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78 LADY MAISET. |
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" For ae bit I'll beg for Childe Vyet, For Lord Ingram I'll beg three,
All for the honourable marriage, that
At Mary Kirk he gave me ! " ia> |
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LADY MAISRY.
This ballad, said to be very popular in Scotland, was taken down from recitation by Jamieson, and is extracted from his collection, vol. i. p. 73. A different copy, from Motherwell's Minstrelsy, p. 234, is given in the Appendix. Another, styled Young Prince James, may be seen in Buchan's Ballads, vol. i. 103. Bonnie Susie Cleland, Motherwell, p. 221, is still another version.
In Lady Maisry we seem to have the English form of a tragic story which, starting from Denmark, has spread over almost all the north of Europe, that of King Waldemar and his Sister. Grundtvig's collection gives seven copies of the Danish ballad upon this subject {Kong Valdemar og hans SSster, No. 126), the oldest from a manuscript of the beginning of the 17th century. Five Icelandic versions are known, one Norse, one Faroish, five Swedish (four of them in Ar-widsson, No. 53, Liten Kerstin och Fru Sofia), and several in German, as Graf Hans von Holstein und seine Schwester Annchristine, Erk, Liederhort, p. 155; |
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