Swedish #C# and nearly all the Norwegian ballads[138] restore the drowned girl to life, but not by those processes of the Humane Society which are successfully adopted by the "arlig man" in Swedish #F#. The harp is dashed against a stone, or upon the floor, and the girl stands forth "as good as ever." As Landstad conceives the matter (484, note 7), the elder sister is a witch, and is in the end burned _as such_. The white body of the younger is made to take on the appearance of a crooked log, which the fishermen (who, by the way, are angels in #C#, #E#) innocently shape into a harp, and the music, vibrating from her hair "through all her limbs, marrow and bone," acts as a disenchantment. However this may be, the restoration of the younger sister, like all good endings foisted on tragedies, emasculates the story.
English #F# 9 has the peculiarity, not noticed elsewhere, that the drowning girl catches at a broom-root, and the elder sister forces her to let go her hold.[139] In Swedish #G# she is simply said to swim to an alder-root. In English #G# 8 the elder drives the younger from the land with a switch, in #I# 8 pushes her off with a silver wand.
English #O# introduces the _ghost_ of the drowned sister as instructing her father's fiddler to make a string of her hair and a peg of her little finger bone, which done, the first spring the fiddle plays, it says,
'Ye'll drown my sister as she's dune me.'
#P#, which is disordered at the end, seems to have agreed with #O#. In #Q# the ghost sends, by the medium of the miller and his daughter, respects to father, mother, and true-love, adding a lock of yellow hair for the last. The ghost is found in #N#, Pinkerton's copy, as well, but there appears to the lover at dead of night, two days after the drowning. It informs him of the murder, and he makes search for the body. This is a wide departure from the original story, and plainly a modern perversion. Another variation, entirely wanting in ancient authority, appears in #R#, #S#. The girl is not dead when she has floated down to the mill-dam, and, being drawn out of the water by the miller, offers him a handsome reward to take her back to her father [#S#, to throw her in again!]. The miller takes the reward, and pushes the girl in again, for which he is hanged.[140]