Narrative Change in the European Tradition of the "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" Ballad
by Holger Olof Nygard
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 65, No. 255 (Jan. - Mar., 1952), pp. 1-12
[Proofed once. Footnotes move to the end. This article does not not look at narrative change in the English version of the ballad but rather compares differences in the ballad internationally (Dutch, German French/English etc). Nyard quotes Danish and German texts but doesn't bother to translate them after the quote. The article didn't do much for me. Not sure if I want to read his book, The Ballad of Heer Halewijn, after reading this.
After all, ballads with similar themes from different country don't have to be related at all. The idea or narrative theme is not proof in itself of a direct link. To think that a version from hills of Tennessee evolved from the Danish Heer Halewijn is poppycock! Apples to apples and dust to dust.
R. Matteson 2011]
NARRATIVE CHANGE IN THE EUROPEAN TRADITION OF THE "LADY ISABEL AND THE ELF KNIGHT" BALLAD[1]
By HOLGER OLOF NYGARD
BY WAY OF PREPARATION for my argument regarding transmissional change in the European tradition of the "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" ballad, I should like to set forth three generalizations that apply in some degree to all ballads found internationally, but particularly to the ballad I propose to discuss. First, the texts of variants of "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" from one linguistic or national area usually resemble one another closely. Second, the ballad as it is found in one linguistic area usually differs markedly from the same ballad as it is found in another linguistic area. Third, in postulations of the ballad's dissemination and change through the process of oral transmission little significance is to be attached to the dates of the texts, for the texts are only fortuitously preserved for us. I shall restate these generalizations for purposes of clarity and set forth my reasons for having made them. First, variants culled from the tradition of one country or one people have a uniformity about them, a family affinity. I make this generalization in order to justify my speaking of the Danish narrative pattern of the ballad story, or of the Low German, or of the French, for example. In no instance do the particular deviations of particular texts alter the narrative pattern of "Kvindemorderen," the title Grundtvig gave to the Danish form of the ballad under discussion. Similarly, while there are numerous Dutch variants, yet in the story which they tell they conform to a predominant and easily defined sequence of events.
The first generalization leads one naturally to the second. Although the international variants of the ballad deal ostensibly with one theme, the common narrative situation, yet the narrative pattern of the Danish ballad differs from that of the Dutch and the Low German, and these again differ from the High German, French, English and other narrative forms in their mode of expounding the common narrative situation.
The third generalization is a statement of distrust of dates of texts as indications of the history and movement of the ballad over Europe. The Danish "Kvindemorderen" is very much the same in narrative outline and details whether the text be from the noblewoman Karen Brahe's manuscript book of ca. 1550 or from E. T. Kristensen's nineteenth-century collection of ballads from the thorps of Jutland. The Icelandic variants have been remarkably constant from I665, the date of our earliest Icelandic text, to the present day. The High German ballad of latter-day tradition is in narrative import the same as the broadside copy of ca. 1550 from south Germany.
The variants in English of "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight," excluding Child 4A and 4B, follow a fairly constant pattern of narration, regardless of the date of the text and regardless of the place of origin of the text, whether it be Scotland, England, or America. As far as dates are concerned, the "Lady Isabel" ballad is an old ballad in western tradition; by the mid-sixteenth century it was well established in Scandinavia, Germany, and Spain, as the earliest texts from these areas indicate. It is only natural to suppose that the ballad had assumed its various national forms by the time these early scattered records were made; and that the predominant form in a particular locality of Europe has been the predominant form for that area for a number of centuries.
I make this third generalization primarily to justify the view that "Halewijn," by which name the Dutch form of the ballad is known, may retain the most ancient form of the story extant in the tradition of this ballad even though no text of "Halewijn" has been preserved for us from a date preceding 1836.[2] If we may judge by the constancy of the ballad story in other countries, it follows that the predominant form of the Dutch ballad as it is preserved for us may well have the narrative outline of Dutch variants of earlier centuries. As we shall see presently, there is a better reason for considering the Dutch form of the ballad as antecedent to other forms preserved for us.
It is evident that the history of the ballad will not be revealed to us by the chance existence of textual dates; nor can the international dissemination of this ballad be satisfactorily arrived at by a pursuit and scrutiny of minute variation within the canon of texts of each separate linguistic area. Minute echoes from the texts of one area to those of another are suggestive of connections and are not to be neglected. But it is my belief that the dissemination of this ballad, its movement in western Europe, where the tradition is undoubtedly centered, can best be determined by a comparative study of the narrative forms as they are found in the contiguous countries of western and northern Europe, and by a postulation of the changes that transmission might have effected as the story wandered from one people to another. It is the object of this paper to present a hypothesis to account for the startling differences in narrative structure among the international forms of the ballad of "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight," differences that have arisen through the hazards and waywardness of oral or written transmission or by the designs of refashioners. In order to demonstrate the process of change that has occurred within the ballad narrative I shall first sketch as much of the narratives of certain national forms of the ballad as is required.
The narrative of the Low Country ballad (the Dutch and Low German) is briefly as follows. Herr Halewijn (or Gert Olbert in the Low German), singing a magically seductive song, entices a king's fair daughter away into the woods with him. They ride until they reach a gallows strung with maidens. The heroine is told that because she is the most beautiful of maids she may choose her means of death. She chooses the sword. By way of a ruse she suggests that before he kill her he should take off his cloak, for maiden blood spurts far. Before he has managed to remove his cloak his head lies at his feet. But the tongue continues to speak; it asks that she blow upon his horn, and that she smear upon his red neck the salve that is in a pot beneath the gallows. She wisely declines to fulfill either request. Instead she washes the head in a spring and rides home triumphantly with the head in her lap.
In the Danish ballad a maid is courted by a knight who entices her away from home by promising to conduct her to a wonderland. In the greenwood they rest. He digs a grave intended, as he says, not for his horse or hound but for her. He has murdered a number of other maids, and she shall be added to the count. She then asks him to lay his head in her lap in order that she may delouse him. While he sleeps she binds him hand and foot. She then wakes him, for she chooses not to deceive him in his sleep. She attends to none of his entreaties but kills him with his own sword and rides home upon his steed.
The predominant French and English forms of the ballad (the English variant A is the marked exception here) differ from the other national forms of western and northern Europe in that the central action takes place beside a body of water, and the practice of the tueur defemmes is to drown his victims. In both the French and English ballads, when the knight and maid have arrived at the sea or riverside, he announces his intention of drowning her as he has drowned others. He then orders her to take off her costly clothing. She asks him in pretense of modesty that he turn about, for it is not fitting that he should see her naked. When he is thus off guard she pushes him into the water. In the French ballad he clutches a branch and pleads that she save him. She cuts the branch with his sword (which she has previously asked him to set at his feet) and so saves herself. In the major episode the English ballad differs from the French only in that he clings to no branch; his destruction is assured by his having been thrown into the water. In the English variants C, E, and G in the Child canon, as in the predominant form of the French ballad, he pleads in vain that she save him from the water.
The High German form of the ballad begins with the knight's seductive song, the art of which he promises to teach the maid if she will ride away with him. When they rest in the greenwood the maid sees eleven maids hanging in a fir tree. As she realizes that she too is to be hanged she asks that first she be allowed three cries. She calls upon Jesus, Mary, and her brother. The brother, hearing her cry at a great distance, hurries to the wood; he rescues his sister and kills the knight.
The East German ballad, as Child has pointed out,[3] would appear to be a development from the High German form. The striking departure in the East German ballad is that the villain hangs the maid; the brother arrives too late to save his sister. But the ballad ends morally with the brother killing the villain.
It is to be seen that in the Low Country form of the ballad alone is the supernatural nature of the villain in any way necessary to the narrative. The magical song of enticement is, of course, found in the High German ballad, and there is a trace of it in the Icelandic. In the Danish ballad the villain promises to take the maid to a wonderland. In the English variant A, a variant clearly an offshoot of the Scandinavian tradition, the villain is specified as an elf knight. But in the High German, French, English, and Danish forms of the narrative, transmissional change has rendered the events so mundane as to leave the villain with no distinctive supernatural markings; he is given merely ballad appellations like "knight," "suitor," "Herr Peder," or "False Sir John"; and his motives have been given the naturalistic explanations of robbery or rape. In the Dutch and Low German ballad, on the other hand, the severed head continues to speak. The head not only speaks but we may suppose that it has the power to rejoin the body if only the maid will comply with the villain's wish that she rub a certain salve upon his red neck. The recurrent echoes of the supernatural to be found sporadically in variants from a number of countries would support the opinion that the narrative was clearly supernatural in its earliest form. But in the Low Countries alone do we find the ballad still totally involved in the otherworld motif; everywhere else the narrative has been rationalized and more or less deprived of mystery.
