third wakes her mother, who
rouses her sons, saying, Katie is calling in the wood.
They find John with a bloody sword; he says he has
killed a dove. They answer, No dove, but our sister,
and maltreat him till he tells what he has done with
his victim: "I have hidden her under the yew-bush;
now put me on the wheel."
39 b, line 13 of the middle paragraph. Read Piosnki
for Pies'ni, and omit the quotation marks in this and the
line before.
40 b, line 2 (the girl's adding her hair to lengthen the
cord). In the tale of the Sea-horse, Schiefner, Awa-
rische Texte, Memoirs of the St Petersburg Academy,
vol. xix, No 6, p. 11 f, a sixty-ell rope being required
to rescue a prince from a well into which he had been
thrown, and no rope forthcoming, the daughter of a sea-
king makes a rope of the required length with her hair,
and with this the prince is drawn out. Dr Reinhold
Kohler, who pointed out this incident to me, refers in
his notes to the texts, at p. vii f, to the song of Siidai
Margin, Radloff, II, 627-31, where Siidai Margin's wife,
having to rescue her husband from a pit, tries first his
horse's tail, and finds it too short, then her hair, which
proves also a little short. A maid is then found whose
hair is a hundred fathoms long, and her hair being tied
on to the horse's tail, and horse, wife, and maid pulling
together, the hero is drawn out. For climbing up by a


490
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
grave: Wicked mother, thou wouldst not let us live to-
gether ; let us rest together. Golovatsky, I, 186, No 8:
a maple from the man's grave, white birch from the
woman's, which mingle their leaves.
Slovenian. Stur, O narodnfch Pi'sni'ch a Povestech
Piemen slovanskych, p. 51: the lovers are buried east
and west, a rose springs from the man's grave, a lily
from the maid's, which mingle their growth.
Wend. Add: Haupt and Schmaler, II, 810, No 81.
Breton. Add: Villemarque', Barzaz Breiz, 'Le
Seigneur Nann et La Fee,' see p. 879, note §, of this
volume.
98 a. Armenian. The ashes of two lovers who
have been literally consumed by a mutual passion are
deposited by sympathetic hands in one grave. Two
rose bushes rise from the grave and seek to intertwine,
but a thorn interposes and makes the union forever im-
possible. (The thorn is creed. The young man was a
Tatar, and his religion had been an insuperable obstacle
in the eyes of the maid's father.) Baron von Haxt-
hausen, Transkaukasia, I, 315 f. (Kohler.)
A Middle High German poem from a MS. of the
end of the 14th century, printed in Haupt's Zeitschrift,
VI, makes a vine rise from the common grave of Pyra-
mus and Thisbe and descend into it again: p. 517.
(Kohler.)
J. Grimm notes several instances of this marvel (not
from ballads), Ueber Frauennamen aus Blumen, Klei-
nere Schriften, II, 379 f, note **.
104.
a
The Paisley Magazine, June 2, 1828, p. 321, communi-
cated by William Motherwell. "Sung to a long, drawling,
monotonous tune."
*****
1 'Gude Earl Brand, I long to see
Faldee faldee fal deediddle a dee
All your grey hounds running over the lea.'
And the brave knights in the valley
2 'Gude lady fair, I have not a steed but one,
But you shall ride and I shall run.'
3 They 're ower moss and they 're ower mure,
And they saw neither rich nor pure.
4 Until that they came to auld Karl Hude;
He's aye for ill and never for gude.
5 'Gude Earl Brand, if ye love me,
Kill auld Karl Hude, and gar him die.'
6 'O fair ladie, we 'll do better than sae:
Gie him a penny, and let him gae.'
7 'Gude Earl Brand, whare hae ye been,
Or whare hae ye stown this lady sheen?'
8 'She's not my lady, but my sick sister,
And she's been at the wells of Meen.'
9 'If she was sick, and very sair,
She wadna wear the red gold on her hair.
10 'Or if she were sick, and like to be dead,
She wadna wear the ribbons red.'
11 He cam till he cam to her father's gate,
And he has rappit furious thereat
12 'Where is the lady o this hall?'
'She's out wi her maidens, playing at the
ball.*
13 'If you 'll get me fyfteen wale wight men,
Sae fast as I 'll fetch her back again.'
14 She's lookit ower her left collar-bane:
'O gude Earl Brand, we baith are taen.'
15 'Light down, light down, and hold my steed;
Change never your cheer till ye see me
dead.
16 'If they come on me man by man,
I 'll be very laith for to be taen.
17 'But if they come on me one and all,
The sooner you will see me fall.'
18 O he has killd them all but one,
And wha was that but auld Karl Hude.
19 And he has come on him behind,
And put in him the deadly wound.
20 O he has set his lady on,
And he's come whistling all along.
21 'Gude Earl Brand, I see blood :'
'It's but the shade o my scarlet robe.'
22 They cam till they cam to the water aflood;
He's lighted down and he's wushen aff the
blood.
23 His mother walks the floor alone:
'O yonder does come my poor son.


