#A#, from Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, is found also in Motherwell's MS., but without doubt was derived from Buchan. Though injured by the commixture of foreign elements, #A# has still much of the original story. #B# has, on the contrary, so little that distinctively and exclusively belongs to this story that it might almost as well have been put with the following ballad, 'Sheath and Knife,' as here. A third ballad, 'The Birth of Robin Hood,' preserves as much of the story as #A#, but in an utterly incongruous and very modern setting, being, like 'Erlinton,' #C#, forced into an absurd Robin Hood framework. The mixture of four-line with two-line stanzas in #A# of course comes from different ballads having been blended, but for all that, these ballads might have had the same theme. Stanzas 33-35, however, are such as we meet with in ballads of the 'Earl Brand' class, but not in those of the class to which 'Leesome Brand' belongs. In the English ballads, and nearly all the Danish, of the former class, there is at least a conversation between son and mother [father], whereas in the other the catastrophe excludes such a possibility. Again, the "unco land" in the first stanza, "where winds never blew nor cocks ever crew," is at least a reminiscence of the paradise depicted in the beginning of many of the versions of 'Ribold and Guldborg,' and stanza 4 of 'Leesome Brand' closely resembles stanza 2 of 'Earl Brand,' #A#.[157] Still, the first and fourth stanzas suit one ballad as well as the other, which is not true of 33-35. The name Leesome Brand may possibly be a corruption of Hildebrand, as Earl Brand almost certainly is; but a more likely origin is the Gysellannd of one of the kindred Danish ballads.