A, from Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, is found also in Motherwell's MS., but without doubt was derived from Buchan. Though injured by the commixture of foreign elements, A has still much of the original story. B has, on the contrary, so little that distinctively and exclusively belongs to this story that it might almost as well have been put with the following ballad, '[Sheath and Knife],' as here. A third ballad, 'The Birth of Robin Hood,' preserves as much of the story as A, but in an utterly incongruous and very modern setting, being, like '[Erlinton],' C, forced into an absurd Robin Hood framework.
The mixture of four-line with two-line stanzas in A of course comes from different ballads having been blended, but for all that, these ballads might have had the same theme. Stanzas 33-35, however, are such as we meet with in ballads of the '[Earl Brand]' class, but not in those of the class to which 'Leesome Brand' belongs. In the English ballads, and nearly all the Danish, of the former class, there is at least a conversation between son and mother [father], whereas in the other the catastrophe excludes such a possibility. Again, the "unco land" in the first stanza, "where winds never blew nor cocks ever crew," is at least a reminiscence of the paradise depicted in the beginning of many of the versions of 'Ribold and Guldborg,' and stanza 4 of 'Leesome Brand' closely resembles stanza 2 of '[Earl Brand],' A.[157] Still, the first and fourth stanzas suit one ballad as well as the other, which is not true of 33-35.
The name Leesome Brand may possibly be a corruption of Hildebrand, as Earl Brand almost certainly is; but a more likely origin is the Gysellannd of one of the kindred Danish ballads.
The white hind, stanzas 28, 30, is met with in no other ballad of this class, and, besides this, the last four stanzas are in no kind of keeping with what goes before, for the "young son" is spoken of as having been first brought home at some previous period. Grundtvig has suggested that the hind and the blood came from a lost Scottish ballad resembling 'The Maid Transformed into a Hind,' D.g.F, No 58. In this ballad a girl begs her brother, who is going hunting, to spare the little hind that "plays before his foot." The brother nevertheless shoots the hind, though not mortally, and sets to work to flay it, in which process he discovers his sister under the hind's hide. His sister tells him that she had been successively changed into a pair of scissors, a sword, a hare, a hind, by her step-mother, and that she was not to be free of the spell until she had drunk of her brother's blood. Her brother at once cuts his fingers, gives her some of his blood, and the girl is permanently restored to her natural shape, and afterwards is happily married. Stanzas similar to 36-41 of A and 12-16 of B will be found in the ballad which follows this, to which they are especially well suited by their riddling character; and I believe that they belong there, and not here. It is worthy of remark, too, that there is a hind in another ballad, closely related to No 16 ('The Bonny Hind'), and that the hind in 'Leesome Brand' may, in some way not now explicable, have come from this. The confounding of 'Leesome Brand' with a ballad of the 'Bonny Hind' class would be paralleled in Danish, for in 'Redselille og Medelvold' T (and perhaps I, see Grundtvig's note, V, 237), the knight is the lady's brother.
The "auld son" in B, like the first bringing home of the young son in A 45, 47, shows how completely the proper story has been lost sight of. There should be no son of any description at the point at which this stanza comes in, and auld son should everywhere be young son. The best we can do, to make sense of stanza 3, is to put it after 8, with the understanding that woman and child are carried off for burial; though really there is no need to move them on that account. The shooting of the child is unintelligible in the mutilated state of the ballad. It is apparently meant to be an accident. Nothing of the kind occurs in other ballads of the class, and the divergence is probably a simple corruption.
The ballad which 'Leesome Brand' represents is preserved among the Scandinavian races under four forms.
Danish. I. 'Bolde Hr. Nilaus' Lön,' a single copy from a manuscript of the beginning of the 17th century: Grundtvig, V, 231, No 270. II. 'Redselille og Medelvold,' in an all but unexampled number of versions, of which some sixty are collated, and some twenty-five printed, by Grundtvig, most of them recently obtained from tradition, and the oldest a broadside of about the year 1770: Grundtvig, V, 234, No 271. III. 'Sönnens Sorg,' Grundtvig, V, 289, No 272, two versions only: A from the middle of the 16th century; B three hundred years later, previously printed in Berggreen's Danske Folkesange, I, No 83 (3d ed.). IV. 'Stalbroders Kvide,' Grundtvig, V, 301, No 273, two versions: A from the beginning of the 17th century, B from about 1570.
Swedish. II. A, broadside of 1776, reprinted in Grundtvig, No 271, V, 281, Bilag 1, and in Jamieson's Illustrations, p. 373 ff, with a translation. B, 'Herr Redevall,' Afzelius, II, 189, No 58, new ed. No 51. C, 'Krist' Lilla och Herr Tideman,' Arwidsson, I, 352, No 54 A. D, E, F, G, from Cavallius and Stephens' manuscript collection, first printed by Grundtvig, No 271, V, 282 ff, Bilag 2-5. H, 'Rosa lilla,' Eva Wigström, Folkvisor från Skåne, in Ur de nordiska Folkens Lif, af Artur Hazelius, p. 133, No 8. III. A single version, of date about 1650, 'Moder och Son,' Arwidsson, II, 15, No 70.
Norwegian. II. Six versions and a fragment, from recent tradition: A-E, G, first printed by Grundtvig, No 271, V, 284 ff, Bilag 6-11; F, 'Grivilja,' in Lindeman's Norske Fjeldmelodier, No 121. III. Six versions from recent tradition, A-F, first printed by Grundtvig, No 272, V, 297 ff, Bilag I-6.
Icelandic. III. 'Sonar harmur,' Íslenzk Fornkvæði, I, 140 ff, No 17, three versions, A, B, C, the last, which is the oldest, being from late in the 17th century; also the first stanza of a fourth, D.