[节选]A Collection of Ballads

Perrault, in 1697, borrowed these from tradition and gave them

literary and courtly shape.  But CENDRILLON or CHAPERON ROUGE in

the mouth of a French peasant, is apt to be the old traditional

version, uncontaminated by the refinements of Perrault, despite

Perrault's immense success and circulation.  Thus tradition

preserves pre-literary forms, even though, on occasion, it may

borrow from literature.  Peasant poets have been authors of

ballads, without being, for all that, professional minstrels.  Many

such poems survive in our ballad literature.



The material of the ballad may be either romantic or historical.

The former class is based on one of the primeval invented

situations, one of the elements of the MARCHEN in prose.  Such

tales or myths occur in the stories of savages, in the legends of

peasants, are interwoven later with the plot in Epic or Romance,

and may also inspire ballads.  Popular superstitions, the witch,

metamorphosis, the returning ghost, the fairy, all of them

survivals of the earliest thought, naturally play a great part.

The Historical ballad, on the other hand, has a basis of resounding

fact, murder, battle, or fire-raising, but the facts, being derived

from popular rumour, are immediately corrupted and distorted,

sometimes out of all knowledge.  Good examples are the ballads on

Darnley's murder and the youth of James VI.



In the romantic class, we may take TAMLANE.  Here the idea of

fairies stealing children is thoroughly popular; they also steal

young men as lovers, and again, men may win fairy brides, by

clinging to them through all transformations.  A classical example

is the seizure of Thetis by Peleus, and Child quotes a modern

Cretan example.  The dipping in milk and water, I may add, has

precedent in ancient Egypt (in THE TWO BROTHERS), and in modern

Senegambia.  The fairy tax, tithe, or teind, paid to Hell, is

illustrated by old trials for witchcraft, in Scotland. (1)  Now, in

literary forms and romance, as in OGIER LE DANOIS, persons are

carried away by the Fairy King or Queen.  But here the literary

romance borrows from popular superstition; the ballad has no need

to borrow a familiar fact from literary romance.  On the whole

subject the curious may consult "The Secret Commonwealth of Elves,

Fauns, and Fairies," by the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle,

himself, according to tradition, a victim of the fairies.



Thus, in TAMLANE, the whole DONNEE is popular.  But the current

version, that of Scott, is contaminated, as Scott knew, by

incongruous modernisms.  Burns's version, from tradition, already

localizes the events at Carterhaugh, the junction of Ettrick and

Yarrow.  But Burns's version does not make the Earl of Murray

father of the hero, nor the Earl of March father of the heroine.

Roxburgh is the hero's father in Burns's variant, which is more

plausible, and the modern verses do not occur.  This ballad

apparently owes nothing to literary romance.



In MARY HAMILTON we have a notable instance of the Historical

Ballad.  No Marie of Mary Stuart's suffered death for child murder.