The People’s Songbag Same Old Story

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 5

The People’s Songbag Same Old Story

(Specially written lor “The Prew” by DERRICK ROONEY)

Gill Morice was an earl’s ton, HU name it waxed wide; It was nae for his great riches. Not yet his meikle pride. But it was for a lady gay. That lived on Carrow side.

Thus begins one erf the most tragic—and most misunderstood—of the great ballads of Scotland: “Gill- Moriee,” of Scottish origin and described by the author of Gray’s Elegy as “divine.”

The story is, in itself, no great shakes, although it has dramatic possibilities; and it is brutal: toe youth Gill Morice, from the greenwoods where he lives, sends a message to Lady Bernard, bidding her come hither—but the message is intercepted by Lord Bernard, who impetuously rides out, slays the youth and brings back his head impaled on a spear. Whereupon the lady breaks into lamentations, for it transpires that Gill Morice was not her lover but her son, born before she married, and reared by her in secret

More interesting than the story, however, are toe ballad’s peregrinations, for two centuries, from anthology to anthology—and that, in seeking its origins, some of the most famous names in folk-lore (Bishop Percy, Robert Burns and William Motherwell included, failed to grasp toe simplest and most obvious truth about it. Burns was convinced it was written in his time, and he attributed authorship to William McGibben, the compiler of a book of Scottish songs in toe 1760’5; but he was clearly mistaken, for it contains several archaic phrases that date it from a much earlier period. Burns’s claim was, in fact.

refuted within a few decades by William Stenhouse, in the notes for Johnson’s “Scots Musical Museum.” He had, Stenhouse wrote, spoken to toe late William Tyler, of Woodhouselee, who knew McGibbon well, and “assured me that *Gill Morice* was one of the oldest of our melodies; and indeed toe wild, and peculiar structure of the air, carries internal evidence of its antiquity.”

According to Stenhouse, the ballad had “every appearance of being a tone narrative of an event that happened in a remote age,” and Motherwell believed that toe greenwood of the' story was the ancient forest of Dundaff, and that Lord Bernard’s castle stood on “a precipitous cliff overhanging the water of Carron.” Thomas Gray, in a letter about the ballad, said that “I have got toe old Scotch ballad on which Douglas (toe play by Home which was a success about the middle of the eighteenth century) was founded; it is divine, and as long as from (Cambridge) to Aston. Aristotle’s best rules are observed in it in a manner that shews the author had never read Aristotle. You may read it two-thirds through without guessing what it is about; and yet, when you come to toe end, it is impossible not to understand toe whole story.” But toe “impossible” happened; and so it went on, from anthology to anthology. By now perceptive readers will have guessed the punch line: that the story of “Gill Morice” is older than-any of these authorities imagined, and is not even Scottish—for it is no more than a variation of the ancient legend of Rustem and Sohrab.