#C.# 'The Brown Bride and Lord Thomas,' Motherwell's MS., p. 157. #D.# 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor.' #a.# Pepys Ballads, III, 316, No 312. #b, c, d#, other broadside copies. #e, f, g, h, i#, recited copies. #E.# 'Sweet Willie and Fair Annie,' Jamieson's Popular Ballads, I, 22. #F.# 'Sweet Willie and Fair Annie,' Kinloch MSS, III, 127, V, 339. #G.# Skene MSS, p. 104. #H.# 'Fair Annie and Sweet Willie,' Gibb MS., p. 64. The copy of 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet' in Herd, 1769, p. 246, 1776, I, 24, and in the Musical Museum, p. 553, No 535, is Percy's, #A#. The English version of this ballad, 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor,' given, with alterations, in Percy's Reliques, III, 82, 1765,[113] is a broadside of Charles the Second's time, printed for I. Clarke, W. Thackeray, and T. Passenger, and licensed by L'Estrange, who was censor from 1663 to 1685. This copy has become traditional in Scotland and Ireland. The Scottish traditional copy, 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,' given by Percy in the Reliques (unfortunately with some corrections, but these cannot have been many), is far superior, and one of the most beautiful of our ballads, and indeed of all ballads. 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William,' "a more pathetic story of the man who loves one woman and marries another," begins in the same way, with the last long talk before parting. The conclusion is that the forsaken maid dies of grief, not by the hand of her incensed rival, and it is most natural that the two stories should be blended in tradition, as they are here in #E-H#, #E# 31 ff, #F# 27 ff, #G# 24 ff, #H# 37 ff belonging to 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William.' There is a copy of 'Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor,' written over for the ballad-mongers, and of course much less in the popular style, in Pepys, IV, 48, No 45, and Roxburghe, II, 553, with the title 'The Unfortunate Forrester, or, Fair Eleanor's Tragedy.' In this Fair Ellinor stabs herself and Lord Thomas then kills himself with the same dagger.[114] Norse ballads have the story of 'Lord Thomas and Fair Annet,' coming very close in details. Those forms which are nearest to the English resemble more the mixed versions, #E-H#, than the simple, #A-D#. But in none of the Norse ballads is love thwarted because it stands upon the choice of friends. A man abandons a woman who is in all but the name his wife, and who regards herself, and is evidently regarded by others, as standing in no dishonorable relation to him. There is again a bifurcation in the catastrophe. The forsaken mistress submits and hangs herself in the one case, in the other she takes a fierce revenge. The latter conclusion may well, as Grundtvig holds, be the more original, but the ballads which have the other will here be put first, as being nearer to the English.