Child 7 Comment

Although Child understandably put together ‘Earl Brand’ (EB) and ‘Lord Douglas’s Tragedy’ (LDT) under one number the two ballads have very little text in common, and though they are clearly versions of the same story, they tell that story in quite different ways. I think we would nowadays be more inclined to treat them as two separate ballads, much in the same way as we treat the two broadside ballads ‘Bruton Town’ (Laws M32, Roud 18) and ‘The Constant Farmer’s Son’ (Laws M33, Roud 675) as separate, though they tell the same story.

Child and others before him clearly demonstrate that EB is the same ballad almost exactly as the Scandinavian ballad ‘Ribolt og Guldborg’ although the latter tells a much fuller story. Whilst the Scandinavian ballad survives in many widespread and varied versions dating back to the seventeenth century, we only have evidence that the Scottish ballad existed in manuscripts and oral tradition in a relatively brief half-century period at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

That EB is older than LDT, the modern stall ballad, is almost unquestionable. LDT has lost some of the essential elements of the story, and in terms of form, whilst LDT is in straightforward quatrains, EB has the older form of couplets interspersed with unrelated refrain. Using comparisons with other ballads of the type I am tempted to suggest that EB could even be a seventeenth century broadside ballad, but as no such broadside has come to light this is pure conjecture.

In the case of the more modern ballad LDT I would guess at mid to late eighteenth century when this stall ballad was cobbled together from bits of Percy’s poem, ‘The Child of Elle’ ,a little of EB and with a smattering from the Scandinavian story. Some of it, of course, is made up of commonplaces found in a number of other ballads. It survives in several stall copies, at least one dated 1792, of varying quality. Sadly it swiftly replaced the earlier ballad in oral tradition, and although both ballads are fairly scarce in Scotland LDT went on to blossom in North America. Bronson gives thirty-three American versions and no doubt this number has increased much since he published his ‘Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads’ in 1959. Undoubtedly all versions of LDT derive ultimately from the Scottish stall copies, which vary only by the usual printing errors, except rather strangely in the additional final commonplace stanzas concerning the deaths and burials of the two lovers which throw up some interesting combinations of the three stanzas.

Child gives references to and describes numerous Scandinavian ballad versions under a wide variety of names (collectively referred to hereon as ‘Ribolt og Guldborg’). Interestingly one of the heroes' names which crops up is Lillebrand, very close to the hero’s name in the Scottish ballad. Prior in his ‘Ancient Danish Ballads’ Volume 2, pp396-422 translated six versions and relates the story to an early Icelandic romance, and also mentions its similarity to an early German romance. Taken together the plots of the Scandinavian ballad versions cover a range of different scenes, each described in some detail; the King sets a guard around his daughter, Guldborg; one of the guards, a king of England’s son, Ribolt, persuades her to elope with him; on their journey they meet an old man who recognizes her despite her disguise, and attempts at bribery failing he rides off to warn her parents; her father and brothers set off in pursuit and then comes the climactic fight in which he kills all but one, her youngest brother who fatally wounds Ribolt. The story then diverges into two quite different conclusions, one in which, as in the Scottish ballad, they both reach his mother’s house and all three then die; and the other in which he dies soon after the battle, she is dragged off by her youngest brother, locked in a tower and eventually sold. A further dimension added to this type of the story is that she finishes up in working in his mother’s palace and tells her story to his mother before both of them die of shame and grief respectively. Indeed in some versions the story commences with the girl already at his mother’s house/palace where she then becomes the narrator telling the whole story to his mother. The fact that there are so many scenes to the story and so many widely varying versions of it would lend strength to the possibility that the ballad descended into ballad form from the romance, probably the Icelandic one.

Prior states, ‘Grundtvig (The Danish compiler of many of these ballads) observes that these ballads may be in some measure a medieval echo of the Icelandic romance of ‘Helge Hundingsbane’, in which the hero fights for Sigrun and kills her father, but is himself slain by her youngest brother whose life he has spared.’…’All these ballads (the twenty-four published by Grundtvig) ….appear to be fragments of some very ancient and much longer romance.’

Returning to the Scottish stall copy ‘Lord Douglas’s Tragedy’, here follows a probable list of sources stanza by stanza used in its composition.

