Burns’s version, in Johnson’s _Museum_ (1792). Scott’s version is made
up of this copy, Riddell’s, Herd’s, and oral recitations, and contains
feeble literary interpolations, not, of course, by Sir Walter. _The
Complaint of Scotland_ (1549) mentions the “Tale of the Young Tamlene” as
then popular. It is needless here to enter into the subject of
Fairyland, and captures of mortals by Fairies: the Editor has said his
say in his edition of Kirk’s _Secret Commonwealth_. The Nereids, in
Modern Greece, practise fairy cantrips, and the same beliefs exist in
Samoa and New Caledonia. The metamorphoses are found in the _Odyssey_,
Book iv., in the winning of Thetis, the _Nereid_, _or Fairy Bride_, by
Peleus, in a modern Cretan fairy tale, and so on. There is a similar
incident in _Penda Baloa_, a Senegambian ballad (_Contes Populaires de la
Sénégambie_, Berenger Ferand, Paris, 1885). The dipping of Tamlane has
precedents in _Old Deccan Days_, in a Hottentot tale by Bleek, and in
_Les Deux Frères_, the Egyptian story, translated by Maspero (the Editor
has already given these parallels in a note to _Border Ballads_, by
Graham R. Thomson). Mr. Child also cites Mannhardt, “Wald und
Feldkulte,” ii. 64–70. Carterhaugh, the scene of the ballad, is at the
junction of Ettrick and Yarrow, between Bowhill and Philiphaugh.