The story of this ballad seems to have become disordered in most of the versions. A alone, the first published, has perhaps retained the original form. The principal idea is, however, preserved in all the full versions: the dead lover returns to ask back his unfulfilled troth-plight. His grave is wrongly said in A to be far beyond the sea. B constitutes, in Herd's Manuscripts, and F, in Jamieson's Popular Ballads, the termination of a copy of 'Clerk Saunders' (No 69).
'Sweet William's Ghost' has much in common with one of the most beautiful and celebrated of the Scandinavian ballads, 'The Betrothed in the Grave' (Grundtvig, No. 90), and may well be a different development of the same story. A man dies as he is to be married. His love grieves for him passionately. The dead hears her under the ground, comes to her bower with his coffin on his back, and knocks. She lets him in after he has proved himself to be "a spirit of health" by uttering the name of Jesus, combs his hair, and asks him how it is under the black earth. It is like the bliss of heaven. May she follow him into the grave? It is like blackest hell. Every time she weeps for him his coffin is filled with lappered blood. But when she sings and is happy, his grave is all hung with rose-leaves. The cock crows, the white, the red, the black; he takes up his coffin and goes wearily back to the graveyard. His love follows through the mirk wood, to the churchyard and into the church. Then his yellow hair falls away, his rosy color wanes. He bids her go home and never weep for him more. "Look up at the sky, the night is going!" and as she looks he slips into his grave. She goes sadly home, prays God that she may not live out a year and a day, falls sick, and dies within a month. The Scandinavian ballad agrees in many particulars with the conclusion of the second lay of Helgi Hundingsbani in the Elder Edda.
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