It is generally agreed among ballad scholars that the Low Country narrative form is the most ancient of the forms of the story which we have. Grundtvig did not venture to point out the homeland of the ballad, but he thought it might be the Lowlands of Europe or Denmark.[4] Child, more venturesome in this instance, thought that the Dutch ballad was "marked with very ancient and impressive traits."[5] Succeeding scholars of balladry have never challenged the view that the Low Country ballad is the oldest of the many forms of the story. Sophus Bugge,[6] followed by George Doncieux,[7] was particularly anxious to view the,Dutch ballad as the earliest form of the "Lady Isabel" narrative, for such a view supported his particular idea that the ballad had originated from the Judith and Holofernes apocryphal tale; only in the Low Country ballad is there the decapitation and the triumphant bearing home of the head. But the more common and less controversial reason for accepting the Low Country form of the ballad as the earliest form extant is that it preserves the supernatural elements of the story most strikingly.
The ballad, transmitted throughout Europe, underwent great changes. But the narrative core of the ballad, its narrative "idea," remained intact: that a villain entices a girl away from her home to kill her as he has killed others before her, that she, through her bravery and cleverness, defeats his designs by a ruse, and that he, pleading for his life, is destroyed by her. That every variant of the ballad does not conform with the narrative pattern of the vast majority of variants is hardly to be wondered at. The High German and East German departures from the common narrative have been noted. In an abridged form of the Icelandic ballad the villain comes off best. Some French variants have departed from the usual tradition, apparently by admixture with other ballads. But despite these sporadic departures the generalization still holds that the majority of variants in the countries of western and northern Europe tell much the same story. It would appear that the memories of ballad singers have nearly everywhere been impelled by the simplicity of the central situation in the ballad and perhaps by psychological sympathy for the heroine and antipathy for the villain to retain the outline of the narrative to the extent of the one-sentence sketch just given. The tradition of the ballad among singers has been sufficiently alive and distinct to maintain the uniformity that we find in the narratives of the many far-flung variants.
But a diversity of narrative did develop. The scene of action changed, the maid employed different ruses, and the motives of the villain were clarified or at any rate reduced to mundane terms. It is my belief that the process of rationalization of the narrative, that is, the reduction of the supernatural which must have been intrinsic to the original story, is responsible for bringing about the changed forms of the ballad to be found in areas contiguous with the Lowlands of Europe. The hypothesis I wish to make predicates that certain changes were necessary in the narrative management and sequence of events in the story if the incident was no longer conceived of by singers as a maid's contention with a being of the other world, but instead was thought of as a human drama, a story of two human beings. That the story in traveling from one people to another should lose its supernatural nature need not be wondered at; that process of loss has always been operative in ballads that deal with elves and demons. And the earthly motif of bride-stealing and abduction, a theme met with frequently in the balladry of the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany, may well have influenced the "Lady Isabel" story and so reduced the villain to human proportions. The Danish bride-stealing ballad "Ribold og Guldborg" (the "Earl Brand" ballad of Scandinavia) provides an illustration of this influence; the "Ribold" ballad has in some instances given wholesale to "Kvindemorderen" variants as many as fifteen consecutive stanzas. The first fifteen stanzas of variant A of "Kvindemorderen" are the usual opening stanzas of variants of "Ribold og Guldborg." Most variants of the two ballads begin with a series of stanzas common to both, a certain sign that the thematic content of both ballads has been associated in the minds of singers.
