"Rob Roy" and "Eppie Morrie": reality vs. deep play

Our last ballad presented invincible maidenhood in disguised sexual terms; even as it skirted the mythological problem of dead-end erotic power, it showed a graceful activity at which the "bonnie lass" could applaudably excel. But "Eppie Morrie" (#223) is a harder case. Taking abduction and attempted rape as its raw subject matter, this extraordinary ballad turns stubborn sexual resistance into the stuff of epic theater. It celebrates the undisguised triumph of she who "wouldna' be a bride." And it could well be seen as undermining the myth of the lady and the lusty smith, for instead of the preferred resistance scene -- one that in fact fosters a sense of male sexual power -- it dwells upon a scene that can only reinforce men's fears about the whole "magical," i.e., unpredictable, matter of "proving a man." Fears that are hardly the stuff of strong lovemaking. Our "lady gay" of "The Baffled Knight" thus cherishes the myth even as she resists the man. She turns resistance into a sexual come-on, and honoring her double purpose, balladry generally celebrates female trickery over myth-destroying, primal sexual resistance.

But Eppie Morrie plays a deeper game, and far from destroying the magical myth, she lends it covert support. Playing with a definitely miscarried exercise of male boldness -- with myth-gone-wrong, as it were -- her ballad also hints at what might have been had myth only "gone right." Had Eppie only met up with Rob Roy?

For the ballad of "Rob Roy" (#225) presents a kind of mirror twin to "Eppie Morrie." Its title ostensibly referring to an 18th-century folk hero, "bold outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor" 1 from the proscribed and impoverished Clan Gregor, #225, like #223, features the outlaw act of bridestealing. Except that where "Eppie Morrie" applauds an invincible, largely fictive stolen bride, "Rob Roy" invites us to applaud a real bridestealer -- to applaud him as, at the time, some sympathized or at least refused to condemn2 Rob Oig ("the younger") MacGregor, youngest son and namesake of the legendary father. For the abduction of Jean Key, a young widow "of means" living with her mother at Edinbelly, in Stirlingshire, and taken by force on the night of December 8, 1750, Rob Oig was eventually hanged, his intrepid brother James (who goes largely unmentioned in the ballad, though credited with possibly instigating and certainly taking a strong part in the action) was prosecuted on multiple counts before escaping from Edinburgh castle, while Jean Key died ("but not of the violence she had undergone," Child assures us) not long after her rescue. These prosaic facts are the "rest of the story [which] does not come into the ballad" -- a ballad that as Child goes on to say, "adheres to fact rather closely." 3 That is, he finds it adhering, in one variant or another, to the circumstantial details of the actual abduction, though I am more struck by the single truth implied across all variants: that the motive for the celebrated bridestealing lies in the stolen bride's money ("my cursed gold").

Now historically speaking, indeed within "family memory" as Rhona Rauszer of Skye describes "Big Donald Angus" carrying off her great great grandmother over his shoulder, a piglet under his arm (and a spinning wheel under an embattled clansman's arm),4 bridestealing was but one way for an enterprising man to better his fortune. In this unromantic tradition, it was all of a piece with the cattle raiding (and ransoming) that has given us the word "blackmail" (mail being the Scots word for "rent" or "tribute" and black the typical color of the Highlander's cattle)5 except that cattle could indeed be ransomed back and forth while wives were for keeping -- for keeping and perpetuating one's "line." On that score, for all the messiness of his bride-and-piglet heist (he'd wanted the cattle too of course), "Big Donald" did very well for himself. The younger Rob Roy obviously didn't.

Still, our ballad hero is accurately portrayed as a man of enterprise (especially if we can take him, as a composite hero, to include the character of James!). He is the bold Highlander swooping down from the north to carry off the unprotected heiress ("to hold his house in order" surely refers to her bank account rather than her housekeeping skills!). His is the name of legend, prevailing from the start over a usually unnamed "lady fair" with an entirely believable aptitude for both hiding and weeping (at the first alarm, Jean Key is reported to have hidden in a closet and then -- when produced under threats "to murder every person in the family or to burn the house and every person in it alive" -- to have shed such copious tears as she was carried off that Rob Oig "had partly consented to let her return, when James came up, with a pistol in his hand, and asking whether he was such a coward as to relinquish an enterprise in which he had risked everything to procure him a fortune, in a manner compelled his brother to persevere" 6):

Rob Roy frae the Highlands cam, and to the Lawland border,
And he has stown [stolen] a lady fair to haud his house in order.
Himself went in and found her oot, she clung close to her mother.
Wi' doleful cries and watery eyes they parted frae each other.
("Rob Roy," as sung by Carl Peterson7)

