This is one of the cases in which a remarkably fine ballad has been worse preserved in Scotland than anywhere else. Without light from abroad we cannot fully understand even so much as we have saved. Though injured by the commixture of foreign elements, A has still much of the original story. B has, on the contrary, so little that distinctively and conclusively belongs to this story that it might almost as well have been put with No. 16.
The ballad which 'Leesome Brand' represents is preserved among the Scandinavian races under four forms. One form of the story in Danish, 'Redselille og Medelvold' (Grundtvig, No. 271), runs thus: A daughter is forced to acknowledge to her mother that she has been beguiled by a knight. The mother threatens both with punishment, and the daughter, alarmed, goes to her lover's house at night, and informs him of the fate that awaits them. They ride off on his horse and come to a wood. Then her pangs seize her, but unwilling that a man should help her, she sends the knight in search of water. When he comes to the spring, there sits a nightingale and sings, "Redselille lies dead in the wood, with two sons in her bosom." All that the nightingale has said is found to be true. In some versions the knight digs a grave, and lays mother and children in it; in two versions he lays himself in the grave with them. It is not said whether the children are dead or living, and the point would hardly be raised, but for what follows. In certain Danish and Swedish versions, however, it is expressly mentioned that the children are alive, and in some Danish and Norwegian versions the children are heard, or seem to be heard, shrieking from under the ground. Nearly all the versions make the knight run himself through with his sword, either immediately after the others are laid in the grave, or after he has ridden far and wide, because he cannot endure the cries of the children from under the earth. This would seem to be the original conclusion of the story; the horrible circumstance of the children being buried alive is much more likely to be slurred over or omitted at a later day than to be added.
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