THE BONNY HIND
Herd got this tragic ballad from a milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child
quotes a verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic.
There is a similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the
Finnish Kalevala. Scott says that similar tragedies are common in
Scotch popular poetry; such cases are "Lizzie Wan," and "The King's
Dochter, Lady Jean." A sorrow nearly as bitter occurs in the
French "Milk White Dove": a brother kills his sister,
metamorphosed into a white deer. "The Bridge of Death" (French)
seems to hint at something of the same kind; or rather the Editor
finds that he has arbitrarily read "The Bonny Hind" into "Le Pont
des Morts," in Puymaigre's Chants Populaires du Pays Messin, p. 60.
(Ballads and Lyrics of Old France, p. 63)
YOUNG BEICHAN, OR YOUNG BICHAM
This is the original of the Cockney Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman,
illustrated by Cruikshank, and by Thackeray. There is a vast
number of variants, evidence to the antiquity of the story. The
earliest known trace is in the familiar legend of the Saracen lady,
who sought and found her lover, Gilbert Becket, father of Thomas a
Becket, in London (see preface to Life of Becket, or Beket), Percy
Society, 1845. The date may be circ. 1300. The kind of story, the
loving daughter of the cruel captor, is as old as Medea and Jason,
and her search for her lover comes in such Marchen as "The Black
Bull o' Norraway." No story is more widely diffused (see A Far
Travelled Tale, in the Editor's Custom and Myth).
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