"The Earl of Mar's Daughter" is
Child ballad
The Child Ballads are 305 traditional ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. Their lyrics and Child's studies of them were published as '' ...
number 270.
Synopsis
The Earl of Mar's daughter saw a lovely bird, and promised it a golden cage if it would come to her. It did, and that night transformed into a prince in her bedroom. His mother had
transformed him to that form. They lived together; she bore seven sons, but the prince carried them safe to his mother. A
wooer came for the daughter, and she said she did not want to marry but to live with her bird. Her father swore to wring its neck, and the prince fled. He got his mother to transform many of his men, his sons, and himself to larger birds, and they attacked the wedding party and bore away the bride.
Variants
Joseph Jacobs
Joseph Jacobs (29 August 1854 – 30 January 1916) was an Australian folklorist, translator, literary critic, social scientist, historian and writer of English literature who became a notable collector and publisher of English folklore.
Jacob ...
included a prose rendering of it, as ''Earl Mar's Daughter'', in his ''English Fairy Tales''. The ballad contains many
fairy tale
A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic (paranormal), magic, incantation, enchantments, and mythical ...
elements.
[Joseph Jacobs, ''English Fairy Tales'']
"Earl Mar's Daughter"
/ref>
The lover visiting in the form of a bird is a common motif in folklore called The Bird Lover The Bird Lover, also known as The Prince as Bird, is a type of narrative structure in folklore, no. 432 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system. In the typical version of story, a woman acquires a bird lover—a nobleman in the shape of a bir ...
.
Uses
In his ''The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
''The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire'' is an 1883 novel by the American illustrator and writer Howard Pyle. Pyle compiled the traditional Robin Hood ballads as a series of episodes of a coherent narrative. For ...
'', Howard Pyle
Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy.
In 1894, he began ...
has Alan-a-Dale
Alan-a-Dale (first recorded as Allen a Dale; variously spelled ''Allen-a-Dale'', ''Allan-a-Dale'', ''Allin-a-Dale'', ''Allan A'Dayle'' etc.) is a figure in the Robin Hood legend. According to the stories, he was a wandering minstrel who became a ...
sing a variant of this song, ''May Ellen's Wedding''.
See also
*"The Brown Bear of Norway
The Brown Bear of Norway is an Irish fairy tale collected by Patrick Kennedy which appeared in his ''Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts'' (1866). It was later included by Andrew Lang in his anthology '' The Lilac Fairy Book'' (1910), though La ...
"
References
Child Ballads
English folklore
Year of song unknown
Songwriter unknown
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