39. (H.) Line 1.
34. (S.) Line 1.
Scott substitutes Herd’s
As soon as he knew it was Montgomery.
40. (H.) Hogg’s broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, derived from a lost form of the Huntiss of Chevets, named in The Complaynte of Scotland.
35. (S.) Scott omits giving the formula common to the English of 1550 and to Herd. This was the whole of Scott’s editorial alteration. Any one may discover the facts from Professor Kittredge’s useful abbreviation of Child’s collection into a single volume (Nutt. London, 1905). Colonel Elliot quotes Professor Kittredge’s book three or four times, but in place of looking at the facts he abounds in the Higher Criticism. Colonel Elliot says that Scott does not tell us of a single line having been borrowed from Percy’s version. [84b] Scott has only “a single line” to tell of, the fourth line in his stanza xxii., “Till he fell to the ground.”
For the rest, the old English version and Herd’s have many inter-borrowings of stanzas, but we do not know whether a Scot borrowed from an Englishman, or vice versa. Thus, in another and longer traditional version—Hogg’s—more correspondence must be expected than in Herd’s fourteen stanzas. It is, of course, open to scepticism to allege that Hogg merely made his text, invented the two crazy old reciters, and the whole story about them, and his second “pumping of their memories,” invented “Almonshire,” which he could not understand, and invented his last broken stanza on the death of Montgomery, to give the idea that The Huntiss of Chevets was mingled in the recollections of the reciters with The Battle of Otterburn. He also gave the sword in place of the pennon of Percy as the trophy of Douglas, “and the same with intent to deceive,” just as he pretended, in Auld Maitland, not to know what “springwalls” were, and wrote “springs: wall-stanes.” If this probable theory be correct, then Scott was the dupe of Truthful James. At all events, though for three years Scott was moving heaven and earth and Ettrick Forest to find a copy of a Scottish ballad of Otterburn, he did not sit down and make one, as, in Colonel Elliot’s system, he easily could and probably would have done.
Before studying his next ill deed, we must repeat that the Otterburn ballads prove that in early times one nation certainly pirated a ballad of a rival nation, and very ingeniously altered it and inverted the parts of the heroes.
We have next to examine a case in a later generation, in which a maker who was interested in one clan, pirated, perverted, and introverted the rôles of the heroes in a ballad by a maker interested in another clan. Either an Elliotophile perverted a ballad by a Scottophile, or a Scottophile perverted a ballad by an Elliotophile.
This might be done at the time when the ballad was made (say 1620–60). But Colonel Elliot believes that the perversion was inflicted on an Elliotophile ballad by a Scottophile impostor about 1800–1802. The name of this desperate and unscrupulous character was Walter Scott, Sheriff of Ettrick Forest, commonly called Selkirkshire.