Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0022636, Fri, 23 Mar 2012 18:14:19 +0000

Subject
Re: Johnny Randall, Ramble, Ohio
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Body



JM: Fabulous detective work and a great find (the changing names, the text of the ballad...).
Did the poisoned boy want to hang his mother, is she his "true love"? ["What will you will your mother, my own pretty boy, /What will you will your mother, my heart's loving joy?"/"A twisted hemp rope, for to hang her up high; /Mother, make my bed easy till I lie down and die."]

MR: The “her” to be hung is not the mother. Rather, he is instructing the mother to carry out vengeance on his behalf. This becomes clear when you read the original Lord Randal together with other, fuller versions of the tale.

JM: I found another version about Lord Randall's true love. It comes close to another, related to a treacherous Elf Knight (totally unrelated to Goethe's and Shade's Erlkonig lines).

MR: I was interested in the “Elf Knight,” too, since in her essay Pound mentions it directly after her discourse regarding “Johnny Randall.” In that ballad, as best I can decipher it, an Elf-Knight enchants the maiden Isabel with his horn and she wishes that he would marry her. At first he protests, saying she is “over-young” to marry, but she says her younger sister married already. The knight then says she must make him a shirt without using scissors, needle or thread, etc. She responds that she will do so, but before he gets his shirt, he too must perform a number of Herculean tasks, like finding an acre of land between the sea and the strand, plowing it with a fork, stacking the grain in a mousehole and threshing it in a shoe. At the end, the maiden makes it clear (“I will keep me a maiden still”) that she has conceived these tasks in order to preserve her maidenhead. Interestingly, there is a version of this ballad (also “Lord Randal”) in Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of Ballads.

http://www.bartleby.com/243/8.html

According to Eric Naiman in Nabokov Perversely, Quilty is “probably a composite, combining . . . Quiller-Couch [VN’s old professor at Oxford] and Nabokov’s friend Edmund Wilson” (40). Strange, strange.

Matt Roth

Pound’s essay:
http://books.google.com/books?id=fQI9AAAAIAAJ&dq=%22johnny%20ramble%22%20ohio&pg=PA507#v=onepage&q=%22johnny%20ramble%22%20ohio&f=false


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