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
#B.# The Ulinger story is also found combined with that of the beautiful
ballad, 'Wassermanns Braut.'[55] (1.) In a Transylvanian ballad,
'Brautmörder,' Schuster, Siebenbürgisch-sächsische Volkslieder, p. 57,
No 54 #A#, 38 vv, with variations, and p. 59, #B#, a fragment of 10 vv;
(#A# in a translation, Böhme, No 14, p. 61.) A king from the Rhine sues
seven years for a king's daughter, and does not prevail till the eighth.
She begs her mother not to consent, for she has seen it in the sun that
she shall not long be her daughter, in the moon that she shall drown
before the year is out, in the bright stars that her blood shall be
dispersed far and wide. He takes her by the hand, and leads her through
a green wood, at the end of which a grave is already made. He pushes her
into the grave, and drives a stake through her heart. The princess'
brother asks what has become of his sister. "I left her on the Rhine,
drinking mead and wine." "Why are your skirts so bloody?" "I have shot a
turtle-dove." "That turtle-dove was, mayhap, my sister." They spit him
on a red-hot stake, and roast him like a fish. Lines 1-4 of this ballad
correspond to 1-4 of #Y# (which last agree with 1-4 of Meinert's
'Wassermanns Braut'); 17, 18, to #Y# 5, 6; 25-34 to 21-30; and we find
in verse 22 the stake through the heart which Hoffmann has interpolated
in #W#, stanza 12.
(2.) A Silesian copy of 'Wassermanns Braut,' co[llecte]d by [Ho]ffman
contributed to Deutsches Museum, 1852, II, 164, represents the bride,
after she has fallen into the water and has been recovered by the nix,
as asking for three cries, and goes on from this point like the Ulrich
ballad #W#, the conclusion being that the sister is drowned before the
brother comes to her aid.[56]
'Nun schürz dich, Gredlein,' "Forster's Frische Liedlein, No 66," Böhme,
No 53, Uhland, No 256 A, which is of the date 1549, and therefore older
than the Nuremberg and Augsburg broadsides, has derived stanzas 7-9 from
an Ulinger ballad, unless this passage is to be regarded as common
property. Some copies of the ballad commonly called 'Müllertücke' have
also adopted verses from Ulinger, especially that in Meier's Schwäbische
Volkslieder, No 233, p. 403.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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