In this Scottish folktale, a rich and powerful man looks into the future and learns that the fate of his son is to marry a girl from a very poor family. He wants a high society wife for his son and does everything that he can to stop the marriage. He unsuccessfully tries to kill the poor girl twice, and is about to throw her over a cliff when she agrees to go away forever. A hungry fish brings them together again and teaches him that, no matter how much you try, you can’t change what is meant to be.
Our source for the story was a children’s book called English Fairy Tales by folktale collector Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890. Jacobs’s source was an Appendix in a book called Notes on the Folk-Lore of Northern Counties of England and the Borders by William Henderson, published in 1886. The Appendix was written by the eccentric savant priest Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who claimed that the story was around three hundred years old. Gould’s source was most likely an 1838 pamphlet which sought to describe the legend behind The Cruel Knight And the Fortunate Farmer’s Daughter, a popular broadsheet ballad of the time. In the legend we are told that the girl was born around 1619.
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