This fine ballad stands by itself, and is not, as might have been expected, found in possession of any people but the Scottish. Yet it has connections, through the principal feature in the story, the retransformation of Tam Lin, with Greek popular tradition older than Homer.
Something of the successive changes of shape is met with in a Scandinavian ballad: 'Nattergalen,' Grundtvig, II, 168, No 57; 'Den förtrollade Prinsessan,' Afzelius, II, 67, No 41, Atterbom, Poetisk Kalender, 1816, p. 44; Dybeck, Runa, 1844, p. 94, No 2; Axelson, Vandring i Wermlands Elfdal, p. 21, No 3; Lindeman, Norske Fjeldmelodier, Tekstbilag til 1ste Bind, p. 3, No 10.
Though many copies of this ballad have been obtained from the mouth of the people, all that are known are derived from flying sheets, of which there is a Danish one dated 1721 and a Swedish of the year 1738. What is of more account, the style of the piece, as we have it, is not quite popular. Nevertheless, the story is entirely of the popular stamp, and so is the feature in it, which alone concerns us materially. A nightingale relates to a knight how she had once had a lover, but a step-mother soon upset all that, and turned her into a bird and her brother into a wolf. The curse was not to be taken off the brother till he drank of his step-dame's blood, and after seven years he caught her, when she was taking a walk in a wood, tore out her heart, and regained his human shape. The knight proposes to the bird that she shall come and pass the winter in his bower, and go back to the wood in the summer: this, the nightingale says, the step-mother had forbidden, as long as she wore feathers. The knight seizes the bird by the foot, takes her home to his bower, and fastens the windows and doors. She turns to all the marvellous beasts one ever heard of,—to a lion, a bear, a variety of small snakes, and at last to a loathsome lind-worm. The knight makes a sufficient incision for blood to come, and a maid stands on the floor as fair as a flower. He now asks after her origin, and she answers, Egypt's king was my father, and its queen my mother; my brother was doomed to rove the woods as a wolf. "If Egypt's king," he rejoins, "was your father, and its queen your mother, then for sure you are my sister's daughter, who was doomed to be a nightingale."[326]
We come much nearer, and indeed surprisingly near, to the principal event of the Scottish ballad in a Cretan fairy-tale, cited from Chourmouzis by Bernhard Schmidt.[327] A young peasant of the village Sgourokepháli, who was a good player on the rote, used to be taken by the nereids into their grotto for the sake of his music. He fell in love with one of them, and, not knowing how to help himself, had recourse to an old woman of his village. She gave him this advice: that just before cock-crow he should seize his beloved by the hair, and hold on, unterrified, till the cock crew, whatever forms she should assume. The peasant gave good heed, and the next time he was taken into the cave fell to playing, as usual, and the nereids to dancing. But as cock-crow drew nigh, he put down his instrument, sprang upon the object of his passion, and grasped her by her locks. She instantly changed shape; became a dog, a snake, a camel, fire. But he kept his courage and held on, and presently the cock crew, and the nereids vanished all but one. His love returned to her proper beauty, and went with him to his home. After the lapse of a year she bore a son, but in all this time never uttered a word. The young husband was fain to ask counsel of the old woman again, who told him to heat the oven hot, and say to his wife that if she would not speak he would throw the boy into the oven. He acted upon this prescription; the nereid cried out, Let go my child, dog! tore the infant from his arms, and vanished.
This Cretan tale, recovered from tradition even later than our ballad, repeats all the important circumstances of the forced marriage of Thetis with Peleus. Chiron, like the old woman, suggested to his protégé that he should lay hands on the nereid, and keep his hold through whatever metamorphosis she might make. He looked out for his opportunity and seized her; she turned to fire, water, and a wild beast, but he did not let go till she resumed her primitive shape. Thetis, having borne a son, wished to make him immortal; to which end she buried him in fire by night, to burn out his human elements, and anointed him with ambrosia by day. Peleus was not taken into counsel, but watched her, and saw the boy gasping in the fire, which made him call out; and Thetis, thus thwarted, abandoned the child and went back to the nereids. Apollodorus, Bibliotheca, III, 13, 5, 6.
The Cretan tale does not differ from the one repeated by Apollodorus from earlier writers a couple of thousand years ago more than two versions of a story gathered from oral tradition in these days are apt to do. Whether it has come down to our time from mouth to mouth through twenty-five centuries or more, or whether, having died out of the popular memory, it was reintroduced through literature, is a question that cannot be decided with certainty; but there will be nothing unlikely in the former supposition to those who bear in mind the tenacity of tradition among people who have never known books.[328]
B 34,
First dip me in a stand of milk,
And then in a stand of water;
Haud me fast, let me na gae,
I'll be your bairnie's father,
has an occult and very important significance which has only very lately been pointed out, and which modern reciters had completely lost knowledge of, as appears by the disorder into which the stanzas have fallen.[329] Immersion in a liquid, generally water, but sometimes milk, is a process requisite for passing from a non-human shape, produced by enchantment, back into the human, and also for returning from the human to a non-human state, whether produced by enchantment or original. We have seen that the serpent which Lanzelet kisses, in Ulrich's romance, is not by that simple though essential act instantly turned into a woman. It is still necessary that she should bathe in a spring (p. 308). In an Albanian tale, 'Taubenliebe,' Hahn, No 102, II, 130, a dove flies into a princess's window, and, receiving her caresses, asks, Do you love me? The princess answering Yes, the dove says, Then have a dish of milk ready to-morrow, and you shall see what a handsome man I am. A dish of milk is ready the next morning; the dove flies into the window, dips himself in the milk, drops his feathers, and steps out a beautiful youth. When it is time to go, the youth dips in the milk, and flies off a dove. This goes on every day for two years. A Greek tale, 'Goldgerte,' Hahn, No 7, I, 97, has the same transformation, with water for milk. Our B 34 has well-water only.[330] Perhaps the bath of milk occurred in one earlier version of our ballad, the water-bath in another, and the two accounts became blended in time.
The end of the mutations, in F 11, G 43, is a naked man, and a mother-naked man in B 33, under the presumed right arrangement; meaning by right arrangement, however, not the original arrangement, but the most consistent one for the actual form of the tradition. Judging by analogy, the naked man should issue from the bath of milk or of water; into which he should have gone in one of his non-human shapes, a dove, swan, or snake (for which, too, a "stand" of milk or of water is a more practicable bath than for a man). The fragment C adds some slight probability to this supposition. The last change there is into "a dove but and a swan;" then Tam Lin bids the maiden to let go, for he'll "be a perfect man:" this, nevertheless, he could not well become without some further ceremony. A is the only version which has preserved an essentially correct process: Tam Lin, when a burning gleed, is to be thrown into well-water, from which he will step forth a naked knight.[331]