Perhaps the original conception was the simple and beautiful one which we find in English #B# and both the Icelandic ballads, that the king's harper, or the girl's lover, takes three locks of her yellow hair to string his harp with. So we find three tets of hair in #D#, #E#, #I#, and three links in #F#, #P#, used, or directed to be used, to string the fiddle or the fiddle-bow, and the same, apparently, with Danish #A#. Infelicitous additions were, perhaps, successively made; as a harp-frame from the breast-bone in English #C#, and fiddle-pins formed of the finger-joints, English #F#, #O#, Danish #B#, #C#, #E#, #F#, #L#. Then we have all three: the frame of the instrument formed from the breast (or trunk), the screws from the finger-joints, the strings from the hair, Swedish #A#, #B#, #G#, Norwegian #A#, #C#, #M#. And so one thing and another is added, or substituted, as fiddle-bows of the arms or legs, Swedish #C#, #D#, Danish #H#, English #L a#; a harp-frame from the arms, Norwegian #B#, Färöe #A#; a fiddle-frame from the skull, Swedish #C#, or from the back-bone, English #L b#; a _plectrum_ from the arm, Färöe #B#; strings from the veins, English #A#; a bridge from the nose, English #A#, #L a#; "hørpønota" from the teeth, Norwegian #B#; till we end with the buffoonery of English #A# and #L a#.
Swedish #H# has nothing about the finding of the body. Music is wanted for the bridal, and a man from another village, who undertakes to furnish it, looks three days for a proper tree to make a harp of. The singer of this version supplied the information, lost from the ballad, that the drowned sister had floated ashore and grown up into a linden, and that this was the very tree which was chosen for the harp. (See, further on, a Lithuanian, a Slovak, and an Esthonian ballad.)
All the Norse ballads make the harp or fiddle to be taken to a wedding, which chances to be that of the elder sister with the drowned girl's betrothed.[134] Unfortunately, many of the English versions are so injured towards the close that the full story cannot be made out. There is no wedding-feast preserved in any of them. The instrument, in #A#, #B#, #C#, #H#, is taken into the king's presence. The viol in #A# and the harp in #H# are expressly said to speak. The harp is laid upon a stone in #C#, #J#, and plays "its lone;" the fiddle plays of itself in #L b#.[135] #B# makes the harper play, and #D#, #F#, #K#, #O#, which say the fiddle played, probably mean that there was a fiddler, and so perhaps with all the Norse versions; but this is not very material, since in either case the instrument speaks "with most miraculous organ."