Thomas the Rhymer.

No scheme of ballad classification can be at all points complete and satisfactory. We have seen that it is impossible to classify the Scottish ballads according to authorship, since authors, known and proved, there are none. Scarce more practicable is it to arrange them in any regular order of chronology or locality; and even when we seek to group them with regard to type and subject, difficulties start up at every step. A convenient and intelligible division would seem to be one that recognised the ballads as Mythological, Romantic, or Historical, this last class including the lays of the foray and the chase, that cannot be assigned to any particular date—that cannot, indeed, be proved to have any historical basis at all—but can yet, with more or less of probability, be assigned to some historical or quasi-historical character. Besides these, there are groups of ballads that cannot be wholly overlooked—ballads in which, contrary to the prevailing spirit of this kind of poetry, Humour asserts itself as an essential element; ballads of the Sea; and Peasant ballads, of which, perhaps, England yields happier examples than Scotland—simple rustic ditties, hawked about in broad-sheets, and dating, many of them, no earlier than the present century, that seldom rise much above the doggerel and commonplace, and do not, as a rule, concern themselves with the high personages and high-strung passions of the ballad of Old Romance.

No well-defined frontier can be laid down between the three chief departments of ballad minstrelsy. The pieces in which fairy-lore and ancient superstition have a prominent place—the ballads of Myth and Marvel—have all of them a strong romantic colouring; and the like may be said of the traditional songs of war and of raiding and hunting, as well as of those whose theme is the passion and tragedy of love. Romance, indeed, is the animating soul of the body of Scottish ballad poetry; the note that gives it unity and distinguishes it from mere versified history and folklore. There are few ballads on which some shadow out of the World Invisible is not cast; few where ill-happed love is not a master-string of the minstrel's harp; few into which there does not come strife and the flash of cold steel. Natheless, a broad division into ballads Supernatural, Romantic, and Martial has reason as well as convenience to recommend it; and in a loose and general way such an arrangement should also indicate the comparative age, not indeed of the ballad versions as we know them, but of the ideas and materials of which they are composed.

First, then, of the ballads that are steeped in the element of the supernatural, let it be remembered that it is well-nigh impossible for us in these days, when we have cleared about us a little island of light in the darkness, to understand the atmosphere of mystery that pressed close around the life of man in the age when the ballad had its birth. The Unknown and the Unseen surrounded him on every side. He could scarcely put forth a hand without touching things that were not of this world; and in proportion to the ignorance was the fear. Through the long twilight in which the primÆval beliefs and superstitions grew up and became embodied in legend and custom, in mÄrchen and ballad, and all through the Middle Ages, man's pilgrimage on earth was indeed through a Valley of the Shadow. It was a narrow way, between 'the Ditch and the Quag, and past the very mouth of the Pit,' full of frightful sights and dreadful noises, of hobgoblins, and dragons, and chimeras dire. Tales that have ceased to frighten the nursery, that we listen to with a smile or at most with a pleasant stirring of the blood and titillation of the nerves, once on a time were the terror of grown men. The ogres and dragons of old are dead, and the Folklorist and the Comparative Mythologist make free of their caves, and are busy setting up, comparing, classifying, and labelling their skeletons for the instruction of an age of science. But there was a time when the wisest believed in their existence as an article of faith, and when the boldest shuddered to hear them named. What are now idle fancies were once the most portentous of realities; and in this lies the secret of the almost universal diffusion of certain typical tales, beliefs, and observances, and of the fascination which they have not ceased to exercise over the imagination of mankind.

Into the subject of the origins, the relationships, and the signification of these venerable traditions and superstitions of the race and of all races, there is neither time nor occasion for entering. This oldest and yet last found of the realms of science is as yet only in course of being surveyed, and from day to day fresh discoveries are announced by the eager explorers of the darkling provinces of myth and folktale. But this at least may be said, that not in the wide domain of popular saga and poetry can there be reaped a richer or more varied harvest of weird and wild and beautiful fancies, touched by the light that 'never was on sea or land,' than is to be found in the Scottish ballads.

