False Knight Upon the Road- Morris (ME) 1934 BFSSN
[From Bulletin from the Folk Song Society of the Northeast, Volume 11, in British Ballads. I'm reproducing Barry's notes in their entirety- which follow.
R. Matteson 2014]
THE FALSE KNIGHT UPON THE ROAD
(Child 3)
From Mr. William Morris, Brewer, Maine, August 20, 1934 as learned from the singing of his mother, Mrs. James Morris, daughter of Alexander and Ruth (Hosket) McPhail, native of Prince Edward Island.
I "O, where are you going?" said the false knight upon the road.
"I'm going to my school," said the pretty little boy about seven years old.
2 "What have you in your bag?" said the false knight upon the road.
"My books and my bread," said the pretty little boy about seven years old.
3 "Will you give me a piece of it?" said the false knight upon the road,
"O, no, sir, not one bit of it," said the pretty little boy about seven years old.
4, "I wish you were a fiddle," said the false knight upon the road.
"And you to be the bow of it," said the pretty little boy about seven years old.
5 "And if the bow should break--" said the false knight upon the road.
"May the end stick in your throat!" said the pretty little boy about seven years old.
The False Knight upon the Road was first reported in 1907 from Maine, (P. B., JAFL. XXIV, 344, BES., British Ballad's from Maine, p. 13): since then it has been sporadically recorded both in the North-east; New Brunswick (BES., op. cit., pp. 12-13), Nova Scotia (Creighton, Ballad's and Songs from Nova Scotia, pp. 1-2; an extraordinary version, crossed with Riddles Wisely Expounded); Vermont (unpublished, recorded by H. H. F., from the singing of Mrs. E. M. Sullivan, of Springfield), and in the Southern Highlands, west to Missouri; (Sharp-Karpeles, I, 3-4, A, B) ; Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, 6, 549; Belden, in JAFL., XXX, 285-6).
This ballad has failed of the critical appraisal it deserves as a striking homiletic drama in two acts.
Act I: The Temptation
The Devil tempts the child 1) to tell a lie, but is thwarted by the child's unfaltering truthfulness; 2) to "break bread" with him, in which he is again thwarted by the flat refusal of the child, who, being seven years old, is by Canon Law declared able to make a moral decision.
Act II: The Flyting.
Actually, this is a trial of wits, rather than an exchange of satirical invective. The child comes off victorious, through his innocence against the guile of the Devil: emphasized particularly in the Vermont version (originally from Co. Cork, Ireland):
"Bad luck to your teacher that taught you so well,"
Said the false, false knight to the child on the road;
"Good luck to the teacher that kept me from you and from your wicked Hell,"
Said the pretty boy, seven years old.
The inferiority complex with which Scriptural precedent has endowed Satan: resist the Devil and, he will flee from you (James IV, 7), neither give place to the Devil (Eph. IV, 27) is rooted in pre-Christian thought. The most effective weapon against demonic malice is in the name-tabu: thus in Child I (C, 18-19, BSPB, I, 5; JAFL., XII, 129) not calling him names, but calling his name puts the Devil to flight. Compare Mark V, 9, in which Jesus demands and obtains the name, Legion, of an unclean spirit.
The name-tabu, likewise, reaches back into dim antiquity. A close parallel, hitherto unnoticed, to the situation in the ballad, is in Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, 7V, 25, in which the philosopher saves a disciple from the wiles of a Lamia:
"The excellent lady is one of the Suecubae, whorn folk call lamias and bogy-dames. They are erotic, fond of the love, but fonder of the flesh of mortals, and by the snares of passion seize those they would devour. 'Hush!' she cried, 'away with you!' --feigning shame at what she heard, even as she poked a bit of fun at philosophers, 'ever babbling.' When the golden beakers and the seeming silver were proved illusions, vanishing before their eyes, when the butlers, cooks and the whole menage, rebuked by Apollonius, disappeared, the spook seemed to shed tears, and to beg for surcease of trial, that she be not forced to confess who she was. Apollonius, however, went on and gave her no respite, so that she acknowledged that she was a Succuba."
The story is not Greek, but Asiatic; nothing less than a bit of folk-tradition of the Semitic Lilith, or Leliota, the Lamia of Greek and Romans. Rudwin (The Devil in Legend, and Literature, p. 95), refers to the Talmudic tradition that Lilith destroys new-born children; these may be protected by the formula "avaunt thee, Lilith." Thus, both in classical tale and modern folk-magic, the name-tabu is the undoing of Lilith, the Lamia, by one tradition, the Devil's consort.
The ghul of the Arabs is a popular development of the Lamia of Isa. XXXIV, Isa, in which the word is a gloss to Hebrew Lilith, a beautiful woman, with horses' hoofs instead of human feet (Hessels, Leyden Glossary, s. v.). Mas'udi, Les Prairies d,'Or,III, 315, tr. C. Barbier de Menard and P. de Countrelle) says:
"When a ghul is seen, they address this rntltr: (i.e., couplet in tirade rhyme) to her:
'O monster with asses' feet, bray all you wish, we shall not quit the level ground, nor the road we are following. . . '
Moreover, one has no sooner apostrophised the ghul in the foregoing terms, but she disappears, into the depth of the valleys, or the heights of the mountains."
Between such use of the name-tabu and the use of invective is no great gap: the more so in European folk-tradition since the poet satirist, the shair of the Arabs and the file of the Irish were believed to have power of causing physical hurt with their verses, the Arabic higa' and the Irish glam dicheum. Yet the power of invective is no less an ancient belief: we haveĀ the case of the same philosopher Apollonius' encounter with a Lamia in the wilderness, who, unable to bear the invectives of himself and his retinue, vanished with a batlike screech (Philostratus, op. cit., II, 4). The passage is cited by Child ESPB., I, 485, as a parallel to The False Knight upon the Road; it is less exact than the adventure cited above, but is a very close parallel to the surviving custom of flyting with witches, which Mr. S. P. Bayard (Harvard Studies and, Notes in Philology and, Literature, XYIII, 3-5) has reported from Greene County, Pennsylvania. We need not be surprised that the formula of protection against Lilith should have been found effective against witches: the medieval witch is a veritable homuncula, grown from her own caldron of hell-broth brewed of ingredients from everywhere, not excluding synthetic mythology.
Thus in the Swedish version of the ballad corresponding to The False Knight upon the Road (Rancken, Nagra prof , p. 25), translated by Child, (ESPB, I, 2l), the temptress of the "goss, who was little" is a hag, kdring, the nursery witch. The means of thwarting her are those of the child flyting with the Devil; absolute truthfulness and a quick wit, as when he answers her wish that he were in Hell, with "you in, I out," and immediately after, her wish that he were in Heaven, with "I in, you out." Such ready forcing a curse to come home to roost is classical: we have the house-servants' banter in Plautus, Rudens, 375:
Ampelisca: Vae capiti atque aetati tune !
Trachalio: Tuost, mea Ampelisca;
which is, being interpreted:
Amp. : Bad 'cess to the soul and life of yer...
Tra. : Self, lil' Clingin' Vine!
Comic irony!, it may be called.
P. B.