"The Earl of Mar's Daughter" is Child ballad number 270. [1]
The Earl of Mar's daughter saw a lovely bird, and promised it a golden cage if it would come to her. It did, and that night transformed into a prince in her bedroom. His mother had transformed him to that form. They lived together; she bore seven sons, but the prince carried them safe to his mother. A wooer came for the daughter, and she said she did not want to marry but to live with her bird. Her father swore to wring its neck, and the prince fled. He got his mother to transform many of his men, his sons, and himself to larger birds, and they attacked the wedding party and bore away the bride.
Joseph Jacobs included a prose rendering of it, as Earl Mar's Daughter, in his English Fairy Tales. The ballad contains many fairy tale elements. [2]
The lover visiting in the form of a bird is a common motif in folklore called The Bird Lover.
In his The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood , Howard Pyle has Alan-a-Dale sing a variant of this song, May Ellen's Wedding.
"Cinderella", or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale embodying an element of unjust oppression and triumphant reward. Thousands of variants are known throughout the world. The protagonist is a young woman living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between around 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.
In mythology, folklore and speculative fiction, shapeshifting is the ability to physically transform through an inherently superhuman ability, divine intervention, demonic manipulation, sorcery, spells or having inherited the ability. The idea of shapeshifting is in the oldest forms of totemism and shamanism, as well as the oldest existant literature and epic poems such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad. The concept remains a common trope in conspiracy theories, modern fantasy, children's literature and popular culture.
Princess and dragon is a generic premise common to many legends, fairy tales, and chivalric romances. Northrop Frye identified it as a central form of the quest romance.
"The Juniper Tree" is a German fairy tale published in Low German by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812.
Catskin is an English fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs, in More English Fairy Tales. Marian Roalfe Cox, in her pioneering study of Cinderella, identified as one of the basic types, the Unnatural Father, contrasting with Cinderella itself and Cap O' Rushes.
The Rose-Tree is an English fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs in English Fairy Tales.
The youngest son is a stock character in fairy tales, where he features as the hero. He is usually the third son, but sometimes there are more brothers, and sometimes he has only one; usually, they have no sisters.
The Fair Fiorita is an Italian fairy tale collected by Thomas Frederick Crane in Italian Popular Tales. Italo Calvino included a variant of it, The Princesses Wed to the First Passer-By, in his Italian Folktales.
"The Twa Sisters" is a Northumbrian murder ballad that recounts the tale of a girl drowned by her sister. It is first known to have appeared on a broadside in 1656 as "The Miller and the King's Daughter." At least 21 English variants exist under several names, including "Minnorie" or "Binnorie", "The Cruel Sister", "The Wind and Rain", "Dreadful Wind and Rain", "Two Sisters", "The Bonny Swans" and the "Bonnie Bows of London". The ballad was collected by Francis J. Child and is also listed in the Roud Folk Song Index.
"Kemp Owyne" is Child Ballad number 34.
"Hind Horn" is a traditional English and Scottish folk ballad.
Prince Robert is Child ballad number 87, existing in several variants, and a murder ballad.
"Nix Nought Nothing" is a fairy tale included in Joseph Jacobs's anthology, English Fairy Tales (1898), but is not in fact "English" in the strict sense, but rather his reworking of the Scottish tale "Nicht Nought Nothing", originally collected by Andrew Lang from an old woman in Morayshire, Scotland.
"Gil Brenton" is Child ballad 5, Roud 22, existing in several variants.
The Battle of the Birds is a Scottish fairy tale collected by John Francis Campbell in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands. He recorded it from a fisherman near Inverary, John Mackenzie. Joseph Jacobs took it from there for his Celtic Fairy Tales and added some additional elements.
Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree is a Scottish fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs in his Celtic Fairy Tales. It is Aarne-Thompson type 709, Snow White. Others of this type include Bella Venezia, Nourie Hadig, La petite Toute-Belle and Myrsina.
"The Pig King" or "King Pig" is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giovanni Francesco Straparola in his The Facetious Nights of Straparola. Madame d'Aulnoy wrote a French, also literary, variant, titled Prince Marcassin.
The King of Love is an Italian fairy tale collected by Thomas Frederick Crane in Italian Popular Tales.
"Yonec" is one of the Lais of Marie de France, written in the twelfth century by the French poet known only as Marie de France. Yonec is a Breton lai, a type of narrative poem. The poem is written in the Anglo-Norman dialect of Old French in rhyming couplets of eight syllables each. This lai tells the story of a woman who seeks to escape a loveless marriage, and of the child born from the love that she found elsewhere.
"The Pretty Little Calf" is a Chinese fairy tale collected by Wolfram Eberhard in "Folktales of China".
![]() | This folk song–related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |