It is perhaps worth emphasizing that Child was not just a collector & popularizer, but a scholar. He criticized the texts as well as reproducing them. And he did his homework. If there was a Hungarian fairy tale that had a similar plot, he was on top of it.

Nor did he neglect what Mencken would call the human juices in the literature. In his retelling of the bizarre tale of the Russian Lady Hamilton, or his furious documentation of the blood libel in Hugh of Lincoln, there is not a dull line.

It *is* a shame that people were still singing "his" ballads in his own country.