It is my hypothesis, then, that ballad singers were forced to alter the narrative and its sequence of events as they lost a sense of the supernatural import of the story. It cannot be established whether the changes were made deliberately or unconsciously; seldom in considerations of transmissional change can one be certain that a change has come about either wilfully or unknowingly. Nor need the question detain us here. The changes forced upon the ballad, either deliberately or unconsciously, differed in every national reworking of the ballad. But the relation of each derivative and altered form of the narrative to what we have posited as the earliest form can reasonably be understood in terms of the hypothesis here set forth. The hypothesis is tenable to the degree that these relations appear reasonable.
It remains, then, to demonstrate the relations between the derivative forms and the Low Country ballad, the posited early form. In the Dutch ballad (all the variants of which are better preserved than those of the similar Low German ballad) the villain makes two pleas for his life after the maid has decapitated him, and to each plea the maid makes a retort; the dialogue is executed in ballad style with incremental repetition and paralleled plea and retort. The incident of the talking head has been accepted in the Low Countries by singers conscious of the supernatural nature of the story. But a rationalized narrative form derived from the Dutch ballad would drop the highly colorful but legendary and supernatural element of the talking head. And tradition has indeed dropped the talking head in all variants not from the Low Countries. It is noteworthy, however, that despite great variations that the story may have undergone as it passed from one people to another, among the most constant parts in the various forms of the ballad are the dialogue interchanges between the two principals. The ballad form has a propensity for dialogue; balladry reveals everywhere the tenacious way in which singers have clung to dramatic interchanges, to the dialogue of the actors in the ballad incident. In the objective and reportorial way of presentation of a ballad, the dialogue markedly gives to the narrative an immediacy and subjectivity, qualities usually spoken of as absent in ballad narrative. The sense of immediacy of ballad dialogue is probably responsible on psychological grounds for the persistence with which oral tradition clings to the speeches of participants in a ballad story. The formulary nature of ballad dialogue-the repetitions direct and incremental, the responses fashioned as parallels to the first speaker's words-does not detract from the sense of immediacy of ballad dialogue. Formulae pervade the reports of action as well as of dialogue in balladry; formulae are the accepted devices of oral tradition which render a ballad easy to remember and to sing. They remove the ballad language and the narrative technique from the dangers of marked individuality, for individuality in the social context of ballad singing is far more a vice than a virtue. Proof of this pervasive conservatism is undeniably revealed by the persistence with which the narrative and language of a ballad maintain themselves through centuries of oral transmission.
Despite the changes that the "Lady Isabel" narrative has undergone, the dialogue interchanges between villain and heroine have been maintained. The words they say to one another, the formulae, have been altered to a degree with each reworking of the ballad. But the import of the dialogue remains the same: after they have arrived at the principal scene of action the villain announces to the maid that he intends to kill her as he has killed other maids; with hopes of managing a ruse she addresses a request to him, the fulfilling of which would place him at her mercy; when he has come into her power he pleads for his life, and she responds to each of his pleas with a fitting retort. Despite the loss of the talking head in all variants in which the supernatural has been lost, ballad singers have nevertheless maintained the dialogue in which Halewijn in the Dutch ballad pleads with the maid that he might be saved. The retention of the villain's pleading with the maid would force a change upon the narrative structure of the variants derived from the Low Country form of the ballad. A plausible situation would have to be supplied in which that pleading could occur; the villain's requests for mercy and pity would have to be moved forward to a point of time before his decapitation. Decapitation would mean death in a tradition that had lost sight of the supernatural nature of the villain, a tradition that had come to consider him as little more than a Madchenrduber. If he is to plead for his life before being killed by the maid he must in some way be brought into her power. It would appear that a necessity for change in the narrative management of the story was imposed upon the ballad in some such way.
The villain's coming into the maid's power while he was still alive might have been arranged by her first putting him to sleep (perhaps even with runes as in a Norwegian variant,[8] or with "a sma' charm" as in the English A variant[9]) and then binding him. The dialogue interchange could then ensue between her waking him and her killing him. It would appear that in such a way the Danish form of the ballad came about.
In the early Danish variants the maid's waking him is rationalized as a wish on her part not to deceive him in his sleep.
