Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight

"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (Child #4; Roud #21) is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads.

[2] This version is written in couplets, with a refrain as second and fourth line: Fair lady Isabel sits in her bower sewing, Aye as the gowans grow gay There she heard an elf-knight blawing his horn.

They ride, sometimes to the side of a river, or more often to the banks of the sea, where he tells her to dismount: 'Mount off, mount off, thy lily-white steed, And deliver it unto me For six pretty maidens I have drowned here And the seventh thou shalt be.

Sometimes the story ends here, but often when she arrives home a parrot comments on how late she has returned, saying he is afraid "Some ruffian hath led you astray".

She promises him a luxurious cage if he keeps her secret, and when her father asks the parrot what makes him "speak before it is day" he replies that a cat was going to eat him.

Child's D version is very similar to other texts except that the young woman is named as May Colven and the knight as False Sir John.

In the second the knight uses a charm to make an initially reluctant May Collin go with him, and the story ends when, after the parrot episode, she goes to her parents, tells them what has happened, and they go to the scene of the crime to find and bury the body "for fear it should be seen".

In her semi-autobiographical novel Lark Rise, Flora Thompson born in 1876 and growing up in Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, stated that in the early 1880s she heard an 83-year-old man sing the Outlandish Knight.

The Roud Folk Song Index lists about 367 instances of this group of ballads collected from traditional singers, with the great majority being of the Outlandish Knight story.

[1] Steve Roud and Julia Bishop point out that this is one of about half a dozen Child ballads that have been most consistently popular, having been collected "time and again all over the English-speaking world"[5] Many of these are available to listen online.

[32] The Dutch song Heer Halewijn is one of the earlier (13th century) versions of this tale, fuller and preserving older elements, including such things as the murderer's head speaking after the heroine has beheaded him, attempting to get her to do tasks for him.

Holger Olof Nygard, in an article in "The Journal of American Folklore" discusses the various theories put forward about the origin of the ballads in this group and what he calls its "continental analogues".

These include: Two sentences in Nygard's conclusion are worth quoting: "We are left with a handful of improbable impossibilities as to the source of the ballad.

[45] But Steve Roud points out that as the two earliest British versions are late 18th century and "Despite its archaic feel and close foreign relatives, the ballad does not seem to be very old, at least in Britain"[5] There have been various other rationalisations, attaching the story to specific locations and historical events: for example to Gilles de Laval in the early fifteenth century.

[47] A rocky promontory called Gamesloup, on the Ayrshire coast, is pointed to by local people as the spot where the knight drowned his victims.

One, based on the comparative evidence, is that the "Lady Isabel" text is a palpable fraud perpetuated by Peter Buchan with the probable help of a "supplier".

In terms of the Anglo-American tradition of the "Outlandish Knight" the "Lady Isabel" text is of little importance, since it seems to have had no influence except in the scholarly titling of variants.

[49] Wilgus goes on to say: Nygard depended to some extent on extratextual information in being influenced by the suspicion of texts from Peter Buchan's collection, voiced by Child and other scholars.

Ironically, Child's suspicions were largely based on the subliterary character of other texts, while "Lady Isabel" is literarily superior.

[56] The dialogue between the Lady and the parrot, which appears in some versions, was made into a comic song: "Tell Tale Polly", published in Charley Fox's Minstrel Companion (ca.