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ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH POPULAR BALLADS

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The popular ballad is a short, anonymous poem, in simple meter, recounting a simple narrative, and adapted, originally, for singing to a recurrent melody. The true ballad shows no traces of individual authorship: the story is told impersonally, without a suggestion of sentiment or reflection from the story-teller. Ballads originate in a naïve, homogeneous community, and it may fairly be said that they are composed not by any individual, but by the community as a whole. Ballads are to be thought of as beginning, ultimately and normally, in a choral throng, in which, to the accompaniment of dancing and singing, one person after another contributes an improvised verse, couplet, or short stanza to a simple but ever increasing story. The story grows by incremental repetition'; that is, in his improvisation, each singer in succession both repeats a part of the preceding improvisation and adds to the story a new element of his own. After contributing their bits to the narrative, the several singers disappear as individuals, leaving as a result a simple narrative poem, which is henceforth regarded as the composition not of one person or of particular persons, but of the gathering as a whole. Although such a process of composition can be securely inferred, no extant ballad shows so simple a form as would result immediately from such communal authorship. Since all true ballads are transmitted orally, variations in style and alterations of the narrative are inevitable; and the hand of a dominating individual may often be inferred. A large proportion of the ballads actually preserved do, however, bear unmistakable marks of their ultimate choral and community origin, and all ballads worthy of the name are the actual possession of the folk as a whole.

From the fact that ballads are transmitted orally, and are committed to writing only by happy accident, the body of preserved and published ballads of any people will represent, inevitably, only a small proportion of the whole sum of ballads produced during the history of that people. The English language, including Scottish, is fortunate in the preservation of at least three hundred and six ballads. Although the greater part of these ballads are recorded only in comparatively modern documents, many of the stories themselves are of very ancient origin. The oldest English ballad completely recorded dates from the thirteenth century. The most important of ballad manuscripts,—the so-called Percy Folio,- was written about the year 1650. Only some eleven of our ballads are preserved in documents older than the seventeenth century.

On the theory of communal authorship' one can readily explain the chief formal characteristics of popular ballads: refrain, repetition, and dialogue.

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