whereby we are prepared for the witch's exclamations.[102]
Danish versions of this ballad are numerous: #A-I#, 'Hustru og Mands Moder' ['Fostermoder,' 'Stifmoder'], Grundtvig, No 84, II, 404 ff; #J-T#, 'Hustru og Mands Moder,' Kristensen, II, 111 ff, No 35: #U-X#,'Barselkvinden,' Kristensen, I, 201 ff, No 74; #Y#, 'Hustru og Slegfred,' Grundtvig, No 85, II, 448 ff: in all twenty-five, but many of Kristensen's copies are fragments. Grundtvig's 84 #A#, #B#, and 85 #a# are from manuscripts of the sixteenth century. 84 #F-I# and several repetitions of 85 are of the seventeenth. Grundtvig's 84 #C#, #D#, #E#, and all Kristensen's versions, are from recent oral tradition. Some of these, though taken down since 1870, are wonderfully well preserved.
The Danish ballads divide into two classes, principally distinguished by their employing or not employing of the artifice of wax children. (There is but one of these in #N#, #R#, Kristensen's #E#, #I#, II, 116, 122, and in the oldest Swedish ballad, as in the Scottish: but children in Scandinavian ballads are mostly born in pairs.) Of the former class, to which our only known copy belongs, are #F-I#, #N-T#, #X# (Grundtvig, 84 #F-I#, Kristensen, II, No 35, #E-L#, I, No 74 #D#). #N# and #I# furnish, perhaps, the most consistent story, which, in the former, runs thus: Sir Peter married Ellen (elsewhere Mettelille, Kirstin, Tidelil, Ingerlil), and gave her in charge to his mother, a formidable witch, and, as appears from #F#, violently opposed to the match. The first night of her marriage Ellen conceived twins. She wrapped up her head in her cloak and paid a visit to her mother-in-law, to ask how long women go with child. The answer was,
'Forty weeks went Mary with Christ, And so each Danish woman must.
'Forty weeks I went with mine, But eight years shalt thou go with thine.'
The forty weeks had passed, and Ellen began to long for relief. Sir Peter besought aid of his sister Ingerlin. If I help your young bride, she said, I must be traitor to my mother. Sir Peter insisted, and Ingerlin moulded a fine child of wax,[103] wrapped it in linen, and exhibited it to her mother, who, supposing that her arts had been baffled, burst out into exclamations of astonishment. She had thought she could twist a rope out of flying sand, lay sun and moon flat on the earth with a single word, turn the whole world round about! She had thought all the house was spell-bound, except the spot where the young wife's chest stood, the chest of red rowan, which nothing can bewitch! The chest was instantly taken away, and Ellen's bed moved to the place it had occupied; and no sooner was this done than Ellen gave birth to two children.