Date: 21 Mar 22 - 05:57 PM

Hi Steve,

I must confess that my present opinions are at least partly influenced by the suggestions in McCabe - read for yourself and form your own opinions, perhaps! Available online here: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7804/1/7804_4801.PDF

Relevant pages are chapter 10 (p.244 onwards) and a portion of Appendix F (pp. 389 onwards).

Pp. 611 onwards in the Finnish Folklore Atlas (available online at https://moam.info/finnish-folklore-atlas_5a1c3ba41723dd7c327408e3.html) also deal in more detail with the non-English versions of this ballad...

Regards - Tony

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Date: 22 Mar 22 - 02:59 AM

I may as well throw this in: another version of "Well Below The Valley" was apparently collected in Ireland in 1955! Unfortunately I do not have access to the text, just to the notes introducing it, thus:

From p. 1335 of "The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volume 4":

"For a discussion of this ballad [i.e., The Well Below the Valley] in Ireland and another full text collected in Achill Island, County Mayo, from Anna Ní Mháille, aged 86, see Anne O'Connor, "Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions" (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarium Fennica, 1991), pp. 85, 119-20."

From Anne O'Connor, "Child Murderess and Dead Child Traditions" (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarium Fennica, 1991), in snippet view: (https://books.google.com.au/books?redir_esc=y&id=ThjXAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=well+below+the+valley):

p. 120: "The following full version of Child 21 from Co. Mayo collected on 9.5.1955 by Pádraig Ó Móráin from Anna Ní Mháille (pensioner, 86 years), of Achill is in fact the earliest recorded version since Child, antedating the Roscommon version collected by Tom Munnelly in 1969 (cf. Bronson, 1972, 457-459)." [text not visible in this snippet view]

If anyone can access that full text, might be very interesting...

Regards - Tony

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Date: 22 Mar 22 - 04:23 AM

I managed to retrieve a few lines of Anna Ní Mháille's 1955 text via snippet view:

There was a rider passin' by
There was a rider passing by
He askhed a drink, as he was dry
At the well below the valley, oh!
My washing tub it is afloat
Green grows the valley, oh!
... ...

If I give you a drink, I might fall in
In the well below the valley, oh!
(Says she)"My true love never was born"
She swore by grass an' swore by corn
That her true love never was born
"How dar' you tell me such a lie
An' you havin' six childer, by the by,
At the well below the valley, oh!
... ...

(the original can be purchased on Amazon, see https://www.amazon.com/Child-Murderess-Dead-Traditions-communications/dp/9514106520, however it would be neat if someone already has a copy they can consult :)

Just a quick calculation - if Anna was 83 in 1955, she would be (say) 10 in 1872 ... so it is at least conceivable that (say) her grandmother might have been alive then, born maybe 1802, so potentially a direct link to the early years of the 1800s when the song was known to be alive in oral tradition in Scotland... just speculative of course, but it shows that what appears at first sight to be a big chronological gap can potentially be traversed without too many generations!

Regards - Tony

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Date: 22 Mar 22 - 04:26 AM

I think I mean 1882 not 1872 in the post above, but the concept still stands :)