From among them one could gather out a whole menagerie of the 'selcouth' beasts and birds and creeping things that have been banished from solid earth into the limbo of FaËry and Romance. They furnish examples of nearly all the root-ideas and typical tales which folklorists have discovered in the vast jungle of popular legends and superstitions—the Supernatural Birth, the Life and Faith Tokens, the Dragon Slayer, the Mermaid and the Despised Sister, Bluebeard of the Many Wives, the Well of Healing, the Magic Mirror, the Enchanted Horn, the Singing Bone, the Babes in the Wood, the Blabbing Popinjay, the Counterpart, the Transformation, the Spell, the Prophecy, the Riddle, the Return from the Grave, the Dead Ride, the Demon Lover, the Captivity in FaËryland, the Seven Years' Kain to Hell, and a host of others.

Certain of them, like Thomas the Rhymer and Young Tamlane, are 'fulfillÉd all of FaËry.' One can read in them how deeply the old superstition, which some would attribute to a traditional memory of the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Western Europe—to the 'barrow-wights,' pigmies, or Pechts who dwelt in or were driven for shelter to caves and other underground dwellings of the land—had struck its roots in the popular fancy. Probably Mr. Andrew Lang carries us as far as we can go at present in the search for origins and affinities, when he says that the belief in fairies, and in their relatives, the gnomes and brownies, is 'a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the Vius of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the Lares of Rome, the fateful MÆrÆ and Hathors—old imaginings of a world not yet dispeopled of its dreams.' The elfin-folk of the Scottish ballads have some few traits that are local and national; but, on the whole, they conform pretty closely to a type that has now become well marked in the literature as well as in the popular beliefs of European countries. The fairies have been, among the orders of supernatural beings, the pets and favourites of the poets, who have heaped their flowers of fancy above the graves of the departed Little Folk. We suspect that the more graceful and gracious touches in the Fairy Ballad are the renovating work of later hands than the elder balladist; and in the two typical Scottish examples that have been mentioned, it is not difficult to find the mark of Sir Walter.

In the time when fairies still tripped the moonlit sward, they received praise and compliment indeed from the mouths of their human kin, but it was more out of fear than out of love. They were the 'Men of Peace' and the 'Good Neighbours' for a reason not much different from that which caused the Devil's share in the churchyard to be known as the 'Guid Man's Croft,' lest by speaking more frankly of those having power, evil might befall. The tenancy of brake and woodland in the 'witching hours' by this uncanny people was a formidable addition to the terrors of the night:

They were tricksy, capricious, peevish, easily offended, malicious if not wholly malevolent, and dangerous alike to trust and to thwart. All this, together with their habit of trooping in procession and dancing under the moon; their practice of snatching away to their underground abodes those who, by kiss or other spell, fall into their hands; and the penance or sacrifice which at every seven years' term they pay to powers still more dread, comes out in the tale of True Thomas's adventure with the Queen of FaËry, and in Fair Janet's ordeal to win back Young Tamlane to earth. Their prodigious strength, so strangely disproportioned to their size, is celebrated in the quaint lines of The Wee Wee Man; while from The Elfin Knight we learn that woman's wit as well as woman's faith can, on occasion, prove a match for all the spells and riddles of fairyland. The enchanted horn is heard blowing—

and, at the spoken wish, the Elfin Knight is at the maiden's side. But the spell the tongue has woven, the tongue can unloose; and the lady brings her unearthly lover first into captivity by setting him a preliminary task to perform, more baffling than that 'sewing a sark without a seam.'

It is otherwise with True Thomas, as it was with Merlin before him, and with all the men, wise and foolish, who have once yielded to the glamourie of the Elfin Queen and others of her type and sex. The Rhymer of Ercildoune was probably only a man more learned and far-seeing than others of his time. His reputation for Second Sight may rest upon a basis similar to that which led the mediÆval mind to dub Virgil a magician, and to recognise the wizard in Sir Michael Scott, the grave ambassador and counsellor of kings, and, at a later date, enabled the profane vulgar to discover a baronet of Gordonstoun to be a warlock, for no better reason than because, with the encouragement of that most indefatigable of ballad collectors, Samuel Pepys, he gave his attention to the perfecting of sea-pumps for the royal navy. Whether the Rhymer's expedition to Fairyland was feigned by the balladist to explain his soothsaying; or whether, rather, his prophecies were invented as evidence of the perilous gift he brought back with him from Elfland, research will never be able to tell us. But the journey True Thomas made on the fateful day when, lying on Huntlie bank,

was one that many heroes of adventure, before him and after him, have made in fairy lands forlorn. The scenery and incidents of that strange ride are also among the common possessions of fairy romance. One dimly discerns in them the glimmer of an ancient allegory, of an old cosmogony, that may possibly be derived from the very infancy of the world, when human thought began to brood over the mysteries of life and time. There are the Broad Path of Wickedness and the Narrow Way of Right, and between them that 'bonnie road' of Fantasy, winding and fern-sown, that leads to 'fair Elfland.' There is a glimpse of the Garden of the Hesperides and its fruits; and a lurid peep into Hades:

The Palace of Truth as well as of Error is built on fairy ground; and there is a foretaste of Gilbertian humour in the dismay with which the Rhymer hears that he is to be endowed with 'the tongue that can never lie.'

