Page:Old English ballads by Francis Barton Gummere (1894).djvu/453

Rh NOTES. 349 O the young cock crew i the merry Linkem, An the wild fowl chirp'd for day. So here (a = * in ') ; * the cocks are crowing in merry .* 6 4. That die in childbirth. 9 2. In other cases — see the passage quoted by Professor Child, III, 227, from Scott's Advertisement to The Pirate — it is the surviving lover who desires to take back the troth-plight bestowed upon the dead. — As for the wand upon which Margaret * strokes * her troth, it seems not unlikely that we are dealing with a confused survival of the common method by which savages and even European peasants get rid of a disease by rubbing the affected part upon a stick, a tree, or what not. See Tylor, Primitive Culture (1873), I^» 146, 148 f. 11 1. With no dress save hose, shoes and gown. 13 3, 4. In some versions she is told that there is no room. 14 1. Meal = mould, earth. EARL BRAND.
 * LOb

This is the older and fuller version, printed by Bell in his Ancient Poemsy of a ballad known best in the form to which Scott gave the name of The Douglas Tragedy. See Child, I, 88 ff. See also the fragment in the Percy Folioy ed. H.-F., I, 1 32 ff ., out of which Percy made his Child of E lie. — The related ballads of Europe are very interesting : see Child, as above, and compare the ballad which follows in his collection, — Erlinion. In these two ballads there are distinct traces of the Germanic Hilde legends. The elopement and the fight with pursuers recall the story of Walter and Hildegund, as told in the A.-S. fragment Waldere^ in the Waltharius of the German Ekkehard, and elsewhere. — This version of Earl Brand (see Child, p. 92 f.) has many points of contact with Scandinavian ballads on the same subject. 7 1. Carl Hood, as Scandinavian sagas give us plainly to under- stand, is here Odin himself, who, ' though not a thoroughly malig- nant divinity, had his dark side.*. . . (Child). 11 1. /<?^-/a«^ = lief -long, corrupted into livelong (defined by some dictionaries = ' long as life* I); <this dear long day.* Cf. German *■ den lieben langen tag.* 13. * Almost literally* the same in certain Danish ballads. — Child. Digitized by LjOOQIC