BALLAD

form of short narrative folk song the distinctive style of which crystallized in Europe during the late Middle Ages. The ballad has been preserved as a musical and literary form up to modern times. Typically, the folk ballad (or standard ballad) tells a compact tale in a style that achieves bold, sensational effects through deliberate starkness and abruptness. Despite a rigid economy of narrative, it employs a variety of devices to prolong highly charged moments in the story and to thicken the emotional atmosphere, the most common being a frequent repetition of some key word, line, or phrase. Any consequent bareness of texture finds ample compensation in this dramatic rhetoric. Because ballads have thrived among unlettered people, and are freshly created from memory at each performance, they are subject to constant variation in both text and tune; tradition has preserved them by re-creation, not by ossification. They exhibit fascination with supernatural happenings; with the fate of lovers (usually, though not always, tragic); with crime and its punishment; with apocryphal legends (the chief stuff of religious balladry); with historical disasters (usually matters of regional rather than national importance); with sensational acts of God and man; with the deeds of outlaws and badmen; and with the hazards of such occupations as seafaring and railroading. The ballad genre in its present form can scarcely have existed before about 1100. The oldest ballad in Francis Child's definitive compilation, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (188298), dates from 1300, but as an oral form the ballad did not need to be written down in order to be performed or preserved. Indeed, to ask for the date of a ballad displays a misunderstanding of the very nature of balladry. Behind each recorded ballad can be detected the workings of tradition upon some earlier form of the same work. Some scholars have argued that ballads are the result of collective composition (the communal school, led by F.B. Gummere and G.L. Kittredge), others that each is the work of an individual composer (the individualist school, led by W.J. Courthope, Andrew Lang, Louise Pound). The tunes are based on the modes of medieval plainsong, not on the chromatic scales of modern music, and most consist of 16 bars with two beats per measure. Musical variation, however, is as frequent as textual variation, and since the singer performs solo, or plays the accompanying instrument, the performance need not keep rigidly to set duration or stress, and the balladeer may introduce grace notes to accommodate hypermetric syllables and may lengthen notes for emphasis. There are significant balladries in England, Scotland, Ireland, the United States, France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain. Their formal characteristics vary from one area to another: British and U.S. ballads, for instance, are invariably rhymed and divided into stanzas (strophes). The Russian ballads (byliny) are unrhymed and unstrophic; the Spanish romances and the Danish viser employ assonance rather than rhyme, but the latter are strophic while the former are not. In addition to folk ballads, other types may be mentioned that are more properly relevant to the history of poetry than to that of true balladry. Minstrel ballads call attention to themselves and to the performer in a way quite foreign to the strict impersonality of the folk ballads and are the work of professional entertainers employed in wealthy households from the European Middle Ages until the 17th century. Many of these pieces glorify noble families. The older Robin Hood ballads, celebrating traditional yeoman virtues, are also examples of minstrel propaganda. Broadside ballads are urban adaptations of the folk ballad and are the work of hack poets commemorating some sensational item of topical interest. They appeared on crudely printed handbills (called broadsheets, or broadsides) in the 16th to 19th century. Sophisticated imitations of broadside ballads, usually penned for purposes of jocular satire, were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, enjoying a special vogue after the publication in 1765 of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The modern literary ballad recalls in its rhythmic and narrative elements the traditions of folk balladry. short narrative folk song whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have not yet affected the habit of folk singing. France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain, as well as England and Scotland, possess impressive ballad collections. At least one-third of the 300 extant English and Scottish ballads have counterparts in one or several of these continental balladries, particularly those of Scandinavia. In no two language areas, however, are the formal characteristics of the ballad identical. For example, British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (i.e., divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as byliny and almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic; and, though the romances of Spain, as their ballads are called, and the Danish viser are alike in using assonance instead of rhyme, the Spanish ballads are generally unstrophic while the Danish are strophic, parcelled into either quatrains or couplets. Additional reading F.J. Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vol. (188298), is the canon of traditional balladry; the tunes for these are supplied in B.H. Bronson (ed.), Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, 4 vol. (195972). Important broadside collections include The Roxburghe Ballads, ed. by W. Chappell and J.W. Ebsworth, 9 vol. (187199); and The Pepys Ballads, ed. by H.E. Rollins, 8 vol. (192932). See also The Common Muse: An Anthology of Popular British Ballad Poetry, XVthXXth Century, ed. by V. de Sola Pinto and A.E. Rodway (1957); C.M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and Its Music (1966); T.P. Coffin, The British Traditional Ballad in North America, rev. ed. (1963); and G.M. Laws, Native American Balladry, rev. ed. (1964). Ballad criticism and scholarship are analyzed in S.B. Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men (1930); D.K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (1959); A.B. Friedman, The Ballad Revival: Studies in the Influence of Popular on Sophisticated Poetry (1961); C.J. Sharp, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907); G.H. Gerould, Ballad of Tradition (1932); and M.J.C. Hodgart, Ballads (1950). A.T. Quillercouch (ed.), The Oxford Book of Ballads (1910, reissued 1951); M. Leach (ed.), The Ballad Book (1955); and A.B. Friedman (ed.), Folk Ballads of the English Speaking World (1956), are the standard anthologies.