[101]. It will be remembered that green is an unlucky color: see II, 181 f.
[102]. She tears the ribbons from her head in D 11, I 12, when she hears the tidings: but this belongs to the bride in the ballad which succeeds, No 215.
[103]. Ten in F, to include the lord with his nine foemen. But why only nine in E, G, M? Is it not because one of the brothers had not been mortally wounded, the brother who is said to kill the husband (lover) in L, M, N, and who may reasonably be supposed to do this in E, F, G? Such a matter would not be left in obscurity in the original ballad.
[104]. This is disagreeable, assuredly, and unnatural too. It is ‘drank,’ probably, that is softened to ‘wiped’ in A 14. Scott, to avoid unpleasantness, reads ‘She kissd them (his wounds) till her lips grew red;’ which would not take long. This is all nicely arranged in L: ‘She laid him on her milk-white steed, and bore him home from Yarrow; she washed his wounds in yon well-strand, and dried him wi the hollan.’ The washing and drying are done in J on the spot, where there might have been water, but no hollan.
[105]. The reciters of A and J, whether they gave what they had received, or tried to avoid the material difficulties about the hair, graze upon absurdity. Her hair was three quarters long, she tied it round ‘her’ (for his?) white hause-bane—and died, A 15. His hair was three quarters long, she’s wrapt it round her middle—and brought it home, J 16. The hair comes in again in the next two ballads, and causes difficulty. Wonderful things are done with hair in ballads and tales: see I, 40 b, and the note at 486 b.
[106]. L 19 is also found only in that copy. It seems to me, but only because L does not strike me as being of an original cast—rather a ballad improved by reciters,—to be an adaptation of No 215, A 2.
[107]. James Chalmers, in Archæologia Scotica, III, 261, says that Hamilton’s ballad was contributed to the second volume of the Tea Table Miscellany in 1724. It is not in the Dublin edition of 1729. It is at p. 242 of the London edition of 1733; in Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonius, II, 34, of the same year; at p. 46 of the first edition of [Hamilton’s] Poems on Several Occasions, Glasgow, 1748. The author died in 1754. The copy in the second edition of Hamilton’s Poems, 1760, p. 67, says Chalmers, is somewhat altered.
In Hamilton’s ballad it is a lover, and not a husband, who is slain, and he is thrown into the Yarrow. It is a question whether Hamilton’s ballad did not affect tradition in the case of J, K, L, particularly L. The editorial Douglas in A 11 is from Hamilton 24. ‘Wi her tears she bathed his wounds,’ I 133, looks like Hamilton 91. The ‘dule and sorrow’ of O 42 is a recurring phrase in Hamilton, and ‘slain the comeliest swain,’ O 43, is in Hamilton 63.
In Hamilton’s ballad the slayer of the lover endeavors to induce the lady to marry him, as is done in the Icelandic ballad spoken of under No 89, II, 297 f.
A song by Ramsay, T. T. M., Dublin, 1729, p. 139, has nearly the same first four lines as Hamilton’s ballad, and these have been thought to be traditional.