Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth. Sidgwick Frank

      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 assistance 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 classified roughly so as to fall under the heads (i) Ballads of Superstition 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 unclassifiable, collected under the title 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. Superstition 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 Dæmon 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 superstition 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 Poeticum 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 superstitions 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 classified 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 niggardly 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 woodpecker 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 mediæval 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