The white hind, stanzas 28, 30, is met with in no other ballad of this class, and, besides this, the last four stanzas are in no kind of keeping with what goes before, for the "young son" is spoken of as having been first brought home at some previous period. Grundtvig has suggested that the hind and the blood came from a lost Scottish ballad resembling 'The Maid Transformed into a Hind,' D.g.F, No 58. In this ballad a girl begs her brother, who is going hunting, to spare the little hind that "plays before his foot." The brother nevertheless shoots the hind, though not mortally, and sets to work to flay it, in which process he discovers his sister under the hind's hide. His sister tells him that she had been successively changed into a pair of scissors, a sword, a hare, a hind, by her step-mother, and that she was not to be free of the spell until she had drunk of her brother's blood. Her brother at once cuts his fingers, gives her some of his blood, and the girl is permanently restored to her natural shape, and afterwards is happily married. Stanzas similar to 36-41 of #A# and 12-16 of #B# will be found in the ballad which follows this, to which they are especially well suited by their riddling character; and I believe that they belong there, and not here. It is worthy of remark, too, that there is a _hind_ in another ballad, closely related to No 16 ('The Bonny Hind'), and that the hind in 'Leesome Brand' may, in some way not now explicable, have come from this. The confounding of 'Leesome Brand' with a ballad of the 'Bonny Hind' class would be paralleled in Danish, for in 'Redselille og Medelvold' #T# (and perhaps #I#, see Grundtvig's note, V, 237), the knight is the lady's brother. The "auld son" in #B#, like the first bringing home of the _young_ son in #A# 45, 47, shows how completely the proper story has been lost sight of. There should be no son of any description at the point at which this stanza comes in, and _auld_ son should everywhere be _young_ son. The best we can do, to make sense of stanza 3, is to put it after 8, with the understanding that woman and child are carried off for burial; though really there is no need to move them on that account. The shooting of the child is unintelligible in the mutilated state of the ballad. It is apparently meant to be an accident. Nothing of the kind occurs in other ballads of the class, and the divergence is probably a simple corruption. The ballad which 'Leesome Brand' represents is preserved among the Scandinavian races under four forms.