492
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
23 'What will I do wi your lady fair?'
'Marry her to my eldest brother.'
The brawest knight i Airly
211. to her. 21l, 22 are written as one stanza.
I
A stall-copy lent me by Mrs Alexander Forbes, Liberton,
Edinburgh.
1 'Rise up, rise up, Lord Douglas,' she said,
'And draw to your arms so bright;
Let it never be said a daughter of yours
Shall go with a lord or a knight.
2 'Rise up, rise up, my seven bold sons,
And draw to your armour so bright;
Let it never be said a sister of yours
Shall go with a lord or a knight.'
3 He looked over his left shoulder,
To see what he could see,
And there he spy'd her seven brethren bold,
And her father that lov'd her tenderly.
4 'Light down, light down, Lady Margret,' he
said,
'And hold my steed in thy hand,
That I may go fight with your seven brethren
bold,
And your father who's just at hand.'
5 O there she stood, and bitter she stood,
And never did shed a tear,
Till once she saw her seven brethren slain,
And her father she lovd so dear.
6 'Hold, hold your hand, William,' she said,
'For thy strokes are wondrous sore;
For sweethearts I may get many a one,
But a father I neer will get more.'
7 She took out a handkerchief of holland so
fine
And wip'd her father's bloody wound,
Which ran more clear than the red wine,
And forked on the cold ground.
8 'O chuse you, chuse you, Margret,' he said,
'Whether you will go or bide!'
'I must go with you, Lord William,' she said,
'Since you 've left me no other guide.'
9 He lifted her on a milk-white steed,
And himself on a dapple grey,
With a blue gilded horn hanging by his side,
And they slowly both rode away.
10 Away they rode, and better they rode,
Till they came to yonder sand,
Till once they came to yon river side,
And there they lighted down.
11 They lighted down to take a drink
Of the spring that ran so clear,
And there she spy'd his bonny heart's blood,
A running down the stream.
12 'Hold up, hold up, Lord William,' she says,
'For I fear that you are slain ;'
''T is nought but the shade of my scarlet
clothes,
That is sparkling down the stream.'
13 He lifted her on a milk-white steed,
And himself on a dapple grey,
With a blue gilded horn hanging by his side,
And slowly they rode away.
14 Ay they rode, and better they rode,
Till they came to his mother's bower;
Till once they came to his mother's bower,
And down they lighted there.
15 'O mother, mother, make my bed,
And make it saft and fine,
And lay my lady close at my back,
That I may sleep most sound.'
16 Lord William he died eer middle o the night,
Lady Margret long before the morrow;
Lord William he died for pure true love,
And Lady Margret died for sorrow.
17 Lord William was bury'd in Lady Mary's kirk,
The other in Saint Mary's quire;
Out of William's grave sprang a red rose,
And out of Margret's a briar.
18 And ay they grew, and ay they threw,
As they wad fain been near;
And by this you may ken right well
They were twa lovers dear.
105 b. D. 10. For Kinlock (twice) read Kinloch;
and read I, 330.


494
ADDITIONS AND, CORRECTIONS
l2. And I 'll gie the hail o my father's land.
2. The first tune that the bonnie fiddle playd,
'Hang my sister Alison,' it said.
8. 'I wad gie you.'
186 a. R b. Read: Lanarkshire.
V
Campbell MS., II, 88.
1 There dwelt twa sisters in a bower,
Benorie, O Benorie
The youngest o them was the fairest flower.
In the merry milldams o Benorie
2 There cam a wooer them to woo,
■ , • • •
3 He's gien the eldest o them a broach and a real,
Because that she loved her sister weel.
At etc.
4 He's gien the eldest a gay penknife,
He loved the youngest as dear as his life.
At etc.
5 'O sister, O sister, will ye go oer yon glen,
And see my father's ships coming in?'
At etc.
6 'O sister dear, I darena gang,
Because I'm feard ye throw me in.'
The etc.
7 'O set your foot on yon sea stane,
And was yeer hands in the sea foam.'
At etc.
8 She set her foot on yon sea stane,
To wash her hands in the sea foam.
At etc.
9 .
But the eldest has thrown the youngest in.
The etc.
10 'O sister, O sister, lend me your hand,
And ye 'se get William and a' his land.'
At etc.
11 The miller's daughter cam out clad in red,
Seeking water to bake her bread.
At etc.
12 'O father, O father, gae fish yeer mill-dam,
There's either a lady or a milk-[whitej swan.'
In etc.
13 The miller cam out wi his lang cleek,
And he cleekit the lady out by the feet.
From the bonny milldam, etc.
14 Ye wadna kend her pretty feet,
The American leather was sae neat.
In etc.
15 Ye wadna kend her pretty legs,
The silken stockings were so neat tied.
In etc.
16 Ye wadna kend her pretty waist,
The silken stays were sae neatly laced.
In etc.
17 Ye wadna kend her pretty face,
It was sae prettily preend oer wi lace.
In etc.
18 Ye wadna kend her yellow hair,
It was sae besmeared wi dust and glar.
