‘Lou fil del rey, et bous né fuessés l’aygo!’
‘Tsano d’Oymé, atal fuessés brullado!’
‘Lou fil del rey, et bous fuessés las clappos!’
4. Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight.
P. 24 a. A copy in Christie’s Traditional Ballad Airs, II, 236, ‘May Colvine and Fause Sir John’ (of which no account is given), is a free compilation from D b, D a, and C c.
The Gaelic tale referred to by Jamieson may be seen, as Mr Macmath has pointed out to me, in Rev. Alexander Stewart’s ’Twixt Ben Nevis and Glencoe, Edinburgh, 1885, p. 205 ff. Dr Stewart gives nine stanzas of a Gaelic ballad, and furnishes an English rendering. The story has no connection with that of No 4.
25 b, note. ‘Halewyn en het kleyne Kind,’ in the first volume of the MS. Poésies pop. de la France, was communicated by Crussemaker, and is the same piece that he printed. Other copies in Lootens et Feys, No 45, p. 85 (see p. 296); Volkskunde, II, 194, ‘Van Mijn-heerken van Bruindergestem.’
27 a, note †. Add: MacInness, Folk and Hero Tales [Gaelic], p. 301, a Highland St George: see I, 487, note.
27 f. Professor Bugge, Arkiv för nordisk Filologi, VII, 120–36, 1891, points out that a Swedish ballad given in Grundtvig, D. g. F. IV, 813 f., F, and here referred to under ‘Hind Etin,’ I, 364 b, as Swedish C, has resemblances with ‘Kvindemorderen.’ Fru Malin is combing her hair al fresco, when a suitor enters her premises; he remarks that a crown would sit well on her head. The lady skips off to her chamber, and exclaims, Christ grant he may wish to be mine! The suitor follows her, and asks, Where is the fair dame who wishes to be mine? But when Fru Malin comes to table she is in trouble, and the suitor puts her several leading questions. She is sad, not for any of several reasons suggested, but for the bridge under which her seven sisters (syskon) lie. ‘Sorrow not,’ he says, ‘we shall build the bridge so broad and long that four-and-twenty horses may go over at a time.’ They pass through a wood; on the bridge her horse stumbles, and she is thrown into the water. She cries for help; she will give him her gold crown. He cares nothing for the crown, and never will help her out. Bugge maintains that this ballad is not, as Grundtvig considered it, a compound of ‘Nökkens Svig’ and ‘Harpens Kraft,’ but an independent ballad, ‘The Bride Drowned,’ of a set to which belong ‘Der Wasserman,’ Haupt and Schmaler, I, 62, No 34, and many German ballads: see Grundtvig, IV, 810 f, and here I, 365 f., 38.
29–37, 486 a. Add: E E, Hruschka u. Toischer, Deutsche Volkslieder aus Böhmen, p. 126, No 35. Like Q, p. 35.