The Elfin Knight
- "The Elfin Knight" in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads ed. by Francis James Child (19th Century).
- "The Task" in A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes (ed.) by Sabine Baring-Gould (1895).
"The Elfin Knight" (Child #2; Roud #12) is a traditional Scottish folk ballad of which there are many versions, all dealing with supernatural occurrences, and the commission to perform impossible tasks.
The song "Scarborough Fair" is a later variant. A similar variant is "Whittingham Fair", a song that was popular in the north and west of Northumberland. There are also several American variants, which differ greatly, among them "My Father Had an Acre of Land", "The Parsley Vine", and "The Shirt of Lace".