Talk:Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight

message: Jean Ritchie recorded this song in 1960 under the name "False Sir John." I'm not sure exactly how to add this to the chart, and I didn't want to mess up the formatting.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.192.99.185 (talk) 02:30, 8 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another recording- I'm not sure how to add this 

message: Garrison Keillor and Richard Dworsky preformed this on "A Prairie Home Companion" on July 14, 2012.  The song can be heard in Segment 3 and is titled "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight"
http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2012/07/14/
JahanaSpurg (talk) 04:32, 12 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another Recording 

message: I have deleted the words "murder of" because it was not murder, but an ecclesiastical judicial execution supported by confession. What happened is that Gilles was born to the two wealthiest people in France, and after the French nobility were decimated at Agincourt, the French rethought their armed forces and developed a strong artillery arm, the first power to do so. As a result, when they eventually rose under Joan of Arc to kick the English out, artillery became a prized weapon and France led the world for the next hundred years. Gilles served as Joan's lieutenant, and it may be surmised that he invested his family fortune in it: certainly on his retirement from the army he was a much poorer man, possibly interested in the early chmystry research into black gunpowder, and with a taste for the miraculous, one interested in producing alchemical gold! That led to a misinterpretation of one of the instructions in the alchemical grimoire, which just reads "The Massacre of the Innocents", which is why these works by the Breugel family are ranked alongside their other alchemical paintings. Gilles' brother paid him a visit to find out what the state of the family fortune really was, and was horrified to find a large number of children's skulls in the bailey: the charges against him which followed were for the murder of a couple of hundred children, he himself admitted to something like 800, and a sociological survey suggested maybe 2000 or more. Gilles was burned at the stake at Nantes, a sea town, in 1440, which may echo in this group of songs.
It is also to be noted that An de Montmorency, Constable of France, was Catherine de'Medicis' collaborator in the Ruggieri workings which led Diane de Poitiers to abandon Chaumont after Catherine forced her to swap chateaux with the prettier Chenonceaux - where chalked pentacles and other alchemical symbols were found in the attics of the bridge extension at Easter 1990. I speak from first hand witness. Also, the heretical charge on which the Counts of Hoornes and Egmont, also members of the de Montmorency family, were executed at Brussels in 1568 was provoked by alchemical workings after they ran out of funds defending the Flemish and Phillip II refused them a state subsidy. In this, they were working in the wake of Phillip's own 1560 workings (Private letters to his Secretary Pedro de la Hoya in the Simancas Royal Archives, reported in the Spanish edition of Prof René Taylor's study of the rationale of the Escorial). In 1600, the family were eventually paid in full the considerable sum of 40000 moutons d'or by the alchemist responsible, who got away.
Furthermore, an interest in the subject has been noted in both Ian Huntley, the Soham child murder, and Marc Dutroux, who killed at least six children in Belgium in the 1990s.
I now sing high tenor in the Cecil Sharp House Choir, where we have cut the final "parrot" verses after the drowning because they seem stylistically to have been imported from another ballad: however, following an appeal from Martin Carthy on Sunday in a Sources concert at the Royal Festival Hall, I'm going to suggest a rephrasing of the verses to bring out the virginity question better, as the symbolism has been lost.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.196.46.25 (talk) 13:10, 6 February 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gilles de Rais 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to  on Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add  after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add  to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20070927185502/http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/forblue2.html to http://www.endicott-studio.com/rdrm/forblue2.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/20061127180923/http://www.dandutton.com:80/ballad_events.html to http://www.dandutton.com/ballad_events.html
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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: I have some concerns about this article as a model. 
The article seems to be based on a theoretical idea of the relationship of the ballad and all its associated forms with European ballads and stories. This may or may not be true - I'm not saying the theory shouldn't be mentioned - but it dominates the structure of the article, which in my opinion doesn't give a balanced view. The introduction itself makes this assumption:
""Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (Child #4; Roud #21) is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads." 
In fact, the common name for this ballad is "The Outlandish Knight" (as a rough approximation of "commonness", the Roud Index gives 356 entries for "Outlandish Knight" and 123 for "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight"). The frequency of use of both names may have more to do with the preferences of folklorists than that of singers, and Roud lists 68 different names for the song: 
"Billy Came Over the Main White Ocean", "Castle By the Sea",  "Don't Prittle Nor Prattle", "Doors of Ivory",  "False Hearted Knight",  "False Hearted William", "False Lover John", "False Knight Outwitted, the (a New Song)",  "Fair Ellender", "False William",  "Fause Sir John",   "Fause Sir John and May Colvin", "Go Bring Me Some of Your Mother's Gold", "Go Steal Your Father's Weight in Gold", "He Followed Me Up He Followed Me Down", "He Mounted on His Milk-white Nag", "Highway Robber", "If I Take Off My Silken Stay", "In Oxford Town", "Indeed Pretty Polly",  "The King's Daughter", "The King of Spain's Daughter", "King's Daughter; Or Six Fair Maids", "King's Seven Daughters", "The Knight and the Chief's Daughter", "Lady Isabel",  "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight",  "Lady Isabel and the Elfin-knight" "Lady Isabel and the Elf King",  "Little Billy",   "Little Golden", "Mary Goldan", "May Collean", "May Collin", "May Collin and the Knight", "May Colven",  "The North Strand", "An Outlandish Rover", Outlandish Knight. "The Outlandish Dream",   "Pretty Polly", "Lovin' Polly", "The Parrot Song", "Miss Mary's Parrot","A Man From the North Land", "A Man in the Land Or the Dapple Grey", "My Pretty Cold Rain", "My Pretty Colinn", "Pretty Gold Lee", "Polly and William", "Pretty Nancy",  "The Robber and the Lady", The Salt-water Sea The Seven Sisters The Seventh King's Daughters The Seventh Sister She Borrowed Some of Her Father's,  The Six Fair Maids, Six King's Daughters, Turn Your Back to the Leaves of the Trees "The Water O' the Weary Wa's", Wearies Wells, Willie Came Over the Ocean Willie Came Over the Ocean, Wilson, Young Jimmie, The Young Officer.
Child uses the Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight title to group all examples, but Child A is the only English language version I can find that uses the description "elf-knight" for the villain of the piece, and as others have pointed out, in many versions the only supernatural element is the talking parrot.
The parrot motif itself is treated in the article as a piece of extraneous fluff, but it occurs in most collected versions, and in what is quite possibly the earliest printed version, Child F.  
The article consistently blurs the distinction between the ballad as it has been found in English speaking countries and the European ballads it has been associated with, as in the synopsis where it is suggested that:  "In other variants, she tells him to "lay your head upon my knee", in some cases offering to de-louse the knight. He agrees, on the condition that should he fall asleep, she shall not harm him while he sleeps. However, she sings a magic song: "Wi a sma charm she lulld him fast asleep". While he sleeps, she ties him up, sometimes with his own belt, then wakes the knight and either stabs him with a dagger or beheads him:" In fact Child A is the only English language version I can find in which the knight is stabbed rather than drowned - the delousing, promise, and beheading all come from continental ballads
The article hardly deals with the ballad as folklore, yet it is one of the Child ballads most frequently collected in England and North America (in both countries in the "Outlandish Knight" variant) . It is less common in Scotland.
There's an article here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/537249?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents which at least demonstrates that ideas about the ballad's origin are controversial.
The gist of what I am trying to say is that the article has the cart before the horse. It states a theory - that the British versions are related to the Continental ones, and indeed that the Continental versions are related to each other - as if it were a fact, and makes that the basis of its approach instead of dealing with the ballad as a cultural object in its own right, and discussing the theory as a relevant aspect, but not an assumption of, the article.
I'd be interested in other peoples' comments. I'd like to change the introduction and synopsis, but don't want to upset anyone Joe Fogey (talk) 13:01, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed, Child's source for "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight", Buchan, uses a different title "The Gowans sae Green", and published "Fause Sir John and May Colvin" as a separate ballad. Joe Fogey (talk) 16:44, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Having left this ^^ here for a while, I've altered the introduction and synopsis section to show the relationships and differences between the ballads. I intend to rewrite more later. Joe Fogey (talk) 15:37, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I've now changed the "Historical Background" section.  Joe Fogey (talk) 14:11, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Is this a model article?