folksongs

[<SOLOMON%BRANDEIS.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> (David Durand)]

For those of you who may be interested in the esoterica of folk songs
I offer the following:

The Twa Magicians is Child # 44.  It is not Irish but Scots.  Child
himself was not impressed with the ballad, calling it a "base-born
cousin of a pretty ballad known over all Southern Europe and
elsewhere."  Child prefers the French versions but mentions other
versions ranging from Catalan to Serbian.  Child cites folk tales as
the origin of the ballad.  Although he mentions many such tales, my
best estimate is that the song is derived from one of the
shape-shifting contests in the Arabian Nights and may very well have
been derived directly from the tale rather than from a translation of
the French.  Child has nothing to say on this point, nor does he try
to date the ballad.  I am inclined to think that the ballad, although
not in its current form may be fairly old.  Much of the magic dropped
out of the surviving versions of ballads in England and Scotland, and
in general the more magic, or magical connotations the older the
version.  The Arabian Nights came to England after the Crusades, and
there is earlier shape-shifting in the Welsh material surrounding
Talesein.  This is all speculation on my part, based on a lot of
reading in this area.

The line indicated as unintelligible should be:
        For the half of that and less.

There is an American version of the Twa Magicians.  There is not
sufficient evidence to date it.  The song is quite similar.  A stanza
in the American version that does not occur in the Scots version is:

        She turned into a fly,
        A fly all in the air,
        And he turned into a spider bug,
        And he fetched her to his lair.

The chorus is:

        Hello, hello, hello, hello, you coal black smith,
        You've done me no harm.
        You never shall have my maidenhead that I have kept so long,
        You fusty, dusty, lusty coal black smith,
        Maiden I shall die.

However the chorus is changed after the last stanza to:

        Hello, hello, hello,  hello you coal black smith,
        You've done me the harm.
        You have taen my maidenhead that I have kept so long,
        You fusty, dusty, lusty coal black smith,
        Do it once again.