Du wag nu op, Vlffuer, och tall med meg!
y s0ffnen wild ieg icke suige deg.[10]
Curiously, in three of the four sixteenth and seventeenth-century Danish variants the maid orders the villain not only to wake up but also to talk with her, "tall med meg!" The touch might well corroborate the hypothesis that in the refashioning of the ballad the singer felt in his mind the need to work into the ballad the pleas of the villain and the maid's retorts after the turning of the tables. Nothing in the Danish ballad demands their speaking after she has bound him save the established tradition, retained from the earlier form, that the villain must suffer through the refusals of the maid to save him before he is dispatched by her.
The maid's ruse in the Danish ballad, that she wishes to delouse him, would appear to be a part of the re-creation of the ballad narrative. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century Danish variants he complies with her wish by laying his head in her lap. But his doing so promptly brings him into a sleep, a sleep described in all early variants as not sweet, "icke sod." The mere act of his laying his head in her lap would appear to place him in her power. Later Danish tradition has tried to rationalize the improbability of his sleeping in her lap after he has informed her that he is going to bury her in the newly dug grave; for in later Danish variants, when she offers to delouse him, he replies that he is willing only if she will not deceive him in his sleep, a sentiment lifted by ballad singers from a point originally farther on in the ballad, and originally, as we have seen, spoken by the maid. In the later Danish tradition, then, he is made to anticipate his sleeping; his sleep is romantically described in nineteenth-century variants as sweet, "sod." Her ruse of putting him to sleep, either by a charm or rune, or by some other power, has been lost sight of by later tradition. His request for a promise of good faith while he sleeps is a poor attempt on the part of transmitters of the ballad to patch what in their minds has appeared to be a flaw in the story, that he should fall asleep after having announced his evil intentions. Later tradition has lost sight of the nature of the maid's ruse, that she in the early Danish ballad designedly worked a sleep upon him. The later tradition is flawed to the extent that the villain has no good reason for willingly and knowingly submitting himself to sleep at this early stage in the narrative.
Even among the Danish variants themselves we see through time a progressive loss of the supernatural; that loss through oral transmission has resulted in changes within the Danish form of the ballad story. The early Danish ballad had itself developed from the Low Country ballad in a process of change attributable to the dropping away of the supernatural nature of the villain.
As we have seen, the Danish ballad moved forward the villain's request for mercy and pity to a point in the narrative before his death by having the maid force sleep upon him and bind him. In the French ballad, "Renaud le Tueur de Femmes," and in the English variants of the C-H type it would appear that the necessary change in narrative sequence has been effected by having the heroine shove the villain into the river or into the sea, thus rendering him helpless and yet able to plead for his life. The scene of action has been moved from the greenwood to the side of a body of water. How the water-and-drowning motif entered the French and English ballad, and why drowning replaced the sword as the means of administering death are questions beyond a conclusive answer. The sword is not totally absent in the French ballad; although the water plays the major part in the heroine's disposing of the villain, the sword is used by the maid in depriving Renaud of his last chance to live. The maid closes the scene in the French ballad by cutting with his sword the branch to which he clings. As for the water motif, by way of mere suggestion it might be pointed out that in western Germany there are instances of mixture of the "Lady Isabel" tradition and the ballad of the "Wassermanns Braut." These mixed forms cannot be looked upon in any way as transitional pieces between a German or Dutch form of the "Lady Isabel" tradition and the French "Renaud" ballad. They merely serve to indicate that in the traditional singing along the Rhine, the abductor of the maid has often been conceived of as a water demon who drowns maids in the Rhine as they cross the river with him. These mixed forms serve to illustrate how easily orally transmitted materials are altered by a tradition as strong as the legends of the Rhine. Some such, transmissional process may have been at work in the formation of the "Renaud" ballad.
