"I remain convinced that they reflect aspects of the lives and experiences of the makers"

Absolutely, Jim, and there's also something of necessity in it. It's like Stonehenge - we may not understand it, we may have weird theories, but we KNOW it's not a random bunch of rocks, it was vitally important to the people who made it.

I believe the people who made the ballads had to do it because their life depended on it. They were creators and entertainers and they had their audience/s. Calling them 'folk' or 'not-folk' is a red herring based on ways of thinking we have inherited from Marx et al. The ballad makers knew what they were doing and who they were doing it for - those among whom they lived, from whom they were not separate. In a society such as 16th C Scotland you knew your place (just as you do now), but you also knew everybody else, whatever their rung on the ladder. And it paid to flatter your patron or slander his enemy, and you could change them round depending on who was feeding you that night; or to change the locality of your tale so that your audience had ownership of it - hence the variant versions of the big ballads.

Quite why some of us still find such nourishment in these often dark tales is a mystery - but we do, so thae bards must have got something right.