Child 8 Comment
The sources of Child’s A version of ‘Erlinton’ from Scott’s Minstrelsy are given in full in the additions and corrections in Volume 4. Although Scott claims to have collated the two copies they are almost identical, and Child conjectures they are so close as to have been versions taken down at different times from the same person, Nelly Laidlaw. Even without these two versions it is easy to identify Scott’s poetic touches in the Minstrelsy version. However, he has added nothing to the story on this occasion and only the last two lines of stanzas 5, 12 and 13, and bits of 14, 16 and 18 are Scott’s ‘improvements’.
Child’s B version ‘True Tammas’ derives from James Telfer, 1800-1862, who was a Northumbrian who became interested in the works of Scott and Hogg at an early stage in his life. (See Dave Harker’s ‘The John Bell Song Collection’, introduction pxxvii) Indeed it was Telfer’s version of Earl Brand (7A) that was sent to Child by Robert White the Newcastle antiquary and Telfer’s close friend. The watermark on the manuscript for this is dated 1819, presumably an indication that Telfer took an interest in the ballads and was already collecting at the age of nineteen.
However, according to Harker, he did not start collecting ballads in earnest until about 1835 and his notes in John Bell’s manuscripts start around 1839. The earliest actual dated piece from Telfer in the Bell Collection is for 1841. This is plenty of time for versions based on the Minstrelsy version of 1803 to have entered oral tradition, but Telfer’s version is obviously related to the Laidlaw version, containing as it does, none of Scott’s embellishments. The differences in text between the two versions of Laidlaw and Telfer would suggest that the ballad had had at least a little currency in oral tradition.
Of Child’s C version, Child writes in additions and corrections in Volume 3, p499, this version is ‘found in a manuscript pretended to be of about 1650, but are written in a forged hand of this century. (nineteenth) I do not feel certain that the ballads themselves, bad as they are, are forgeries,….’ It is obviously a late imitation of a Robin Hood ballad infused with the commonplace ‘elopement, pursuit, battle’ familiar to all from its being much used in broadside ballads. Erlinton was one of the first ballads Child published at the beginning of Volume 1 and he had not yet used the option of placing dubious material in an appendix, which, had this C version been published in a later volume, would certainly have been its fate. Even at that time J Payne Collier was considered a noted ballad forger, and this opinion still holds good today.
To summarise, this leaves us with effectively two, possibly three, close variants of yet another ballad on the ‘elopement, pursuit, battle’ theme. Child points out that Erlinton differs from the others in that it possibly harks back to a motif in some Danish versions whereby the ballad commences with the girl’s father setting up a guard on his daughter. There is no evidence that the ballad existed prior to the late eighteenth century, and like ‘Lord Douglas’s Tragedy’ (See notes to 7) it could easily have been an eighteenth century stall ballad or the product of some border poet of the period.
Having no surviving tune there is no entry in Bronson.