Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/190

 CHILDE ROWLAND.

MONG the English folk-tales that I have lately been collecting and investigating, by far the most interesting is that of "Childe Rowland". I have already called attention to some of the points of interest in my notes on the version of it that I published in my volume on English Fairy Tales, pp. 238-45. But it was impossible in such a way to deal at all adequately with the folk-lore aspects of the tale, and I am glad of the present opportunity to do so at more length. Especially I desire to make accessible the actual form in which the tale was published by Jamieson in his Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, 1814, pp. 397 seq. For the purposes of my book I had to deviate from the pristine form in various ways. I proceed at once to give it in its original form.

When on a former occasion, in "Popular Ballads and Songs", vol. ii, p. 22, the present writer laid before the public a translation of the first ballad of "Rosmer", he expressed an opinion that this was the identical romance quoted by Edgar in King Lear, which, in Shakespeare's time, was well known in England, and is still preserved, in however mutilated a state, in Scotland. Having the outline of the story so happily sketched to his hand, it would have required no very great exertion of talents or industry, for one exercised in these studies, to have presented this romance in a poetical dress, far more correct and generally engaging than that in which it can be expected to be found; but as he accounts an original, however imperfect, which bears the genuine marks of the age which produced it, and of the taste of those who have preserved it, much more interesting to the historian or antiquary