Nerd

I tried to get a serious discussion of Child going on this thread though I was largely shouted down by people who were worried I might be criticising their "god". This is what I said on that thread.

Though it wasn't only Child, he was the main instigator of the C19th movement to define what a ballad is, basically in the terms "A ballad is what I say it is". Hardly surprising that he didn't miss out too many "ballads" ... he was deciding which were and which were not. He even dropped certain "short romances which formerly stood in the first book ... in order to give the collection a homogeneous character".

I'd prefer to use a more general and, should I say, proper definition of the word ballad than Child. Can we use the following dictionary definition of a ballad?

bal·lad (bld) n.

A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple stanzas and usually having a refrain. The music for such a poem. A popular song especially of a romantic or sentimental nature.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Middle English balade, poem or song in stanza form, from Old French ballade, from Old Provençal balada, song sung while dancing, from balar, to dance, from Late Latin ballre, to dance.]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As regards when the ballad form started historically, the argument is, in fact, circular. To rehearse it ... I say it started in the C15th. This is C14th thus it's too early to be a ballad form.

I'll admit that the Auchinleck version is not short, and not about a single event (which often characterises ballads) but then neither is "Hind Horn" either. This problem is sorted in the modern broadside versions by missing out the giving of the ring, so I'd rather see both the early Hind Horn and this version as stages in the formation of the eventual "ballad" form which is the "Broken Token" broadsides.

Apart from probable transcription errors, the rhythmic structure is 6-line tail-rhyme stanzas of the form aabccb. This is quite simple and characteristic of 14th and 15th Century verse intended to be sung (though also of much drama intended to be spoken too). It's not unfamiliar in modern songs either.

BTW since Child used Grundtvig for most of the reasoning behind his classification system, I wouldn't like to speculate too much on what he might have achieved had he lived. The correspondence between him and G certainly seem to suggest that he didn't have a great deal of a clue and that Grundtvig was getting fed up with feeding him ideas.

:-)