ABSTRACT
Before the discovery, rescue, preservation and revival of folk music in the nineteenth century, as described in previous chapters, there had been its literary equivalent in the discovery and publication of the English and Scottish popular ballads. The ballad is one great class of folk-song and was recognized as such even by those scholars who concentrated on the poem to the neglect of the tune. Indeed the first break-down of his huge corpus of material that any scholar or folk-song collector will make is into ballad, however hard to define, and song or lyric, no matter what difficulty of classifying border-line cases may arise. As a matter of history this great body of anonymous literature was isolated in the eighteenth century and study of it has continued ever since, sometimes with its music, more often without. In particular the problems of its origin, definition and diffusion have been endlessly debated. Balladry is indeed a large subject in itself but it is also, as is now realized, an integral part of folk-song, which can throw as much light on folk music as folk music can throw on it. No book on folk music can neglect it in spite of the attention it has already received. What then is a ballad?