In etc.
19 By cam her father's fiddler fine,
And that lady's spirit spake to him.
From etc.
20 She bad him take three taits o her hair,
And make them three strings to his fiddle sae
rare.
At etc.
21 'Take two of my fingers, sae lang and sae
white,
And make them pins to your fiddle sae neat.'
At etc.
22 The ae first spring that the fiddle played
Was, Cursed be Sir John, my ain true-love.
At etc.
23 The next spring that the fiddle playd
Was, Burn burd Hellen, she threw me in.
The etc.


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
497
151.
L
Campbell MSS, II, 19.
1 There were three ladies playing at the ba,
With a hey and a lilly gay
When the King o Fairies rode by them a'.
And the roses they grow sweetlie,
2 The foremost one was clad in blue;
He askd at her if she'd be his doo.
3 The second of them was clad in red;
He askd at her if she'd be his bride.
4 The next of them was clad in green;
He askd at her if she'd be his qneen.
5 'Go you ask at my father then,
And you may ask at my mother then.
6 'You may ask at my sister Ann,
And not forget my brother John.'
7 '0 I have askd at your father then,
And I have askd at your mother then.
8 'And I have askd at your sister Ann,
But I've quite forgot your brother John.'
9 Her father led her down the stair,
Her mother combd down her yellow hair.
10 Her sister Ann led her to the cross,
And her brother John set her on her horse.
11 'Now you are high and I am low,
Give me a kiss before ye go.'
12 She's lootit down to gie him a kiss,
He gave her a deep wound and didna miss.
13 And with a penknife as sharp as a dart,
And he has stabbit her to the heart.
14 'Ride up, ride up,' says the foremost man,
'I think our bride looks pale an wan.'
15 'Ride up, ride up,' says the middle man,
'I see her heart's blude trinkling down.'
16 'Ride on, ride,' says the Fairy King,
'She will be dead lang ere we win hame.'
17 'O I wish I was at yonder cross,
Where my brother John put me on my horse.
18 'I wish I was at yonder thorn,
I wad curse the day that ere I was born.
19 'I wish I was at yon green hill,
Then I wad sit and bleed my fill.'
20 'What will you leave your father then?'
'The milk-white steed that I ride on.'
21 'What will you leave your mother then?'
'My silver Bible and my golden fan.'
22 'What will ye leave your sister Ann?'
'My good lord, to be married on.'
23 'What will ye leave your sister Pegg?'
'The world wide to go and beg.'
24 'What will you leave your brother John?'
'The gallows-tree to hang him on.'
25 'What will you leave your brother's wife?'
'Grief and sorrow to end her life.'
Burden in all but 1, 2, 13, lilly hey; in 16, 17, 18,
spring sweetlie; in 22, smell sweetlie.
M
Campbell MSS, II, 26.
1 There was three ladies playing at the ba,
With a hay and a lilly gay
A gentleman cam amang them a'.
And the roses grow sweet aye
2 The first of them was clad in yellow,
And he askd at her gin she'd be his marrow.
3 The next o them was clad in green;
He askd at her gin she'd be his queen.
4 The last o them [was] clad in red;
He askd at her gin she'd be his bride.
5 'Have ye asked at my father dear?
Or have ye asked my mother dear?
6 'Have ye asked my sister Ann?
Or have ye asked my brother John?'
63


498
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
7 'I have asked yer father dear, 151. green cross.
And I have asked yer mother dear. IT2, bleed.
8 'I have asked yer sister Ann,
But I've quite forgot your brother John.'
9 Her father dear led her thro them a',
Her mother dear led her thro the ha.
10 Her sister Ann led her thro the closs,
And her brother John stabbed her on her
horse.
11 'Ride up, ride up,' says the foremost man,
'I think our bride looks pale and wan.'
12 'Ride up,' cries the bonny bridegroom,
'1 think the bride be bleeding.'
13 'This is the bludy month of May,
Me and my horse bleeds night and day.
14 'O an I were at yon green hill,
I wad ly down and bleed a while.
15 'O gin I was at yon red cross,
I wad light down and corn my horse.
1G 'O an I were at yon kirk-style,
I wad lye down and soon be week'
17 When she cam to yon green hill,
Then she lay down and bled a while.
18 And when she cam to yon red cross,
Then she lighted and corned her horse.
19 'What will ye leave your father dear?'
'My milk-white steed, which cost me dear.'
20 'What will ye leave your mother dear?'
'The bludy clothes that I do wear.'
21 'What will ye leave your sister Ann?'
'My silver bridle and my golden fan.'
22 'What will ye leave your brother John?'
'The gallows-tree to hang him on.'
23 'What will ye leave to your sister Pegg?'
'The wide world for to go and beg.'
'24 When she came to yon kirk-style,
Then she lay down, and soon was week
N
Dr Joseph Robertson's Note-Book, January 1, 1830, No 4.
Then out bespak the foremost priest:
Wi a heigh ho and a lilly gay
I think she's bleedin at the breast.
