I'm interested in symbolism of the "bramble briar" or just "briars" in conjunction with the story line. I've finished the beginning of main page headnotes. I've selected 27 traditional versions (A-W) out of the about 80 versions in America and England that have been collected. It's short so I'll post it here. Comments or suggestions welcomed.
Narrative: 3. The Bramble Briar
As a word, "Bramble Briar" is redundant. A bramble is a wild prickly bush and in England it usually refers to a blackberry bush. A briar (also brier) is a thorny plant that forms thickets. In this ballad the bramble briar is the place where the brothers throw the corpse of their sister's lover, who was their servant or apprentice boy. The location of the murder and the site of his body's disposal has also been sung as "a brake of briars" or "a ditch of briars[1]." In A Midsummer Night's Dream, (The Merchant Of Venice, Volume 5) Shakespeare writes, "Enter into that brake," which Kennett (MS. Lansd. 1033), defines as, "a small plat or parcel of bushes growing by themselves.[2]" It's called "A grounde full of bushes and brambles; a brake of briers; a thicket of thornes," in the Nomenclator, 1585[3].
The briar, well known in ballad lore from the "rose and briar" ending[4] where it grows on the man's grave, in this ballad represents the painful separation, revenge and death within this family[5] and painful death of the daughter's lover. The pain of the thorn and briar as a symbol is evident, for example, in the crucifixion of Christ. Porter[6], for example, refers the 'the bramble briar' as the "central symbol of the song." Even though the exact words, bramble briar, are missing in most versions of the ballad or distorted into "greenberry[7]" and the like, "The Bramble Briar" is the most powerful and symbolic title and far more revealing of the plot than "The Merchant's Daughter[7]."
The ballad story has been told as early as 1353 in "Isabella and the Pot of Basil" which is Philomena's story in the fourth day of The Decameron, a collection of short stories by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375)[8]. German poet Hans Sachs used the theme as the subject of his first narrative poem in 1515 and returned to it three more times over the course of the next thirty years and in 1818 John Keats wrote a narrative poem based on Boccaccio's story[9]. In 1905 Broadwood pointed out the similarity of the ballad story with Boccaccio's:
"This, apart from its fine tune, is a ballad of great interest, for we have here a doggerel version of the story, " Isabella and the Pot of Basil," that, though made famous by Boccaccio, was probably one of those old folk-tales, popular long before his time (1313-1373), of which he loved to make use. Hans Sachs (1494-1576) has put Boccaccio's story into verse, and his translation has much of the directness and homeliness which we find in this Somersetshire version. Both contrast curiously with Keats's flowery and artificial transcription, and certainly suggest better than his a primitive story of the people."[10]