What is supplied in the ballad to make up for such passages in the romance as are omitted is, however, no less strictly traditional than that which is retained. Indeed, were it not for the name Dissawar, the romance might have been plausibly treated, not as the source of the ballad, but simply as a kindred story; for the exquisite tale of ‘The Goose Girl’ presents every important feature of ‘The Lord of Lorn,’ the only notable difference being that the young lord in the ballad exchanges parts with the princess in the tale, an occurrence of which instances have been, from time to time, already indicated.
In ‘Die Gänsemagd,’ Grimms, No 89, II, 13, ed. 1857, a princess is sent by her mother to be wedded to a bridegroom in a distant kingdom, with no escort but a maid. Distressed with thirst, the princess orders her maid to get down from her horse and fetch her a cup of water from a stream which they are passing. The maid refuses; she will no longer be servant, and the princess has to lie down and drink from the stream. So a second and a third time: and then the servant forces her mistress, under threat of death, to change horses and clothes, and to swear to keep the matter secret at the court to which they are bound. There the maid is received as princess, while the princess is put to tending geese with a boy. The counterfeit princess, fearing that her mistress’s horse, Falada, may tell what he has observed, induces the young prince to cut off Falada’s head. The princess has the head nailed up on a gate through which she passes when she takes out the geese, and every morning she addresses Falada with a sad greeting, and receives a sad return. The goose-boy tells the old king of this, and the next day the king hides behind the gate and hears what passes between the goose-girl and Falada. The king asks an explanation of the goose-girl when she comes back in the evening, but the only answer he elicits is that she has taken an oath to say nothing. Then the king says, If you will not tell me your troubles, tell them to the stove; and the princess creeps into the oven and pours out all her grief: how she, a king’s daughter, has been made to change places with her servant, and the servant is to marry the bridegroom, and she reduced to tend geese. All this the king hears from outside of the room through the stovepipe, and he loses no time in repeating it to his son. The false maid is dragged through the streets in a barrel stuck full with nails, and the princess married to the prince to whom she had been contracted.
The passage in the ballad in which the Lord of Lorn relates to the gelding, within hearing of the duke’s daughter, the injuries which he had sworn to conceal has, perhaps, suffered some corruption, though quibbling as to oaths is not unknown in ballads. The lady should be believed to be out of earshot, as the king is thought to be by the goose-girl. Unbosoming one’s self to an oven or stove is a decidedly popular trait; “the unhappy and the persecuted betake themselves to the stove, and to it bewail their sufferings, or confide a secret which they may not disclose to the world.”[50] An entirely similar passage (but without an oath to secrecy) occurs in Basile’s Pentamerone, II, 8, where a girl who has been shamefully maltreated by her uncle’s wife tells her very miserable story to a doll, and is accidentally overheard by the uncle. The conclusion of the tale is quite analogous to that of the goose-girl.
A
Percy MS., p. 73, Hales and Furnivall, I, 180.
1
It was the worthy Lord of Learen,
He was a lord of a hie degree;
He had noe more children but one sonne,