“ Essex cares not for the three keys; the emperor’s son must go to England and be exhibited to the queen. The emperor declares that, if it must be so, his fifty good ships shall go as well for company.
All this is, no doubt, as foolish as it is fictitious, but the ballad-maker’s independence, in fact unconsciousness, of history and common sense, beginning with the title, in which young Essex is made Queen Elizabeth’s champion, is amusing and not unpleasing. The ballad belongs undoubtedly to the eighteenth century, when High Germany had become familiar to the humble English. ”

“ In marked and pleasing contrast with most of the versions of the tale with which we have been dealing, in so many copies grotesque and ferocious, with a lover who, from impulses not always clear, from resentment sometimes that his comfort has been disturbed by her unrestrained grief, sometimes that she has been implicated in forcing him by magic to return to the world which he had done with, is bent on tearing his lass to pieces, is a dignified and tender ballad, in which the lovers are replaced by brother and sister. ”

“ The tinker fears that he shall not know the king from his lords; the nobles will all be bare, the king covered. When they come to the greenwood the nobles gather about the king and stand bare; the tinker whispers, ‘they are all gallant and gay, which, then, is the king?’ ‘It must be you or I,’ answers James, for the rest are all uncovered. The tinker falls on his knees, beseeching mercy; the king makes him a knight with five hundred a year. (Compare the story of James Fifth of Scotland and John Howieson, Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, ch. 27.) ”

“ The steward comes upon the scene, and is angry to find the child in such company. When the child gives his name as Poor Disaware, the steward denounces him as a thief who had robbed his own father; but the duke speaks kindly to the boy, and makes him his stable-groom. One day, when he is watering a gelding, the horse flings up his head and hits the child above the eye. The child breaks out, Woe worth thee, gelding! thou hast stricken the Lord of Lorn. I was born a lord and shall be an earl; my father sent me over the sea, and the false steward has beguiled me. ”

“ One would not be captious with the restlessness of defeated love, but what object is there in this young man’s rising from the grave to take his love from her uncle’s to her father’s house? And what sense is there in his headache?
I have printed this ballad because, in a blurred, enfeebled, and disfigured shape, it is the representative in England of one of the most remarkable tales and one of the most impressive and beautiful ballads of the European continent. The relationship is put beyond doubt by the existence of a story in Cornwall which comes much nearer to the Continental tale. ”

“ The Saracen will not do so infamous a thing as to put his enemy to death in a bath, but assures his wife that the Bastard shall die à guise de martir. A rich dress is furnished the Bastard, and Corsabrin then says, On your oath, now, what death should I die, were I in your power? Sire, says the Bastard, why should I dissemble? I promise you, I would take you to a wood, and I would hang you to the highest tree I could find. By Mahound! says the king, so will I do with you. The Bastard is taken to a wood, with a rope round his neck. Corsabrin’s people look out the highest tree. ”

“ Two Slavic tales, a Bosnian and a Russian, come as near as any to the story of our romance.
A king who has caught a wild man shuts him up, and denounces death to any one that shall let him out. The king’s son’s bedroom is just over the place in which the wild man is confined. ”

“ King William, ‘returning to London from Limerick fight,’ stops at a farm-house ‘for merriment sake,’ and asks country cheer for himself and his nobles. The farmer and his wife have gone to the next market-town to see the king pass, and their daughter alone is at home. She serves bacon and eggs, all that she has; the king throws her ten guineas, and one of his lords adds two for loyal sentiments which the girl had expressed. ”

“ A second invasion, and a third, on a larger and larger scale, ensue, and Ivan and Bulat repulse the enemy with greater and greater loss. Ivan each time goes back to his kitchen; his servant has all the glory, and after the third and decisive victory marries the princess. Ivan gets permission from the cook to be a spectator at the wedding-banquet. The tsar’s daughter, it must now be observed, had overheard the conference between the pseudo-prince and Ivan, and even that between Ivan and Bulat, and had hitherto, for inscrutable reasons, let things take their course. ”

“ A maid who has been some years in a lady’s service aspires to something higher; she seeks and obtains a place with a queen, ‘to sew the seams of silk.’ The queen warns her to keep herself from the young prince, but the pair become familiar, and the queen has her mounted on a wild horse without a bridle, expecting to dispose of her summarily in this way. ”

“ The morrow the mother of his seven sons is to be wedded; instead of merry-making, he desires to have twenty stout men turned into storks, his seven sons into swans, and himself into a goshawk. This feat is beyond his mother’s (quite limited) magic, but it is done by an old woman who has more skill. The birds fly to Earl Mar’s castle, where the wedding is going on. The storks seize some of the noble guests, the swans bind the bride’s best man to a tree, and in a twinkling the bride and her maidens are carried off by the birds. The Earl of Mar reconciles himself with his daughter. ”

“ An old woman, the husband’s mother, sleeps in a bed beside the lady’s, and keeps strict watch over her. The gentleman’s squires hoist him in a basket over the wall of the house, so that he obtains entrance into the hall, whence he passes into the lady’s chamber. The old woman observes a disturbance, and gets up, pretending that she is going to the kitchen. In the hall she goes astray and falls into the basket. The squires, noticing a movement of the cords, pull at the basket. The old woman is ‘towed’ up and down, and knocked about, much as in the ballad. ”

“ Bearwell’s life is in danger where he is, and the lady has had the forethought to build him a ship, in which she sends him off. By the process of sailing both east and west and then meeting wind from the north, he is blown to a land where the king and court, who pass their time mostly in playing ball, put a harp into the hand of every stranger and invite him to stay and play. Bearwell stays, and perhaps plays, twelve months. During this time the lady is so beset with suitors that she feels constrained to apply to a young skipper named Heyvalin to fetch her true-love back. ”

