"The Twa Sisters" Going Which Way?- Parker 1951
"The Twa Sisters" Going Which Way?
by Harbison Parker
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 64, No. 254 (Oct. - Dec., 1951), pp. 347-360
[Briefly proofed. In several places Parker uses asterisks in addition to footnotes, these have been lettered as in 15a and placed at the end.
R. Matteson 2014]
"THE TWA SISTERS"-GOING WHICH WAY?
By HARBISON PARKER
AFTER WRESTLING WITH THE COMPLEX cross-relationships between "The Twa Sisters" (Child 10) and the Scandinavian analogues of this British ballad, noting the riddle posed by the similarities of motifs in the British versions first to one detail in the West-Scandinavian variants (those from Norway, Iceland, and the Faeroe Islands), then to another in the East-Scandinavian (Danish, Swedish), Knut Liestol concludes concerning this perplexing ambiguity, in his study of "Dei tvo systar," that the likeliest explanation of this is, that the ballad first was composed in England or Scotland, there split itself into two versions, and both of these then came to Scandinavia by different paths, one to Norway (Iceland, the Faeroe Islands) and the other to Denmark.[1]
The temptation to postulate a double influence in the passage of this ballad from one language into the other becomes understandable when we observe the propensity of the British variants to exhibit diverse renderings of the same detail, one in accord with the West-Scandinavian versions, the other with the East. Such a counsel of desperation, however, if applied at the opposite end of the British-Scandinavian tradition, would lead rather to the conclusion that Britain had received this ballad both from Denmark and from the Norwegian-Icelandic-Faeroese milieu, so that some British variants exhibit motifs consonant with the Western versions, others, motifs reflecting the Eastern tradition.
If the Scandinavian versions alone were considered, it would be fairly easy to make a convincing case for transmission from, say, West to East, with plausible explanations of variations in the details; then the circumstance that the British tradition complaisantly manages to agree partly with each of the Scandinavian traditions might be accounted for on the hypothesis that versions were independently accepted from both. The stumbling-block to such a theory is the ubiquitous figure of the miller, who appears in every variant of the British which is not hopelessly fragmentary--but not at all in the Scandinavian renderings of the story. That two lines of ballad-descent entering Britain from different milieus could come to a universal agreement on this figure strains credulity too far, even about the capers of ballad transmission. (How Liestol deals with the miller will be discussed later.)
Liestol demonstrates[2] the close similarity between the British and the Scandinavian versions, which, as he says, both Child and Grundtvig remarked, and which a perusal of the ballads makes convincing-- so convincing that there can be no quarrel with his conclusion that The English and the Scandinavian ballad are so similar that it is unthinkable that they, in different places, could have taken up the same theme (in prose) and composed so similarly about it. There must have been loaning of the identical ballad from the one country to the other. It is not only in the legend itself that the English and the Scandinavian ballad agree. In form, in individual verses, phraseology and modes of expression we find likenesses.[3]
The conclusion seems inevitable and elementary that there was somewhere, sometime, an Urform from which all extant versions of all three traditions-British, West-, and East-Scandinavian--are sprung, some to a lesser, others to a greater distance. Upon this I would ground the conjecture that neither Liestol's theory of a split in the British tradition which gave differing versions to the two Scandinavian traditions, nor the suggested converse, creation of the British form from elements derived independently from the two Scandinavian repertories, is likely, but rather that the British borrowed the ballad from the West-Scandinavian tradition (probably from the Faeroe branch), and that motifs which correspond to those in the Danish do so only fortuitously. There are some difficulties facing this hypothesis which are perhaps impossible to explain altogether satisfactorily, and which therefore appear to support Liestol's theory. On the other hand, there are weaknesses in his theory which, in my estimation, are too grave to permit it to stand unchallenged; and the theory here offered in its place, it seems to me, surmounts those. Child's Version B, which Liestol commends as "one of the best versions,"[4] is a good representative of the British tradition:
1. There was twa sisters in a bowr,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh
There was twa sisters in a bowr,
Stirling for ay
There was twa sisters in a bowr,
There came a knight to be their wooer.
Bonny Saint Johnston stands upon Tay.
