Thanks for the additional information, Jim and Brian. And here is my best take on the "Price Version." I would be interested in your further comments.

I've been pondering the Price version of our ballad for several weeks now. I don't have anything much new to add, other than I'm a bit puzzled about why it hasn't created more discussion, since 1945! Of course I was puzzled about why the Willard copy hadn't created more of stir as well. Could one conclude that "ballad studies" are not a particularly hot item and haven't been for over half of a century?

I am not an expert in the British ballad traditions and don't know very much at all about the various manuscripts. I want to say at this point how much I miss Malcolm Douglas in these discussions! In any case, I want to try to sum up my observations on the Price version.

We know that Marguerite Olney collected this version, for Helen Hartness Flanders, from Miss Edith Ballenger (Ballinger?) Price of Newport, Rhode Island on October 23, 1945. Miss Price learned her version "as a young girl from a lady living in Massachusetts." In an introduction to another ballad in this collection, which was also obtained from Miss Price, it says she learned it " about 1910 when a small child, from the singing of a friend in Amherst, Massachusetts ...." We don't know for sure if this is the same person or an accurate dating for her "Daemon Lover," but we might assume that it is. When I can get to the library and look at some of Flanders' other books, I may be able to find out more about Miss Price and her friend from Massachusetts.

The next thing that we know about the "Price version" is that it is unique in the total collection of this ballad in North America. While the title, "Daemon Lover," shows up elsewhere, some of the details in the Price version do not show up anywhere else in North America as far as I know. Her version seems to overtly maintain not only a supernatural element, which is rare in North America, but also a diabolical element, with reference to the "cloven hoof." Here are some of the more remarkable verses:

"I've seven ships upon the sea,
Beaten with the finest gold,
And mariners to wait upon us;
All this she shall behold."

She set her foot unto the ship,
No mariners did she behold;
But the sail was o' the....
And the mast o' the beaten gold.
----
They hadna' been a league, a league,
A league but only two,
When she beheld his cloven foot,
From his gay robe thrusting through.

They hadna' sailed a league, a league,
A league but only three,
When dark and fearsome grow his looks
And gurly grow the sea.

"Now hold your tears, my dearest dear,
Let all your weeping be
And I'll show ye how the white lilies grow
At the bottom o' the sea."
----
It would seem that Price's version comes closest to the Scottish (in differentiation from the "English" or "Scotch-Irish" traditions - please forgive me if I am mangling boundaries here!) traditions of this ballad, in which the supernatural and the diabolical are most pronounced. Clinton Heylin suggests that this version, along with the one it resembles most from Motherwell, come from earlier Scottish oral tradition. Gardner-Medwin, in her article, seems to suggest that it comes directly from Scott's book. However, as Richard Mellish, above, and Clinton Heylin himself point out, the word "gurly" is not found in the Motherwell/Scott version, but in another version from the Scottish oral tradition, from Kinloch.

In fact, when you compare Price's version with the version from Motherwell, which Heylin does on pages 83-84 of his book, one sees that while there are resemblances between the two suggesting that they may indeed have a common ancestor, they are different enough from each other to say that probably the Price version is not taken from the Motherwell version. Unless it has been significantly reworked. But that suspicion raises some other questions.

So, it is surely possible that the Price version does come from Scottish tradition. Motherwell's version was published in 1827, suggesting that he got his version from the oral tradition somewhat earlier, and if Price's version comes from the same milieu, then that would date it back to the early part of the 19th century. Both Heylin and Gardner-Medwin argue that there were earlier versions than the 1858 Andrews/De Marsan broadside printing in North America and suggest that they either came from Scotland or were influenced by the Scottish versions.

However, one might immediately ask, "why are there no other surviving examples like the Price version anywhere else in North America if such versions came over from Scotland between about 1750 and 1860?" Also, we just don't know when the Price version arrived on North American shores. Price says that she learned her song from a friend whose "family came from England." When did this "English" family come over? The unspoken implication would seem to be that it was fairly recently, since otherwise, what would be the point of mentioning this in the light of the fact that many, many families had "come over from England!" While there is no evidence to support it, this seems to point to a time more recent than 1827.

There is nothing to say that a Scottish version of "The Daemon Lover" could not have been preserved in England throughout the 19th century and then brought over to the United States later. However, just as there are no surviving examples of this form of the ballad in North America other than Price's, there also do not seem to be any in England either, other than what was already in print. I may be wrong about this. But the question remains, where did it come from, and when?

We know that Miss Price was born in New Jersey and grew up there, and then went to art school in Boston. In 1910, she would have been about 13 years old. It would be so interesting to know more about this "friend" but at this point I don't. However, we do know that Francis James Child had published Part VIII (Vol. 4, Part 2 of the Dover Edition) of his THE ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS in Boston in 1892, about five years before Miss Price was born. Child had died a year before Miss Price's birth. But the point is that his works were certainly current and available in the Boston/Amherst/Cambridge area in 1910. It is possible that someone with a literary training and background, both of which Miss Price possessed, could have skillfully crafted a "traditional" version of an old ballad, using nothing more than Child's work itself. We all know that this is not an uncommon or necessarily undesirable practice. This could have been done by either Miss Price or her "English" friend, or her English friend's "family". If only M. Olney or H.H. Flanders had asked a few more questions!

On the face of it, the Price version does not "look" like a compilation, but like a genuine surviving version of a somewhat Anglicized Scottish variant of "The Daemon Lover', or exactly what collectors would long to have found all over North America - but didn't. Heylin even suggests that this may be " the only real suggestion that the 'dæmonic' version might have once had a foothold in English tradition."

After trying to consider all of this carefully, I find myself still on the suspicious side of the argument. Too much time had elapsed for such a neat version to all of a sudden show up in Child's backyard a few years after his death. There is too much of a literary ambience surrounding this version. And there is a total lack of any other such versions in either the U.S. or Great Britain for the possible time frames involved, especially from "oral tradition." The Price version remains a somewhat suspicious enigma for me.