‘Brunenborch,’ Willems, No 53, p. 135, 21 stanzas, purports to be a critical text, constructed partly from copies communicated to the editor (“for the piece is to this day sung in Flanders”), and partly from =C=, =A=, =D a=, and Hoffmann, No 6.[33] It is not entitled to confidence. All the versions are meagre, and =A= seems to be corrupted and defective at the beginning.[34] A youth, =B= 2, has watched a winter-long night, brought thereto by a fair maid, =A= 1, 3, =B= 1, to whom he has devoted his heart and thoughts, and with whom he wishes to make off, =A=, =B=. Ill news comes to the maid, =B= 2, that her lover is a prisoner, and has been thrown into a tower. There Brennenberg (=A=, der Bremberger, =B=, Brandenborch, =C=, der Brandenburger, =D a=) lay seven years or more, till his head was white and his beard was gray. They laid him on a table and slit him like a fish,[35] cut out his heart, dressed it with pepper, and gave it to the fairest, =A=, the dame, =B=, the dearest, =C=, to eat. ‘What have I eaten that tasted so good?’ ‘Brennenberg’s heart,’ =A=. ‘If it is his heart, pour wine for me, and give me to drink.’ She set the beaker to her mouth, and drank it to the bottom, =B=. The first drop she drank, her heart broke into a dozen bits, =A=, =C=. (Their love was pure, such as no one could forbid, =A= 11; the same implied in =A= 12, =C= 5.) The German-Dutch ballad, though printed two hundred years before any known copy of the Swedish-Danish, is much less explicit. The lady is certainly a maid in =B=, and she is a maid in =A= if the first stanza is accepted as belonging to the ballad. Then it should be her father who proceeds so cruelly against her. The wine-drinking, followed by speedy death, may come, as it almost certainly does in some of the Scandinavian ballads, from the story of Ghismonda; and therefore the German-Dutch ballads, as they stand, may perhaps be treated as a blending of the first and the ninth tale of Boccaccio’s fourth day. But there is a German meisterlied, printed, like =B=, =C=, =D a=, in the sixteenth century, which has close relation with these ballads, and much more of Boccaccio’s ninth tale in it: ‘Von dem Brembergers end und tod,’ von der Hagen’s Minnesinger, IV, 281, Wunderhorn, 1808, II, 229, epitomized in the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen, II, 211, No 500. The knight Bremberger has loved another man’s wife. The husband cuts off his head, and gives his heart to the lady to eat. He asks her if she can tell what she has eaten. She would be glad to know, it tasted so good. She is told that it is Bremberger’s heart. She says she will take a drink upon it, and never eat or drink more. The lady hastens from table to her chamber, grieves over Bremberger’s fate, protesting that they had never been too intimate, starves herself, and dies the eleventh day. The husband suffers great pangs for having ‘betrayed’[36] her and her deserving servant, and sticks a knife into his heart.[37]