“ There is certainly much in it that is exasperating,—the greeters in the school, the lifting of the hat, and, most of all, perhaps, the mint in meadows. These are, however, the writer’s own property; the nicking with nay and the giant are borrowed from romances. In this and not a very few other cases, I have suppressed disgust, and admitted an actually worthless and a manifestly—at least in part—spurious ballad, because of a remote possibility that it might contain relics, or be a debased representative, of something genuine and better. ”

“ In Grundtvig B, the bird is a falcon. The maid will have no man that cannot fly. Master Hillebrand, son of the king of England, learns this fact, and has a bird’s coat made for him, enters the room where man had never been before, sleeps under white linen, and in the morning is a knight so braw. ”

“ Bertram, a merchant of Verdun, who has been happily married for ten years, is required in the course of business to go to a fair at Provins. While he is sitting at table in an inn with other merchants, Hogier, the host, sets his guests to talking of their wives, and three of them give a very bad account of their domestic experiences. Bertram, when urged to take his turn, professes himself the most fortunate of men, for his wife (Irmengard) is, for beauty, sense, modesty, manners, the flower of womankind. ”

“ A princess, an only daughter, has a lover; her father disapproves, and throws the lover into prison (where he remains fifteen years in the ballad, only a day or two in the tale) . The lover is taken from prison and put to death, and his heart is cut out. (The heart is not sent to the princess in a golden vessel, as in the Decameron, IV, 1, and the Scottish and Italian ballads, but is cooked, and given her to eat, and is eaten; and she says, when informed that she has eaten her lover’s heart, that it shall be her last food.) ”

“ Sólfager’s hand, that she may be recognized in a strange country. The Ormeking (or King Orm) comes riding while Sólfager is sunning her hair. ‘Trick King David,’ he says, ‘and bind yourself to me.’ ‘Never shall it be,’ she replies, ‘that I give myself to two brothers.’ He administers to her three potions, she swoons; word comes to King David that she is dead; they bury her. Ormeking does not fail to carry off the body. King David goes to Ormeking’s land in pilgrim’s garb, with pilgrim’s staff; as he enters the court Sólfager is undoing her hair. ”

“ The Bastard is made to go up, higher and higher, the hangman drawing the rope all too tight the while, till the king says, Now. At the last moment the Bastard calls out to Corsabrin that he is a knight of high birth, and ought not to die like a rogue, but as a man of mark dies among the Franks. And how is that? asks the Saracen. They give him a horn, and he blows four or five times to summon the angels to come for his soul. Then he says a prayer. Then they strangle him or behead him. A horn is sent up to the Bastard, and he blows lustily. Hugh hears, and rides in hot haste to the call. ”

“ Besides the tale in its integrity, certain verses which occur in it, and which are of a kind sure to impress the memory, are very frequent, and these give evidence of a very extensive distribution. The verses are to this effect:
The moon shines bright in the lift,
The dead, they ride so swift,
Love, art thou not afraid?
to which the lovelorn maid answers,
How fear, when I am with thee? ”

“ She asked her father in plain terms to give her Dissawar for her husband. The king replied, not unkindly, that she could not marry below her rank, and therefore must take the prince who had been selected for her; and to the steward she was married, however sorely against her will. In the course of the wedding-dinner, the three Neapolitan lords entered the hall, and saluted the king, the queen, and Lillian, but not the bridegroom. The king asked why they did no homage to their prince; they replied that they did not see their prince, went in search of Roswall, and brought him in. ”

“ The ballad occurs in Swedish, but in the form of a mere abstract; in Arwidsson, II, 188, No 112, MS. of the sixteenth century. A maid will have no man but one that can fly. A swain has wings made from five gold rings; he flies over the rose-wood, over the sea, sits on a lily-spray and sings, flies till he sleeps in the maid’s bosom.
A Färöe copy is noted by Grundtvig as in the possession of Hammershaimb, resembling his B, but about twice as long.
The lover in bird-shape is a very familiar trait in fiction, particularly in popular tales. ”

“ At a Christmas feast in the palace of King Maelgwn, the company were discoursing of the unequalled felicity of the king, upon whom heaven had bestowed, with every other good gift, a queen whose virtues exceeded those of all the noble ladies in the kingdom. Elphin, Maelgwn’s nephew, said, None but a king may vie with a king ”

“ Husband and wife are sitting near the entrance of their house one night; the husband says, It is time to go to bed, shut the door; she says, Shut it yourself. They make a compact that the one who speaks first shall shut the door. The wife, tired of silence and growing sleepy, goes to bed; the husband stretches himself on a bench. A gentleman’s servant, whose lantern has been put out by the wind, seeing the door open, asks for a light. ”

“ The Outlaw protests again that he won his lands from the enemy, and as he won them so will he keep them, against all kings in Christendom; but having indulged in this vaunt asks mercy again, and offers to give up the keys of his castle if the king will constitute him and his successors sheriffs of the forest. The king, on his part, is equally ready for a compromise. The Outlaw, on surrendering the keys of his castle, shall be made sheriff of Ettrick Forest, and shall never be forfeited as long as he continues loyal, and his men shall have pardon if they amend their lives. ”

“ In this little ballad, which has barely story enough to be so called, Dugald Quin, a Highlander, who seems to give himself out as a man in very humble circumstances, induces Lizzie Menzies, a young lady who appears to have nine maids at her command, to follow him, regardless of her father’s opposition. ”

“ The brothers are to visit their sister often (Slavic) ; Constantine promises to bring her to his mother should there be special occasion. A fatal year comes, and all the brothers die of the plague (in a few cases they are killed in war) . The mother chants laments at the graves of the eight, strews flowers, burns candles, gives alms for their souls; at Constantine’s grave she tears her hair. ”