Re Kipling's sources: I find it both amusing and annoying that there are always people who can't accept that anyone can make up a story or a poem; they always have to find an earlier source it must have been pinched from. I know RK was familiar with folklore and traditional ballads: it's obvious from some of his material and the styles he pastiches (is that a verb?!). But to say he wasn't creative enough to invent something and make it look trad shows a lack of understanding of people in general, not just writers and poets.

There--rant over!

I always wondered, but never got round to finding out, about oak ash & thorn: there's an Old English letter "ash"--the "AE" ligature, and another "thorn"--the "th" sound that gets misread as "y", as in "ye Olde Tea-Shoppe"--but I don't know whether there's a conection. There's another ligature "OE", which I don't know the name of, but I'm pretty sure it's not "oak".

Steve