The flowers they spring so sweetly
12. Lord Randal.
P. 151.
B. Add: Kinloch MSS, VII, 89.
D. Read: a. 'Lord Randal,' Minstrelsy, etc. b.
'Lord Rannal,' Campbell MSS, II, 2G9.
I. Add: h. Communicated by Mr George M. Rich-
ardson, i. Communicated by Mr George L. Kittredge.
K. b. Insert after Popular Rhymes: 1826, p. 295.
Add: d. 'The Crowdin Dou,' Kinloch MSS, I, 184.
Add: P. 'Lord Ronald, my son,' communicated by
Mr Macmath, of Edinburgh.
Q. 'Lord Randal,' Pitcairn's MSS, III, 19.
R. 'Little wee toorin dow,' Pitcairn's MSS, III, 13,
from tradition.
153 a. I failed to mention, though I had duly noted
them, three versions of ' L'Avvelenato,' which are cited
by Professor D'Ancona in his Poesia popolare Italians,
pp 106 ff.
D. The Canon Lorenzo Panciatichi refers to the bal-
lad in a ' Cicalata in lode della Padella e della Frit-
tura,' recited at the Crusca, September 24, 1656, and
in such manner as shows that it was well known. He
quotes the first question of the mother, "Dove andastii
a cena," etc. To this the son answered, he says, that
he had been poisoned with a roast eel: and the mother
asking what the lady had cooked it in, the reply was,
In the oil pot.
E. A version obtained by D'Ancona from the singing
of a young fellow from near Pisa, of which the first four
stanzas are given. Some verses after these are lost, for
the testament is said to supervene immediately.
F. A version from Lecco, which has the title, derived
from its burden, ' De lu cavalieri e figliu de re,' A.
Trifone Nutrieati Briganti, Intorno ai Canti e Racconti
popolari del Leccese, p. 17. The first four stanzas are
cited, and it appears from these that the prince had
cooked the eel himself, and, appropriately, in a gold
pan.
154 a, first paragraph. F is given by Meltzl, Acta
Comparationis, 1880, columns 143 f, in another dialect.
154 b. Magyar. The original of this ballad, 'A
megetett Ja,nos,' ' Poisoned John' (as would appear, in
the Szekler idiom), was discovered by the Unitarian
bishop Kriza, of Klausenburg, and was published by
him in J. Arany's ' Koszoru,' in 1864. It is more ex-
actly translated by Meltzl in the Acta Comparationis


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
501
s
Communicated to Percy by Rev. P. Parsons, of Wye, near
Ashford, Kent, April 19, 1775: taken down by a friend of
Mr Parsons " from the spinning-wheel, in Suffolk."
1 'Where have yon been today, Randall, my
son?
Where have you been today, my only man?'
'I have been a hunting, mother, make my bed
soon,
For I'm sick at the heart, fain woud lie down.
Dear sister, hold my head, dear mother, make
my bed,
I am sick at the heart, fain woud lie down.'
2 'What have you eat today, Randal, my son?
What have you eat today, my only man?'
'I have eat an eel; mother, make,' etc.
3 'What was the colour of it, Randal, my son?
What was the colour of it, my only man?'
'It was neither green, grey, blue nor black,
But speckled on the back; make,' etc.
4 'Who gave you eels today, Randal, my son?
Who gave you eels today, my only man?'
'My own sweetheart; mother, make,' etc.
5 'Where shall I make your bed, Randal, my
son?
Where shall I make your bed, my only man?'
'In the churchyard; mother, make,' etc.
6 'What will you leave her then, Randall, my
son?
What will you leave her then, my only man?'
'A halter to hang herself; make,' etc.
166 a. Insert after C:
D. b. Disordered; b 1 = a 1 ; b 2 = a 4 ; b 3 =
a 51-a -|_a 2s,4; b 4 = a 3 ; a 2L 2, 5*4, are
wanting.
b. Is. been at the hunting.
82. I fear ye've drunk poison.
3* = a 2*. I supd wi my auntie.
4L s = a 8l 2. your supper.
This copy may be an imperfect recollection of a.
166 b.
I. h. Four stanzas only, 1, 2, 6, 7.
I2. my own little one.
1*. at the heart . . . and fain.
61. will you leave mother.
71. will you leave grandma. 7s. a rope,
k. Seven stanzas.
Is. to see grandmother.
I4. sick at heart, and fain.
2*. Striped eels fried.
3 = a 6, d 5, h 8.
8L 2. Your grandmother has poisoned you.
3s. I know it, I know it.
4 = a 6. 41,2. would you leave mother.
5 = a 8, b 9, h 7.
51,2. would you leave sister.
5*. A box full of jewels.
6 == a 7; 7 = a 8.
6L *. would you leave grandmother.
6*. A rope for to hang her.
7L s. O where shall I make it.
K. Add after o:
d. I1. my bonnie wee crowdin, and always.
21. frae your stepmither.
22. She gied me a bonnie wee fish, it was baith
black and blue.
