[H]. From recitation, 1881.
[I]. 'Tiranti, my Son.' a. Communicated by a lady of Boston, b. By an aunt of the same. c. By a lady of New Bedford. d. By a lady of Cambridge. e, f, g. By ladies of Boston.
[J]. 'The Bonnie Wee Croodlin Dow,' Motherwell's MS., p. 238.
[K]. a. 'The Croodlin Doo,' Chambers, Scottish Ballads, p. 324. b. 'The Wee Croodlen Doo,' Chambers, Popular Rhymes, 1842, p. 53. c. Johnson's Museum, by Stenhouse and Laing, IV, 364*.
[L]. 'Willie Doo,' Buchan's MSS, II, 322, and Ballads, II, 179.
[M]. 'The Croodin Doo,' Chambers, Popular Rhymes, 1870, p. 51.
[N]. Kinloch MSS, V, 347.
[O]. 'The Croodlin Doo.' From a manuscript belonging to the Fraser-Tytler family.
The title 'Lord Randal' is selected for this ballad because that name occurs in one of the better versions, and because it has become familiar through Scott's Minstrelsy. Scott says that the hero was more generally termed Lord Ronald: but in the versions that have come down to us this is not so. None of these can be traced back further than a century. F and D were the earliest published. Jamieson remarks with respect to G (1814): "An English gentleman, who had never paid any attention to ballads, nor ever read a collection of such things, told me that when a child he learnt from a playmate of his own age, the daughter of a clergyman in Suffolk, the following imperfect ditty." I, a version current in eastern Massachusetts, may be carried as far back as any. a, b derive from Elizabeth Foster, whose parents, both natives of eastern Massachusetts, settled, after their marriage, in Maine, where she was born in 1789. Elizabeth Foster's mother is remembered to have sung the ballad, and I am informed that the daughter must have learned it not long after 1789, since she was removed in her childhood from Maine to Massachusetts, and continued there till her death. 'Tiranti' ['Taranti'] may not improbably be a corruption of Lord Randal.