Hello, and welcome to the Folklore & Fiction newsletter. In this edition, I'm writing about the ballad genre with help from scholars Gordon Hall Gerould, David Buchan, Roger deV. Renwick and others, helping you analyse a ballad, and discussing ways to bring ballads to your story craft.
I would add before going on that there are many ballad traditions in the world, each of them rich and nuanced. It would be impossible to write about them all here, so I don't intend to try. Instead, I'll be focusing on the ballads collected in Francis James Child's ten-volume work The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which are among the oldest in the English language. I would also point out that even this collection of narrative songs represents a complex tradition I can only summarize in a newsletter. So I'll be covering the basics and touching upon the role of memory in the composition and performance of these songs.
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