mousethief wrote: For a series I am writing on folklore, I would like to know a few old songs, preferrably Child, that go on interminably.

This obviously points us to the longest of the Child Ballads, "The Gest of Robyn Hode" [Child 117], which Child prints as 456 stanzas although I am firmly of the opinion that it should be 457. No tune has been preserved, but Bronson hints that all the Robin Hood ballads were sung to just a handful of tunes. The "Gest" can be sung to the one known tune of "Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar."

The other three early Robin Hood ballads, the "Monk" [Child 119], the "Potter" [Child 121], and "Guy of Gisborne" [Child 118], are also quite substantial.

Of course, those four ballads are actually romances, not ballads. But that's almost distinction without a way of distinguishing -- as witness the many pieces in the Percy Folio which appear to have originally have been short romances that were chopped down by someone to be the length of long ballads. There are a lot of those in the Folio. An example where we can prove that this happened is "The Squire of Low Degree," which exists basically in two versions, one printed by William Copeland (who, coincidentally, is the likely printer of the "f" version of the "Gest") and one in the Percy Folio. Copeland's version is 1132 lines long (according to the text edited by William Edward Mead); that of the Percy Folio is about 170.

And if you're going to look at romances, you might want to look at "Sir Orfeo," which, other than Chaucer's romances and perhaps Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is the best of all Middle English romances, and is fairly short (600+ lines). There is no tune, but a tune survives for the ballad "King Orfeo" [Child 19], which is too damaged to really be sung but which (as I demonstrated in Romancing the Ballad) is descended from the "Sir Orfeo" family.

If you want something that survived into modern times, as opposed to a piece in Middle English, an obvious candidate is "Chevy Chase" ("The Hunting of the Cheviot," Child 162). The Child texts are 60+ verses. Also "King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth" [Child 273], which has multiple tunes and appears to go back to multiple early romances, "King Edward and the Hermit," "King Edward and the Shepherd," "John the Reeve," "The King and the Barker," "King Henry the Second and the Miller of Mansfield."

If you want more, look at the items in the Percy Folio. There were 68 of them that I concluded belonged in the Ballad Index, of which 47 were included in the Child corpus.