B

There is little psychological comment, and the ‘meaning’ is realized through directly rendered action, and cryptic references to the larger context of related events. There is a ‘ballad form’ and a ‘ballad world’, both of supreme imaginative interest. The traditional ballads became admired literary objects in the eighteenth century, and numerous collections were made and published from then on. The most famous is Francis J. Child’s five volumes of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98). Such study tended to treat the ballads as timeless, though later discussion, based on the invaluable work of scores of collectors, such as Bishop Percy (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765), Sir Walter Scott (Minstrelsy of the Scottish Borders, 1802-3) and Child himself, has begun to establish the evolution of style in the ballads. The Romantics were interested in the ballads as folk-art and monuments of the heroic past. The literary ballad, with no music, had a vogue at the end of the eighteenth century and for another century, the best known of such works being Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner and Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’. The older study of ballads had the disadvantage of

treating ‘collected’ ballads both as written texts – though any written form poorly represents the ‘performed’ ballad in its musical and dramatic strength – and as fossil objects of a dead art.