A spell is employed to bring him back, 1, 2, 6, 9.
He comes on a horse, 3, 4, 6-8, 11, 12; in a wagon, 5, 10; on foot, 1, 2, 9.
The verses found in the tales occur in 3 (three times), 4, 5, 6, 12; in 10, a voice from the clouds cries, What hast thou done, to be going off with a dead man?
She is taken to a graveyard. The grave closes over the man, she is left without, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12; both go into the grave, 4, 6, 7, 11.
She breathes out her soul on the grave, 3; she finds herself in the morning in a strange land, of different speech, is seven years in going home, 12.
1, 2, 9, are varieties of one ballad. The man asks the maid to go out with him to the dark wood, 1; to the cherry-tree (trees), 2, 9. After a time, he tells her to go back, he is no longer her lover, but a devil; she turns to dust, 1; the cock crows, he tells her to go home and not look round, to thank God for the cock, because he should have cut off her head, he is no longer her lover but a devil, 2. In 9, the man says his head aches badly, for, after mouldering six years, she had forced him to rise by her spell. The maid tells her mother that her lover is buried under the cherry-trees, mass is said for him; he returns to give thanks for his redemption from hell.[57]
Reverting now to the English tales, we perceive that the Cornish is a very fairly well-preserved specimen of the extensive cycle which has been epitomized. Possibly the full moonshine is a relic of the weird verses which occur in so many copies. The hemp-seed rite is clearly a displacement and perversion of the spell resorted to in five Slavic and two German copies to compel the return of the dead man. It has no sense otherwise, for the maid did not need to know who was to be her lover; she was already bound to one for life and death. The ballad was made up from an imperfect and confused tradition. In pointlessness and irrationality it easily finds a parallel in the 55th tale, as already remarked. The hood and safeguard brought by the ghost represent the clothes which the girl takes with her in numerous copies. Remembering the 9th ballad, where the revenant complains of a headache, caused by the powerful enchantment which had been brought to bear on him, we may quite reasonably suppose that the headache in ‘The Suffolk Miracle,’ utterly absurd to all appearance, was in fact occasioned by a spell which has dropped away from the Suffolk story, but is retained in the Cornish.
M. Paul Sébillot has recently (in 1879) taken down, in that part of Brittany where French is exclusively spoken, a tale which is almost a repetition of the English ballad, and which for that reason has been kept by itself, ‘Les Deux Fiancés,’ Littérature orale de la Haute-Bretagne, p. 197. A young man and a maid have plighted themselves to marry and to be faithful to one another even after death. The young man, who is a sailor, goes on a voyage, and dies without her learning the fact. One night he leaves his tomb, and comes on a white mare, taken from her father’s stable, to get the girl, who is living at a farm at some distance from her own home. The girl mounts behind him: as they go he says, The moon is bright, death is riding with you, are you not afraid? and she answers, I am not afraid, since you are with me. He complains of a headache; she ties her handkerchief round his head. They arrive at the girl’s home; she gets down and knocks. To an inquiry, Who is there? she replies, Your daughter, whom you sent for by my husband that is to be. I have come on horseback with him, and lent him my handkerchief on the way, since he had none. He is now in the stable attending to the horse. They go to the stable and find the mare in a sweat, but no man. The girl then understands that her lover is dead, and she dies, too. They open the man’s grave to bury the two together, and find the girl’s handkerchief on his head. This is the English ballad over again, almost word for word, with the difference that the lover dies at sea, and that the substance of the notable verses is preserved.
In marked and pleasing contrast with most of the versions of the tale with which we have been dealing, in so many copies grotesque and ferocious, with a lover who, from impulses not always clear, from resentment sometimes that his comfort has been disturbed by her unrestrained grief, sometimes that she has been implicated in forcing him by magic to return to the world which he had done with, is bent on tearing his lass to pieces, is a dignified and tender ballad, in which the lovers are replaced by brother and sister. This ballad is found among the Servians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and Albanians, and is very common among the Greeks, both of the mainland and the islands.
Servian. Karadžić, II, 38, No 9, ‘Yovan and Yelitza;’ Talvj, Volkslieder der Serben, 1853, I, 295; Dozon, Chansons p. bulgares, p. 321; Bowring, Servian Popular Poetry, p. 45. Davidović, pp. 10-14, ‘Yovo and Mara,’ No 7; Krek, in Magazin f. d. Litt. d. In- u. Auslandes, p. 652, No 8.