A guest wrote: There is a significant genre of "murdered sweetheart" ballads , but surely very few Child ballads along such lines.

You're right that murdered sweetheart ballads do not make up as large a fraction of the Child collection as of, say, the Laws collection, but they aren't rare. Two very popular examples: "Lord Randall" (Child #12) and "Young Hunting" (Child #68). And "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (Child #4) arguably qualifies, too, and "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet" at least encroaches on the territory -- and the latter two are among the ten most popular Child Ballads in terms of number of collections and printed versions.

This particular whine, and some similar ones about long ballads, again raise a question that's worth thinking about: The long old ballads surviving in tradition only because people thought them worth singing, and there are some very long works that survived that way, starting with Homer, no less. Or the romance of "Sir Orfeo" (not the ballad "King Orfeo," but the source romance) must have survived in oral tradition, because the three manuscript copies vary dramatically, including the fact that the shortest version is about a sixth shorter than the longest version.

So people used to sit through, and remember, long pieces (600+ lines). What has changed that we no longer care for them? Are our memories worse? Our attention span? Or are we just more stupid? :-)