ABSTRACT
To match our text with any o f Professor Child ’s would prove an almost impossible task. Even to understand the basic story from our five verses would mean juggling lines from stanza to stanza, changing tense and gender, inserting absent verses and motifs. The full story’ tells o f a girl who has been challenged to meet her lover on the top o f a hill and return home a virgin. In some versions she consults a witch before em barking upon her task. In other versions she administers a sleeping-potion to her lover and then goes o ff to the hill armed only with her own courage. Upon arriving at the trysting-place, she finds her lover asleep, lays broom at his head and feet, then walks three (seven, nine) times around his feet or head. After leaving a token to prove she has met the terms o f the wager, she hides behind a bush o f broom in order to observe her lover’s reaction. The young man, on discovering the token, turns enraged upon his steed, his hawk, his hound, and demands to know why they did not wake him. They reply that their attempts to do so elicited no response. He laments that had he been awake instead o f asleep he would have had his will o f her or else the small birds would have had their fill o f her blood. Sometimes a final verse depicts the girl running m errily back to town.
