Now you have torn off all my clothes, and done me sin and shame,
I beg you, before God most high, tell me what is your name.
Magnus, he answers, is his father, and Gertrude his mother, and he himself is Olaf, and was brought up in the woods. By this she recognizes that he is her own brother. Olaf begs her to go back to the convent, and say nothing, bearing her sorrow as she may. This she does. But every autumn the king makes a feast, and invites to it all the nuns in the cloister. Margaret is missed, and asked for. Is she sick or dead? Why does she not come to the feast, like other merry dames? The wicked abbess answers, Your daughter is neither sick nor dead; she goes with child, like other merry dames. The king rides off to the cloister, encounters his daughter, and demands who is the father of her child. She replies that she will sooner die than tell. The king leaves her in wrath, but returns presently, resolved to burn the convent, and Margaret in it, Olaf comes from the wood, tired and weary, sees the cloister burning, and quenches the flames with his heart's blood.
The Icelandic ballad, 'Margrètar kvæði,' Íslenzk Fornkvæði, Grundtvig and Sigurðsson, No 14, has the same story. It is, however, the man who brings on the discovery by asking the woman's parentage. The editors inform us that the same subject is treated in an unprinted Icelandic ballad, less popular as to style and stanza, in the Arne Magnussen collection, 154.
The story of Kullervo, incorporated in what is called the national epic of the Finns, the Kalevala, has striking resemblances with the ballads of the Bonny Hind class. While returning home in his sledge from a somewhat distant errand, Kullervo met three times a girl who was travelling on snow-shoes, and invited her to get in with him. She rejected his invitation with fierceness, and the third time he pulled her into the sledge by force. She angrily bade him let her go, or she would dash the sledge to pieces; but he won her over by showing her rich things. The next morning she asked what was his race and family; for it seemed to her that he must come of a great line. "No," he said, "neither of great nor small. I am Kalervo's unhappy son. Tell me of what stock art thou." "Of neither great nor small," she answered. "I am Kalervo's unhappy daughter." She was, in fact, a long-lost sister of Kullervo's, who, when a child, had gone to the wood for berries, and had never found her way home. She had wept the first day and the second; the third and fourth, the fifth and sixth, she had tried every way to kill herself. She broke out in heart-piercing lamentations:
'O that I had died then, wretched!
O that I had perished, weak one!
Had not lived to hear these horrors,
Had not lived this shame to suffer!'
So saying she sprang from the sledge into the river, and found relief under the waters.
Kullervo, mad with anguish, went home to his mother, and told her what had happened. He asked only how he might die,—by wolf or bear, by whale or sea-pike. His mother vainly sought to soothe him. He consented to live only till the wrongs of his parents had been revenged. His mother tried to dissuade him even from seeking a hero's death in fight.
'If thou die in battle, tell me,
What protection shall remain then
For the old age of thy father?'
'Let him die in any alley,
Lay his life down in the house-yard.'
'What protection shall remain then
For the old age of thy mother?'
'Let her die on any straw-truss;
Let her stifle in the stable.'
'Who shall then be left thy brother,
Who stand by him in mischances?'
'Let him pine away in the forest,
Let him drop down on the common.'
'Who shall then be left thy sister,
Who stand by her in mischances?'
'When she goes to the well for water,
Or to the washing, let her stumble.'
Kullervo had his fill of revenge. Meanwhile father, brother, sister, and mother died, and he came back to his home to find it empty and cold. A voice from his mother's grave seemed to direct him to go to the wood for food: obeying it, he came again to the polluted spot, where grass or flowers would not grow any more. He asked his sword would it like to feed on guilty flesh and drink wicked blood. The sword said, Why should I not like to feed on guilty flesh and drink wicked blood, I that feed on the flesh of the good and drink the blood of the sinless? Kullervo set the sword hilt in the earth, and threw himself on the point. (Kalewala, übertragen von Schiefner, runes 35, 36.)
The dialogue between Kullervo and his mother is very like a passage in another Finnish rune, 'Werinen Pojka,' 'The Bloody Son,' Schröter, Finnische Runen, 124, ed. 1819; 150, ed. 1834. This last is a form of the ballad known in Scottish as ['Edward,' No 13], or of ['The Twa Brothers,' No 49]. Something similar is found in ['Lizie Wan,' No 51].