Scarborough Fair
Listening to the Mediaeval Baebes’ short version of “Scarborough Fair” on Mirabilis, I got to thinking about the different lyrics of this old song.
The version available at this site make it clear that the singer is asking his lover to perform a series of impossible tasks, for example, to find an acre of land between the ocean’s foam and the sandy beach or to plow with the horn of a lamb.
The folksong collector Martin Carthy considered it to be a version of the “Elfin Knight” ballad, like “The False Knight on the Road,” in which an elfin/demonic knight asks a young traveler a series of trick questions.
So is the list of herbs a form of herbal magic or part of the more Victorian “language of the flowers,” as the first site suggests?