Ed de Moel

Child Ballads - Additions and Corrections

49. The Twa Brothers

P. 435. There is a copy in Nimmo, Songs and Ballads of Clydesdale, p. 131, made from D, E, with half a dozen lines for connection.

437 b. It is E (not A) that is translated by Grundtvig; and D by Afzelius, Grimm, Talvj, Rosa Warrens.

436 f. In one of the older Croat ballads Marko Kraljević and his brother Andrija, who have made booty of three horses, quarrel about the third when they come to dividing, and Marko fells Andrija with a stab. Andrija charges Marko not to tell their mother what took place, but to say that he is not coming home, because he has become enamored of a girl in a foreign country. Bogišić, p. 18, No 6. There is a Magyar-Croat variant of this, in which two brothers returning from war fall out about a girl, and the older (who, by the way, is a married man) stabs the younger. The dying brother wishes the mother to be told that he has staid behind to buy presents for her and his sisters. The mother asks when her son will come home. The elder brother answers, When a crow turns white and a withered maple greens. The (simple) mother gets a crow and bathes it daily in milk, and irrigates the tree with wine; but in vain. Other Slavic examples of these hopeless eventualities: Little-Russian, Golovatsky, I, 74, No 30, 97, No 7, 164, No 12, 173, No 23, 229, No 59; II, 41, No 61, 585, No 18, 592, No 27; III, 12, No 9, 136, No 256, 212, No 78; Bohemian, Erben, p. 182, No 340; Polish, Roger, p. 3, No 2; Servian, Vuk, I, No 364, Herzegovine, p. 209, No 176, p. 322, No 332; Bulgarian, Verković, No 226; Dozon, p. 95; Magyar-Croat, Kurelac, p. 11, No 61, p. 130, No 430, p. 156, No 457 (and note), p. 157, No 459, p. 244, No 557. (W.W.)

The following are mostly trivial variations from the spelling of the text.

441 a, 16. Read warsell. 43. Read bloody.

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