Unlike Rhona's great great grandmother (already betrothed to a young laird from a neighboring island and said not to have spoken to her abductor "for a long, long time, not until three of their children were born" 8) Jean Key had powerful friends. But the captive whom "the MacGregors found it necessary to release" and who died shortly thereafter doesn't sound like much of a power in her own right. Nor does #225 present her as one, except very briefly in Child's version J, which not only names her as "Jean Key" (and her abductor as "Rob Oig"); as we shall see, this variant endows her for two stanzas with an extraordinary readiness to fight -- an extraordinary, fleeting resemblance to Eppie Morrie! But the bold abductor prevails, and she remains his hapless, almost accidental prize -- one who ought to be grateful, he intimates, that so remarkable a man as himself has deigned to carry her off.

In "Eppie Morrie," however, it is the stolen bride who establishes herself from the start as the ballad's driving force, with her "resistant" character (no mention of money or of "holding his house in order") presented as sole motive for the abduction:

Four-and-twenty Hielan' men cam' frae the Carron side
To steal awa' Eppie Morrie, for she wouldna be a bride, a bride,
she wouldna be a bride.
("Eppie Morrie" from the singing of Ewan MacColl)

Her reiterated refusal to wed, moreover, goes with a curiously generalized combativeness; indeed the first in a series of "stand off" (or "hold away") speeches is inexplicably addressed to her own mother:

"Haud awa' frae me, mither; haud awa' frae me!
There's no a man in a' Strathdon shall wedded be wi' me, wi' me,
shall wedded be wi' me."

Surely the picture "Rob Roy" presents of mother and daughter clinging to each other makes more sense! But "Eppie Morrie" needs these speeches. They play into the peculiar trickery this ballad imposes on us -- the way, even before the problem arises of making sheer stubborn sexual resistance seem theatrically applaudable, our heroine is given a mythic shape transcending the details of the plot and especially transcending the reality-based details of "Rob Roy."

Much as in "Rob Roy," "Eppie Morrie" includes hard riding to and from the minister's house ("fast as horse could gang, could gang..., fast as horse could flee, could flee..."), the minister's refusal, even with a pistol at his breast, to marry an unwilling bride, and finally the critical moment of "mass was sung and bells were rung ... and Willie and Eppie Morrie, in ane bed they were laid." As currently sung -- or at least printed -- "Rob Roy" slides over the ensuing action, discreetly jumping from "maist mournfully she wept and cried when she bye him was laid, O," to the injunction:

"O, be content, be content, be content to stay, ladie;
For now you are my wedded wife unto my dying day, ladie."

But in "Eppie Morrie," that narrative gap is where the action takes off, if we can call "action" what on Eppie's part consists of little more than going all stiff. To be sure, the Scots language suggests (at least to an English ear) a display of active female ferocity that a better knowledge of the language dispells; thus "grat" is simply the past tense of the Scots word "greet" (or "weep), nothing to do with raking a man with your nails! Instead we are told that Eppie weeps and spits and turns to the wall; and of course, in an involuntary muscle reaction to the situation, she surely clenches her thighs, although this is something the ballad only implies and has a real problem celebrating. To make her applaudable, it must give our heroine a more active combative role than she'd outwardly play in any realistic presentation of the struggle. Since she obviously hasn't learned any show-off karate moves, that struggle must be turned into an occasion for show-off speech, i.e., into the heterosexual equivalent of glorious warrior combat. So Willie prepares for the event by taking off his shirt (apparently all he's wearing at this point), kicking away his shoes, and throwing away the chamber key, And our heroine rises to the occasion:

"Haud awa' frae me, Willie! Haud awa' frae me!
Before I lose my maidenheid, I’ll try my strength wi' thee, wi' thee,
I’ll try my strength wi’ thee."

He kissed her on the lily breist and held her shoulders twa,
And aye she grat and aye she spat and turned to the wa,' the wa,'
and turned to the wa.'

"Haud awa' frae me, Willie! Haud awa' frae me!
Before I lose my maidenheid, I'll fecht wi' you till day, till day,
I’ll fecht wi' you till day."

A' through the nicht they warssled there until the licht o' day,
And Willie grat and Willie swat but he couldna streitch her spey, her spey;
he couldna streitch her spey. (swat = sweated, spey = female pudend)

Realistically, of course, this exuberant battle boasting is all wrong; it seems rather the stuff of Hotspur facing Prince Hal on the Shakespearean stage than of a woman thrown into bed with a naked man. To show flaunted sexual resistance in a struggle that must have long passed beyond the conflicted feminine mindset that I see as intrinsic to any such display -- to have passed indeed, at least on her part, beyond sexual feeling at all? How grotesquely mistimed!

