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Rather than coincidence, the resemblance of all three types suggests the influence of the
local favourite on the other two types. In the standard plot of "The Unquiet Grave," a
disconsolate hero(in)e pronounces immoderate vows of austerity on the grave of her lover.
She will weep on his grave "for a twelvemonth and a day," and literally weeps him out of
it. His ghost reproves her pointless and upsetting sorrow, illustrating the belief that the
tears of the living wet the shrouds of the dead and thus disturb their rest. All she wants is a
kiss from him but the dead lover turns down her unnatuml request. The motif refers to the
superstition that kissing a supernatural being, ghost, fairy, or other, is fatal to Ihe living.
The return of the troth, like the kiss of adieu given on the death-bed in local tradition,
indeed protects the girl from a detrimental attachment to her dead lover. The motif also
appears in "The Grey Cock" (Ch 248), which locally substitutes a dead lover for a living
one, and thus appears more concerned with enforcing the same lesson than romancing a
lovers' secret meeting.
Last but not the least revenant in this repertoire is the one appearing in the two
col1ected versions of the peculiar oikotype of "The Unquiet Grave" (Ch 78*). In this
alternative plot, the girl's fiance dies shortly before their planned wedding. She soon
finds another love, and marries him only eight months after the other's death. Here. she
runs illlo trouble as a result of her excessively short mourning for her dead lover, and the
ballad takes over from there, showing the consequences of her violation ("offence") of
the traditional mourning period prescribed for a close relative. I It is the revenal1\, and
not the girl, who laments for the loss of its only love; its grief, or jealoLlsy at any rate,
makes it beg a last kiss from her lips before he loses her to her bridegroom. Yet, as it
reveals the purpose of its visit, it warns her that this kiss will be fatal to her. 2 Here then
is an imaginative combination of the two motifs encountered earlier: the revenant's return
to beg a kiss from its true love, though in contradiction with its refusing her that kiss in
Ch 78 and Ch 248, makes coherent sense in the light of Ch 77 and Scon's aCCOlll1\. The
begging of the kiss here is equivalel1\ to that of the troth-plight; as the girl, in her haste to
marry another, neglects to return this, she receives a visit from her first fiance, who, in
vengeance for her failing in her obligation towards him, cuts short her love commitment
to another.3 So, underlying the apparent contradiction suggested by this reversal of plO!
I In the light of this duration for mourning, the girl's weeping "for a twelvemonth and a
day,'" which is a constant clement in all other versions of the ballad, suggests e;(eessive
grief ill a literal sense.
2This threat is realized in two local versions of Ch 85 in which the girl takes the initiative
of kissing her lover's corpse, and thereafter announces her death.