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 Färöe 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 unprinted versions. A prose comment upon Danish I has her stabbed by the bridegroom.
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 bridegroom 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, nearly, 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 himself a drunken fool (the passage is borrowed from another ballad): still in L, though successful for the nonce, she comes to the stake and wheel some months after. In H the fiddler dashes the instrument against a stone, seemingly to earn his bribe, but this trait belongs 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 explains that she had been pushed into the water, "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 handsome wedding follows.
Swedish C and nearly all the Norwegian ballads[138] 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, emasculates 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.[139] 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 silver 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,