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
Another Transylvanian tale, Schuster, p. 433, has a fountain, a thirsty
bride, and doves (two or three) that sing to her, traits which have
perhaps been derived from some Ulinger ballad; but the fountain is of an
entirely different character, and the doves serve a different purpose.
The tale is a variety of 'Fitchers Vogel,' Grimms, No 46, and belongs to
the class of stories to which 'Bluebeard,' from its extensive
popularity, has given name. The magician of 'Fitcher's Vogel' and of
'Bluebeard' becomes, or remains, a preternatural being (a hill-man)
further north, as in Grundtvig's Gamle danske Minder, 1857, No 312, p.
182. There is a manifest affinity between these three species of tales
and our ballad (also between the German and Danish tales and the
Scandinavian ballad of 'Rosmer'), but the precise nature of this
affinity it is impossible to expound. 'Bluebeard,' 'La Barbe Bleue,'
Perrault, Histoires ou Contes du temps passé, 1697, p. 57 (Lefèvre), has
a special resemblance to the German ballads of the second class in the
four calls to sister Anne, which represent the cries to father, mother,
and brother, and agrees with these ballads as to the means by which the
death of the malefactor is brought about.
Looking back now over the whole field covered by this ballad, we observe
that the framework of the story is essentially the same in English,
Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian; in the first class of the German
ballads; in Polish #A#; in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and
Magyar. The woman delivers herself from death by some artifice,[72] and
retaliates upon the man the destruction he had intended for her. The
second form of the German ballad attributes the deliverance of the woman
to her brother, and also the punishment of the murderer. The third form
of the German ballad makes the woman lose her life, and her murderer,
for the most part, to suffer the penalty of the law, though in some
cases the brother takes immediate vengeance. Polish #B-K# may be ranked
with the second German class, and #O-CC# still better with the third;
but the brother appears in only a few of these, and, when he appears,
counts for nothing. The Wendish and the Bohemian ballad have the
incident of fraternal vengeance, though otherwise less like the German.
The Servian ballad, a slight thing at best, is still less like, but
ranks with the third German class. The oldest Icelandic copy is
altogether anomalous, and also incomplete, but seems to imply the death
of the woman: later copies suffer the woman to escape, without vengeance
upon the murderer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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