43 A. The Maid on the Shore (Appendix- Bronson)
[I'm following Bronson and including the related ballad, The Maid on the Shore (The Fair Maid by the Sea Shore; The Sea Captain) as an appendix to Child No. 43.
R. Matteson 2012, 2014]
CONTENTS:
1. Bronson's Narrative
2. My Brief
3. Barry's Brief
3. Joyce's Mermaid, first printed version
ATTACHED PAGES (see left hand column):
1. Recordings & Info: The Maid on the Shore
A. Roud Number 181 The Maid on the Shore (48 Listings)
2. Sheet Music: The Maid on the Shore (Bronson's texts and some music examples)
3. US & Canadian Versions
4. English and Other Versions
43 Appendix: Bronson's Narrative- The Maid on the Shore
(Appendix) A final group, from Maine, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Ireland, have seemingly little to do with any of the rest, and go to a curious marine adaptation of the text. Three are Mixolydian, authentic, and in 6/8 time; one Irish copy is Ionian; a copy from Newfoundland is Dorian, and another-the only plagal tune and a diflerent melodic type-is AE-/D.
Brief by Richard L. Matteson Jr.
This ballad loosely follows the story line of Broomfield Hill: The maid outwits her abductor by making him (them) fall asleep. The Maid on the Shore's story begins when a sea captain sees a pretty girl on the shore, and entices her to come aboard, hoping to have his way with her. After she comes aboard she escapes by singing captain and sailors to sleep. She then robs captain and sailor and rows back to shore using the captain's sword for an oar!
According to Cazden, "Gale Huntington prints texts from two whalers' manuscript logbooks of 1833 and 1849. An American printing of a portion of the text in Henry De Marsan's Singer's Journal during 1870 seems to have gone without notice." Leach, "A widespread story in ballad and folk tale tells of a ship captain luring a lady on board a vessel and then sailing away with her. See Grimm's "The Faithful Servitor" and many references to that story." Barry adds "Fair Maid by the Sea-Shore is the representative in English of a group of Nordic and Romance ballads in which a maid is enticed on board a ship and abducted; the motif is found also in Middle Irish popular tales."
The earliest version is from 1828 is found in Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs by Emily B. Lyle, Scottish Text Society - 1996. Crawfurd, a disabled doctor, spent most of his time collecting ballads and songs. I don't have a copy of this edition.
In the US, most versions have been found in the northeast but they have migrated to Oregon, California and one from 1866 by William Larkin was found in Illinois. The ballad has been widely recorded since the 1960s.
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Phillip Barry's Brief; BFSSNE 1937
This ballad was first printed in Joyce's Old Irish Folk-Music and, Songs, p. 152, "The Mermaid", a fragment of one stanza with the air. American versions have been printed by Mackenzie (Ballads and Sea Songs from Nova Scotia, pp. 74-5, 394, two texts, with one air), Gordon, (Adventure, August 15, 1927, text from California), Greenleaf and Mansfield, (Ballads and Sea-Songs from Newfoundland, pp. 63-4, one text with its air). There are two unpublished texts, one with the air, in the Belden MSS., (Harvard University Library), the other, recorded by Miss Smyth, from Mr. Horace Priest of Sangerville, Maine. The rather close relationship of the texts to each other suggests derivation from a lost broadside; the traditional divergencies are less in the textual variants than in the sets of the air. The Fair Maid, by the Sea-Shore is the representative in English of a group of Nordic and Romance ballads in which a maid is enticed on board a ship and abducted; the motif is found also in Middle Irish popular tales.
The Romance form is in French, Italian and Catalan. A French ballad, L'Epee Liberatrice (V. Smith, Romania, VII, 69) is of a Prince's daughter who sees a ship with thirty men on board, coming to land; she goes on board to learn the song sung by the youngest of the crew. The song puts her to sleep; when she awakes, she is on the high seas. She asks a sailor for a sword and kills herself. The Italian ballad Il Corsaro (C. Nigra, Canti Popolari d'el Piemonte, p. 106) is much the same, except that it omits the sleep-producing effect of the music. In Catalan tradition (Lo Mariner, in Briz y Candi, Cansons d'e Ia
Tema,I, 113-20), the ballad has a happy ending.