2. He courted the eldest wi glove an ring,
But he lovd the youngest above a' thing.
3. He courted the eldest wi brotch an knife,
But lovd the youngest as his life.
4. The eldest she was vexed sair,
An much envi'd her sister fair.
5. Into her bowr she could not rest,
Wi grief an spite she almos brast.
6. Upon a morning fair an clear,
She cried upon her sister dear:
7. 'O sister, come to yon sea stran,
An see our father's ships come to lan.'
8. She's taen her by the milk-white han,
An led her down to yon sea stran.
9. The younges[t] stood upon a stane,
The eldest came an threw her in.
10. She tooke her by the middle sma,
An dashd her bonny back to the jaw.
11. 'O sister, sister, tak my han,
An Ise mack you heir to a' my lan.
12. 'O sister, sister, tak my middle,
An yes get my goud and my gouden girdle.
I3. 'O sister, sister, save my life,
An I swear Ise never be nae man's wife.'
14. 'Foul fa the han that I should tacke,
It twin'd me an my wardles make.
15. 'Your cherry cheeks an yallow hair
Gars me gae maiden for evermair.'
I6. Sometimes she sank, an sometimes she swam,
Till she came down yon bonny mill-dam.
17. O out it came the miller's son,
An saw the fair maid swimmin in.
18. 'O father, father, draw your dam,
Here's either a mermaid or a swan.'
I9. The miller quickly drew the dam,
An there he found a drownd woman.
20. You coudna see her yallow hair
For gold and pearle that were so rare.
21. You coudna see her middle sma
For gouden girdle that was sae braw.
22. You coudna see her fingers white,
For gouden rings that was sae gryte.
23. An by there came a harper fine,
That harped to the king at dine.
24. When he did look that lady upon,
He sighd and made a heavy moan.
25. He's taen three locks o her yallow hair,
An wi them strung his harp sae fair.
26. The first tune he did play and sing,
Was, 'Farewell to my father the king.'
27. The nextin tune that he playd syne,
Was, 'Farewell to my mother the queen.'
28. The lasten tune that he playd then,
Was, 'Wae to my sister, fair Ellen.'[5]
With variations, the Scandinavian versions tell the following straight forward and coherent story:
There lived a man in a variously-specified locality. He had two daughters, the younger fair, the elder ugly. Wooers came and wooed the younger, rejecting the elder. She thereupon invited her sister to go down to the strand, suggesting, in response to the younger's demand for a reason for going, that they wash themselves white so as to be alike. Often the younger answers by twitting her with the declaration that no matter how much she may wash, she will never be fair, and will never catch a man. Nevertheless, she goes, followed by her scheming sister, and sets herself upon a stone, whence the elder pushes her into the water. The younger begs her sister to save her life, and promises to give her various gifts for so doing. The elder is unmoved, pointing out that she can now get those articles anyhow. In desperation, the girl offers to surrender her suitor to the adamant sister, but the offer is refused for the same reason. (Frequently the elder sister demands the suitor, whereupon the younger usually replies that his counsel is his own.) The corpse is blown to shore and is there discovered by two minstrels, who avail themselves of parts of it for a musical instrument, a harp or a fiddle; often the fingers are used for pegs, and almost invariably the hair is used for strings. One minstrel (or, in the West-Scandinavian, fisherman, pilgrim, beggar) suggests to the other that they repair to a dwelling where a wedding (which turns out to be that of the elder sister) is taking place. There they play the instrument: the strings speak and denounce the murderess, who is usually burnt upon a pyre, often at the bridegroom's command. (In the Icelandic and Faeroe versions and Swedish A, the bride dies of fear or remorse.) Variations between the West- and East-Scandinavian traditions in salient motifs in this resume will be considered as the discussion demands.
Liestol bases his theory that the Scandinavian repertory took the ballad from the British upon his contention that ". . . the English form has more original traits and on the whole is more ancient than the Scandinavian."[6] This claim for the preeminence of the British is built upon a scrutiny of various salient motifs. First, he considers the contrast between the fairness or beauty of the younger and the "dunness" or ugliness of the older.