But ballads are like that; they play with time in a way that that can be both unrealistic and deeply truthful. And "Eppie Morrie" is both. "Haud awa' frae me." we keep on hearing, along with "there's no a man ... shall wedded be with me," "there's no a man...there's no a man." It isn't always Eppie who says these words, and (as we've seen) they're not always directed at Willie; she says them to her mother at the beginning of the ballad and to the chambermaid at the end, while the minister adapts them slightly ("shall married be by me") to rebuff the man holding a pistol on him. But the change of preposition is barely noticed in the galloping rhythm of the song, which clearly is all about maiden integrity, maiden "apartness."

With the reiterated assertion of that "apartness," our heroine establishes herself as an inviting sexual target whom no ordinary man can wed. Or to borrow the language of our starting ballad, we might say that no ordinary man can "lay her pride." For what "The Twa Magicians" calls the lady's "mighty pride" turns to indomitable virgin "might" in the epic struggle of #223. And that, too, is unrealistically portrayed. We’re told only that "aye she grat and aye she spat and turned to the wall" (which sounds so much more like a fighting cat than "maist mournfully she wept and cried"!) Not that she "wouldna pairt her knees," for the obvious response to forced lovemaking would lower the tone of the struggle, suggesting a trivial mechanical solution (a crowbar perhaps?) whereas the explicit (and in our lost sexual language, more magical) sexual reference -- "he couldna streitch her spey" -- focuses our attention on Eppie's virgin integrity. On a bodily wholeheartedness to which her strong resistance in the form of clenched thighs is believably tied.

But let us not be deceived. With the "misdirection," as it were, that a critical bit of female flesh refuses to stretch, this ballad is far from making virginity into a magic shield of absolute or effortless safety. (There are real rape victims,) Nor is it implying that either Willie or Eppie suffers sexual dysfunction, as the modern mind leaps to assume it. That he "couldna' prove a man" (as the chambermaid takes him to task the next morning) and that she "wouldna' be a bride" are rather two sides of the same miscarried myth in which Willie proves not to be the figure of superlative sexual energy, superlative sexual enchantment that the myth requires but an ordinary man instead. A man who, overstepping an undefined physical boundary (something that can happen far short of forced lovemaking!) meets with unambivalent, total resistance. In other words, a woman who feels grabbed (let alone put into bed with a naked man!) is far more likely to stiffen than to melt, and the feminine fence-sitting that "The Twa Magicians" resolves with irresistible lovemaking is more prosaically resolved with a response of female mind and muscle that may lock out enemy man as effectively as it locks out all sexual feeling.

It may lock him out, but then again, it may not. So Rob Roy succeeds in raping his abducted bride, though in Child's version 'J' of #225 she fights as long and hard as the heroine of #223. Indeed the two "battle stanzas" in Child’s single text of "Eppie Morrie" are almost identical to two stanzas from his version 'J' of "Rob Roy." Since it comes from a manuscript that Child gives as his sole source for #223, I cannot but wonder if a whole ballad of indomitable sexual resistance sprang, perhaps, from these two verses of vain resistance:

"Haud far awa' frae me, Rob Oig, (Willie in #223)
haud far awa' from me!
Before I lose my maidenhead,
I’ll try my strength with thee."
She's torn the cap from off her head (She took the cap.... in #223)
and thrown it to the way, (and threw it.....)
And ere she lost her maidenhead (Said, “Ere I lose my......)
she fought with him till day. (I’ll fight with you.....)
(from Child's 'J' version of #225 and his single text of #223)

Or the verses could have been simply "lifted" from the rarer and arguably older bridestealing ballad to the more topical one. In any case, "Eppie Morrie" is a flight of fancy, if not an actual perversion of fact, for which we have no historical evidence. Yet the "unrealistic" ballad has survived in a powerfully imaginative way which the "Rob Roy" texts throw into high relief; it has evolved, I am tempted to say, as if in search of "deep play."

