B. The ballad of ‘Kellyburnbraes,’ Johnson’s Museum, No 379, p. 392, was composed by Burns, as he has himself informed us, “from the old traditional version.” “The original ballad, still preserved by tradition,” says David Laing, “was much improved in passing through Burns’s hands:” Museum, IV, *389, 1853. Cromek, Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song, p. 83, 1810, gives us what he calls the “Original of Burns’s Carle of Kelly-Burn Braes,” remarking, with some effrontery, that there is reason to believe that Burns had not seen the whole of the verses which constitute this copy. Allan Cunningham, Songs of Scotland, II, 199, undertook “to make a more complete version than has hitherto appeared” out of Burns, Cromek, and some “fugitive copies.” So we get the original from none of them, but are, rather, further from it at each step. Whether B has come down pure, unaffected by Burns and Cromek, it is impossible to say. That it shows resemblances to both copies is not against its genuineness, if there was a fair leaven of the popular ballad in each of these reconstructions; and it is probable that there would be, at least in Burns’s.
A curst wife who was a terror to demons is a feature in a widely spread and highly humorous tale, Oriental and European. See Benfey, Pantschatantra, I, 519-34; and, for a variety which is, at the beginning, quite close to our ballad, Ralston, Russian Folk-Tales, p. 39 (Afanasief, I, No 9).
Cromek’s ballad is translated by Wolff, Halle der Völker, I, 93, Hausschatz, p. 230.
A
Dixon, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs, p. 210, Percy Society, vol. xvii.
1
There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,
(Chorus of whistlers)
There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,