Child Ballads - Narrative

Sheath and Knife

1. 1. Motherwell's Manuscript, p. 286.
   2. The broom blooms bonnie and says it is fair,' Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 189.
   Version A
2. Sharpe's Ballad Book, ed. by D. Laing, p. 159. Version B
3. 'The broom blooms bonie,' Johnson's Museum, No 461. Version C
4. Notes and Queries, First Series, v, 345, one stanza. Version D

The three stanzas of this ballad which are found in the Musical Museum (C) were furnished, it is said, by Burns. It was first printed in full (A b) in Motherwell's Minstrelsy. Motherwell retouched a verse here and there slightly, to regulate the metre. A a is here given as it stands in his manuscript. B consists of some scattered verses as remembered by Sir W. Scott.

The directions in 3, 4 receive light from a passage in Robin Hood's Death and Burial:

But give me my bent bow in my hand,
And a broad arrow I'll let flee,
And where this arrow is taken up
There shall my grave diggd be.

'Lay me a green sod under my head,' etc.

Other ballads with a like theme are 'The Bonny Hind,' further on in this volume, and the two which follow it.

Translated in Grundtvig's E. og s. Folkeviser, No 49, p. 308; Wolff's Halle der Völker, 1, 64.

This page most recently updated on 15-Oct-2011, 09:13:42.
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