ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AMERICA 237

prophesied in the later years of the thirteenth century; but the
ballad is separated from the person by the intervening romance.
It is a case of popular verse which, by the working of tradition, has

become a ballad. The story of his ride to Elf-land, in company with
the Queen of the fairies, is made memorable by one supremely vivid

stanza:

For forty days and forty nights

he wade thro red blude to the knee,
and he saw neither sun nor moon,

but he heard the roaring of the sea.

In Tarn Lin (39) also we are concerned with the elves and fairies,
but the hero is himself human and a changeling. The ballad is
uniquely Scottish, and would take its place in the first half-dozen
in Europe. Everything conspires to hold our interest; the love
of a mortal for a supernatural being, and especially for one of
the damned, cannot fail to move our hearts; the fatalism and
courage of the girl who redeems her lover; the fantastic trans-
formations of the captured Tarn Lin and the fruitless anger of
the Queen o' Fairies are expressed in words uniformly direct and
poignant.

A number of ballads are concerned with the making and undoing
of wicked enchantments: Kemp Ozvvne, Alison Gross, The laily
Worm (34-6), Broomfield Hill (43), Willie's Lady (6), The Mother's
Malison (216), Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick (257), The Knight's
Ghost (265), and The Earl of Mar's Daughter (270). This group is
almost entirely Scottish. Its first member has Scandinavian con-
nexions, and The Mother's Malison makes use of a motif employed
also in Piedmont and Rumania. Our ballads have no share in the
merman cycle common to Scandinavia and North Germany, but
one encounters the Shetland superstition that seals become human
and have human children (The great Silkie of Side Skerry, 113).
It can hardly be a medieval ballad, since the deserted lady
is to marry a 'proud gunner*, who will kill the silkie with his
first shot.

Ballads concerning revenants are found in both countries. Sweet
William's Ghost (77) belongs to the Lenore tradition, and is a source
of Burger's poem. It would be hard to fix the focus of radiation for
this legend. The Suffolk Miracle (272) is a version of the Greek
ballad of Constantine and Arete or The Dead Brother's Return,
brought directly to England by sea during the eighteenth century,