In the Scandinavian version of the ballad great weight is laid upon the circumstance that the eldest sister is ugly and the younger pretty. In Norwegian A the younger sister says:
Although thou wilt wash thyself never so white,
so shalt thou become never to thy sister like.
Although thou do both wash thee and scrub,
so shalt thou never become other than God has created thee.
Norwegian C has also:
Thou mayest wash thee as white as thou canst;
never wilt thou get a bridegroom.
Likewise in one of the Icelandic and the Danish and Faeroe versions. So far as that goes, there is something of it in the English ballad. The oldest version makes no contrast between the sisters. Nor [Mrs.] Brown's version either (nor any of the others which are not named). F, G and Q say that "the youngest was the fairest flower," M: "ye was fair and I was din," P(a): "the old was black and the young one fair." The Scandinavian ballad intends to give grounds for the eldest sister's conduct and does it in such a way that we lose sympathy with the younger, and the ballad loses much of its tragic power.[7]
Liestol clearly implies here that the British versions are superior to the Scandinavian in the treatment of this detail precisely to the degree that they omit it.[8] Nevertheless, this motif must have been in the original form of the ballad from which descended both the Scandinavian and the British forms; for when a detail appears in all branches of the Scandinavian tradition and also in the British, it seems not illogical to conclude that it was part of the Urform it would, indeed, be illogical to conclude otherwise, since different traditions are not so likely to add the same detail independently as they are to preserve it from the original form. Aesthetic considerations might, therefore, support the notion that the British singers improved the story by soft-pedaling the motive of the elder sister, but they cannot here aid in advancing the claim that the British versions are older or purer.
Next, Liestol points out that in nearly all the British versions three strings for the instrument are fashioned from the girl's hair, whereas among the Scandinavian the Icelandic alone remembers the number three, the magical number, which "is certainly the original and is the condition which permits the harp to speak."[9] Among the other Northern versions, as soon as the number of the strings was forgotten, one could give the harp as many or as few notes as one wished. Thus we find the number increased to 4, 5, 6 notes in the Norwegian versions. Likewise in the Faeroese. Of the Danish, three versions (A, D, F) have the correct number, three; some give no number at all, others have two or one note. In the Icelandic version one has, as one could expect, the threefold note, which answers to the three strings.[10]
Since the British consistently remembers the number as three, whereas only the Icelandic and three of the Danish versions have that correct number, Liestol is confident that The English ballad has here held to an original feature of the legend better than the Scandinavian. But [he concedes] this is in itself no proof that the Scandinavian version has borrowed from the English. One can only conclude that the English ballad could not have takent hat legend-trait from the Scandinavian after the number three was forgotten."
This conclusion, however, amounts to nothing, for the number three was not forgotten, as Liestol's own testimony shows. That the British versions so consistently remember it could be taken either as proof that this tradition received the ballad from the Scandinavian rather late, so that there was not sufficient time for a forgetting to occur in some variants, as was the case in Scandinavia, or merely that the British singers here exhibit a more tenacious memory than their northern neighbors.
That "none of the English versions have anything about the elder sister being punished" Liestol regards as proof that the British tradition cleaves more closely to the original version of the story. He points out that In some the harp calls down woe upon her:
B28: The lasten tune that he playd then,
Was: "Wae to my sister, fair Ellen."
In others, the harp wishes that the sister may receive her punishment: "Hang my sister" (D, F, K), "Ye'll drown my sister as she's dune me" (O), "Tell him to burn my sister Jean" (P), "Burn Burd Ellen, she threw me in" (V). This wish is not found in any of the oldest and best English versions, and not in any Scandinavian version. (In the English versions wherein the wish is found, the harp speaks only one time, except in V, where it speaks two times.) This verse, then, has certainly been added later. That the wishes are so various points to the same thing.[12] (The opposite view about the "lateness" of these wishes seems to me more plausible: the very fact that they are various indicates that this motif has been in the ballad long enough for such variation to arise. Furthermore, if added late, why did the various singers independently add differing wishes? Rather, it seems to me, the basic idea persists, but cumulative repetitions have gradually changed the method of expressing it.)
