Brome, brome on hill,
The gentle brome on hill, hill,
Brome, brome on Hive hill,
The gentle brome on Hive hill,
The brome stands on Hive hill a.
"A more sanguine antiquary than the editor," says Scott, "might perhaps endeavor to identify this poem, which is of undoubted antiquity, with the 'Broom, broom on hill' mentioned ... as forming part of Captain Cox's collection." Assuredly "Broom, broom on hill," if that were all, would justify no such identification, but the occurrence of Hive hill, both in the burden which Moros sings and in the eighth stanza of Scott's ballad, is a circumstance that would embolden even a very cautious antiquary, if he had received Hive hill from tradition, and was therefore unaffected by a suspicion that this locality had been introduced by an editor from the old song.[367]
Most of the versions give no explicit account of the knight's prolonged sleep. He must needs be asleep when the lady comes to him, else there would be no story; but his heavy slumber, not broken by all the efforts of his horse and his hawk, is as a matter of course not natural; es geht nicht zu mit rechten dingen; the witch-wife of A 4 is at the bottom of that. And yet the broom-flowers strewed on his hals-bane in A 8, B 3, and the roses in D 6, are only to be a sign that the maid had been there and was gone. Considering the character of many of Buchan's versions, we cannot feel sure that C has not borrowed the second and third stanzas from B, and the witch-wife, in the sixth, from A; but it would be extravagant to call in question the genuineness of C as a whole. The eighth stanza gives us the light which we require.
'Ye'll pu the bloom frae aff the broom,
Strew't at his head and feet,
And aye the thicker that ye do strew,
The sounder he will sleep.'
The silver belt about the knight's head in A 5 can hardly have to do with his sleeping, and to me seems meaningless. It is possible that roses are not used at random in D 6, though, like the posie of pleasant perfume in F 9, they serve only to prove that the lady had been there. An excrescence on the dog-rose, rosenschwamm, schlafkunz, kunz, schlafapfel, it is believed in Germany, if laid under a man's pillow, will make him sleep till it is taken away. Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 1008, and Deutsches Wörterbuch (Hildebrand), V, 2753 e.
C makes the lady hide in the broom to hear what the knight will say when he wakes, and in this point agrees with the broadside F, as also in the comment made by the men on their master in stanza 24; cf. F 16.
Mr J. W. Dixon has reprinted an Aldermary Churchyard copy of the broadside, differing as to four or five words only from F, in Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, p. 116, Percy Society, Volume XVII. The editor remarks that A is evidently taken from F; from which it is clear that the pungent buckishness of the broadside does not necessarily make an impression. A smells of the broom; F suggests the groom.[368]
The sleep which is produced in A by strewing the flower of the broom on a man's head and feet, according to a witch's advice, is brought about in two Norse ballads by means not simply occult, but altogether preternatural; that is, by the power of runes. One of these, 'Sömn-runorna,' Arwidsson, II, 249, No 133, is preserved in a manuscript of the end of the seventeenth, or the beginning of the eighteenth, century. The other, 'Sövnerunerne,' Grundtvig, II, 337, No 81, was taken down in 1847 from the singing of a woman seventy-five years of age.
The Swedish ballad runs thus. There is a damsel in our land who every night will sleep with a man, and dance a maid in the morning. The fame of this comes to the ears of the son of the king of England, who orders his horse, thinking to catch this damsel. When he arrives at the castle gate, there stands the lady, and asks him what is his haste. He frankly answers that he expects to get a fair maid's honor for his pains, and she bids him follow her to the upper room. She lays sheets on the bed, and writes strong runes on them. The youth sits down on the bed, and is asleep before he can stretch himself out. He sleeps through that day, and the next, and into the third. Then the lady rouses him. "Wake up; you are sleeping your two eyes out." He is still so heavy that he can hardly stir. He offers her his horse and saddle to report the matter as he wishes. "Keep your horse," she says; "shame fa such liars."
The Danish story is much the same. One of a king's five sons goes to make trial of the maid. She tells him to fasten his horse while she goes before and unlocks; calls to her maid to bring five feather-beds, feather-beds nine, and write a sleep on each of them. He sleeps through three days, and is roused the fourth, with "Wake up, wake up; you have slept away your pluck." He offers her a bribe, as before, which she scornfully rejects, assuring him that he will not be spared when she comes among maids and knights.