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"Gil Brenton" is Child ballad 5, Roud 22, existing in several variants. [1]
| Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
"Gil Brenton" is Child ballad 5, Roud 22, existing in several variants. [1]
A man (often described as a king or lord) has brought home a foreign woman to be his wife.
In several variants, the bride is warned that if she is not a maiden (i.e., virgin), she had best send someone else to take her place in the marriage bed, in order to prevent her husband from discovering this fact. She sends her maid in her place. The morning after the wedding, the groom asks the blankets and sheets of the bed, or in some versions the household spirit Billie Blin, if he married a maiden, and they answer that the woman he married was not, and furthermore, she is pregnant.
In other variants, the bride informs the bridegroom of her pregnancy without any tests.
The groom laments this state of affairs to his mother, who goes to tax his bride with it. The mother-in-law asks who the father of the baby is, and the bride tells how she had gone to the greenwood to gather flowers and been detained there until evening by a man. When he allowed her to return home, this man gave her several tokens (e.g., a lock of hair, some black beads, a golden ring, and a pen-knife). The mother demands the tokens, takes them to her son, and asks him what he had done with the tokens that she (the mother) had given to him. He tells her that he gave them to a lady, and he would give anything to have that lady as his wife. She assures him that his wish has been granted.
When the baby is born, there is writing on his body declaring that he is the son of the hero. The hero may show his pleasure by the number of kisses given to wife and son, or by having the lady dressed in silk and the baby bathed in milk.
One of the ballad variants is titled "Cospatrick" and features a hero of that name. The name was used at different times by several earls of Dunbar and Home, and the ballad may have become attached to one of them as a legend. [2]
Besides the variants in English, there are several Scandinavian variants; Swedish and Danish ones are particularly close. [3] In The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad , these correspond chiefly to ballad types D 415–422, all of which end with the revelation of bridegroom as violator; of these, D 420 and 421 feature a speaking rug, although a nightingale sometimes takes it place. [4] Some variations occur: in some ballads, the hero had broken into the heroine's bower rather than found her in the woods; [5] the hero may recognize her on the strength of her story, without any tokens; [6] or her condition may be revealed by difficulty riding a horse. [7] It contrasts with the Child Ballad "Crow and Pie", where the raped woman tries to obtain some token from the rapist, and is refused.
The difficulty riding because of a pregnancy also features in the ballad "Leesome Brand". [8]
The fairy tale Little Annie the Goose-Girl makes use of many of these elements, but the heroine of the story, Annie or Aase, is not the bride but the maiden who substitutes for her; the revelation of three successive princesses not being maidens results in the hero's marrying the goose-girl who had substituted for them. [9]
The substitution of a maiden for the non-virgin bride is found earlier in many forms of the legend of Tristan and Iseult; Iseult, having lost her virginity to Tristan on the journey, substitutes her maid Brangwin. [10]
Sir Aldingar is Child ballad 59. Francis James Child collected three variants, two fragmentary, in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. All three recount the tale where a rebuffed Sir Aldingar slanders his mistress, Queen Eleanor, and a miraculous champion saves her.
Billy Blind, Billy Blin, Billy Blynde, Billie Blin, or Belly Blin is an English and Lowland Scottish household spirit, much like a brownie. He appears only in ballads where he frequently advises the characters. It is possible that the character of Billy Blind is a folk memory of the god Woden or Odin from Germanic mythology, in his "more playful aspect" and is speculated to have been the same character as Blind Harie, the "blind man of the game" in Scotland.
"Young Beichan" is a ballad, which with a number of variants and names such as "Lord Baker", "Lord Bateman", and "Young Bekie", was collected by Francis James Child in the late 19th century, and is included in the Child ballad as number 53.
"Hind Horn" is a traditional English and Scottish folk ballad.
"Hind Etin" is a folk ballad existing in several variants.
Fair Annie is Child ballad number 62, existing in several variants.
Lord Thomas and Fair Annet is an English folk ballad.
"The Twa Magicians", "The Two Magicians", "The Lady and the Blacksmith", or "The Coal Black Smith" is a British folk song. It first appears in print in 1828 in two sources, Peter Buchan's Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland and John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae #40. It was later published as number 44 of Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. During the 20th century, versions of it have been recorded by a number of folk and popular musicians.
The Gay Goshawk is Child ballad number 96.
"The Fair Flower of Northumberland" is a folk ballad.
Leesome Brand is Child Ballad number 15 and Roud #3301.
Vesle Åse Gåsepike is a Norwegian fairy tale collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in Norske Folkeeventyr. It has also been translated as Little Lucy Goosey Girl, and classified as Aarne-Thompson tale type 870A.
Fause Foodrage is Child ballad 89, existing in several variants.
Fair Janet is Child Ballad number 64.
"Riddles Wisely Expounded" is a traditional English song, dating at least to 1450. It is Child Ballad 1 and Roud 161, and exists in several variants. The first known tune was attached to it in 1719.
Erlinton is #8 of the Child Ballads, the collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898 by Houghton Mifflin in ten volumes and later reissued in a five volume edition.
"Earl Brand" is a pseudo-historical English ballad.
Crow and Pie is Child ballad 111. It is one of the oldest preserved ballads, dating to c. 1500. Pie is the now-obsolete original name for the magpie, a bird often connected with sorrow and misfortune. The crow is a scavenger, often thought of as feeding upon the bodies of men hanged or slain in battle, and thus associated with unhallowed and violent death.
Sweet William's Ghost is an English Ballad and folk song which exists in many lyrical variations and musical arrangements. Early known printings of the song include Allan Ramsay's The Tea-Table Miscellany in 1740 and Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. Percy believed that the last two stanzas of the version he published were later additions, but that the details of the story they recounted were original.
"Brown Robyn's Confession" is Child ballad 57.