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz coined the term in a paper on Balinese cockfighting -- on a violent ritual and its investment with human meaning -- but it carries over, I think, to sexual activity and its cultural investment, via erotic myth, with meaning too. Geertz found the deepest investment of human meaning in matches where the odds are more or less even and the stakes "irrationally" high; he would not be surprised, I think, to find primitive sexual magic to be a more haunting force in "Eppie Morrie" than in the Rob Roy ballads more realistically concerned with matters of class and money. His "deep play" requires a parity of force conspicuously lacking in texts that dwell on the bold abductor ("I am as bold, I am as bold, I am as bold, and more lady"). Except for version 'J,' they depict "shallow matches," with often fainting heroines; while even version 'J' undercuts its fighting heroine by endowing her with the same "watery eyes and mournful sighs" as other Rob Roy stolen brides -- proper matches for "sae braw a man" only in their rich estate. Realistically enough, they may be shown to have strong personal feelings about their abductor ("still she did abhore him"), to resent his claim of "love" ("you love me for my money"), and to part reluctantly from home, but they do not stake the imaginative claim on us that the figure of Eppie Morrie, developed only in mythic outline, does; they do not appear to be seeking the "deep match" that a ballad abounding in expressions of almost impersonal sexual resistance and sexual challenge perversely conjures up.

To be sure, the ballad finally conjures up a romantic lover for Eppie, but "young John Forsyth" (he's also referred to by the family name of Breadalbane) not only appears too late to have any effect on the action; he seems irrelevant to the "'deep play" that might have happened, the ballad suggests, had Willie only been the man that that the ballad itself seems to be daring forth. For indeed the words most suggestive of a failed erotic world are those of the chambermaid who comes into the room in the morning. For me at least, her speech resonates with sexual magic from an older order of things (which is not to deny that it also reflects a grim socio-sexual reality of the time!). And Eppie has combative words with her too -- for calling her "young woman" instead of "maiden," for speaking as if any man might wed her. Yet for all Eppie's protesting -- indeed as a direct consequence of all that protesting -- I cannot but suspect that the chambermaid is speaking for Eppie (making an imaginative shortcut, I even thought to have first heard her words, appropriately modified, as Eppie's):

"Weary fa' you, Willie, that you couldna' prove a man;
Ye micht ha’ ta’en her maidenhead, she would ha’ hired your hand, your hand;
she would ha' hired your hand."
("Eppie Morrie," from the singing of Ewan MacColl)

If only Willie were Rob Roy! The thought leaps to mind, along with the objection that the bold abductor of #225 prevails with force that clearly doesn't enchant ("O, would that I could dee!" says the vanquished heroine of version 'J'). The objection leaps to mind and also the rebuttal: that he could only prevail against an exemplar of mythic sexual resistance like Eppie Morrie if he did enchant.... But how much simpler to acknowledge that in #225 we're looking at the wrong Rob Roy -- that the self-proclaimed icon of "boldness" we meet in the bridestealing ballad is only a blustering copy of the legend with which he attempts to merge:

"He was a hedge unto his friends, a heckle to his foes, ladie;
And ilka ane that did him wrong, they felt his deadly blows, ladie.
I'm as bold, I am as bold as my father was afore, ladie.
Ilka ane that does me wrong shall feel my gude claymore, ladie."
("Rob Roy," from the singing of Carl Peterson)

There can be an endearing small boy quality to this second-hand boasting ("and ilka ane that did him wrang, he beat him on the nose, ladie," goes another version, carrying no threat, of course, of hitting her on the nose). But as a candidate for "deep play," the son doesn't hold a candle to the father.

"That name [MacGregor] was one of power," says "Macgregor's Wail," written after the final clearance of the clan from its territories, and the real Rob Roy must have been a good part of the name. "Pardon now the bold outlaw, Rob Roy MacGregor O," begins a song (written by an unknown author as the finale to the opera Rob Roy), which goes on to call him "Scotland's fear and Scotland's pride." And there, I submit, is the "deep match" for Eppie Morrie, the match that doesn't happen. There is the "bold outlaw" who wasn't, in fact, a bridestealer at all but whom we can well imagine "becoming her love" in this magical, intensely physical way that does have a certain outlaw quality. (And is it pure coincidence, I wonder, that the lover who does appear for Eppie is identified as a Breadalbane -- a family that "under the pretext of royal grants," says Peterson, had in earlier times taken over much of the MacGregor territory and consequently become the target for continuing MacGregor raids?)

It's only an erotic hint, and it comes as a afterthought to the main action, as indeed I submit that erotic fantasy can only come as a very long-after-thought to thwarted rape. A considerably longer time span would have to elapse for most women to go from the mindset for all-out resistance to the mindset for erotic fantasy than a heroic action ballad like "Eppie Morrie" allows (much longer than the reverse, which can happen with disconcerting speed!). In other words, the ballad is still playing fast and loose with time. But the hint is there. And it rings disturbingly true.