"Jim, what would you regard as a Celtic Child Ballad?"
I am very suspicious of the overused term 'Celtic' Steve but I assume we are including Irish in this.
One of the songs in Irish is claimed to be a version of the Two Sisters' - I have my doubts as it is too distinct thoough it is very old - one sister from the ballad a mother with a young child and the other is a wet-nurse who drowns the first by tying her hair to a rock on the seashore, takes the baby and eventually marries the husband.
is it a version, as is claimed, is it an offshoot or is it an earlier version?
I don't know, and unless you can positively identify The Two Sisters, neither do you.
Lord Randal, The Cruel Mother and Oor Goodman present us with the same questions - all distinctly Irish in their form
You have the same problem with French, Portugese, Spanish and some Eastern European Countries with ballad Traditions - all referred to by Child and all with claims to Celticism
I don't know enough about any of these traditions, but I believe it is a little hasty to say there are no Child Ballads from any of them
When you're dealing with international ballads you are faced with a chicken and egg situation.
You are faced with the same problem with Ballads that should have been in Child, Bramble Briar being one.
A song in Ballad form that appears not to be too old, but has turned up in other forms at least as far back as Boccaccio
Get up and Bar the Door turns up from ancient India as a cante-fable
Keach in the Creel was a fableaux as far back as the Italian renaissance, Lord Randal from 16th century Verona....
I'm not sure, but a conversation we had with an Irish singer who gave us a part small fragment of a song makes me wonder whether 'The Wedding of Sir Gawain' wasn't doing the rounds in west Clare in a completely different form a century or so ago.
I know some of these have no claim to be 'Celtic' but the fact that they have been doing the sounds for as long as they have raises questions about their origins
I challenged your somewhat definitive statement on the same basis as I challenged you claim about the broadsides
We simply don't know, abd once we start sayig we do we stop looking for answers.
Jim Carroll