The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #164332 Message #3931567
Posted By: GUEST,RA
18-Jun-18 - 03:40 AM
Thread Name: Origins: Child Ballads in Ireland
Subject: RE: Origins: Child Ballads in Ireland
Guest, Kevin W writes: "I also didn't know that ballads were mostly unknown Irish and Scots Gaelic culture."
'Ballads' in the Anglo-Saxon sense of rhyming quatrains might not exist in Scottish Gaelic, but then there are the ancient lays which in a narrative, if not structural sense could be construed as ballads... songs such as 'Am Bron Binn', which is notable as being a rare occurrence of Arthurian material in the Gaelic language. There's a whole book about that song, 'Am Bron Binn: An Arthurian Ballad in Scottish Gaelic' by Linda Gowans. Then there are all the fenian lays, the material from which James McPherson constructed his 'Ossian'.