Date: 21 Mar 22 - 02:17 PM

Hi Steve, thanks for the comments. "Completed my study"... Well each time I write something, I think it is complete, until I get an idea to go back and look into some aspect a little further, often roads I may have travelled already but not appreciated everything that I was reading!

You asked for my opinion - RE "some literary hand decided to tag on the penance verses to the Cruel Mother, not found in purely English versions or the presumed original" - my feeling from reading around (and that is all it is) is that the "creep" of penances from Child 21 (Maid & Palmer) into Child 20 (Cruel Mother) is more likely to have happened in oral rather than written tradition - a singer who knew all or portions of both ballads getting them a bit mixed up on one or more occasions, and so the new combination begins to circulate - in Scotland, Ireland, Canada and the USA, with 32 instances as documented by McCabe in her 1980 thesis, labelled therein C.M. [Cruel Mother] 1 through 32.

"the ballad must have been extant in Scotland during the 18th century"... well, the Glenbuchat version - as well as Child 21B, the Walter Scott fragment, clearly the same song - clearly attests to that; and my thought would be that this is sufficiently different from the Percy text not to be a direct derivative, but that they both come from something older. As I point out in the [current version of] the Wikipedia article for "The Maid and the Palmer", "the [original] song has been thought to originate in Catalonia, from where it spread to France, Italy and among Slavic peoples".

McCabe is of the opinion that "transmission from Britain to Scandinavia, or vice versa, had clearly taken place by the late Middle Ages, though fresh contact at a later date must not be ruled out". She dates the initial English-language version to the late medieval period, and points out a few elements in the Percy text that are probably later additions, so it makes sense to me that the other versions recovered later might well have survived as an alternative stream to the Percy text. So to summarise, I see the Percy version as more of a "fork" (albeit written down the earliest), the Glenbuchat/Scott version as closer to the original and representing a song then still current in oral tradition in Scotland (from where it then disappeared), and being carried from there to Ireland (possibly Ulster) from which the Irish versions (now at least 5 if you count that by Thomas Moran) subsequently derived. Interestingly, the "creep" of penances into the "Cruel Mother" variants seems to have happened more in Scotland and North America than Ireland, and possibly originate with a Scottish version or versions, in which the "Cruel Mother" persisted but the "Maid and Palmer" was generally forgotten.

Just my take on things as above, not really an academic one but trying to make the best sense of available material. Happy to discuss further of course!

Regards - Tony