Border ballad
song genre from the Anglo-Scottish border
Border ballads are a group of songs in the long tradition of balladry collected from the Anglo-Scottish border. Like all traditional ballads, they were traditionally sung unaccompanied. There may be a repeating motif, but there is no "chorus" as in most popular songs. The supernatural is a common theme in border ballads, as are recountings of raids and battles.
Ballad types
The ballads belong to various groups of subjects, such as riding ballads like "Kinmont Willie"; historical ballads like "Sir Patrick Spens"; comic ballads like "Get Up and Bar the Door"; and those with supernatural themes including "Thomas the Rhymer" (also known as "True Thomas" or "Thomas of Erceldoune") and "Tam Lin".
Writings about
Some of the earliest known references (in Middle Scots) to the ballads appeared in The Complaynt of Scotland (1549).
Sir Walter Scott wrote about border ballads in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, first published in 1802–03.
A. L. Lloyd said of the ballads:
The bare rolling stretch of country from the North Tyne and Cheviots to the Scottish southern uplands was for a long time the territory of men who spoke English but had the outlook of Afghan tribesmen; they prized a poem almost as much as plunder, and produced such an impressive assembly of local narrative songs that some people used to label all our greater folk poems as 'Border ballads'.
See also
Child Ballads
List of the Child Ballads
References
Further reading
Pick, J.B. (1993), "The Border Ballads: How Many Worlds are There?", in The Great Shadow House: The Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction, Polygon, Edinburgh, pp.
“Border ballad” enters the record as song genre from the Anglo-Scottish border. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Border, ballad and song can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 15, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q2910735. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1549, 1802 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Border ballad” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.