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disconsolate girl is left alone, and she lets herself die of grief. In explanation of the
revenant's request for his love token-·the only motivation for his visit--Child writes:
Sir Walter Scott infonns us, in the Advertisement to The Pirate, that the
lady whose affections had been engaged by Goff, the historical prototype
of Cleveland, "went up to London to see him before his death, and that,
arriving too late, she had the courage to request a sight of his body; and
then touching the hand of the corpse, she formally resumed the troth-plight
which she had bestowed." "Without going through this ceremony," SCOlt
goes on to say, "she could not, according to the superstition of the
country, have escaped a visit from the ghost of her departed lover, in the
event of her bestowing upon any living suitor the faith which she had
plighted to the dead."l
This belief is found in Newfoundland to this day, and expressed in the wake custom
of touching or kissing the deceased. The practice retains its protective function in assuring
the living that by doing this, they prevent the spirit of the dead person from haunting them
or occurring in their dreams. This ritual separation evokes the dissolution of the vows of
love and fidelity in marriage, as the fonnula "until death us do pan" signifies. The gesture
as well as the phrase acknowledges the dichotomy between Ihis world and the
"otherworld," notwithstanding the love bonds of the living and the dead. What the request
of the revenant lover suggests is a courageous acceptance of its death as a physical
separation but also as a necessary dissolution of any fonner affection. Through affirming
this rupture between the living and the dead, however beloved, Ihis gesture of "adieu" in
the literal sense, beyond any superstition, means to keep the bereaved from excessive grief
which would only bury their own life in memory of the past. The ballad-story thus
illustrates the gospel's psychological recommendation to "let the dead bury the dead."
The British versions of the ballad make their point by presenting a counter-example of
the attitude the ballad judges appropriate. The girl's immoderate grief leads her to walk in a
dead man's company, showing a regressive preference for an illusory continuing
relationship with her dead lover above her own life and what it still holds for her, including
the chance of another love, as the Scottish belief suggests. As a result, her failure to cope
with the hardships of her life only precipitates her own death.
The numerous Newfoundland versions convey the identical idea but present it in
positive and more encouraging tenns. The argument is buill on an expressive antithesis
IChild 2: 227; with a reference to a note in the Kinloch MSS, VII, 277, indicating that Scoll
\Old Kinloch that he had received this story from an old woman in Shetland.