FOOTNOTES:
[51] Mr W. E. A. Axon, in his Lancashire Gleanings, p. 261, speaks of the story of the Spectre Bridegroom as having been current in the neighborhood of Liverpool in the last century, both in an oral and a printed form. But it is plain that what was current, either way, was simply ‘The Suffolk Miracle.’ Of this I have a copy learned in the north of Ireland in 1850 (and very much changed as to form), in which the scene is laid “between Armagh and County Clare.”
[52] Popular Romances of the West of England, collected and edited by Robert Hunt, First Series, pp. 265-72, dating from about 1830.
[53] A portion (or portions) of a Low German tale of this class, the verses and a little more, was the basis of Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ composed in 1773. (As to the particulars of the traditional basis, Erich Schmidt seems to me undoubtedly right: Charakteristiken, p. 219 f.) At the end of the last century, when ‘Lenore’ became well known in England through half a dozen translations, it was maintained that Bürger had taken the idea of his ballad from ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ with which he was supposed to have become acquainted through the copy in Old Ballads, 1723. See The Monthly Magazine, 1796, II, 603. But it is nearly certain that Bürger had not seen, and never saw, the “Old Ballads” of 1723. In 1777 Boie made him acquainted with a book of that title, but this was in all probability Evans’s first collection, which appeared in that year. See Strodtmann, Briefe von und an G. A. Bürger, II, 85, 87. Bürger knew ‘Sweet William’s Ghost’ from Percy’s Reliques, and took a hint or two from that, besides the lover’s name.
[54] I. Sozonovič, Bürger’s ‘Lenore,’ and the related matter in European and Russian popular poetry, Warsaw, 1893 (in Russian). Professor Wollner has furnished me translations of some twenty-five pieces in Sozonovič. See, for German versions of many of the Slavic tales and ballads, Wollner, in Archiv für slavische Philologie, VI, 243-59; Krek, in the same, X, 357-59, and in Magazin für die Litteratur des In- u. Auslandes, 1887, CXII, 629-32, 650-54; Grudziński, Lenore in Polen, 1890, p. 13 ff.; Treichel, in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, II, 144.
[55] 30, 31, 32, 50, have curious popular traits. In 30, 32, the dead man (men) within being unable to render aid, the lover calls to yarn spun on Thursday (on Thursday after the evening meal) to open. A watchman tells the yarn to stay where it was hanged; the girl cuts the skein in two with an axe. In 31 there is no corpse in the house; the lover calls on a ball of thread and a broom, ‘ohne Seele’ (with no centre-piece, no handle) to open. In 50 the dead man within cannot help the man without because a broom is standing on its handle; so the man without calls on a skein of yarn, a pot-hook, a ball of thread, to open. For various reasons these appeals prove bootless.
[56] For German versions of most of the Slavic pieces, Grudziński, as before, p. 27; Wollner, as before, pp. 250, 255 f., 258; Krek, as before, p. 652. 7 also in A. Waldau’s Böhmische Granaten, II, 254, No 354.
‘Lenore’ in Wunderhorn, II, 19, 1808, is to be rejected as spurious, on internal and external evidence. See Pröhle, G. A. Bürger, Sein Leben und seine Dichtungen, 1856, p. 100 f.
[57] In 11 we have to do with a married pair, as in several of the tales. In tale 44 the woman has been twice married, and her first husband comes for her.
[58] No filiation is implied in the above arrangement of the ballads.
[59] The mother demands tokens of her identity, Romaic 11, 12, 21, 22, Albanian 4, 5. Cf. II, 215