Although the villain's mode of administering death varies in different forms of the ballad, the variations do not affect the narrative "idea" or the story sequence in the many forms of the ballad. These variations may well have arisen from suggestions in the posited early form of the ballad itself. For in the Dutch and Low German ballad the maid is offered a choice of means of death. For instance, in "Gert Olbert," a Low German variant, the villain asks the maid,
"Wust du di keisen den Dannigbom,
Of wust du di keisen den Waterstrom,
Of wust du di keisen dat blanke Schwert?"[11]
In the Low Country variants as well as in two Danish variants[12] that preserve the same offer the maid refuses hanging and drowning and chooses the sword. It may well be that the differing means of administering death used in the different forms of the ballad were prompted by the suggestion of alternatives in the Low Country form. In the High German ballad the villain intends to hang the maid; in the East German form he does hang her. In the Dutch and Low German ballad, although she is to die by the sword, the villain's other victims have been hanged on a gallows tree. In most Danish variants the instrument of death is not specified; the villain announces his intention to kill her by preparing a grave for her. In the French and English forms of the ballad (exclusive of English variant A) the villain employs drowning as the means of death. Although the French and English ballads have departed from the more prevalent traditions of the gallows and the sword, they do employ a means of death suggested in the tradition of the Low Country ballad, in which drowning is offered to the maid as an alternative way of dying. The water motif as another means of death could enter the ballad with no disruption of the narrative "idea" or the narrative arrangement. The water motif affords another way in which the villain can be put at the mercy of the maid so that the final dialogue of pleading and refusal can be retained. The villain's being pushed into the water would put him at the maid's mercy. From the water he might plead for his life and bribe her with promises of marriage; the dialogue might ensue as it does in the predominant French and English forms of the ballad, without his being able to save himself. In such a way tradition has maintained the closing dialogue in the French-English ballad.
Like the maid in the Danish ballad, the heroine in the French-English ballad employs a ruse different from that used against Halewijn in the Dutch form of the story. But unlike the ruse in the Danish ballad, the one in the French-English tradition is merely a rearrangement of an event already in the Low Country ballad. In the Dutch ballad, it will be remembered, the maid by way of a ruse asks that Halewijn take off his cloak lest her blood smear it when he stabs her. In the French-English form of the ballad the heroine's ruse still turns upon the motif of doffing clothes. But the order to undress, the heroine's in the Dutch ballad, has been transferred to Renaud or False Sir John. The maid's request that the villain remove his cloak was probably relinquished as a ruse when the derivative tradition of the ballad assumed the drowning motif in place of the earlier sword motif as the villain's intended way of killing the maid. But the incident of clothes-doffing was maintained by tradition, for the incident could be turned to a new use, to enhance the plausibility of the narrative. Having the villain order the maid to disrobe would render him understandable in mundane, earthly terms as a robber motivated by a desire to acquire the costly clothing and jewelry of his victims. The French ballad does little more than suggest the robbery motive; in Renaud's order that the maid undress he does appraise the value of her clothing.
"La belle, defaites votre manteau,
Votre chemise de vrai lin
Qui parait comme un vrai satin."[13]
The rationalization of the villain's motives is clearly revealed in the English tradition of the ballad represented by the C-H group of variants.
"Is this your bowers and lofty towers,
So beautiful and gay?
Or is it for my gold," she said,
"You take my life away?"
"Strip off," he says, "thy jewels fine,
So costly and so brave,
For they are too costly and too fine
To throw in the sea wave."[14]
From suggestions in the older Dutch tradition have been provided both a motive for the villain and, simultaneously, a new ruse for the maid. Since
the maid is to be drowned she can no longer plead that her blood may spatter
him; she cannot therefore ask him to remove his cloak. Instead it is the villain,
as a robber, who asks her to remove her clothing. The maid's ruse in the
French-English ballad has had to shift its nature to be in harmony with the
other changes in the ballad. As she prepares to undress she asks that he avert
his eyes, a request apparently prompted by a natural enough modesty but
palpably calculated as a scheme for freeing herself.
"N'est pas affaire aux chevaliers
De voir dame deshabiller.
Mets ton epe' [des] sous tes pics
[Et] ton manteau devant ton nez."[15]
His complying with her request makes it possible for the maid to shove him into the water. Although the French and Dutch narratives differ considerably they are more closely related than superficially they appear to be. Besides the common motif of clothes-doffing, the ruse involves the villain's momentarily averting his eyes in both forms of the ballad; and in both forms
his cloak is the means by which he averts his eyes.
