In I-L the father makes the servant-lad fight with the nine high-born suitors.
The wife tries to keep her husband at home, A-E, I; but he is confident that all will go well, and that he shall come back to her early, A, B, C, I. She kisses (washes) and combs him, and helps to arm him, B, C, E, F, G, I; so J, K.[[99]] He finds nine armed men awaiting him on the braes or houms of Yarrow, A, E-G, I-M, ten B, D.[[100]] They ask if he has come to hawk, hunt (drink), or fight; he replies that he has come to fight, C, E, I; cf. A 5, 6. Five (four) he slays and four (five) he wounds, A, B, D, E, I, J, K; in F he kills all the nine; in L he gets no further than the seventh; in G he kills all but one.
These nine, after the way of ballads, should be the lady’s brothers, and such they are in A 7, 8. Three of them, but only three, should be the lady’s brothers according to B 1–5, C 1–5. Three brethren are charged by the husband with a message to his lady in D 8, and these might be his brothers-in-law. The message is sent in E 9 by a good-brother, or wife’s brother, John, who clearly was not in the fight in E, though the husband says he is going to meet this brother John in A 6. This brother-in-law of E is probably intended by brother in I 8.
After the hero has successively disposed of his nine or ten antagonists (he takes them ‘man for man’), he is stabbed from behind in a cowardly way, A, B, C, E, I, L, N, by somebody. The tradition is much blurred here; it is a squire out of the bush, a cowardly man, a fause lord. An Englishman shoots him with an arrow out of a bush in D. But other reports are distinct. The lady’s father runs him through (not from behind) in J, K. Her brother springs from a bush behind and runs him through, L. Her brother John comes behind him and slays him, N. Up and rose her brother James and slew him, M. In E “that stubborn knight” comes behind him and runs his body through, and that (a) “stubborn lord” is the author of his death in G, F. Taking E 2, 8, 9 together, the stubborn knight, at least in E, may be interpreted as good-brother John, whose treachery is feared in E 2, who is prominent in A 6, and who is expressly said to slay his sister’s true-love in N. On the whole, the preponderance of tradition is to the effect that the hero was treacherously slain by his wife’s (love’s) brother.
Word of her husband’s death is sent or carried to the wife by her brother, brother John, A, E, L, N; her or his three brothers, D 8; her or his brother, I 8; his man John, C 12, by mistake; her father (?), J, K; her sister Anne, F, G, H. The wife has had a dream that she, her lord or true-love and she, had been pulling green heather (birk) in Yarrow, A, C-F, I-M, O.[[101]] The dream is explained to signify her lord’s death, and she is enjoined to fetch him home. In A, the dream occurs before the fight and is double, of pulling green heather and of her love coming headless home; in B, the lady dreams that her lord was sleeping sound in Yarrow, and in the highly vitiated N that ‘he had lost his life.’
The wife hurries to Yarrow;[[102]] up a high, high hill and down into the valley, where she sees nine (ten) dead men, E, F, G, M (nine well-armed men, wrongly, H).[[103]] She sees her true-love lying slain, finds him sleeping sound, in Yarrow, A, B, J, K. She kisses him and combs his hair, A, E, F, G, I, L, M; she drinks the blood that runs from him, E 12, F 11, G 7, M 9.[[104]]
Her hair is five quarters long; she twists it round his hand and draws him home, C; ties it round his middle and carries him home, D. She takes three lachters of her hair, ties them tight round his middle and carries him home, B. His hair is five quarters long! she ties it to her horse’s mane and trails him home, K.[[105]] The carrying strikes one as unpractical, the trailing as barbarous. In L, after the lover is slain, the surviving lords and her brother trail him by the heels to Yarrow water and throw him into a whirlpool. The lady, searching for him, sees him ‘deeply drowned.’ His hair, which we must suppose to float, is five quarters long; she twines it round her hand and draws him out. Raising no petty questions, it appears enough to say that this is the only version of fourteen in which the drowning occurs, and that the drowning of the lover is the characteristic of No 215, the next following ballad, which has otherwise been partly confused with this.[[106]]
The lady’s father urges her to restrain her grief; he will wed her with as good a lord as she has lost, or a better; she rejects his suggestions. Her heart breaks, B, I; she dies in her father’s arms, D, F-H, J-L, being at the time big with child, B, D, F-H, J.
The lady tells her father to wed his sons, B 12; his seven sons, J 18. So ‘Clerk Saunders’ (of which this may be a reminiscence, for we do not hear of seven sons in this ballad), No 69, G 28; cf. A 26, E 19.
She bids him take home his ousen and his kye, E 15, F 12, G 8, H 9. This I conceive to be an interpolation by a reciter who followed the tradition cited from Hogg further on.