The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
it up, as in #B#, and it cuts his back in two.
Neus, in his Ehstnische Volkslieder, maintains the affinity of
'Kallewisohnes Tod,' No 2, p. 5, with the Ulinger ballads, and even of
his Holepi with the Dutch Halewyn. The resemblance is of the most
distant, and what there is must be regarded as casual. The same of the
Finnish 'Kojoins Sohn,' Schröter, Finnische Runen, p. 114, 115; 'Kojosen
Poika,' Lönnrot, Kanteletar, p. 279.
In places where a ballad has once been known, the story will often be
remembered after the verses have been wholly or partly forgotten, and
the ballad will be resolved into a prose tale, retaining, perhaps, some
scraps of verse, and not infrequently taking up new matter, or blending
with other traditions. Naturally enough, a ballad and an equivalent tale
sometimes exist side by side. It has already been mentioned that
Jamieson, who had not found this ballad in Scotland, had often come upon
the story in the form of a tale interspersed with verse. Birlinger at
one time (1860) had not been able to obtain the ballad in the Swabian
Oberland (where it has since been found in several forms), but only a
story agreeing essentially with the second class of German ballads.
According to this tradition, a robber, who was at the same time a
portentous magician, enticed the twelve daughters of a miller, one after
another, into a wood, and hanged eleven of them on a tree, but was
arrested by a hunter, the brother of the twelve, before he could
dispatch the last, and was handed over to justice. The object of the
murders was to obtain blood for magical purposes. This story had, so to
speak, naturalized itself in the locality, and the place where the
robber's house had been and that where the tree had stood were pointed
out. The hunter-brother was by some conceived of as the Wild Huntsman,
and came to the rescue through the air with a fearful baying of dogs.
(Birlinger in Volksthümliches aus Schwaben, I, 368, No 592, and
Germania, 1st Ser., V, 372.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account