B. Madel (M'Adel), the oldest of a king's two daughters, is stolen by a king's son to be his leman, and taken to a far country. They have seven sons, and he forsakes her and betroths himself to her sister. He asks his mother what present she will make his bride; she has seven mills which she will give her. Madel, asked in like manner, replies, My old stockings and shoes. Madel asks the queen-mother if she may go to the bridal, for the king is to marry, and is answered as in A. When she comes to the bride-loft they pour wine for her, and she drops tears in the cup. The bride asks who this is, and the king replies, One of my nieces from a far country, who came to do me honor, but only puts me to shame. You are not telling me the truth, says the bride. The king owns that it is Madel, his leman, with her seven sons. The bride recognizes a brooch[78] stiff with gold and silk. "There are but two such in all Flanders; I and my sister each had one." She tears the crown from her own head and puts it on her sister, saying, King, marry her in my place. The brooch is distinctly made the means of identification, which it by all likelihood was originally in all the Scandinavian ballads, though only Swedish C has retained (or restored) this feature.
The German ballad resembles Dutch A closely. The queen-mother gives Adelheid permission to go to the wedding, and her seven sons must walk before her. At the feast the king offers her to drink; she cannot drink for the grief he has caused her. The bride sees her weeping, and orders food and drink to be offered her (cf. English J 36), but she cannot touch them. The king pretends that she is one of his nieces who has lived with him seven years [is fatigued by her journey, B]. The bride exclaims, I see the fore-span (by your fore-span, A), you are driving a pair! In A she asks the fair woman's name and country. Her country is over the Rhine, and thence she had been stolen. "Then you must be my sister," declares the bride somewhat hastily, gives up her seat and the crown, puts her ring on Adelheid's finger, and bids the news be sent to father and mother.
The lyric beauty of the Scottish version of this ballad, especially conspicuous in A, C, E, has been appreciatingly remarked by Grundtvig.
But Fair Annie's fortunes have not only been charmingly sung, as here; they have also been exquisitely told in a favorite lay of Marie de France, 'Le Lai del Freisne.' This tale, of Breton origin, is three hundred years older than any manuscript of the ballad. Comparison will, however, quickly show that it is not the source either of the English or of the Low German and Scandinavian ballad. The tale and the ballads have a common source, which lies further back, and too far for us to find.
The story of the lay is this.[79] There were two knights in Brittany, living on contiguous estates, and both married. The lady of one of the two gave birth to two boys, and the father sent information of the event to his neighbor and friend. His friend's wife was a scoffing, envious woman, "judging always for the worse," and said,
I marvel much, thou messenger,
Who was thy lordës counsellor,
That did advise him not to spare
This shame to publish everywhere,
That his wife hath two children bore:
Well may each man know therefore
Two men have been with her in bower,[80]
Which is to both but small honour.
In the course of the same year the woman that had made this hateful insinuation was brought to bed of twin girls. To save her reputation she was ready even to put one of them to death, but a favorite damsel in her house suggested a better way out of her perplexity, and that was to leave one of the children at the door of a convent. The child, wrapped in a rich pall that had been brought from Constantinople, with a jewelled ring bound to its arm to show that it was well born, was taken away in the night to a considerable distance, and was laid between the branches of a great ash-tree in front of a nunnery. In the morning it was discovered by the porter, who told his adventure to the abbess; and the abbess, having inspected the foundling, resolved to bring it up under the style of her niece. The girl, who received the name La Freisne from the tree in which she had been found, turned out a marvel of beauty and of all good qualities. A gentleman of the vicinity fell in love with her, and made large gifts to the monastery to constitute himself a lay-brother, and so have access to her without exciting suspicion. He obtained her love, and in the end induced her to fly with him to his château. This she did with sufficient deliberation to take with her the robe and ring which were the tokens of her birth; for the abbess had told her how she had been found in the ash, and had committed these objects to her care. She lived a good while with the knight as his mistress, and made herself loved by everybody; but his retainers had repeatedly remonstrated with him for not providing himself with a lawful successor, and at last forced him to marry the daughter and heiress of a gentleman near by. On the day of the nuptials La Freisne let no sign of grief or anger escape her, but devoted herself to the bride so amiably as even to win over the mother, who had accompanied her daughter, and had at first felt much uneasiness at the presence of a possible rival. Finding the marriage bed not decked with sufficient elegance, La Freisne took from a trunk the precious pall from Constantinople, and threw it on for a coverlet. When the bride's mother was about to put her daughter to bed, this robe was of course the first object that met her eyes. Her heart quaked. She sent for the chamberlain, and asked where the cloth came from. The chamberlain explained that "the damsel" had put it on to improve the appearance of the bed. The damsel was summoned, and told what she knew: the abbess who brought her up had given her the robe, and with it a ring, and charged her to take good care of them. A sight of the ring was asked; the lady cried, You are my daughter, and fainted. When she recovered she sent for her husband and confessed everything. The husband was only too happy to find that the damsel tant pruz è sage è bele was his daughter. The story was repeated to La Freisne, and then to the knight and to the archbishop who had performed the marriage ceremony. The marriage was dissolved the next day, and La Freisne formally espoused by the knight, who received with her half her father's heritage. The sister went home and made a rich marriage.
The common ground-work of the ballads and the lay is, that a man who has formed an irregular union with a woman whose family he does not know undertakes matrimony with another person, who is discovered on the day of the nuptials to be sister to his leman. A jewel in the possession of the latter, by itself or together with another token, reveals and proves the kinship in the lay and in the Scandinavian-German ballad, but there is no trace of such an instrumentality in the Scottish.
Single features, or even several features, of the story of Fair Annie or of La Freisne occur in many other ballads and tales, but there is no occasion to go into these resemblances here. A Norse ballad has almost every point in 'Fair Annie' but the sisterly relation of leman and bride: see 'Slegfred og Brud,' Grundtvig, No 255, and 'Thomas o Yonderdale,' an apocryphal ballad of Buchan's, further on. Bare mention may be made of the beautiful Spanish romance 'Las dos Hermanas,' found also in Portuguese, in which the queen of a Moor or Turk discovers her sister in a slave who has been presented to her, or captured at her request.[81]