The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 2 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 2 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
These last ballads apparently give us the middle and end of a story
which has also some sort of beginning in the following: Danish, 'Den
elskedes Død,' Kristensen, II, 39, No 20, A-D, and in many unprinted
copies from oral tradition, besides two from MSS of the sixteenth
century, communicated to me by Grundtvig; Swedish, 'Hertig Nils,'
Arwidsson, II, 21, No 72, 'Peder Palleson,' Arwidsson, No 71, II, 18,
437; Norwegian, 'Herr Stragi,' Landstad, p. 537, No 61.[122] A lover
and his mistress have parted, have been long parted. She is sick,
dying, or even dead. In the Danish manuscript copies we are distinctly
told that she has grieved herself to death on his account. Word is
sent him by carrier-pigeons, a bird, a page; or he is informed by a
spae-wife (Landstad). He leaps over the table, spilling mead and wine
(Kristensen), and rides faster than the doves fly. The rest of the
tale is much as before, with those minor diversities that are to be
expected. The lover commonly kills himself, but dies of heart-break in
'Peder Palleson' and one of the sixteenth century Danish copies. In
the latter he hears the bells, says he shall never arrive alive, dies
without the house and she within; in the former the maid dies in the
upper room, the swain on the wild moor. In the Danish manuscript copies
the man is laid south in the churchyard, the maid north [west, east],
two roses spring from their breasts and span the church-roof, and there
they shall stay till doom; in Kristensen it is two lilies, in Arwidsson
a linden.
With these last may belong a German ballad of a young Markgraf, who
marries a very young wife, goes for her mother upon the approach of a
threatening childbirth, and, returning, has encounters similar to those
in 'Der Ritter und die Maid.' In some instances it is a Reiter, or
Jäger, "wohlgemuth," not married, or in secret relations with his love,
who, coming to a wood or heath, hears a bell that alarms him; etc. In
the end he generally kills himself, sometimes dies of a broken heart.
Lilies in several cases rise from the young woman's grave, or their
grave.[123]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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