Raven Banners, Tanners' Daughters, Etins and Widows' Sons,

[Note:  What follows is rank conjecture, unscholarly, and likely wrong-headed.  Enjoy.]



All I intended to do was read "The Red Etin" from The Blue Fairy Book as an experiment to see if obscure stories from the Andrew Lang collections could yield some kind of meme to wrap a poem, ballad, or flash fiction around.  It's a simple tale, or so it seems.  Three boys go off to seek their fortune, encounter things in threes - in series and in parallel - then encounter the Red Etin.  The third boy wins.  The End.  But there's a phrase that caught my eye in the poem recited by the Shepherd/Swineherd/Goatherd (threes, remember?) describing the central conflict of the Etin's abduction (and three-part torture) of a princess.

"And stole King Malcom's daughter

The King of fair Scotland."

 

That smelled historical... [The rest of this rambling post is at Occassional Chatter, my 'thinking out loud' blog.]