Molly Bawn- Mrs Morse (ME) pre1935 Barry B
[Fragment from BFSSNE, Vol. 10, 1935. Notes by Barry follow at the bottom of this page. Also in British Ballads from Maine (Second Series) Phillips Barry, Fanny Hardy Eckstorm , Mary Winslow Smyth; edited by Pauleena MacDougall; 2011.
Obviously this is much older than 1935- I'll need to find out more info before it can be dated.
R. Matteson 2016]
B. "Molly Bawn." - Fragment taken down from the recitation of Mrs. Fred W. Morse, Islesford, Maine, who learned it as a child from her grandmother in County Waterford, Ireland.
1 Molly Bawn was out walking by the setting of the sun,
She sat down by a bower, a passing shower to shun.
2 Young Jimmie with his gun had been fowling all day,
. . .
Her apron being around her, he mistook her for a swan,
But alas! unto his grief, 'twas his own Mollie Bawn.
3 That night, to her uncle, her spirit did appear,
Saying: "Uncle, dear uncle, my true love is free!
My apron being around me, he took me for a fawn,
But alas ! to his grief, 'twas his own Mollie Bawn."
MOLLY BAWN, or, THE SHOOTING OF HIS DEAR (Barry's notes)
The closed canon of balladry is under protest; most articulate in a recent article by Miss Thelma G. James, JAFL., XLVI, 51-68, who shows again how fluid Chiid's opinions were. Already Gerould (The Ballad, of Tradition, p. 33), though less courageously than the facts warrant, has defended the right of Molly Bawn, or, The Shooting of his Dear, to a place in the Child corpus.
Robert Jamieson remembered "having, when a child, heard a silly ditty of a young man, who, returning homeward from shooting with his gun, saw his sweetheart and shot her for a swan" (Popular Ballad, I, 193). In 1806 he printed six stanzas of this ballad, sent him by a correspondent, with the comment:
"This seems to be one of the very lowest description of vulgar modern English ballads, which are sung about the streets in country towns, and sold, four or five for a half-penny, to maid-servants and children; and I owe an apology to my readers for attempting to introduce such paltry stuff to their notice, but one of my classical friends, on reading "Lord Kenneth" asked me whether I had not Ovid's beautiful and romantic story of Procris and Aura in my eye when I wrote it. Had that been the case I ought certainly to have made something better of it than I have done; but most assuredly thought as little of Procris and Aura when I was writing 'Lord Kenneth' as did the great author of 'Peggy Baun' " (ibid., p. 194).
Jamieson was a better aesthetician than folklorist, but his classical friend was right: the story of' Molly Bawn is that of Piocris and Aura, or, as it is better known, of Cephalus and Procris. Not Ovid's version, however, but a much earlier type of the myth (C. Robert, Die Griechische Heldeisage, I, PP. 162, ff.): is most similar to the plot of our ballad. In this version, the lovers are hunting in the woods, unknown to each other. Procris beats the bushes, Cephalus hearing the noise, casts his spear and kills her. In 1910, we called attention to the importance of the swan in the story (JAFL, XXII p. 357): a dozen years later, Miss A. G. Gilchrist (JFSS., VII, 17-21), quite correctly appraised the antiquity of the theme and the relation of the swan (or 'hind') to the belief in the theriomorphic soul. As parallels, she cited certain Scandinavian ballads and the French La Biche Blanche. Actually, the trait of the theriomorphic soul is itself part-and-parcel of the tradition of the myth of Cephalus and Procris, though the evidence is not literary but iconographic. A scene on a red-figured vase in the British Museum (G. Weicker, Der Seelenvogel in der alten Litteratur und Kunst, p. 166), depicts the death of Procris. Cephalus, his dog at his side, looks on to Procris, mortally wounded, sinks to the ground. At the same moment, a large bird, with the head and features of Procris, rises into the air. The vase, but doubtless not the scene, is unique: in any case, it has preserved a conception of the myth which ls in keeping with the theriomorphic soul trait as we have it in Molly Bawn. It is still a belief in remote localities of Ireland, that ducks and other birds flying at night are souls in bird-form (Lady Gregory, Visions and Beliefs, II, 103).
The substitution of the fawn for the swan as we have it in Mrs. Morse's text, as well as in the comic version Polly von Luther and Jamie Randall (Andrews, New York, before 1860), is not due to mere zerzingen. The explanation which we offer here is tentative and subject to revision.
We have already shown that the Siren-Lamia, identified with Lilith (Isa, XXXIV, 14) is the prototype of Morgain la vee of medieval synthetic mythology (FSSNE, Bulletin 7, p. 13; 8, pp 11-12). Hebrew Lilith is written in Syriac, Leliota for which the Peschita has in Isa XXXIV 14, Aiyato, explained by the lexicographer Bar 'Ali as demon quae sub forma mulieris fletis se ntonstrat. Now Syriac aliyota is easily misread as ayolata - "doe, hind." With this may be connected the formula ayyeleth ha-sucher, "hind of the dawn"- probably the name of a traditional air- in the Hebrew introduction to Psalm XXII, 1, which has been referred to Rabbinical traditions of a "hind hunted in the morning. In Celtic mythology, as Miss Gilchrist has pointed out (JFSS, VII, 20), Ossian's mother in her form of a doe, was under a geas or tabu, never to be seen at dawn, while in the Guigemar of Marie de France, the supernatural doe is apparently a hypostasis of Morgain.
A Gaelic text of a ballad apparently identical with Molly Bawn was heard in the West Highlands by the late Miss Lucy E. Broadwood (JFSS, VII, 17): moreover, a set of the air to Molly Bawn, or The Shooting of his Dear (Joyce, Old Irish Folk-Music and Songs, p. 220), bearing the Irish title Malli Ban, was printed by Edward Bunting in 1809. We conclude that our ballad is a translation by some sorry rhymester, from a Gaelic original. Miss Gilchrist aptly compares the lines in Buchan's Leesome Brand (Ballads of the North of Scotland, I, 39):
"Be sure ye touch not the white hynde,
For she is o the woman kind."
Herein is a clear allusion to the super-natural hind, the fay in animal form. Child, who suspected some connection between Leesome Brand and The Bonny Hind (No. 50), a ballad of brother-sister fixation, never found the connecting link in the French La Biche Blanche, in which the brother hunts his own sister in hind-form. To the same group belongs The West Country Damosel's Complaint. (Child, 292).
P. B.