"Enough!"
I agree entirely - back to the subject in hand.
"If we linked together the ballads say in the Child canon that have the same motifs....."
True, but here we are not talking about stray secondary motifs - we are dealing with two songs where a woman avoids seduction using enchantment - not an incidental part of the plot, but its main feature in both cases.
I overcame my abhorrance of MT magazine and read your artical - sorry, not convinced. Too heavily reliant on the printed versions which, as I've said before, I believe to be rewritings of songs from the tradition. Phillips Barry's expressed contempt of 'the folk' along with his overactive imagination as displayed by his flights of fantasy over magic Islands and water nymphs (see his note to 'Lake of Col Finn') make him an unreliable source of information as far as I'm concerned.
So we are left with just the two narratives to go on, which I believe are similar enough to have come from the same source - nothing definitive, just "a gut reaction".
Jim Carroll