Related Research Articles
Will Scarlet is a prominent member of Robin Hood's Merry Men. He is present in the earliest ballads along with Little John and Much the Miller's Son.
"Kinmont Willie" or "Kinmount Willie" is a ballad from the English-Scottish border country, catalogued as Child ballad 186. It recounts the rescue of William Armstrong of Kinmont from an English prison. It is one of several border ballads dealing with the exploits of the Armstrongs.
Billy Blind is an English and Lowland Scottish household spirit, much like a brownie. He appears only in ballads, where he frequently advises the characters. It is possible that the character of Billy Blind is a folk memory of the god Woden or Odin from Germanic mythology, in his "more playful aspect" and is speculated to have been the same character as Blind Harie, the "blind man of the game" in Scotland.
"Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" is the English common name representative of a very large class of European ballads.
"The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry" or "The Grey Selkie of Sule Skerry" is a traditional folk song from Orkney and Shetland. A woman has her child taken away by its father, the great selkie of Sule Skerry which can transform from a seal into a human. The woman is fated to marry a gunner who will harpoon the selkie and their son.
"The Cruel Mother" is a murder ballad originating in England that has since become popular throughout the wider English-speaking world.
"Geordie" is an English language folk song concerning the trial of the eponymous hero whose lover pleads for his life. It is listed as Child ballad 209 and Number 90 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The ballad was traditionally sung across the English speaking world, particularly in England, Scotland and North America, and was performed with many different melodies and lyrics. In recent times, popular versions have been performed and recorded by numerous artists and groups in different languages, mostly inspired by Joan Baez's 1962 recording based on a traditional version from Somerset, England.
The Gay Goshawk is a traditional English-language folk ballad.
"Rose the Red and White Lily" is Child ballad number 103.
The Laird o Drum is an English-language folk song, originating in Scotland. Francis James Child collected six versions, labeled A to F, all based on Alexander Irvine's courtship of and marriage to Margaret Coutts, his second wife. Though the events depicted in the ballad took place in the late 1600s, the earliest version of the ballad dates back to the early 1800s.
The Bent Sae Brown is an English-language folk song.
Robin Hood's Golden Prize is an English folk song. It is a story in the Robin Hood canon, which has survived as, among other forms, a late seventeenth-century English broadside ballad, and is one of several ballads about the medieval folk hero that form part of the Child ballad collection.
The King's Disguise, and Friendship with Robin Hood is an English ballad of Robin Hood. It is a relatively late work in the corpus, found in the Forresters Manuscript from the 1670s. The work seems loosely based on the 7th and 8th fyttes of A Gest of Robyn Hode which recounts the end of Robin Hood's outlawry after an encounter with the king. Unlike Gest, the king is not acting out of the need to suppress Robin; additionally, The King's Disguise and Friendship uses the 17th century updates to the legend that places Robin as contemporaneous with King Richard's reign. In the late 1800s, Francis James Child included it in his influential collection, the Child Ballads, as #151.
Jock of the Side or Jock O' the Side is a border ballad existing in several variants, and is part of the series of 305 traditional songs of England and Scotland known as the Child ballads, having Child number 187. It is assigned the Roud number 82.
"Erlinton" is an English-language folk ballad. One variant features Robin Hood, but this variant forces the folk hero into a ballad structure where he does not fit naturally.
"The Maid and the Palmer" is an English language medieval murder ballad with supernatural/religious overtones. Because of its dark lyrics, the song was often avoided by folk singers. Considered by scholars to be a "debased" version of a work more completely known in European sources as the Ballad of the Magdalene, the ballad was believed lost in the oral tradition in the British Isles from the time of Sir Walter Scott, who noted a fragment of it having heard it sung in the early years of the nineteenth century, until it was discovered in the repertoire of a living Irish singer, John Reilly, from whom it was collected in the 1960s, although subsequently other versions have surfaced from Ireland from the 1950s to the 1970s; an additional full text, collected and notated in around 1818, was also recently published in Emily Lyle's 1994 Scottish Ballads under the title "The Maid of Coldingham", having remained in manuscript form in the intervening time. Based on a tape of Reilly's performance provided by the collector Tom Munnelly, the singer Christy Moore popularised the song under its alternate title "The Well Below the Valley" with the Irish folk band Planxty and later solo performances/recordings, this song providing the title of that group's second album released in 1973; the song has subsequently been recorded by a number of more recent "folk revival" acts.
Captain Ward and the Rainbow, or Ward the Pirate is an English-language folk song. It recounts a tale of the pirate Captain Ward, likely Jack Ward.
Dick o the Cow is an Anglo-Scottish border ballad. The ballad tells the story of a man who regains his stolen cows.
"The Dowie Dens o Yarrow", also known as "The Braes of Yarrow" or simply "Yarrow", is a Scottish border ballad. It has many variants and it has been printed as a broadside, as well as published in song collections. It is considered to be a folk standard, and many different singers have performed and recorded it.
Thomas o Yonderdale is an English-language folk song, catalogued as Child ballad number 253 and Roud number 3890. Child assessed that this "apocryphal" ballad seemed like a recent fabrication from a pastiche of other ballads.
References
- ↑ The English and Scottish Popular Ballads; Vol. 3; by Francis James Child. Courier Dover Publications, 2003, ISBN 0-486-43150-9, ISBN 978-0-486-43150-5; p. 484
