Jim,

Paul Brewster wrote "A Rumanian Analogue of 'The Maid Freed from the Gallows' " in 1941.

Erik Pohl's 1934 study of "Losgekaufte" is in German, and I've only transcribed one study on my site written in German (and it took a while). However Long says Pohl summarized ("Losgekaufte," pp. 59-61) the logical case against accepting the "golden ball" version as the original form of "The Gallows Tree":

1. There is no apparent reason for the introduction's being in prose.[59]
2. There is no reason to assume that a ballad lacking motivation in its text must originally have had an introduction.
3. Popular balladry offers analogous cases that can always be demonstrated to be secondary.
4. The lost golden ball does not satisfactorily motivate the situation.

Iilar Kempinnen's 1957 study is in Finnish but it apparently compares most of the international texts with those from Finland. I don't think it's been translated.

Richie