The Balladists Part 4

But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess, tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the spell. _Kempion_ is a type of a cla.s.s of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been pa.s.sed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings'

sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and _marchen_; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous creature; and at the third kiss she turns into

'The loveliest ladye e'er could be.'

The rescuer asks--

'O, was it wehrwolf in the wood, Or was it mermaid in the sea?

Or was it man, or vile woman, My ain true love, that misshaped thee?'

Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved weird. In _King Henrie_, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest, when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and

'A grisly ghost Stands stamping on the floor.'

The manners of this _Poltergeist_ are in keeping with her rough entrance on the scene; her ogreish appet.i.te is not satisfied even when she had devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the _Wife of Bath's Tale_, and the _Marriage of Sir Gawain_ and other legends of the same type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded for having given the lady her will:

'When day was come and night was gane And the sun shone through the ha', The fairest ladye that e'er was seen Lay between him and the wa'.'

In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They are apt to prove to be of the race of the _succubi_, from whom a kiss means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, _The Lord Nann_, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. _Alison Gross_ is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other s.e.x. Thus _The Demon Lover_ is a tale known in several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr.

Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:

'He turned him right and round about, And the tear blindit his e'e; "I would never have trodden on Irish ground If it hadna been for thee."'

They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a drearier voyage than that of True Thomas--to a Hades of ice and isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:

'"O whaten a mountain 's yon," she said, "So dreary wi' frost and snow?"

"O yon 's the mountain of h.e.l.l," he cried, "Where you and I must go."

He strack the tapmast wi' his hand, The foremast wi' his knee; And he brake the gallant ship in twain And sank her in the sea.'

Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel.

Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in _Hynd Horn_, gifted with the property of revealing death or faithlessness:

'When your ring turns pale and wan, Then I 'm in love wi' another man.'

Or, as in _Rose the Red and Lily Flower_, it is a magic horn, to be blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance.

These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in _The Drowned Lovers_, in _Child Rowland_, in _Annie of Lochryan_, and in a host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not differ greatly in _Willie's Lady_--the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'--from those mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy Blin''--the Brownie--that give the cue by which the evil charm is unwound. The Brownie--the Lubber Fiend--owns a department of legend and ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by lot:

'We were sisters, sisters seven, Bowing down, bowing down; The fairest maidens under heaven; And aye the birks a' bowing.

And we keest kevils us amang, Bowing down, bowing down; To see who would to greenwood gang, And aye the birks a' bowing.'

The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk Saunders; in other ballads it is done by pa.s.ses of the hand, or of a crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats made o' the birk':

'It neither grew in syke or ditch, Nor yet in ony sheugh; But at the gate of Paradise That birk grew green eneuch.'

Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.'

When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing in her brain:

'What hae ye made o' the fause Sir John That ye gaed wi' yestreen?'

And in _Earl Richard_ and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among the green summer leaves:

'"Tell me, my bonnie bird, When shall I marry me?"

"When six braw gentlemen Kirkward shall carry thee"';

and the 'Three Corbies' croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they feast on the new-slain knight:

'Ye 'll sit on his white hause bane, And I 'll pike oot his bonnie blue een; Wi' ae lock o' his yellow hair We 'll theak our nest when it is bare.

O mony a ane for him maks mane, But nae ane kens whaur he is gane, O'er his white banes when they are bare The wind shall sigh for evermair.'

But things that have neither sense nor life utter aloud words of menace and accusation. Lord Barnard's horn makes the forest echo with the warning notes, 'Away, Musgrave, away!' _Binnorie_ embalms the tradition of the 'singing bone' which pervades the folklore of the Aryan peoples, and is found also in China and among the negro tribes of West Africa. A harper finds the body of the drowned sister, and out of her 'breast-bane' he forms a harp which he strings with her yellow hair.

According to a northern version of the ballad, he makes a plectrum from 'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:

'Wae to my sister, fair Helen!'

In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead from their graves. In the tale of _The Cruel Mother_, we seem to see the workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:

'She 's wrapped her mantle about her head, All alone, and alonie O!

She 's gone to do a fearful deed Down by the greenwood bonnie O!'

The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:

'The lady looked o'er her high castle wa', All alone and alonie O!

She saw twa bonnie bairnies play at the ba'

Down by yon greenwood bonnie O!

The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the ghost-children rise and p.r.o.nounce judgment on her:

'O cruel mither, when we were thine, All alone and alonie O!

From us ye did our young lives twine, Doon by yon greenwood bonnie O.'

Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superst.i.tious belief, which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as late as the middle of the seventeenth century--that of the Ordeal by Touch. In _Young Benjie_ another test is applied to find the murderer; and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit corpse':

'About the middle of the night The c.o.c.ks began to craw; And at the dead hour o' the night, The corpse began to thraw.'

It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':

'Ye maunna Benjie head, brothers, Ye maunna Benjie hang, But ye maun pyke oot his twa grey een Before ye let him gang.'

In _Proud Lady Margaret_, again, we have a form of the legend, told in many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the cla.s.sical German ballad of _The Lady of the Kynast_, of a haughty and cruel dame whose riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':

'The wee worms are my bedfellows And cauld clay is my sheets';

and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the betrayed and slain knight in _Child Rowland_, the first line of which, preserved in _King Lear_ as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to strike a keynote of ballad romance:

'Child Rowland to the dark tower came,'

mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us, sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening: