Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/198

 190 time, who declares (supra, p. 189, n.) that it was recited in his day, 1828, in Scotch nurseries. This independent testimony saves us the trouble of investigating very closely the authenticity of Jamieson's version, even if his accompanying remarks did not prove, on the face of them, his obvious bona fides.

Here, then, we have happening in our own land what we folk-lorists so often assume to happen elsewhere. The story existed before Shakespeare, yet does not get written down till 200 years after his death. The mere fact that it is ultimately written down in the Lowlands of Scotland need not, I think, disturb us from the conclusion that it existed in Elizabethan England, for I have been able to trace every one of the folk-stories which are preserved in Lowland Scotch either to England or to the Highlands. The story of "Childe Rowland" does not, therefore, arise in Lowland Scotland, and as it is known by Shakespeare's quotation to have been in England in the sixteenth century, it is, notwithstanding all Saturday Reviewers may say, an English fairy tale. But it bears within it marks of still higher antiquity than the sixteenth century. Here we reach those points of contrast between Folk-tale and Customary Archæology with which Messrs. Gomme, Hartland, and Lang have familiarised us. We may profitably, I think, devote some attention to the "survivals" of archaic life, which are, I believe, to be found in unusual profusion in "Childe Rowland".

I. Unction of Extremities.—We may dismiss rather curtly the youngest antiquity. Jamieson has already noticed that the way in which Burd Ellen's elder brothers are restored to life by anointment of the seats of the five senses—"unction of the extremities" we might call it—is derived from the extreme unction of the Roman Catholic Church. This involves that the tale received its final form while England was still Roman Catholic, i.e., before the sixteenth century. It does not necessarily follow that this touch was a part of the original when first composed.