51. my ain wee dog.
61. And whare is your ain wee dog.
62. It laid down its wee headie and deed,
And sae maun I do nou.
Q. "The second, third, fourth, and fifth stanzas
were very much similar to the set Lord Ronald, in
Scott's Border Minstrelsy, and as Mr Robertson was
hurried he did not take down the precise words."
MS., p. 21.
Ronald is changed to Randal in 6, 7, but is left in 8.
R. Written in four-line stanzas.
13. Edward.
P. 168 a, first paragraph. Add: Swedish E, Amin-
son, Bidrag till Sodermanlands Kulturhistoria, m, 37,
eight stanzas. Nine stanzas of Finnish B are trans-
lated by Schott, Acta Comparationis, 1878, IV, cols
132, 133. The murder here is for wife-seduction, a
peculiar and assuredly not original variation.
168 b. B is translated by Adolph von Mardes, p. 27;
by Graf von Platen, II, 829, Stuttgart, 1847 ; after Her-
der into Magyar, by Dr Karl von Szasz.
14. Babylon; or, The Bonnie Banks o
Fordie.
P. 172 a. Swedish. Professor George Stephens
points me to two localized prose outlines of the story,
one from Sm&land, the other from Skane; 'Truls och
bans barn,' in the Svenska Fornminnesfbreningens
Tidskrift, II, 77 f.
15. Leesome Brand.
P. 179 a. Swedish. II. Add: I, ' Risa lill,* Wig-
strbm, Folkdiktning, II, 28.


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
503
marriage, and espouses the right woman. Miklosisch,
Ueber die Mundarten der Zigeuncr, IV, Marchen u.
Lieder, 15th Tale, pp 52-55, at the end of a story of the
class referred to at p. 401 f. (Kohler.)
A personage appeared at Magdeburg in 1348 in the
disguise of a pilgrim, asked for a cup of wine from the
archbishop's table, and, in drinking, dropped into the
cup from his mouth the seal ring of the margrave
Waldemar, supposed to have been long dead, but whom
he confessed or avowed himself to be. Kloden, Dip-
Iomatische Geschichte des fur falsch erkliirten Mark-
grafen Waldemar, p. 189 f. (Kohler.)
A wife who long pursues her husband, lost to her
through spells, drops a ring into his broth at the feast
for his second marriage, is recognized, and they are
happily reunited: The Tale of the Hoodie, Campbell,
West Highland Tales, I, 63-66.
In a pretty Portuguese ballad, which has numerous
parallels in other languages, a long-absent husband,
after tormenting his wife by telling her that she is a
widow, legitimates himself by saying, Where is your
half of the ring which we parted? Here is mine: ' Bella
Infanta,' Almeida-Garrett, II, 11, 14, Braga, Cantos p.
do Archipelago Acoriano, p. 300; 'Dona Infanta,'
'Dona Catherina,' Braga, Komanceiro Geral, pp 3 f, 7.
See, further, for ring stories, Wesselofsky, Neue
Beitrage zur Geschichte der Salomonsage, in Archiv
fur Slavische Philologie, VI, 397 f; Hahn, Neugriech-
ische M'archen, No 25.
The cases in which a simple ring is the means of
recognition or confirmation need, of course, not be mul-
tiplied.
200 a, line twenty-four. For Alesha read Alyosha.
205. G. In Kinloch MSS, VII, 117. After " from
the recitation of my niece, M. Kinnear, 23 August,
1826," is written in pencil "Christy Smith," who may
have been the person from whom Miss Kinnear derived
the ballad, or another reciter. Changes are made in
pencil, some of which are written over in ink, some
not. The printed copy, as usual with Kinloch, differs
in some slight respects from the manuscript.
I
a. From the recitation of Miss Jane Webster, formerly of
Airds of Kells, now of Dairy, both in the Stewartry of Kirk-
cudbright, December 12, 1882. b. From Miss Jessie Jane
Macmath and Miss Agnes Macmath, nieces of Miss Web-
ster, December 11, 1882: originally derived from an old
nurse. Communicated by Mr Macmath, of Edinburgh.
*****
1 She gave him a gay gold ring,
Hey lillelu and how lo lan
But he gave her a far better thing.
With, my hey down and a hey diddle downie
2 He gave her a silver wan,
With nine bright laverocks thereupon.
*****
3 Young Hynd Horn is come to the lan,
There he met a beggar man.
4 'What news, what news do ye betide?'
'Na news but Jeanie's the prince's bride.'
5 'Wilt thou give me thy begging weed?
And I 'll give thee my good grey steed.
6 'Wilt thou give me thy auld grey hair?
And I 'll give ye mine that is thrice as fair.'
7 The beggar he got on for to ride,
But young Hynd Horn is bound for the bride.
8 First the news came to the ha,
Then to the room mang the gentles a'.
9 'There stands a beggar at our gate,
Asking a drink for young Hynd Horn's sake.'
10 'I 'll ga through nine fires hot
To give him a drink for young Hynd Horn's
sake.'
