Sir Patrick Spens

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Sir Patrick Spens is an English-language ballad of Scottish origin. It is one of the best-known ballads from the collection of Francis James Child known as Child Ballads and bears the number 58.

Plot and versions

All versions of the ballad follow the same basic pattern: the King of Scotland is in Dunfermline and is looking for a good seafarer for an important assignment. A courtier calls the name of Sir Patrick Spens "the best sailor", who subsequently receives a letter from the king. Sir Patrick feels honored by the royal commission, but is dismayed to have to go to sea in the middle of winter and fears that it might be his last trip.

At this point the versions differ from each other. In some, the ship sinks after Sir Patrick leaves and the ballad ends there. Often, however, Sir Patrick reaches Norway , where a dispute breaks out between the Norwegian nobles and the Scots, whom the Norwegians accuse of being a burden to their king. The Scots leave the next day indignantly. Some versions report a bad omen of the moon in the new light ("Late late yestreen I saw the new moone, Wi the auld moone in hir arme"). The ship gets caught in a winter storm and sinks with Sir Patrick Spens and Scottish nobles. In some versions the purpose of the trip is stated: a king's daughter is to be brought either from Scotland to Norway or from Norway to Scotland. In addition to a different spelling of Spence, there are also versions in which the navigator Sir Andrew Wood (Version D in Child) or Earl Patrick Graham (Version P) is mentioned.

Historical background

Ruins of "Malcolm's Tower", a former royal seat in Dunfermline

Thomas Finlayson Henderson suspects in his edition of Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (1902) that the historical background of the ballad could be found in an event in 1589, when the Scottish King James VI. drove to Norway in stormy weather with his ambassador Sir Patrick Vans to fetch Anna from Denmark to Scotland, who had been married to him in Denmark by proxy . Anna was in Norway, on the coast of which she had been forced by the adverse weather on her trip to Scotland. Although Jacob's trip was successful, the ballad could have been inspired by rumors of catastrophe in this context. Henderson saw this assumption confirmed by the "indeterminacy" of earlier versions.

Walter Scott himself had considered the ballad to be of a later age and assumed its origin in the return of Queen Margaret ("Virgin of Norway") from Norway to Scotland, who died on the crossing in 1290 - but of illness. Scott pointed out that the Scottish kings stayed in Dunfermline very often before Robert I , which would fit the beginning of the ballad "The king sits in Dumferling toune". Following on from Scott, the Scottish poet and historian William Motherwell put forward the theory that the king's daughter in the ballad was not the "Virgin of Norway", but her mother Margrete Aleksandersdotter , who traveled from Scotland to Norway in 1282 To marry King Erik II , and the ballad is based on the shipwreck of the ambassadors traveling home who had accompanied Margrete to Norway.

There is no record of a historical Patrick Spens. The Scottish poet William Edmonstoune Aytoun , however , stated in his collection of Scottish ballads published in 1858, in which Sir Patrick Spens comes first, that on the Orcadian island of Papa Stronsay a great grave "since time immemorial" as "the grave of Sir Patrick Spens “Has been handed down. Aytoun assumed that this tradition was older than the fame of the ballad in the Orkneys (the Scottish ballads were not known on this group of islands for a long time), and that the locals only knew the name of the grave and had no legend to tell. From this he concluded that the grave on Papa Stronsay could be a reference to a historical Patrick Spens who was shipwrecked on the coast of Orkney on his way from Norway.

Re-seals

There are various German adaptations, among others by Johann Gottfried Herder ( Der Schiffer in his folk songs ) and Theodor Fontane . The adaptation of Herder was praised by Walter Scott as "beautiful German translation".

The popular first verse is in the original ( Child Ballads No. 58, Version A) and in Herder's and Fontane's version:

Child Herder Fountain

THE king sits in Dumferling toune,
Drinking the blude-reid wine:
'O whar will I get guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?'

The king sits in Dumferling's castle,
he drinks blood-red wine,
"O where do I meet a sailor, sailing
this ship?"

The King sits in Dumferlin Castle,
He drinks blood-red wine;
“Who is my best sailor?
He has to go into the sea. "

music

Like many other ballads from the Child collection , Sir Patrick Spens has been interpreted and released on phonograms by numerous solo artists and bands since the "Folk Revival" in the mid-20th century , including:

Web links

Wikisource: Child's Ballads / 58  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Scott: Minstrelsy of the Scottish border . Ed .: TF Henderson. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902, pp. 222 ( online at archive.org ).
  2. ^ A b Walter Scott: Minstrelsy of the Scottish border . Ed .: TF Henderson. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902, pp. 217 ( online at archive.org ).
  3. ^ Walter Scott: Minstrelsy of the Scottish border . Ed .: TF Henderson. Blackwood, Edinburgh 1902, pp. 221 ( online at archive.org ).
  4. ↑ a b William Edmondstoune Aytoun (ed.): Ballads of Scotland . Vol. 1. William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh 1858, pp. 2–3 ( online at Google Books ).
  5. ^ Francis James Child (Ed.): The English and Scottish popular ballads . Vol. 2, part 1. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston 1882, p. 20 ( online at archive.org ).
  6. ↑ Johann Gottfried Herder: Folksongs . New edition. Weygand, Leipzig 1825. Part 1, pp. 125–128 ( online at Google Books ).
  7. ^ Theodor Fontane: Poems . 10th edition Cotta, Stuttgart / Berlin 1905, pp. 389-390 ( online at Wikisource ).