[128] Cunningham has re-written Scott's version, Songs of Scotland, II, 109, 'The Two Fair Sisters.' He says, "I 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
[129] 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."
[130] 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.
[131] Swedish H begins, "Dear sister, come follow me to the clapping-stone:" "Nay, I have no foul clothes." So F 6, 7, G 4, 5, Färöe 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 buck their clothes snow-white," H; and so Rancken's S nearly.
[132] There are, besides the two fishermen, in Norwegian A, two "twaddere," i.e., landloupers, possibly (Bugge) a corruption of the word rendered pilgrims, Färöe vallarar, Swedish 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 allowed to be harmless vagrants, but scarcely better, seeing that they are ranked with "staff-carls" in Norges Gamle Love, cited by Cleasby and Vigfusson at 'vallari.'
[133] A harp in the Icelandic and Norwegian ballads, Färöe A, B, C, Swedish A, B, D, G, H; a harp in English B, C, G, J. A harp is not named in any of the Danish versions, 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.
[134] Some of the unprinted Norwegian ballads are not completely described, but a departure from the rule of the major part would probably have been alluded to.
[135] 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.
[136] The fourth string is said to speak in Färöe A 30, but no utterance is recorded, and this is likely to be a mistake. In many of the versions, and in this, after the strings have spoken individually, they unite in a powerful but inarticulate concord.