In the Scandinavian version of the ballad, the evil sister receives her punishment. Both the Icelandic versions have:
The bride's heart was broken.
Likewise the Faeroese and one Swedish version (A). Some of the Danish have that the bride was burnt:
On Wednesday she sat on the bride-bench,
on Thursday she lay on the pyre and was burnt (C).
In Norwegian K the younger sister, who has come to life again, asks that the elder shall be sent out of the country, and "they send her so far from the country, so far that no one can trace her."
Norwegian L has:
"They worked so great violence on the bride:
they buried her alive under the ground."
But in most of the Norwegian versions she is burnt. An addition in prose to Danish I says that "the bridegroom took a dagger and killed her" (the bride).
The very fact that the bride receives her punishment in so many different modes makes it probable that the punishment is a later addition. It is much easier to believe that the punishment could have been added, than that it could have been forgotten. In the later ballad-composition it was the custom to add a moral outcome to the ballad in which the evil could receive their punishment and the good their reward. This we see best in the outcome which some of the Swedish and Norwegian versions have taken. The evil sister gets therein her punishment, and the younger comes to life again . . . It is unthinkable that all the English versions, which otherwise conform so well to the Scandinavian, could have forgotten such an important motif as that of the punishment, if it were true that the English ballad was a reworking of the Scandinavian. The Estonian, Slovakian and Lithuanian ballads which center about this theme say nothing about punishment. Nor do the closely related legends, except a Polish version. Nowhere does the murdered one come to life again.
It is, then, the most credible that both the motif of the punishment and the motif about the younger coming to life again have come in later, and that the English ballad here stands closer to the original form of the story than the Scandinavian.[13]
Several objections can be made to Liestol's reasoning. The demurrer to his contention that variation indicates recency holds good here, too, it seems to me: the Scandinavian versions remember that the sister was punished, but there has been sufficient time for some of them to forget the method originally employed and to substitute other punishments. His contention that the motif of punishment of the elder sister was added later to the original story is, it seems to me, untenable. Contrary to his contention, I find it far more readily conceivable that the idea of punishment was forgotten than that it was added. The moral solicitude for seeing that the criminal got her just reward must have been present in the British as well as the Scandinavian tradition, for the demand made by the instrument that the sister be burnt or otherwise punished as clearly reflects this attitude as the actual punishment. Moreover, the basic idea is not so much the "moral" one of punishment as it is the less Christian one of revenge: what point is there in the uncovering of the crime by the talking strings if it is not to revenge the victim on her murderer (or, if it pleases a moral age better, to see to it that she gets her punishment)? The fact which clinches the whole matter, however, is that the idea of punishment appears in all three traditions, and must therefore probably have been in the Urform. Even though in the British it is expressed in mere requests or wishes, those demands would hardly have been made if behind them there did not lie the circumstance that originally the punishment was stated to have been actually carried out.
After pointing out that ". . all forms of the ballad divide themselves into three groups: the English-Scottish, the Northern [i.e., West-Scandinavian] and the Danish," Liestol remarks that One of the chief marks of distinction between the Northern and the Danish versions is this, that all the Danish have a fiddle, all the Northern a harp. In the English we find both instruments. B, C, G, J, W have the harp; A, D, E, F, I, K, L, O, P, V have a fiddle. The Northern and the Danish forms of the ballad here meet together in the English.[14] The implication is, in the light of the conclusion Liestol draws from the sum of his various arguments, that the Danish tradition took from the British ballad the fiddle, whereas the West-Scandinavian took therefrom the harp. In accord, however, with the hypothesis here urged in place of Liestol's--the theory that there was a single Urform from which all three traditions sprang either the harp or the fiddle must have been the original instrument, the other having replaced it in some versions. Swedish A and B have a harp, though other Swedish versions have a fiddle; this branch of the East-Scandinavian tradition thus proves that the harp can be found in all three of Liestol's major traditions, whereas the fiddle appears in but two. Therefore, it seems probable that the harp was the original instrument. Furthermore, it appears much more probable that the more familiar fiddle would replace the rarer harp than vice-versa. The phenomenon that both the British and the East-Scandinavian have the fiddle might seem to point to a liaison between the two traditions; yet it is hardly unthinkable that the change from the harp, which did not maintain itself as an instrument of wide popularity among amateurs, to the commonplace fiddle could have taken place independently in two separate traditions.
