Graves' piece forms part of his discussion of The Two Magicians, and he certainly had its structure in mind. The neo-Pagan song quoted here, though, appears to be no more than Graves' verses, expanded and altered in places to suit the anonymous adaptor's perspective, and falsely presented, by accident or design, as authentically traditional. Here is what Graves wrote:

Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle would fetch him back.

O, I shall go into a hare
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,
And I shall go in the Devil's name
Aye, till I be fetchèd hame.

Hare, take heed of a bitch greyhound
Will harry thee all these fells around,
For here I come in Our Lady's name
All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

Yet I shall go into a trout
With sorrow and sighing and mickle doubt,
And show thee many a merry game
Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

Trout, take heed of an otter lank
Will harry thee close from bank to bank,
For here I come in Our Lady's name
All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

Yet I shall go into a bee
With mickle horror and dread of thee,
And flit to hive in the Devil's name
Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

Bee, take heed of a swallow hen
Will harry thee close, both butt and ben,
For here I come in Our Lady's name
All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

Yet I shall go into a mouse
And haste me unto the miller's house,
There in his corn to have good game
Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

Mouse, take heed of a white tib-cat
That never was balked of mouse or rat,
For I'll crack thy bones in Our Lady's name;
Thus shalt thou be fetchèd hame.

Cunning and art, etc.


Graves' usual confusing mixture of genuine scholarship and wild imagination is too long usefully to quote in full, but here is an extract:

"In the British witch-cult the male sorceror was dominant -though in parts of Scotland Hecate, or the Queen of Elfin or Faerie, still ruled- and The Coal Black Smith is likely to have been the song sung at a dramatic performance of the chase at a witches' Sabbath... Anne Armstrong, the Northumbrian witch... testified in 1673 that, at a well-attended Sabbath held at Allansford, one of her companions, Ann Baites of Morpeth, successively transformed herself into cat, hare, greyhound and bee, to let the Devil... admire her facility in changes. At first I thought that he chased Ann Baites, who was apparently the Maiden, or female leader of the coven, around the ring of witches, and that she mimicked the gait and cry of these various creatures in turn while he pursued her, adapting his changes to hers. The formula in The Coal Black Smith is "he became a greyhound dog", or "he became an otter brown", and "fetched her home again". "Home again" is used here in the technical sense of "to her own shape", for Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne, at her trial in 1662, quoted the witch formula for turning oneself into a hare:

I shall go into a hare
With sorrow and sighing and mickle care
And I shall go in the Devil's name
Aye, till I come home again.

It is clear from her subsequent account that there was no change of outward shape, but only of behaviour, and the verse suggests a dramatic dance. I see now that Ann Baites gave a solo performance, alternately mimicking the pursued and the pursuer, and that the Devil was content merely to applaud her. Probably the sequence was seasonal -hare and greyhound, trout and otter, bee and swallow, mouse and cat- and inherited from an earlier form of the chase, with the pursuer as the Cat-Demeter finally destroying the Sminthean house on the threshing-floor in the winnowing season. The whole song is easy to restore in its original version."

-Robert Graves, The White Goddess, Faber and Faber, 1961. pp. 401-2.