Rather abruptly and mysteriously, perhaps to give the effect of a fragment, the stall copy commences with two almost identical stanzas which are a warning and call to arms that the couple have eloped. This warning is given by some unnamed female who occurs in no other British traditional version. However in Thomas Percy’s poem, ‘The Child of Elle’, this same warning is given by the eloping girl’s ‘own damselle’ (her waiting maid) in stanzas 27 and 28. This at the very least gives us a hint that partially the stall copy is probably based on Percy’s poem. As far as we know Percy based his poem solely on a fragment of eleven stanzas of a ballad of the same name in his Folio Manuscript (Child’s F version), and this has no mention of the ‘damselle’. The third stanza of LDT is a ballad commonplace that has equivalents both in EB and Percy’s poem. The reference to her seven brethren has no mention in Percy’s poem but it does occur in the Folio Manuscript version. However I would guess that the writer’s source for this would have been a Scandinavian translation as he would not have had access to the then unpublished Folio Manuscript. Stanza 4, however is almost word for word stanza 33 of Percy’s poem, with the seven brethren displacing Percy’s ‘discourteous knight’. Stanzas 5-6 and 8 appear to be from some translation of Ribolt og Guldborg, although I have not yet identified any translations of the Danish ballad as early as the mid eighteenth century and would welcome any knowledge of this. Jamieson’s translation published in 1814 is the earliest I have yet come across. Stanza 7 is rather garbled and has no equivalent elsewhere, presumably a product of the writer’s own imagination. Stanza 8 is once again taken straight from Percy’s poem, stanza 25, although it is found as a commonplace in other ballads. In this LDT’s ‘blue gilded horn’ is obviously a corruption of Percy’s ‘bugle’. Stanzas 9-13 are paraphrases of the equivalent stanzas in EB, stanza 12 being just a verbatim repeat of stanza 8, and these do not occur in Percy’s poem which hereon continues in a totally different vein. The ‘mother, make my bed’ stanza 14 is a commonplace found in several ballads as are the last three stanzas found in many ballads in many languages.

So, to me at least, LDT is a stall ballad composed of pieces of Percy’s poem, EB and commonplaces, with a little input from translations of a Scandinavian version; and like several of Sir Walter Scott’s and Peter Buchan’s concoctions has been localized to arouse local interest, there being a local tradition involving a similar elopement by a Lord Douglas which is well documented in most of the Scottish collections in which it has been published. However I am not suggesting for one moment that in this case there has been some attempt by the writer to deceive. Performers, even today, are happy to take a traditional ballad and alter it to suit their own locality or set of circumstances, and why not?

We now come to the late eighteenth century stall ballad ‘The Bold Dragoon’ (Laws M27, Roud 321) as this has understandably been associated with Child 7 on occasions, particularly in America. Whilst there is an overlap of material between this short piece and what we perhaps should refer to as the Child 7/8 family, that overlap, as we shall shortly demonstrate, is made up of seventeenth century commonplaces. The earliest version of ‘The Bold Dragoon’ I have seen, ‘The Valiant Dragoon, A New Song’ was printed by T Wise of London c1790. Wise actually wrote some of his printed stall ballads, but, whilst he may have rewritten this one in a different rhyming pattern, it had been printed on at least two very similar seventeenth century broadsides, both to the designated traditional tune of ‘A Week before Easter’, in quatrains with the first three lines rhyming together and the fourth shorter line unrhymed. The earlier of the two ‘The Seaman’s Renown in Winning his Fair Lady’ (Roxburghe Ballads, Volume 7, p559) has twenty stanzas and was printed c1666-78; and the other ‘The Master-piece of Love Songs’ (Roxburghe Ballads, Volume 6, p230) of sixteen stanzas was printed in the 1690s. The hero of the latter is ‘a bold keeper’ and although their texts are pretty close it would appear the latter was the model for ‘The Bold Dragoon’. Of course there were quite likely interim versions which haven’t surfaced yet or survived. Although the story of these two seventeenth century ballads is similar to the Ribolt og Guldborg theme and may be based upon what must have been a familiar plot, it is possible the similarities are merely coincidental. The outcome of the climactic battle and the girl’s reaction to it are very different in both stories. In the Child ballad EB kills all of his assailants bar one who fatally wounds him, whereas in the stall ballad her father offers the hero money to put up his sword and the girl encourages him to continue fighting as the portion is too small, her father finally agreeing to all their demands, and for the lovers a happy ending.