The British versions and the Swedish exhibit the alteration in a stage not yet complete, whereas the Danish show the change unanimously made. If the contrary view is taken, that the British and Swedish both reveal, in their two-fold motif, influence from other traditions, Liestol's view is not helped, for the inferred corollary would be that the British ballad received this motif from both the West- and the East-Scandinavian repertory. (This corollary would be plausible in the case of the Swedish tradition, which might have received the harp from the West-Scandinavian ballads and the fiddle from the Danish; but equally plausible is the hypothesis that the Swedish took the harp from the West, changed it to a fiddle, and passed that instrument along to the Danish.) Passing from the instrument to the player, Liestol remarks that All the Danish versions stand together on the point that it is musicians[15] who find the corpse. In A-F and L it is two fiddlers, in G three, in H one. Not any of the Norwegian, Icelandic or Faerose versions have fiddlers. Most of the Norwegian have "fishers" or "beggars," M "two pilgrims"; in the Faerose it is "two pilgrims"; in the Icelandic,"wooers." Some of the Swedish have fishers, some musicians.
* * *
In the English versions it is a miller who finds the corpse, but a musician who manufactures the harp or fiddle. Here the Scandinavian have either fishers, pilgrims or musicians. It is plausible that the West-Scandinavian ballad has taken the one and the Danish the other of the two persons, the miller[15a] and the musician, in the English and forgotten the other, because he had wandered out. In this way, the course of the narrative became simpler. As we know, the folk-ballad has a custom of taking away the crowded and involved.[16]
The insistence of both the Danish and the British upon musicians as fashioners of the instrument is an apparent link which poses a problem even more perplexing than the fiddle to the hypothesis that the British ballad is linked with the West-Scandinavian tradition. Yet Liestol's manner of dealing with this likeness is not satisfactory, for the miller, rather than being an original figure in the ballad, probably developed in the British tradition after it had received the ballad from Scandinavia; and very likely he was induced, as I shall attempt to show, by the motif of the milldam. Liestol is apparently as little bothered by the appearance of the dam in the British versions as were the folk-singers themselves.
In the English versions the drowning happens at a sea-strand or a river. The Norwegian has river, the Danish, sea-strand.[16a] Here again the Scandinavian versions meet in the English.[16b] But this difference is, in itself, little to be heeded, because locations are so easy to change.
Liestol thus relegates to a footnote the most perplexing problem in the British versions of this ballad: whence came the milldam? All three traditions, as divided by Liestol, have, strangely enough, both river and seashore. Child's summary presents the tabulation concisely, if not completely:
The scene of action is a seashore in Icelandic and Faroe A, B, Norwegian A, Swedish A, B, G, H, and in all the Danish complete copies: a seashore, or a place where ships come in, in English A, B a, D-I, Q, R a, T, but in all save the last of these (the last is only one stanza) we have the absurdity of a body drowned in navigable water being discovered floating down a millstream. B c has "the deep mill-dam"; C "the river-strand," perhaps one of Scott's changes; M, "the dams"; L, O, P, R b c, a river, Tweed mill-dam, or the water of Tweed. Norwegian B has a river.[18]
Immediately discernible from this tabulation is the circumstance that the seashore is more widely distributed, appearing in all branches of all three traditions, whereas the river appears only in some of the English, one of the Swedish (F-not included, strangely, in Child's summary), and in some Norwegian versions. Thus Liestol's unqualified remark that "Dei norske hev elv, dei danske sjastrand" (see above) makes the contrast seem stronger than the tabulation warrants. Furthermore, even in those Norwegian versions which begin with "There lived a man here out by the river," as in Norwegian A (similarly in C), the identification of the water as a river is made only in the first line of the ballad, whereas the scene depicted seems to fit the seashore better than a river-side. The younger sister is invited to go to the "strand" (A); and in Liestol's version[19] the corpse is driven "onto the white sand." "By the sand" or "On the sand" is the inset refrain in Norwegian A, C, and Liestol's version. And the end refrain in these three is (with very minor variations), "The billows bear so pretty a woman from land." Moreover, Landstad presents a variant second stanza of the C version,
"Sister speaks to sister so:
Now shall we two go to Sauar-river"
which has "sjauar flow" in place of "Sauar-A," and adds the comment that "The last word sjauar is unquestionably the right one, for it stands for sjoar or sjoar [sea; fld = flood]."[20] I surmise that the word "i" (river) was introduced as a rhyme for "tva" in the formula-like first stanza:
Der bur ein bonde it mes i,
han heve seg dei dottane tva.
[There lives a man out by the river;
he has daughters two.][21]
The Norwegian versions themselves, then, appear originally to have possessed the motif of the seashore, making the Scandinavian tradition unanimous on the point (except for Swedish F). The circumstance becomes more apparent that in the original form of the ballad, the girl must have both drowned and been found at the seashore.
Moreover, the connection which Liestol implies between the river in the Norwegian versions and that in the British seems unlikely not only in the direction he suggests, but even in the opposite one: influence by the Norwegian on the British. The absurdity of the girl's immerging in salt water and emerging in fresh must, in my opinion, have arisen within the British tradition. The alternative on the basis of Liestol's theory is to suppose that this absurdity was in the British tradition evolved from the Urform of the ballad, and was adjusted by singers when the ballad story entered the Scandinavian tradition. But if the discrepancy between the seashore and the milldam bothered so few of the British singers, it would seem strange that none of the Scandinavian traditions were able to tolerate it. It seems evident, therefore, that the milldam is a corruption and was evolved only in the British tradition, after it separated from the Scandinavian. (If we are to accept Liest0l's conjecture that the ballad was taken into the Scandinavian tradition from the British, we are faced with the question of why-since water mills were not unfamiliar to the Scandinavians- the milldam was not retained.)
If we grant what seems probable, that the ballad was not originally in the British repertory but came into it from the Scandinavian, it may be possible to account for the milldam, which appears in all the British versions except the fragments J, K, L, S, T, U, X and the versions V and W, which are defective at this point. No mention is made of a miller or of a milldam in any of the Scandinavian versions. But in Liestol's Norwegian version, the course of the corpse is traced thus:
There came a wind from the north,
Drove the corpse to a fjord.
There came a wind from the east,
Drove the corpse to a boat-house [naust].
There came a wind from another land,
Drove the corpse upon the white sand.
In Faeroe A the report is:
There came the wind from the south,
The corpse went to the bottom.
There came the wind from the billows blue,
The corpse went to the land.
There came the wind from the east,
The corpse went to a boathouse [neysta].[22]
In Faeroe C the account runs:
Here came the wind from the east,
The corpse drove to a boathouse [neysta].
Here came the wind and billows blue,
The corpse went to the land.[23]
In these three versions, unlike all the rest of the Scandinavian accounts, the corpse is depicted as being driven to a particular spot, a structure erected by man. "Boathouse" is the nearest translation for the terms "naust" and "neysta." The term "nost" or "noust" is used also in the Shetlands, and the latter form is recorded from the Orkneys in Hugh Marwick's study of The Orkney Norn. He defines it as "a boat-stance at shore, trench formed at edge of beach into which a boat is hauled and shored up ... In Orkney, nousts are, rarely, if ever, covered over."[24] In Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language the term is similarly explained:
1. A landing-place, an inlet for admitting a boat to approach the shore, especially where the entrance is rocky; called also nouster. Orkn.
