words returned to Rowland and he threw down the food, upon which the King of Elfland burst into the hall. Rowland fought with the King, and with the aid of his father's sword beat him into submission. The King begged for mercy, and Rowland granted it, provided his siblings were released. They returned home together, and Burd Ellen never circled the church widdershins again. In the version given by F. A. Steel in her English Fairy Tales, originally published in 1918 (republished by Macmillan in 2016), when Rowland finds Burd Helen, or at least an enchanted version of her, and she speaks to him, he remembers Merlin's instructions and cuts her head off, which brings back the real Burd Helen. This explains why the first two brothers had not returned; they could not bring themselves to cut off her head, and had become enchanted themselves. History Joseph Jacobs's version was based on that of Robert Jamieson in Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, published in 1814. Jamieson had heard it from a tailor. Jamieson compared the narrative to the Danish ballads about Rosmer Halfmand from the 1695 work Kaempe Viser. There were three ballads about Rosmer, who was a giant or merman, stealing a girl whose brother later rescues her. In the first, the characters are the children of Lady Hillers of Denmark, and the sister is named Svanè. In the second, the main characters are Roland and Proud Eline lyle. In the third, the hero is Child Aller, son of the king of Iceland. Unlike the English Roland, the hero of the Danish ballads relies on trickery to rescue his sister, and in some versions they have an incestuous relationship. Jamieson also compared the story to the ballad of "The Merman and Marstig's Daughter," where a merman steals a young woman from a church. Other narratives where brothers seek a missing sister are The Old Wives' Tale and Milton's Comus. Cultural influences Jacobs's version is predated by the "Childe Rowland" reference in King Lear, and by Robert Browning's 1855 poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Browning's poem has inspired other works such as Gordon R. Dickson's unfinished science fiction series Childe Cycle (1959) and Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Jacobs's tale may itself have been the inspiration for a number of modern works, but it is difficult to distinguish this from the reception of Browning's poem. Lord Dunsany's 1924