A lost fairy tale

[wolfinthewood]

Gray goose and gander,
Waft your wings together,
And carry the good king’s daughter
Over the one-strand river.

James Orchard Halliwell added this rhyme to the 1844 edition of his Nursery Rhymes of England. He didn’t say where he found it.

The only person I know of who has paid much attention to it is Robert Graves, who wrote about it in an essay on nursery rhymes, ‘Mother Goose’s Lost Goslings’. It was in this essay, published in his collection The Crowning Privilege, that I first found it, back in the sixties. Graves reinvents it as a corruption of a middle Scots lament for Flodden: a characteristically learned and imaginative tour-de-force which I find good fun but unconvincing. (It’s sometimes hard to know how far Graves believes himself when he goes off, as he often does, on these pseudo-historical bardic flights.)

My own view of this verse is that it sounds like one of those invocatory rhymes that are found in fairy tales. I think it comes from a lost English oral tale featuring a princess (surprise!) and a flock of helpful geese. No doubt the princess has helped them first, as is usual in such stories. As for the ‘one-strand river’: it has been suggested that this is the sea, which makes some sense. But I suggest that it is most likely also the barrier between this world and some otherworld, oversea place that the king’s daughter must reach to fulfil a quest for a magical object, or just possibly a lost person.


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