B

86
YOUNG BENJIE

'Verkel Vejemandsøn,' Grundtvig, IV, 151, No 198, invites a comparison with 'Young Benjie,' although the ballads, in the form in which they are now extant, are widely divergent. Verkel Vejemandsøn, seeing maid Gundelild shining in her virgin crown, makes a fiendish vow to rob her of it. He rides up to her house and asks where her father and mother are. They are away from home. He carries her off on his horse into the thickest of a wood, and bids her hold the beast while he makes a bed of leaves. He loses her in the thicket, and cannot find her, though he looks for her a day and two days. She goes to the strand and throws herself into the sea, saying, It was a very different bride-bed that my mother meant me to have. She is drawn out in a fisherman's net. Verkel swears that he has not seen her for eight years, but he is convicted of his crime, on evidence not given, and "clothes three stakes;" that is, he is hanged, and parts of his body are exposed on the wheels which crown the three posts of a gallows.

Sir Walter Scott's observations on the passage in which the drowned maid reveals the author of her death are too interesting to be spared:

"In this ballad the reader will find traces of a singular superstition, not yet altogether discredited in the wilder parts of Scotland. The lykewake, or watching a dead body, in itself a melancholy office, is rendered, in the idea of the assistants, more dismally awful by the mysterious horrors of superstition. In the interval betwixt death and interment, the disembodied spirit is supposed to hover round its mortal habitation, and, if invoked by certain rites, retains the power of communicating, through its organs, the cause of its dissolution. Such inquiries, however, are always dangerous, and never to be resorted to unless the deceased is suspected to have suffered foul play, as it is called. It is the more unsafe to tamper with this charm in an unauthorized manner, because the inhabitants of the infernal regions are, at such periods, peculiarly active. One of the most potent ceremonies in the charm, for causing the dead body to speak, is setting the door ajar, or half open. On this account the peasants of Scotland sedulously avoid leaving the door ajar while a corpse lies in the house. The door must either be left wide open or quite shut; but the first is always preferred, on account of the exercise of hospitality usual on such occasions. The attendants must be likewise careful never to leave the corpse for a moment alone, or, if it is left alone, to avoid, with a degree of superstitious horror, the first sight of it.

"The following story, which is frequently related by the peasants of Scotland, will illustrate the imaginary danger of leaving the door ajar. In former times a man and his wife lived in a solitary cottage on one of the extensive Border fells. One day the husband died suddenly, and his wife, who was equally afraid of staying alone by the corpse, or leaving the dead body by itself, repeatedly went to the door, and looked anxiously over the lonely moor for the sight of some person approaching. In her confusion and alarm she accidentally left the door ajar, when the corpse suddenly started up and sat in the bed, frowning and grinning at her frightfully. She sat alone, crying bitterly, unable to avoid the fascination of the dead man's eye, and too much terrified to break the sullen silence, till a Catholic priest, passing over the wild, entered the cottage. He first set the door quite open, then put his little finger in his mouth, and said the paternoster backwards; when the horrid look of the corpse relaxed, it fell back on the bed, and behaved itself as a dead man ought to do.

"The ballad is given from tradition. I have been informed by a lady of the highest literary eminence [Miss Joanna Baillie], that she has heard a ballad on the same subject, in which the scene was laid upon the banks of the Clyde. The chorus was,

and the watching of the dead corpse was said to have taken place in Bothwell church."

A is translated by Schubart, p. 164; by Gerhard, p. 88; by Knortz, Schottische Balladen, No 31.

A

B

87
PRINCE ROBERT

Prince Robert's mother poisons him because he has married against her will. He sends for his bride to come, but she is in time only for the funeral. The mother will give her nothing of her son's, not even the ring on his finger, all that she asks for. The bride's heart breaks before the mother's face.

There are other ballad-stories of a mother's poisoning because of displeasure at a son's match, but I know of none which demands comparison with this very slender tale.

A is translated by Schubart, p. 122; by Doenniges, p. 57; A and B combined by Rosa Warrens, Schottische Volkslieder, No 36.

A

B

C

D

88
YOUNG JOHNSTONE

Pinkerton inserted Herd's 'Cruel Knight,' A, in his Select Scotish Ballads, I, 69, with alterations and omissions. Motherwell enters in his Note-Book, p. 6, that he had received from Mrs Gentles, Paisley, 'The Young Johnstone,' "different in some measure from the copy in Finlay's Ballads." Of the version printed in his Minstrelsy (B a), undoubtedly that which was derived from Mrs Gentles, he says, "for a few verbal emendations recourse has been had to Mr Finlay's copy (B b)." These versions should therefore not have differed considerably, Finlay suppressed "Young Johnstone's reason for being sae late a coming in," "as well as a concluding stanza of inferior merit;" in this rejection he was not followed by Motherwell. Christie, I, 156, gives E "with some alterations from the way it was sung" by an old woman; petty variations, such as one must think could not have impressed themselves upon a memory unapt to retain things of more importance. 'Young Johnstone' in Chambers's Twelve Romantic Scottish Ballads, p. 19, is made up mostly from B a, B b, E, like the copy in the same editor's Scottish Ballads, p. 293, but handles tradition very freely.

E seems to be A altered, or imperfectly remembered, with the addition of a few stanzas. Motherwell remarks of his version, what is true of all the others but E, that the ballad throws no light on Young Johnstone's motive for stabbing his lady. An explanation was afforded by the reciter: "The barbarous act was committed unwittingly, through Young Johnstone's suddenly waking from sleep, and, in that moment of confusion and alarm, unhappily mistaking his mistress for one of his pursuers." And this is the turn which is given to the act in E 13: