The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
[28] There is another Danish ballad in which two knights wager on a
maid’s fidelity, but it is of entirely different tenor, the maid being
lured by a magical horn: ‘Ridderens Runeslag,’ Grundtvig, II, 285, No
73, =A-B=, ‘Ridder Oles Lud,’ Kristensen, II, 108, 353, No 34, =A-C=;
Prior, III, 34, No 105.
269
LADY DIAMOND
=A.= ‘Lady Daisy,’ Aytoun’s Ballads of Scotland, II, 173, 1859.
=B.= ‘Lady Dayisie,’ from an old lady’s collection formerly in
possession of Sir Walter Scott,[29] now belonging to Mr Macmath,
Edinburgh.
=C.= Sharpe’s Ballad Book, p. 12, 1823.
=D.= ‘Lady Diamond,’ Buchan’s MSS, II, 164; ‘Lady Diamond, the King’s
Daughter,’ Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland, II, 206; ‘Ladye
Diamond,’ Dixon, Scottish Traditional Versions of Ancient Ballads, p.
71, Percy Society, vol. xvii.
=E.= ‘Robin, the Kitchie-Boy,’ Joseph Robertson, “Adversaria,” p. 66.
Diamond (Daisy, Dysmal, Dysie), only daughter of a great king, is with
child by a very bonny kitchen-boy. The base-born paramour is put to
death, and, by the king’s order, his heart is taken to the princess in
a cup of gold. She washes it with the tears which run into the cup,
=A=, =B=, =C=, and dies of her grief. Her father has a sharp remorse,
=A=, =C=; his daughter’s shame looks pardonable, when he considers the
beauty of the man he has slain, =A=.
=B= is blended with ‘Willie o Winsbury,’ No 100; cf. =B= 4-9, and No
100, =A= 2-7, =B= 1-5, etc. In ‘Willie o Winsbury’, =B=, the princess’s
name is Dysmill. =A= 12, =B= 11 of ‘Lady Diamond’ also recall ‘Willie o
Winsbury.’
In =C=, =D=, the kitchen-boy is smothered between two feather-beds.
Isbel was the princess’s name in a copy obtained by Motherwell, but not
preserved. Motherwell’s Note-Book, p. 7; C. K. Sharpe’s Correspondence,
II, 328.
The ballad is one of a large number of repetitions of Boccaccio’s tale
of Guiscardo and Ghismonda, Decamerone, IV, 1. This tale was translated
in Painter’s Palace of Pleasure, 1566 (ed. Jacobs, I, 180), and became
the foundation of various English poems and plays.[30] Very probably it
was circulated in a chap-book edition in Great Britain, as it was in
Germany (Simrock, Volksbücher, VI, 153).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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