Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth Part 1

Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth.

by Frank Sidgwick.

PREFACE

The issue of this second volume of _Popular Ballads of the Olden Time_ has been delayed chiefly by the care given to the texts, in most instances the whole requiring to be copied by hand.

I consider myself fortunate to be enabled, by the kind service of my friend Mr. A. Francis Steuart, to print for the first time in a collection of ballads the version of the _Grey Selchie of Shool Skerry_ given in the Appendix. It is a feather in the cap of any ballad-editor after Professor Child to discover a ballad that escaped his eye.

My thanks are also due to the Rev. Professor W. W. Skeat for a.s.sistance generously given in connection with the ballad of _Judas_; and, as before, to Mr. A. H. Bullen.

F. S.

BALLADS IN THE SECOND SERIES

The ballads in the present volume have been cla.s.sified roughly so as to fall under the heads (i) Ballads of Superst.i.tion and of the Supernatural, including Dirges (pp. 1-122); (ii) Ballads of Sacred Origin (pp. 123-154); (iii) Ballads of Riddle and Repartee (pp.

155-181); and (iv) a few ballads, otherwise almost uncla.s.sifiable, collected under the t.i.tle of 'Fyttes of Mirth,' or Merry Ballads (pp. 182 to end).

I

That the majority of the ballads in the first section are Scottish can hardly cause surprise. Superst.i.tion lurks amongst the mountains and in the corners of the earth. And, with one remarkable exception, all the best lyrical work in these ballads of the supernatural is to be found in the Scots. _Thomas Rymer_, _Tam Lin_, _The Wife of Usher's Well_, _Clerk Sanders_, and _The Daemon Lover_, are perhaps the most notable examples amongst the ballads proper, and _Fair Helen of Kirconnell_, _The Twa Corbies_, and _Bonnie George Campbell_ amongst the dirges. All these are known wherever poetry is read.

'For dulness, the creeping Saxons; For beauty and amorousness, the Gaedhills.'

But the exception referred to above, _The Unquiet Grave_, is true English, and yet lyrical, singing itself, like a genuine ballad, to a tune as one reads.

The complete superst.i.tion hinted at in this ballad should perhaps be stated more fully. It is obvious that excessive mourning is fatal to the peace of the dead; but it is also to be noticed that it is almost equally fatal to the mourner. The mourner in _The Unquiet Grave_ is refused the kiss demanded, as it will be fatal. _Clerk Sanders_, on the other hand, has lost--if ever it possessed--any trace of this doctrine.

For Margret does not die; though she would have died had she kissed him, we notice, and the kiss was demanded by her and refused by him: and Clerk Sanders is only disturbed in his grave because he has not got back his troth-plight. The method of giving this back--the stroking of a wand--we have had before in _The Brown Girl_ (First Series, pp. 60-62, st. 14).

In the Helgi cycle of Early Western epics (_Corpus Poetic.u.m Boreale_, vol. i. pp. 128 ff.), Helgi the hero is slain, and returns as a ghost to his lady, who follows him to his grave. But her tears are bad for him: they fall in blood on his corpse.

The subject of the Lyke-wake would easily bear a monograph to itself, and at present I know of none. I have therefore ventured, in choosing Aubrey's version in place of the better known one printed--and doubtless written over--by Sir Walter Scott, to give rather fuller information concerning the Dirge, its folklore, and its bibliography. A short study of the ramifications of the various superst.i.tions incorporated therein leads to a sort of surprise that there is no popular ballad treating of the subject of St. Patrick's Purgatory, which has attracted more than one English poet. Thomas Wright's volume on the subject, however, is delightful and instructive reading.

II

The short section of Ballads of Sacred Origin contains all that we possess in England--notice that only two have Scottish variants, even fragmentary--and somewhat more than can be cla.s.sified as ballads with strictness. Yet I would fain have added other of our 'masterless'

carols, which to-day seem to survive chiefly in the West of England.

One of their best lovers, Mr. Quiller-Couch, has complained that, after promising himself to include a representative selection of carols in his anthology, he was chagrined to discover that they lost their quaint delicacy when placed among other more artificial lyrics. Perhaps they would have been more at home set amongst these ballads; but I have excluded them with the less regret in remembering that they stand well alone in the collections of Sylvester, Sandys, Husk; in the reprints of Thomas Wright; and, in more recent years, in the selections of Mr. A. H.

Bullen and Canon Beeching.

_The Maid and the Palmer_ would appear to be the only ballad of Christ's wanderings on the earth that we possess, just as _Brown Robyn's Confession_ is the only one of the miracles of the Virgin. One may guess, however, that others have descended rapidly into nursery rhymes, as in the case of one, noted in J. O. Halliwell's collection, which, in its absence, may be called _The Owl, or the Baker's Daughter_. For Ophelia knew that they said the owl was the baker's daughter. And the story of her metamorphosis is exactly paralleled by the Norse story of _Gertrude's Bird_, translated by Dasent.

