ABSTRACT
Professor Child emphasises the antiquity of riddling and setting impossible tasks by putting the riddling ballads at the beginning of his collection. His work on ‘The Elfin Knight’ quotes antecedent stories and ballad analogues. Frazer summarises the function of riddling as ‘the expression of the conflict between a life-force and a death-force in a potentially fertile situation’ (i.e., courtship, planting, harvesting, and so on). In most versions of the ballad the contest does, indeed, take place between two lovers. Despite the fact that seven of Child’s texts are given the title ‘The Devil’s Courtship’, the devil himself does not appear as a protagonist in any of them although there are elements of the supernatural in the person of an elphin knight or an ‘old, old man’. John MacDonald’s actual naming of the devil is unusual.