But from his seven years' wanderings in fairyland, that speed like a day upon earth, he wakens up as from a dream, and again he is laid on Huntlie bank, in sight of the cleft Eildon.

Is it not significant that Melrose and Abbotsford, where a later and greater wizard wrought his spells over the valley of the Tweed and Ettrick Forest, should be half-way between the chief scenes of our Fairy Ballads—between the Rhymer's Tower and Carterhaugh? Fair Janet's conduct, when forbidden to come or go by Carterhaugh, where Yarrow holds tryst with Ettrick, lest she might encounter the Young Tamlane, may be traced back to the Garden of Eden, and is of a piece with that of Mother Eve:

There she falls in with the 'elfin grey' who might have been an 'earthly knight'; and he tells her how, as a youth, he had been reft away to fairyland:

as happened to 'Held Harald' and his men in the German legend. But he also tells her how, by waiting at the cross road at midnight on Halloweve, 'when fairy folk do ride,' she may win back the father of her child to mortal shape. That waiting on the dreary heath while 'a north wind tore the bent,' and what followed, become the ordeal of Janet's love:

and holding her lover fast, through all his gruesome changes of form, she 'borrowed' him from the 'seely court,' and saved him from becoming the tribute paid every seven years to the powers that held fairydom in vassalage.

Another series of transmutations, familiar in ballad and folklore, is that in which the powers of White and Black Magic strive for the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in Hiawatha. The baffled magician or witch—often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales—alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of The Twa Magicians, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that follows and overcomes.

But, as a rule, the transformations that are made the subject of the Scottish ballads are of a more lasting kind; the prince or princess, tempted by a kiss, or at the touch of enchanted wand or ring, is doomed for a time to crawl in the loathly shape of snake or dragon about a tree, or swim the waters as mermaid or other monstrous brood of the seas of romance, until the appointed time when the deliverer comes, and by like magic art, or by the pure force of courage and love, looses the spell. Kempion is a type of a class of story that runs, in many variations, through the romances of chivalry, and from these may have been passed down to the ballad-singer, although ruder forms of it are common to nearly all folk-mythology. The hero is one of those kings' sons, who, along with kings' daughters, people the literature of ballad and mÄrchen; and he has heard of the 'heavy weird' that has been laid upon a lady to haunt the flood around the Estmere Crags as a 'fiery beast.' He is dared to lean over the cliff and kiss this hideous creature; and at the third kiss she turns into

The rescuer asks—

Nor do we wonder to hear that it was the doing of the wicked and envious stepmother, on whom there straight falls a worse and a well-deserved weird. In King Henrie, too, it is the stepdame that has wrought the mischief. He is lying 'burd alane' in his hunting hall in the forest, when his grey dogs cringe and whine; the door is burst in, and

The manners of this Poltergeist are in keeping with her rough entrance on the scene; her ogreish appetite is not satisfied even when she had devoured his hounds, his hawks, and his steed. As in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the Marriage of Sir Gawain and other legends of the same type, the knight's courtesy withstands every test, and he is rewarded for having given the lady her will:

In most cases it is not wise or safe to give entertainment to these wanderers of the night, whether they come in fair shape or in foul. They are apt to prove to be of the race of the succubi, from whom a kiss means death or worse. More than one of our Scottish ballads are reminiscent of the beautiful old Breton lay, The Lord Nann, so admirably translated by Tom Taylor, wherein the young husband, stricken to the heart by the baleful kiss given to him against his will by a wood-nymph, goes home to die, and his fair young wife follows him fast to the grave. Alison Gross is another of those Circes who, by incantation of horn and wand, seek to lower the shape and nature of her lovers to those of the beasts that crawl on their bellies. Sometimes the tempter is of the other sex. Thus The Demon Lover is a tale known in several versions in Scotland, and lately brought under notice by Mr. Hall Caine in its Manx form. The frail lady is enticed from her home, and induced to put foot on board the mysterious ship by an appeal, a pathetic echo of which has lingered on in later poetry, and has been quoted as the very dirge of the Lost Cause:

