The Ballad of Sweet William's Ghost- Ker 1898
THE BALLAD OF SWEET WILLIAM'S GHOST
by W. P. Ker.
The Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature, Vol. 1, No. 3 (November 1898), p.226
THE BALLAD OF SWEET WILLIAM'S GHOST
In the version of this ballad in Herd's MSS. (Child, No. 77 b) there is a reading which has been given up by the editors: -
(The ghost speaks)-
"Cocks are crowing a merry mid-larf
I wat the wild fule boded day;
Gie me my faitha nd trouthea gain,
And let me farem e on myw ay."
For midlarf Scott in the Border Minstrelsy read midnight, which has been frequently repeated in quotation. Mr Child, and the editors to whom the completion of his admirable work was left, have made, no correction.
Read midlerth (pronounced midlarth by the reciter, and misheard and miswritten with f for th). The word is the right word- it is on merry middle-earth, where the cocks a re crowing a nd the day coming on, and where the ghost has no place. The corresponding Danish Middelhjem is found (an exceptional old word) in a ballad of similar character, the Mother's Ghost, sometimes k nown as Svend Dyring, translated by Jamieson as the Ghaist's Warning in the notes to the Lady of the Lake, Canto IV. ; Moderen under Mulde, in Grundtvig, Folkeviser, No. 89. In Grundtvig's version A , from Karen Brahe's MS. (16th century) it is read in stanzas 16 and 17:-
Hun gaar seg till enngeliest
hun bad seg loif äff Jesu Chrest.
Dette hun maattet ill mieelhjemg aa
och taalle med synn bonn saa smaa.
* She goes to Paradise, she prayed leave of Jesus Christ; that she might go to Middle-earth, and talk with her children so small."
Later in the same ballad comes the warning cockcrow : -
" Then up and crew the red red cock,
And up then crew the gray " -
" Nu gaaller hanen den rodde
till graffuset unddera lle dy dodde. "
Medill-erthe is contrasted with Fairy- land in Thomas of Erceldoune( Child, i. p. 327), and again in Sir Cawline (ibid., ii. p. 59), in connexion with the "eldridge king ": -
"and to meeten oe man of middle-earth
and that liues on Christs his lay."
These last two references are from the Glossary to Child's Ballads under the heading Middle-earth.
W. P. Ker.