Scottish Ballads

This is the first book to combine contemporary debates in ballad studies with the insights of modern textual scholarship. Just like canonical literature and music, the ballad should not be seen as a uniquely authentic item inextricably tied to a documented source, but rather as an unstable structure subject to the vagaries of production, reception, and editing. Among the matters addressed are topics central to the subject, including ballad origins, oral and printed transmission, sound and writing, agency and editing, and textual and melodic indeterminacy and instability. While drawing on the time-honoured materials of ballad studies, the book offers a theoretical framework for the discipline to complement the largely ethnographic approach that has dominated in recent decades. Primarily directed at the community of ballad and folk song scholars, the book will be of interest to researchers in several adjacent fields, including folklore, oral literature, ethnomusicology, and textual scholarship.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

The Child Ballads are traditional ballads from England and Scotland, collected and anthologized by Francis James Child during the second half of the 19th century. The collection contains examples from the 13th century onward. However, the majority of the ballads date to the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Although some have very ancient influences, only a handful can be definitively traced to before 1600. Child Ballads are heavier and darker than other ballads. The topics of the ballads are romance, enchantment, devotion, determination, obsession, jealousy, forbidden love, hallucination, the suppressed truth, supernatural experiences and deeds, half-human creatures, teenagers, family strife, the boldness of outlaws, authority, lust, death, karma, punishment, sin, morality, vanity, folly, dignity, nobility, and many others. They contain stories of national heroes like Robin Hood and mysterious creatures like elves and fairies.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1857.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1890.