They have not sailed far, when his countenance changes, and he grows to a monstrous stature; the foul fiend is revealed. They are bound on a drearier voyage than that of True Thomas—to a Hades of ice and isolation that bespeaks the northern origin of the tale:

Other spells and charms not a few, for the winning of love and the slaking of revenge, are known to the old balladists. We hear of the compelling or sundering power of the bright red gold and the cold steel. Lovers at parting exchange rings, as in Hynd Horn, gifted with the property of revealing death or faithlessness:

Or, as in Rose the Red and Lily Flower, it is a magic horn, to be blown when in danger, and whose notes can be heard at any distance. These are examples of the 'Life Token' and the 'Faith Token,' known to the folklore of nearly all peoples who have preserved fragments of their primitive beliefs. The prophetic power of dreams is revealed in The Drowned Lovers, in Child Rowland, in Annie of Lochryan, and in a host of others. The spells used by witchcraft to arrest birth do not differ greatly in Willie's Lady—the 'nine witch-knots,' the 'bush of woodbine,' the 'kaims o' care,' and the 'master goat'—from those mentioned in its prototypes in Scandinavian, Greek, and Eastern ballads and stories; and in more than one it is the sage counsels of 'Billy Blin''—the Brownie—that give the cue by which the evil charm is unwound. The Brownie—the Lubber Fiend—owns a department of legend and ballad scarcely less important than that possessed by his relatives, the Elfin folk and the Trolds; a shy and clumsy monster, but harmless and good-natured, and with a turn for hard manual labour that can be turned to useful account. Good and ill fortune, in the ballads, comes often by lot:

The birk held a high place in the secret rites and customs of the Ballad Age. It was with 'a wand o' the bonnie birk' that May Margaret went through the mysterious process of restoring her plighted troth to Clerk Saunders; in other ballads it is done by passes of the hand, or of a crystal rod. When the 'Clerk's Twa Sons o' Owsenford' were brought back to earth by their mother's bitter grief and longing, they wore 'hats made o' the birk':

Birds of the air carry a secret; there are tongues in trees that syllable men's names; and even inanimate things cry aloud with the voice of Remorse or of Doom. When the knight wishes to send a message, he speaks in the ear of his 'gay goshawk that can baith speak and flee.' When May Colvin returns home after the fatal meeting at the well, where her seven predecessors in the love of the 'Fause Sir John' had been drowned, the 'wylie parrot' speaks the words that were no doubt ringing in her brain:

And in Earl Richard and other ballads, it is the 'popinjay' that proclaims guilt or fear from turret or tree. One remembers also 'Proud Maisie' walking early in the wood, and Sweet Robin piping her doom among the green summer leaves:

and the 'Three Corbies' croaking the most grim and dismal notes in all the wide, wild range of ballad poetry, as they feast on the new-slain knight:

But things that have neither sense nor life utter aloud words of menace and accusation. Lord Barnard's horn makes the forest echo with the warning notes, 'Away, Musgrave, away!' Binnorie embalms the tradition of the 'singing bone' which pervades the folklore of the Aryan peoples, and is found also in China and among the negro tribes of West Africa. A harper finds the body of the drowned sister, and out of her 'breast-bane' he forms a harp which he strings with her yellow hair. According to a northern version of the ballad, he makes a plectrum from 'a lith of her finger bane.' On this strange instrument the minstrel plays before king and court, and the strings sigh forth:

In other ballads, the yearning or remorse of the living draw the dead from their graves. In the tale of The Cruel Mother, we seem to see the workings of the guilty conscience, which at length 'visualised' the victims of unnatural murder. The bride goes alone to the bonnie greenwood, to bear and to slay her twin children:

The crime and shame are hid; but peace does not come to her:

The mother's yearning awakens within her, and she promises them all manner of gifts if they will only be hers. But the voices of the ghost-children rise and pronounce judgment on her:

Elsewhere in these old rhymes may be traced a superstitious belief, which was put in practice as a means of discovering guilt, at least as late as the middle of the seventeenth century—that of the Ordeal by Touch. In Young Benjie another test is applied to find the murderer; and at midnight the door of the death-chamber is set ajar, so that the wandering spirit may enter and reanimate for an hour the 'streikit corpse':

It sat up; and with its dead lips told the waiting brethren on whose head justice, tempered with a strange streak of mercy, should fall for the foul slaughter of their 'ae sister':

In Proud Lady Margaret, again, we have a form of the legend, told in many lands, and made familiar, in a milder form, by the classical German ballad of The Lady of the Kynast, of a haughty and cruel dame whose riddles are answered and whose heart is at length won by a stranger knight. She would fain ride home with him, but he answers her that he is her brother Willie, come from the other side of death to 'humble her haughty heart has gart sae mony dee':

and there is no room in his narrow house for other company. Out of the Dark Country, too, on a similar errand, on Hallowe'en night, rides the betrayed and slain knight in Child Rowland, the first line of which, preserved in King Lear as it was known in Shakespeare's day, seems to strike a keynote of ballad romance:

mumbles the feigned madman in the ear of the poor wronged king as they tread the waste heath. And the sequel, as it has come down to us, sustains and strengthens the spell of the opening:

The passages that describe the haunted ride in the moonlight, when the lady has fled from the scene of her treachery and guilt, are not surpassed in weird imaginative power, if they are equalled, by anything in ballad or other literature:

She set whip and spur to her steed, but 'nae nearer could she get'; she appealed to him, as from a 'saikless,' or guiltless, maid to 'a leal true knight,' to draw his bridle-rein until she can come up with him:

until he drew rein at a broad river-side. Then he spoke:

They plunged in together, and the flood bore them down:

But the perturbed spirit does not always thus revisit the glimpses of the moon to awaken conscience, to humble pride, or to wreak vengeance. More often it is the repinings and longings of passionate love that keep it from its rest. In mÄrchen and ballad the ghost of the lover comes to complain that the tears which his betrothed sheds nightly fill his shroud with blood; when she smiles, it is filled with rose leaves. The mother steals from the grave to hap and comfort her orphan children; their harsh stepmother neglects and ill-treats them, and their exceeding bitter and desolate cry has penetrated beneath the sod, and reached the dead ear. In The Clerk's Sons o' Owsenford, and in that singular fragment of the same creepy theme, recovered by Scott, The Wife of Usher's Well, it is the yearning of the living mother that brings the dead sons back to their home:

The revenants, silent guests with staring eyes, wait and warm themselves by the fireside, while the 'carline wife' ministers to their wants, and spreads her 'gay mantle' over them to keep them from the cold, until their time comes:

A chill air as from the charnel-house seems to breathe upon us while reading the lines; the coldness, the darkness, and the horror of death have never been painted for us with more terrible power than in the 'Wiertz Gallery' of the old balladists.

We feel this also in the ballads of the type of Sweet William and May Margaret, quoted in Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle, where the dead returns to claim back a plighted word; and at the same time we feel the strength of the perfect love that triumphs over death and casts out fear:

How miserably the poetical taste of the early part of last century misappreciated the spirit of the ancient ballad, preferring the dross to the fine gold, and tricking out the 'terrific old Scottish tale,' as Sir Walter Scott calls it, in meretricious ornament, may be seen by comparing the original copies with that 'elegant' composition of David Mallet, William and Margaret, so praised and popular in its day, in which every change made is a disfigurement of the nature of an outrage. Read the summons of the ghost, still 'naked of ornament and simple':

along with the 'improved' version:

Of a long antiquity most of these Mythological Ballads must be, if not in their actual phraseology, in the dark superstitions they embody and in the pathetic glimpses they afford us of the thoughts and fears and hopes of the men and women of the days of long ago—the days before feudalism; the days, as some inquisitors of the ballad assure us, when religion was a kind of fetichism or ancestor worship, when the laws were the laws of the tribe or family, and when the cannibal feast may have been among the customs of the race. We cannot find a time when this inheritance of legend was not old; when it was not sung, and committed to memory, and handed down to later generations in some rude rhyme. The leading 'types' were in the wallet of Autolycus; and he describes certain of them with a seasoning of his grotesque humour, to his simple country audience. There were the well-attested tale of the Usurer's Wife, a ballad sung, as ballads are wont, 'to a very doleful tune'—obviously a form of the Supernatural Birth; and the story, true as it is pitiful, of the fish that turned to woman, and then back again to fish, in which he that runs may read an example from the Mermaid Cycle. They are to be found to-day, often in debased and barely recognisable guise, in the hands of the peripatetic ballad-mongers who still haunt fairs and sing in the streets, and in the memories of multitudes of country folks who know scarce any other literature bearing the magic trademark of Old Romance.

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