Gertrude was an old woman with a red mutch on her head, who was kneading dough, when Christ came wandering by, and asked for a small bannock.

Gertrude took a n.i.g.g.ardly pinch of dough, and began to roll it into a bannock; but as she rolled, it grew, until she put it aside as too large to give away, and took a still smaller pinch. This also grew miraculously, and was put aside. The same thing happened a third time, till she said, 'I cannot roll you a small bannock.' Then Christ said, 'For your selfishness, you shall become a bird, and seek your food 'twixt bark and bole.' Gertrude at once became a bird, and flew up into a tree with a screech. And to this day the great woodp.e.c.k.e.r of Scandinavia is called 'Gertrude's Bird,' and has a red head.

III

The Ballads of Riddle and Repartee do not amount to very many in our tongue. But they contain riddles which may be found in one form or another in nearly every folklore on the earth. Even Samson had a riddle.

Always popular, they seem to have been especial favourites in early Oriental literature, in the mediaeval Latin races, and, in slightly more modern times, amongst the Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples. Perhaps _King John and the Abbot_ is the best English specimen, for it is to-day as pleasing to an audience as it can ever have been. But _Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight_, better known as _May Colvin_, is the most startling of any, in its myriad ramifications and supposed origin.

IV

The 'Fyttes of Mirth' conclude the present volume. It may be as well to say here that I have placed under this head any ballad that tells of a successful issue and has a happy ending or mirthful climax.

The version I have given of that famous ballad _The Lord of Learne_ (or, more commonly, _Lorne_) is most enchanting in its _navete_, and, when read aloud or recited, is exceedingly effective. The curious remark that the affectionate parting between the young Lord and his father and mother would have changed even a Jew's heart; the picturesque description of the siege of the castle, so close that 'a swallow could not have flown away'; the sudden descent from romance to a judicial trial; the remarkable a.s.sumption by the foreman of the jury of the privileges of a judge; and the thoroughly satisfactory description of the false steward's execution--

'I-wis they did him curstly c.u.mber!'

--all these help to form the ever-popular _Lord of Learne_.

The remaining 'Fyttes of Mirth' are mostly well known, and require no further comment.

ADDITION TO GLOSSARY OF BALLAD COMMONPLACES

(See First Series, pp. xlvi-li)

The late Professor York Powell explained to me, since the note on 'gare'

(First Series, p. 1) was written, that the word means exactly what is meant by 'gore' in modern dressmaking. The antique skirt was made of four pieces: two cut square, to form the front and the back; and two of a triangular shape, to fill the s.p.a.ce between, the apex of the triangle, of course, being at the waist. Thus a knife that 'hangs low down' by a person's 'gare,' simply means that the knife hung at the side and not in front.

THOMAS RYMER

+The Text.+--The best-known text of this famous ballad is that given by Scott in the _Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border_, derived 'from a copy obtained from a lady residing not far from Erceldoune, corrected and enlarged by one in Mrs. Brown's MS.' Scott's ballad is compounded, therefore, of a traditional version, and the one here given, from the Tytler-Brown MS., which was printed by Jamieson with a few changes. It does not mention Huntlie bank or the Eildon tree. Scott's text may be seen printed parallel with Jamieson's in Professor J. A. H. Murray's book referred to below.

+The Story.+--As early as the fourteenth century there lived a Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer, who had a reputation as a seer and prophet. His fame was not extinct in the nineteenth century, and a collection of prophecies by him and Merlin and others, first issued in 1603, could be found at the beginning of that century 'in most farmhouses in Scotland' (Murray, _The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune_, E.E.T.S., 1875). The existence of a Thomas de Ercildoun, son and heir of Thomas Rymour de Ercildoun, both living during the thirteenth century, is recorded in contemporary doc.u.ments.

A poem, extant in five ma.n.u.scripts (all printed by Murray as above), of which the earliest was written about the middle of the fifteenth century, relates that Thomas of Erceldoune his prophetic powers were given him by the Queen of Elfland, who bore him away to her country for some years, and then restored him to this world lest he should be chosen for the tribute paid to h.e.l.l. So much is told in the first fytte, which corresponds roughly to our ballad. The rest of the poem consists of prophecies taught to him by the Queen.

The poem contains references to a still earlier story, which probably narrated only the episode of Thomas's adventure in Elfland, and to which the prophecies of Thomas Rymour of Ercildoun were added at a later date.

The story of Thomas and the Queen of Elfland is only another version of a legend of Ogier le Danois and Morgan the Fay.