2. It is also expl. "a sort of ditch in the shore into which a boat is drawn for being moored." A term evidently retained from the Norwegians; as it preserves not only the form, but nearly the significance of Isl. naust, station aval is subtecto:... It seems originally to have signified the place where a vessel was stationed under cover, after it had reached the shore.[25]
It is not clear from Jamieson's definition whether the term was Orkneyan only, though that seems to be the implication. Peter F. Anson in his book on Fishing Boats and Fisher Folk on the East Coast of Scotland makes no mention of the term, nor, so far as I have yet discovered, speaks of any similar device of a trench into the shore. He reports that at the busy fishing town of Fraserburgh in 1815:
At that period the fishing boats used to be beached at high water, allowed to fall on their sides, later on propped up on high supports, after which the men shook the herring from the nets and took out what was in the hold. . .[26]
All his sketches of fishing boats up and down the coast depict them, if not in an actual harbor, as being merely drawn up onto the beach. It seems not illogical to suppose, then, that, if this ballad came into Britain from Scandinavia, and especially from the Faeroes or Norway, the singers lost sight of the fact that the trench into which the corpse floated was at the seashore and substituted the familiar "dam," undisturbed by the discrepancy between the girl's entrance into salt water and the recovery of her body from fresh. Such substitution of the familiar for the strange or the unknown can be discerned in other ballads; and it has been demonstrated by Professor Frederic C. Bartlett of Cambridge to be a typical part of the process of remembering. In Remembering, A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, he lists it as a type of rationalization to which people often subject material that has elements which are strange to them, in an unconscious attempt to "render material acceptable, understandable, comfortable, straightforward; to rob it of all puzzling elements.[27] This type of rationalization is . . . the case in which some particular, and maybe isolatedd etail, is transformed immediately into a more familiar character. Thus "canoe" rapidly became "boat" [these examples were derived from American Indian and other folktales remembered by English subjects], "paddling" became "rowing;" a "peanut" became an "acorn;" . . . and so on in a very large number of different cases.[28]
This type of rationalization
... is apt to exhibit the same results so long as the observers are drawn from the same social class group. Changes of this type, which nearly all concern the names of common objects, or special phrases, or the like, may therefore be of particular importance when any attempt is being made to trace the line of passage of material from one social group to another."[29]
Once the milldam was established in the ballad, who should be so handy- or so logical- as the miller to pull the maiden out? It seems clear that the miller was not a figure in the Urform of the story. He appears in none of the Scandinavian versions. Except in British A and L, both being burlesquely corrupted, the miller is never the maker of the instrument. In B, C, G, J and W the miller fishes the body out, but a harper makes the instrument from it; in D, E, F, I, O, P, V a fiddler fashions the instrument, after the miller retrieves the body. This vast majority of cases in which the fashioning and playing of the instrument is assigned to a musician makes it clear that the miller is an intrusion, having entered the ballad only for the purpose of getting the corpse out of the milldam. Even in A, where the miller makes the "violl," the instruction to "pay the miller for his pain" better fits the "minstrels" of Scandinavian tradition than the miller.
Assuming that this theory as to the genesis of the miller is true, it is interesting to note how this particular incident in the story-the retrieving of the corpse-has been expanded by the singers. From the simplicity of having the same man (or men) make the instrument that recovers the body, there is a step to having the functions performed by different characters. Then, in many of the British versions (B is an example), another character is added to the dramatis personae to inform the retriever that there is a corpse to be recovered. Perhaps it was the desire to heighten the incident of the landing of the corpse by introducing dialogue about it which caused the addition of the miller's son or daughter to report the arrival of the corpse in the milldam.[30]
A scrutiny of various of Liestol's hypotheses, then, weakens the grounds on which he bases his contention that Scandinavia took the ballad from Britain, and strengthens the theory that the ballad came into Britain from Scandinavia, most likely from the Western tradition-from Norway or the Faeroes.[31]
University of California,
Berkeley, California
Footnotes:
1 Maal og Minne (1909), p. 51. (The translation is mine, as is the case with other quotations from Scandinavian materials. I am much indebted to Assar G. Janzen, Professor of Scandinavian Languages and Literature at the University of California, for his aid in unraveling knotty passages. I alone, however, am responsible for any mistranslations, misinterpretations, or misrepresentations.)
2 Ibid., pp. 42-43.
3 Ibid., p. 42.
4 Ibid., p. 37.
5 Francis J. Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, I, I27.
6 Liestol, op. cit., p. 51. (When Listol refers to the "English" he apparently means to include the Scottish-in brief, the whole British tradition.)
