Herd got this tragic ballad from a milkmaid, in 1771. Mr. Child quotes a
verse parallel, preserved in Faroe, and in the Icelandic. There is a
similar incident in the cycle of Kullervo, in the Finnish _Kalevala_.
Scott says that similar tragedies are common in Scotch popular poetry;
such cases are “Lizzie Wan,” and “The King’s Dochter, Lady Jean.” A
sorrow nearly as bitter occurs in the French “Milk White Dove”: a brother
kills his sister, metamorphosed into a white deer. “The Bridge of Death”
(French) seems to hint at something of the same kind; or rather the
Editor finds that he has arbitrarily read “The Bonny Hind” into “Le Pont
des Morts,” in Puymaigre’s _Chants Populaires du Pays Messin_, p. 60.
(_Ballads and Lyrics of Old France_, p. 63)