The Nordic form, found in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and, Faroese, has been studied in detail by R. Berge, Skipar Holgje, in Norsk Folkekultur, I, pp. 71-84. The best form of it is the Swedish Skon, Jungfrun (A.I. Arwidsson, Szsenska Fornsanger, I, no. 41, PP. 2S8, ff.) A maid on the beach sees a ship coming to land and asks the skipper what he has to sell. He takes her by the snow-white hand and leads her into his cabin, where she passes the night. When she awakes on the high seas, she laments that she will never see her children again -a taunt for the skipper, implying that she has deceived him- lets down her yellow hair, jumps overboard and swims to her native land. The skipper pursues in his ship, but is left cursing on the beach, as he sees her sitting in her father's window' Norwegian B (Berge, l. c., pp. 72-3) has the "happy ending" of the Catalan ballad, found also in the version of The Fair Maid on the Sea Shore in the Belden MSS.
Our ballad resembles the Nordic form rather more closely, but approaches the Romance form in its retention of the sleep-producing music. We have the magic music in the Middle Irish Dindsenchus of Cleena's Wave, Glandore, County Cork, to the effect that Cleena (M. Ir., Clidna) was beguiled by Iuchna Curly-locks, who played sleep-producing music to her in his boat of bronze, from which she was washed overboard and drowned. (Revue Celtique, XV, 437; Todd Lecture Series, X, part 3, pp. 206, ff.)
Elsewhere in the Dindsenchas (Rev. Celt., XVI , 32) , the sleep-producing music is called "the mermaid's melody": the fact that in our ballad, it is the maid and not the seaman who sings it enables us to trace the ancestry of the ballad to ancient mythology of the ghost-soul.
G. Weicker, in Der Seelenaogel in der Antilten Litteratur und Kunst, shows that the Sirens, birds with human heads, originally represented spirits of the dead. From very ancient time, the ghost soul was believed to desire passionately the love of a living mortal: this belief, through the lore of Lilith, Lamia and similar types of supernatural women, has left innumerable traces in popular tradition. The magic music, that is, ghost and spirit music, of which Sirens' song and angels' song are but particular types, has been held to possess for mortal ears an attraction so irresistible that the consciousness of time and space might be extinguished by it. In the eighth century, as we learn from the tract De Monstris et Belluis, (ed. Berger de Xivrey, p.25) Sirens are described as mermaids, women with tails of fishes, "who deceive sailors by their lovely form and by the charm of their singing". We suspect the change is due to Arabic influence, since the Latin synonym of siren, namely puella marina, is in Arabic bint al-bahr, "maid, (literally daughter) of the sea", a phrase applied by Arab naturalists to the manatee, popularly believed to be half fish, half human. Through the Irish muirgen, morigain -the latter a gloss to lamia in Isa., XXXIV, 14, Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus, f, 2, -the character of the siren-lamia is fixed fbr Morgain la Fee, the case-type of supernatural mistress, sometimes devoted, sometimes cruel and malicious.
A Greek ballad printed by A. Passow, Carmina Popularia Graeciae Recentiorit, No. 524, p. 401, has some affinities with our ballad. A water-woman, who calls herself the Lamia of the Sea Shore and, of the Sea wagers that she can dance longer than a young shepherd can pipe for her. He pipes for three days, then falls asleep: the Lamia robs him of his flocks.
P. B.
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The ballad is also known under the title "The Mermaid," no relation to Child 289 The Mermaid. Here's the music with the concluding verse published by Joyce in 1909 followed by the entry from Kuntz, A Fiddler's Companion.
Joyce: Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909)
MERMAID, THE (An Mhaighdean Mhara). Irish, Air (3/4 time). D Major. Standard. One part. "A beautiful mermaid visited a ship by moonlight. The captain tried to detain her: but she chanted a song that threw captain and crew into a trance, and so she escaped. 'One of the best of the old northern airs' {Mr. McKenzie}" (Joyce).
***
O were my men drunk or were my men mad,
Or were my men drowned in care‑‑O,
When they let her escape, which made us all sad?
And the sailors all wished she was there‑‑O, there,
And the sailors all wished she was there.
***
Cazden (et al, 1982) finds the tune, with a similar lyric theme, as "The Maid on the Shore" collected in New York's Catskill Mountains, and said it seemed quite familiar in the northeastern United States and eastern Canada. The melody is also related to O'Neill's air "The Sorrowful Maiden." Source for notated version: Mr. J. M'Kenzie of Newtownards, c. 1879 [Joyce]. Joyce (Old Irish Folk Music and Song), 1909; No. 327, pg. 152. CCF2, Cape Cod Fiddlers – “Concert Collection II” (1999).
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S:Joyce - Old Irish Folk Music and Songs (1909)
Z:AK/Fiddler’s Companion
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