"
Mr. Child also thinks that the "dreamy dream" may be copied from
Hume of Godscroft. It is at least as probable that Godscroft
borrowed from the ballad which he cites. The embroidered gauntlet
of the Percy is in the possession of Douglas of Cavers to this day.
TAM LIN, OR TAMLANE
Burns's version, in Johnson's Museum (1792). Scott's version is
made up of this copy, Riddell's, Herd's, and oral recitations, and
contains feeble literary interpolations, not, of course, by Sir
Walter. The Complaint of Scotland (1549) mentions the "Tale of the
Young Tamlene" as then popular. It is needless here to enter into
the subject of Fairyland, and captures of mortals by Fairies: the
Editor has said his say in his edition of Kirk's Secret
Commonwealth. The Nereids, in Modern Greece, practise fairy
cantrips, and the same beliefs exist in Samoa and New Caledonia.
The metamorphoses are found in the Odyssey, Book iv., in the
winning of Thetis, the Nereid, or Fairy Bride, by Peleus, in a
modern Cretan fairy tale, and so on. There is a similar incident
in Penda Baloa, a Senegambian ballad (Contes Populaires de la
Senegambie, Berenger Ferand, Paris, 1885). The dipping of Tamlane
has precedents in Old Deccan Days, in a Hottentot tale by Bleek,
and in Les Deux Freres, the Egyptian story, translated by Maspero
(the Editor has already given these parallels in a note to Border
Ballads, by Graham R. Thomson). Mr. Child also cites Mannhardt,
"Wald und Feldkulte," ii.
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