"The Bitter Withy" and Its Relationship to "The Holy Well"

Abstract

A succinct explanation of this discovery, and of subsequent scholarship, must start with Mr. Frank Sidgwick, who was the first to publicly exhibit the ballad, in I905 in Notes and Queries.2 It had been collected originally in i888 from an old Herefordshire man, who called it Withies (see Appendix, B). At practically the same time that this second Notes and Queries text was printed, another version appeared in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society.3 It was collected by Dr. Vaughan-Williams and designated Our Saviour Tarried Out (see Appendix, C). Mr. Sidgwick soon followed, this time in Folk-Lore, with a reprint of his variant from Notes and Queries, and with various conjectures upon the ballad's origins, explication, and relation to other similar ballads.4 He also contributed still another text (variant), albeit incomplete. Mr. Sidgwick's zealous activity had meanwhile aroused some of the great ballad scholars of the day, who were amazed that Child's collection could have neglected an essentially ballad. But the noted F. B. Gummere, in his The Popular Ballad (Boston, I907), pronounced it genuine. In an American journal G. H. Gerould supported Gummere's position with the single, most scholarly study that had been attempted as yet.5 In this investigation Gerould produced still another variant (actually a completion of Sidgwick's partial text which had appeared in the Journal of the Folk-Song Society-see Appendix, D), and he corrected Sidgwick's comments and interpretations in the course of attempting more advanced hypotheses of his own. The consensus then was that Withies (or Bitter Withy, or Our Saviour Tarried Out) was a traditional ballad not found in Child's extensive collection. However, the discussion of the new ballad was by no means termi-