11 She gave him the drink, and he dropt in the
ring;
The lady turned baith pale an wan.
12 'Oh got ye it by sea, or got ye it by lan?
Or got ye it off some dead man's han?'
13 'I got it not by sea, nor I got it not by lan,
But I got it off thy milk-white han.'
14 'I 'll cast off my dress of red,
And I 'll go with thee and beg my bread.
15 'I 'll cast off my dress of brown,
And follow you from city to town.
16 'I 'll cast off my dress of green,
For I am not ashamed with you to be seen.'
17 'You need not cast off your dress of red,
For I can support thee on both wine and
bread.


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
505
one day she saw Jesus pass. She wept a fountain of
tears to wash his feet, and dried his feet with her
tresses. Then she asked for a penance. She wished
to go into a cave without door or windows, sleep on the
bare ground, eat raw herbs, and drink a little salt water;
and this she did. In ' La Maddalena,' Guerrini, Al-
cuni C. p. romagnoli, p. 7, there is no penance.
22. St Stephen and Herod.
P. 286 a. Spanish. Mild's new edition, Romance-
rillo Catalan, No 31, 'El romero acusado de robo,'
pp 86-38, adds six copies, not differing in anything
important. In C, the youth, un estudiant, n'era ros
com un fil d'or, blanch com Santa Catarina.
I may note that Thomas Becket stands by his vo-
taries when brought to the gallows as effectually as St
James. See Robertson, Materials, etc., I, 369, 471, 615,
524.
238. Note J should have been credited to R. Kbh-
ler.
238 b, second paragraph. Professor George Stephens
informs me that the miracle of the cock is depicted,
among scenes from the life of Jesus, on an antependium
of an altar, derived from an old church in Slesvig, and
now in the Danish Museum. Behind a large table sits
a crowned woman, and at her left stands a crowned
man, who points to a dish from which a cock has
started up, with beak wide open. At the queen's right
stands an old woman, simply clad and leaning on a
staff. This picture comes between the Magi announc-
ing Christ's Birth and the Massacre of the Innocents,
and the crowned figures are judged by Professor Ste-
phens to be Herod and Herodias. Who the old woman
should be it is not easy to say, but there can be no con-
nection with St James. The work is assigned to the
last part of the fourteenth century.
239. Most of the literature on the topic of the res-
toration of the roasted cock to life is collected by Dr
R. Kbhler and by Ferdinand Wolf, in Jahrbiicher fur
romanische u. englische Literatur, III, 58ff, 67f. Dr
Kbhler now adds these notes : The miracle of St James,
in Hermann von Fritslar's Heiligenleben, Pfeiffer's
Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, I,
168 f; Hahn, Das alte Passional (from the Golden Le-
gend), p. 223, v. 47-p. 225, v. 85 ; Liitolf, Sagen, Briiuche
und Legenden aus Lucern, u. s. w., p. 367, No 334;
von Alpenburg, Deutsche Alpensagen, p. 137, No 135;
Sepp, Altbayerischer Sagenschatz, pp 652 ff, 656 f.
239 b. Three stone partridges on a buttress of a church
at Miihlhausen are thus accounted for. In the early
days of the Reformation a couple of orthodox divines,
while waiting dinner, were discussing the prospect of the
infection spreading to their good city. One of them,
growing warm, declared that there was as much chance
of that as of the three partridges that were roasting in
the kitchen taking flight from the spit. Immediately
there was heard a fluttering and a cooing in the region
of the kitchen, the three birds winged their way from
the house, and, lighting on the buttress of Mary Kirk,
were instantly turned to stone, and there they are.
Thiiringen und der Harz, mit ihren Merkwiirdigkei-
ten, u. s. w., "VI, 20 f. (Kbhler.)
240 a. The monk Andrius has the scene between
Judas and his mother as in Cursor Mundi, and attrib-
utes to Greek writers the opinion that the roasted cock
was the same that caused Peter's compunction. Mus-
safia, Sulla legenda del legno della Croce, Sitz. Ber.
der phil.-hist. Classe der Wiener Akad., LXIII, 206,
note. (Kbhler.)
"About the year 1850 I was on a visit to the rector
of Kilmeen, near Clonakilty, in the county of Cork.
My friend brought me to visit the ruins of an old cas-
tle. Over the open fireplace in the great hall there
was a stone, about two or three feet square, carved
in the rudest fashion, and evidently representing our
Lord's sufferings. There were the cross, the nails, the
hammer, the scourge; but there was one piece of
sculpture which I could not understand. It was a sort
of rude semi-circle, the curve below and the diameter
above, and at the junction a figure intended to repre-
sent a bird. My friend asked me what it meant. I
confessed my ignorance. 'That,' said he, 'is the
cock. The servants were boiling him for supper, but
when the moment came to convict the apostle he
started up, perched on the side of the pot, and aston-
ished the assembly by his salutation of the morning.'"
Notes and Queries, 5th series, IX, 412 a. (Kbhler.)
