Child Ballads - Narrative

The Wee Wee Man

1. 1. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Herd's Manuscripts, I, 153; Herd's Scottish Songs, 1776, I, 95.
   Version A
2. Caw's Poetical:Museum, p. 348 Version B.
3. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Scott's Minstrelsy, II, 234, ed, 1802. Version C
4. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Kinloch ]\iSS, VII, 253. Version D
5. 1. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Motherwell's NoteBook, fol. 40; Motherwell's Manuscript, p. 195.
   2. Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 343.
   Version E
6. 'The Wee Wee Man,' Motherwell's Manuscript, p. 68. Version F
7. 'The Little Man,' Buchan's Ballads of the North of Scotland, 1, 263. Version G

This extremely airy and sparkling little ballad varies but slightly in the half dozen known copies. The one in the Musical Museum, No 370, p. 382, and that in Ritson's Scotish Songs, II, 139, are reprinted from Herd.

Singularly enough, there is a poem in eight-line stanzas, in a fourteenth-century manuscript, which stands in somewhat the same relation to this ballad as the poem of Thomas of Erceldoune does to the ballad of Thomas Rymer, but with the important difference that there is no reason for deriving the ballad from the poem in this instance. There seems to have been an intention to make it, like Thomas of Erceldoune, an introduction to a string of prophecies which follows, but no junction has been effected. This poem is given in an appendix.

This page most recently updated on 15-Oct-2011, 10:17:08.
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