[35] All the German versions appear to have been originally in the two-line stanza.
[36] 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.
[37] Both D and E have attached to them this final stanza:
'Odilia, why are thy shoes so 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.
[38] 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.
[39] The number eleven is remarkably constant in the German ballads, being found in G, 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, Danish F, have ten; German A, B, Danish E, Norwegian I, have nine; German C, D, seven; Danish G has nineteen. 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.
[40] This stroke of realism fails only in M, N, R, of this second class.
[41] Apparently to a Ribold ballad, of which no other trace has been found in German. See further on in this volume.