7 Ibid., pp. 43-44.
8 Unfortunately, he bases this judgment, apparently, upon his own reaction to the story upon his feeling that if the elder sister is given some excuse for her crime, the tragedy is less. This sort of attitude, all too prevalent among commentators on ballads, is a fallacy which should be avoided: its dangerous assumption is that the singers of the ballads have the same aesthetic and critical attitudes toward ballad stories and the expression of them that cultured critics do, and in their singing mould the ballads in accord with those attitudes.
9 Op. cit., p. 44.
10 Ibid., pp. 44-45.
11 Ibid., p. 45.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., pp. 45-46. Professor Archer Taylor, in his review of Der singende Knochen (FF Communications, No. 49) by Lutz Mackensen, remarks that the restoration of the girl belongs to the story. "Chance has preserved it in the verse forms of the tale only in these Norwegian ballads; but Mackensen's summaries of the variants will convince anyone that the original conclusion of the prose tale, the source of the ballad, was the restoration to life of the murdered sister." (Modern Philology, 24 (1927), 487-488.) This consideration might point to the Norwegian versions as closest to the original ballad form of the story; but this discussion is not concerned with establishing priority among the Scandinavian branches, but merely with demonstrating that the British got the ballad from some one of them.
14 Ibid., pp. 49-50.
15 Liestol's term, here translated "musicians," is "spilemenn," which could also mean "minstrels" or "fiddlers." This last meaning seems obviated in this passage by the reference in the second quoted paragraph to the "spileman" as maker of fiddle or harp.
15a. That the miller becomes a fisherman could easily happen. We have an intermediate link in English M, where the miller goes and fishes.
16 Op. cit., p. 49; P. 50.
16a. Likewise the Icelandic and Faeroese.
16b. Most of the English versions have moulded river and sea-strand together, so that they produce the nonsense that the girl, who drowns at the sea-strand, goes along in a river till she comes to a milldam."[17]
17 Ibid., p. 50.
18 ESPB, I, I20.
19 In Knut Liestol og Molkte Moe, NorskeF olkevisor( Kristiania: Dybwad, 1920), I, 148-152. The version Liestol used in "Dei tvo systar" is that of Jorgen Moe, printed in Universitetsog Skoleannaler (I850), labeled by him (and Child [ESPB, I, II9] and Grundtvig [Danmarks gamleFolkeviser,I I, 507] as Norwegian A. The C version is Landstad's (see next footnote).
20 M. B. Landstad, Norske Folkeviser (Christiania: Tonsberg, I853), p. 481, note 2.
21 Norwegian C; similarly A, and F-where the rhyme is "a" and "dottana sma [small]."
The formulaic nature of this stanza is demonstrable, among other means, by comparison with
the opening stanza of the English R version:
There was a king of the north countree,
And he had daughters one, two, three.
22 E. G. Geijer och A. A. Afzelius, Svenska Folkvisor [new edition by R. Bergstr6m and
L. Hoijer (Stockholm, I880), II, 70.
23 V. U. Hammershaimb, Fser#sk Anthologi (K0benhavn: M0ller, I891), I, 25.
24 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, I929), p. 123.
25John Jamieson, D.D., An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, "A New
Edition" (Paisley: Gardner, I879), III, 375.
26 (London: Dent and Sons, I930), p. i66.
27 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, I932), p. 89.
8 Ibid., p. 88.
29 Ibid., p. 89.
30 This assumption as to the multiplying of characters contradicts Liestol's assumption (above) that the tendency of singers is to prune away supernumerariesb; ut it is more in accord, I believe, with actual ballad practice, at least in the British tradition.
31 It has not been necessary to discuss American or English versions not in Child's collection, since they contain no new motifs having bearing upon the question at hand; nor has it been necessary to consider the split between the Scottish and English variants pointed out by Professor Archer Taylor ("The English, Scottish, and American Versions of the 'Twa Sisters,' " JAF, 42 [I929], 238-246), since that division has no connection with the split which Liestol conjectures. Nor has it been thought necessary to toss into the fray such general but unsupported pronouncements as the obiter dictum in Bolte and Polivka's Anmerkungen zu den Kinder- u. Hausmarchen der Briider Grimm (I, 276) that the ballad went to England from Scandinavia.