Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy by Andrew Lang

Author:Andrew Lang [Lang, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Scott, Walter, Sir, 1771-1832
Published: 2003-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

To feed my men and me.

The deer rins wild frae dale to dale,

The birds fly wild frae tree to tree,

And there is neither bread nor kale,

To fend my men and me.

These seem to me sound true ballad lines, like -

My hounds may a' rin masterless

My hawks may fly frae tree to tree,

in Child's variant of Young Beichan. The speakers, we see, are "inverted." Percy, in the English, promises Douglas's men pheasants— absurd provision for the army of 40,000 men of the English ballad. In the Ettrick text Douglas says that there are no supplies, merely ferae naturae, but he will wait at Otterburn to give Percy his chance.

Colonel Elliot takes the inversion of parts as a proof of modern pilfering and deliberate change to hide the theft; at least he mentions them, and the "prettier verses," with a note of exclamation (!). {73a} But there are, we repeat, similar inversions in the English and in Herd's old copy, and nobody says that Scott or Hogg or any modern faker made the inversions in Herd's text. The differences and inversions in the English and in Herd are very ancient; by 1550 "the Percy and the Montgomery met," in the line quoted in The Complaynte of Scotland. At about the same period (1550) it was the Percy and the Douglas who met, in the English version. Manifestly there pre-existed, by 1550, an old ballad, which either a Scot then perverted from the English text, or an Englishman from the Scots. Thus the inversions in the Ettrick and English version need not be due (they are not due) to a MODERN "faker."

In the Hogg MS. (xxiii.), Percy wounds Douglas "till backwards he did flee." Hogg was too good a Scot to interpolate the flight of Douglas; and Scott was so good a Scot that—what do you suppose he did?—he excised "till backwards he did flee" from Hogg's text, and inserted "that he fell to the ground" FROM THE ENGLISH TEXT!

In the Hogg MS. (xviii., xix.), in Scott xvii., xviii., Douglas, at Otterburn, is roused from sleep by his page with news of Percy's approach. Douglas says that the page lies (compare Herd, where Douglas doubts the page) -

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