The heroine in this same ballad is named Helena (Linnich in F); in others (German C, D, E), Odilia. These are names of saints, and this circumstance may tend to show that the woman in the ballad was originally conceived of as rather a saint than a secular character, though in the course of time the story has so changed that the devout widow who sought out her country's enemy in his own camp has been transformed into a young maid who is enticed from home by a treacherous suitor.
It is an original trait in the ballad that the murderer, as is expressly said in many copies, is from a foreign land. According to an English version (E), he comes from the north, as Holofernes does, "venit Assur ex montibus ab aquilone" (Jud. xvi, 5).
The germ of this outlandish knight's bloodthirstiness is found in the truculent part that Holofernes plays in the Bible, his threats and devastations. That the false suitor appears without companions is in keeping with the ballad style of representation; yet we might find suggestions of the Assyrian's army in the swains, the brothers, the stable-boy, whom the maid falls in with on her way home.
The splendid promises made in many of the ballads might have been developed from the passage where Holofernes, whose bed is described as wrought with purple, gold, and precious stones, says to Judith, Thou shalt be great in the house of Nebuchadnezzar, and thy name shall be named in all the earth (xi, 21).
In many forms of the ballad, especially the Dutch and the German, the maid adorns herself splendidly, as Judith does: she even wears some sort of crown in Dutch A 16, German D 8, as Judith does in x, 3, xvi, 10 (mitram).
In the English D, E, F, the oldest Danish, A, and the Polish versions, the maid, like Judith, leaves her home in the night.
The Piedmontese casté, Italian E 1 [there is a castle in nearly all the Italian ballads, and also in Dutch B], may remind us of Holofernes' castra.
The knight's carrying off the maid, lifting her on to his horse in many copies, may well come from a misunderstanding of elevaverunt in Judith x, 20: Et cum in faciem ejus intendisset, adoravit eum, prosternens se super terram. Et elevaverunt eam servi Holofernis, jubente domino suo.[86]
In German A Gert Olbert and Helena are said to ride three days and nights, and in Danish D the ride is for three days; and we may remember that Judith killed Holofernes the fourth day after her arrival in his camp.
The place in which the pair alight is, according to German G 20, a deep dale, and this agrees with the site of Holofernes' camp in the valley of Bethulia. There is a spring or stream in many of the ballads, and also a spring in the camp, in which Judith bathes (xii, 7).