Motherwell's one stanza is:
O heard ye eer o a bloody knight
That livd in the west countrie?
For he has stown seven ladies fair,
And drownd them a' in the sea.
[E].
32. of the.
172. But so.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] 'The Elfin Knight' begins very much like A, but perhaps has borrowed its opening stanzas from this ballad. See page 13.
[25] The second stanza, which describes the harping, occurs again in 'Glenkindie' (st. 6).
[26] Perhaps the change from wood, A, to water, B-F, was made under the influence of some Merman ballad, or by admixture with such a ballad; e.g., 'Nøkkens Svig,' Grundtvig, No 39. In this (A) the nix entices a king's daughter away from a dance, sets her on his horse, and rides with her over the heath to a wild water, into which she sinks. It is also quite among possibilities that there was originally an English nix ballad, in which the king's daughter saved herself by some artifice, not, of course, such as is employed in B-F, but like that in A, or otherwise. Maid Heiemo, in Landstad, No 39, kills a nix with "one of her small knives." Had she put him to sleep with a charm, and killed him with his own knife, as Lady Isabel does, there would have been nothing to shock credibility in the story.
Aytoun, Ballads of Scotland, I, 219, 2d ed., hastily pronounces Buchan's ballad not authentic, "being made up of stanzas borrowed from versions of 'Burd Helen' ['Child Waters']." There are, indeed, three successive steps into the water in both ballads, but Aytoun should have bethought himself how natural and how common it is for a passage to slip from one ballad into another, when the circumstances of the story are the same; and in some such cases no one can say where the verses that are common originally belonged. Here, indeed, as Grundtvig remarks, IV, 7, note*, it may well be that the verses in question belonged originally to 'Burd Helen,' and were adopted (but in the processes of tradition) into 'The Water of Wearie's Well;' for it must be admitted that the transaction in the water is not a happy conception in the latter, since it shocks probability that the woman should be able to swim ashore, and the man not.