According to the hypothesis here set forth, the narrative changes developed in the Scandinavian and French-English forms of the ballad as the result of a loss to these traditions of a sense of the supernatural element in the story. The initial change, which brought with it other alterations, was the rearranging of the narrative so that the villain was placed in the maid's power while still alive and able to plead for his life.
In the High German form of the ballad the villain has again lost his supernatural nature. But it would appear that the ballad narrative has been altered for reasons over and above this loss. The High German narrative is not so easily to be related to the earlier form of the story; there are some inexplicable details in the transformation. But the significant change in the High German tradition is that the heroine has lost heroic stature; to transmitters of the High German ballad the maid has no longer the astuteness and bravery to save herself. The maid no longer manages to bring the villain into her power, and so the villain no longer pleads for mercy from her. In the dialogue interchange the plea for mercy has been transferred instead to the maid. And her plea is at one and the same time her ruse. She asks that she may be allowed three cries. The villain permits the cries, for he believes that the cries cannot be heard. She calls upon Jesus, Mary, and her brother to save her. Her prayers and cry are answered by her brother's intervention.
The narrative alterations in the High German tradition would appear to stem from the loss of the capacity the heroine has in the older tradition of turning the tables on the villain. Her having to plead with him would be a necessary result of such a loss. The notion that the maid comes off best in the end may have persisted from the older tradition and may account for the importation into the High German ballad of a brother to save the maid. As the High German ballad moved eastward through Germany the degree of heroic stature of the maid diminished to the extent that she is killed by the villain in the East German ballad before her brother has time to arrive. Pictured as helpless in the High German tradition, she suffers the consequences of helplessness in the East German ballad as processes of transmission alter the narrative in the direction of intrinsic consistency.
My hypothesis regarding narrative change in the European tradition of the "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" ballad has attempted to explain how the divergent narrative forms of the ballad have arisen. The narrative alterations which have produced the various forms of the ballad are the compensations made by tradition to offset the loss of significant elements in the story, for
traditional singing has a constant tendency to render familiar, understandable, and consistent the material it perpetuates. The hypothesis provides, in addition, a demonstration of the avenues of dissemination of the ballad theme in western Europe. And it provides a rationale for the hitherto undemonstrated view that the Low Country ballad retains the earliest features of the tradition; for the Dutch and Low German ballad cannot be accounted for by a similar hypothesis of transmissional change as a development from another form. The demonstration would indicate that the great editors of European balladry by no means left closed accounts; their collections invite analysis of such a matter as the transmissional history of the ballads common to various countries of Europe.
University of California,
Berkeley, California
---------------------------------
Footnotes:
1 This paper was read at the Sixty-second Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society in Berkeley, California, Dec. 28, 1950.
2 Our earliest text of the Dutch ballad is the variant noted by Fr. Willems in F. J. Mone's Anzeiger fiir Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit, Fiinfter Jahrgang (1836), col. 447 ff.
3 F. J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Boston, I882-98), I, 48.
4 Svend Grundtvig, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (Kj0benhavn, 1853 ff.), IV, 29.
5 Op. cit., p. 24.
6 "Bidrag til den nordiske Balladedigtnings Historie," Det Philologisk-historiske Samfunds Mindeskrift, 1854-I879 (Kjobenhavn, 1879), 75-92.
7 Le Romancero Populaire de la France (Paris, 1904), pp. 351-365
8 "Svein Nordmann og Gullbjir," no. 31, in K. Liestel and M. Moe, Norske Folkevisor (Kristiania, I920), I, I56-I58.
9 Child, op. cit., p. 55.
10 Stanza 30 of variant A (ca. 1550) in Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, IV, 33.
11. Stanza 6 of no. 4If in Ludwig Erk and Franz B6hme, Deutscher Liederhort (Leipzig,
1893-94), I, 128.
12. Variants E and F.
13 From stanza 5 of "Renaud et ses Quatorze Femmes," no. 31, in Le Comte de Puymaigre, Chants Populaires Recueillis dans le Pays Messin (Metz et Paris, 1865), pp. 98-99.
14 Stanzas II and 12 of English variant D in Child, op. cit., I, 57.
15 From stanzas 5 and 6 of "Renaud" in Doncieux, op. cit., p. 354. Doncieux is responsible for the additions in brackets.