A heathen in West Gothland (Vestrogothia) had
killed his herdsman, Torsten, a Christian, and was re-
proached for it by Torsten's wife. Pointing to an ox
that had been slaughtered, the heathen answered: Tam
Torstenum tuum, quem sanctum et in coelis vivere ex-
istimas, plane ita vivum credo prout hunc bovem quem
in frusta caedendum conspicis. Mirum dictu, vix verba
finiverat, cum e vestigio bos in pedes se crexit vivus,
stupore omnibus qui adstabant attonitis. Quare sacel-
lum in loco eodem erectum, multaque miraeula, praiser-
tim in pecorum curatione, patrata. Ioannis Vastovii
Vitis Aquilonia, sive Vita? Sanctorum regni Svec-goth-
ici, emend, et illustr. Er. Benzelius filius, Upsalise,
1708, p. 59. (Kbhler.)
240 b. Man begegnet auf alten Ilolzschnitten einer
Abbildung von Christi Geburt, welche durch die dabei
stehenden Thiere erklart werden soil. Der Hahn
auf der Stange kr'ahet da: Christus nalns est! der
Ochse briillt mit uberschnappender Stimme drein:
Ubi t und das Lammlein blaheret die Antwort: Bethle-
hem! Rochholz, Alemannisches Kinderlied und Kin-
derspiel aus der Schweiz, p. 69 f. (Kbhler.)
241 a. Wer sind die ersten Vorbothen GottesV Der
Hahn, weil er kraht, " Christ ist geboren." Der Tau-
ber, weil er ruft, " Wo?" Und der Ziegenbock, weil er
schreit, "Z' Bethlehem." Pater Amaud Baumgarten,
Aus der volksmiissigen Ueberlieferung der Heimat,
I, Zur volksthumlichen Naturkunde, p. 94. (Kbhler.)
Hahn : Kikeriki 1 Gott der Herr lebt!
t
64


506
ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
Ochs: Wo? Wo?
Geiss : Mah ! zu Bethlehem!
Simrock, Das deutscho Kinderbuch, 2d ed., p. 173,
No 719; 3d ed., p. 192, No 787. (Kohler.)
Quando Christo nasceu disse o gallo: Jesus-Christo
e nd . . . a . . . a . . . do (niido). J. Leite de Vas-
concellos, Tradicdes populares de Portugal, p. 148, No
285 b.
242. Note. Add : W. Creizenach, Judas Ischarioth
in Legende und Sage des Mittelalters, in Paul and
Braune's Beitrage, II, 177 ff.
25. Willie's Lyke-Wake.
P. 247 b. Add: E. 'Willie's Lyke-Wake.' a. Bu-
chan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 51. b.
Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 122.
249 b. Swedish. Add: D. Aminson, Bidrag till
Siidermanlands Kulturhistoria, n, 18.
French. 'Le Soldat au Convent,' Victor Smith,
Vielles Chansons recueillies en Velay et en Forez, p.
24, No 21, or Romania, VII, 73; Fleury, Literature
Orale de la Basse Normandie, p. 810, ' La Religieuse ;'
Poesies populaires de la France, III, fol. 289, fol. 297.
A soldier who has been absent some years in the wars
returns to find his mistress in a convent; obtains per-
mission to see her for a last time, puts a ring on her
finger, and then "falls dead." His love insists on con-
ducting his funeral; the lover returns to life and car-
ries her off.
249 b. A. Magyar. The ballad of 'Handsome
Tony' is also translated by G. Heinrich, in Ungarische
Revue, 1883, p. 155.
The same story, perverted to tragedy at the end, in
Golovatsky, II, 710, No 13, a ballad of the Carpa-
thian Russians in Hungary.
250. Dr R. Kohler points out to me a German copy
of A, B, C, which I had overlooked, in Schriier, Kin
Ausfiug nach Gottschee, p. 266 ff, ' Hansel junc.' The
mother builds a mill and a church, and then the young
man feigns death, as before. But a very cheap tragic
turn is given to the conclusion when the young man
springs up and kisses his love. She falls dead with
fright, and he declares that since she has died for him
he will die for her. So they are buried severally at
one and the other side of the church, and two lily
stocks are planted, which embrace " like two real mar-
ried people ; " or, a vine grows from one and a flower
from the other.
252. This is the other form referred to at p. 247 a.
E
a. Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 51. b.
Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs, I, 122.
1 'If my love loves me, she lets me not know,
That is a dowie chance;
I wish that I the same could do,
Tho my love were in France, France,
Tho my love were in France.
2 'O lang think I, and very lang,
And lang think I, I true;
But lang and langer will I think
Or my love o me rue.
3 'I will write a broad letter,
And write it sae perfite,
That an she winna o me rue,
I 'll bid her come to my lyke.'
4 Then he has written a broad letter,
And seald it wi his hand,
And sent it on to his true love,
As fast as boy could gang.
5 When she looked the letter upon,
A light laugh then gae she;
But ere she read it to an end,
The tear blinded her ee.
6 'O saddle to me a steed, father,
O saddle to me a steed;
For word is come to me this night,
That my true love is dead.'
7 'The steeds are in the stable, daughter,
The keys are casten by;
Ye cannot won to-night, daughter,
To-morrow ye 'se won away.'
8 She has cut aff her yellow locks,
A little aboon her ee,
And she is on to Willie's lyke,
As fast as gang could she.
9 As she gaed ower yon high hill head,
She saw a dowie light;
It was the candles at Willie's lyke,
And torches burning bright
10 Three o Willie's eldest brothers
Were making for him a bier;
One half o it was glide red gowd,
The other siller clear.
11 Three o Willie's eldest sisters
Were making for him a sark;
The one half o it wras cambric fine,
The other needle wark.


ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS
507
12 Out spake the youngest o his sisters,
As she stood on the fleer:
How happy would our brother been,
If ye'd been sooner here!
13 She lifted up the green covering,
And gae him kisses three;
Then he lookd up into her face,
The blythe blink in his ee.
14 O then he started to his feet,
And thus to her said he:
Fair Annie, since we 're met again,
Parted nae mair we 'se be.
b. "Given with some changes from the way the
editor has heard it sung."
2*. I trow. 3K But L 3s. That gin.
7*. the night
28. Burd Ellen and Young Tamlane.
P. 2S6. This ballad is in Pitcairn's MSS, III, 49.
It was from the tradition of Mrs Gammel. The last
word of the burden is Machey, not May-hay, as in
Maidment.
29. The Boy and the Mantle.
P. 270 b. If a girl takes a pot of boiling water off
the fire, and the pot ceases to boil, this is a sign of lost
modesty. Lammert, Volksmedizin und inedizinischer
Aberglaube in Bayern, u. s. w., p. 146.
30. King Arthur and King Cornwall.
P. 274. A Galien in verse has been found in the
library of Sir Thomas Piiillipps, at Cheltenham. Ro-
mania, XII, 5.
31. The Marriage of Sir Gawain.
P. 292 b, last paragraph but one. Add: 'Gorvomb,'
Arnason, II, 375, Powell, Icelandic Legends, Second
Series, 36G, 'The Paunch.' Gorvomb, a monstrous
creature, in reward for great services, asks to have the
king's brother for husband, and in bed turns into a
beautiful princess. She had been suffering under the
spells of a step-mother.
39. Tarn Lin.
P. 335. Add: J. 'Young Tamlane,' Kinloch MSS,
V, 891.
335 a. The stanzas introduced into I a were from
"Mr Beattie of Meikledale's Tamlane," as appears
from a letter of Scott to Laidlaw, January 21, 1803.
(W. Macmath.-)
336 b, third paragraph. Add: Aminson, Bidrag,
etc., iv, 6, No 27.
Fourth paragraph, line 9. Read: in it which.
338 a. An old woman is rejuvenated by being burnt
to bones, and the bones being thrown into a tub of
milk: Ralston, Russian Folk-Tales, p. 59, ' The Smith
and the Demon;' Afanasief, Legendui, No 31, from
Dahl's manuscript collection.
356. The following is perhaps the version referred
to by Dr Joseph Robertson : see p. 335.
J
"A fragment of Young Tamlane," Kinloch MSS, V, 391.
In Dr John Hill Burton's handwriting, and perhaps from
the recitation of Mrs Robertson (Christian Leslie), mother
of Dr Joseph Robertson.
*****
1 'The night, the night is Halloween,
Tomorrow's Hallowday,
2 'The night, the night is Halloween,
Our seely court maun ride,
Thro England and thro Ireland both,
And a' the warld wide.
* * * * i *
3 'The firsten court that comes ye bye,
You '1l lout, and let them gae;
The seconden court that comes you bye,
You 'll hail them reverently.
4 'The thirden court that comes you by,
Sae weel's ye will me ken,
For some will be on a black, a black,
And some will be on a brown,
But I will be on a bluid-red steed,
And will ride neist the queen.





Henry Young and Sons' Catalogue of Books,
BALLADS.—THE ENGLISH and SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS.
edited by Prof. F. J. Child, with Notes, Glossaries, and Indexes:THE
SPLENDID EDITION printed by the Riverside Press, hi their best style on
extra laid paper, Fine Bright Set, in tho original 10 parts, as issued to subscribers,
Rare, £12 18, 188i•8 imperial 8vo
This groat collection is by far the most exhaustive in our language, and it" will remain for all
time the final one upon the subject." Only 1,000 copies were printed, all of which were
speedily absorbed, many by pubhc institutions8 consequently, although a modern book, it is
now rare and expensive, and as time lapses it must necessarily become rarer and more expen-
sive. The ballads are printed in their entirety and purity from the most authentic sources,
no text being taken at second hand, and in the case of ballads extant in a variety of forms,
all the more important versions are given. Each ballad has a proper preface, there is also an
index of liullud Titles, an index of Matters and Literature, a Bibhography, and a Biography
of Prof. Child with his portrait. See also Nog. ">8-66.