http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/ChildBallads

Burd Isabel and Billy Blind, from Young Bekie

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Has nothing to do with children.

In the late 19th century, Harvard professor Francis James Child was concerned that the tradition of folk songs in the British Isles was endangered—songs were dying out, unrecorded. He made it his personal mission to collect as many traditional folk songs as he could from England and Scotland. (Including Ireland, he felt, was way too ambitious a goal.)

He got about 300 of them, not including variants; many of the ballads have a dozen variants, or more, and most have several — though some are only fragmentary. (Some versions you may be familiar with have had verses created by the person performing them, to make the song make sense.) Even today, ballads are often referred to by the numbers Child assigned them. See here for the full text of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads .

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They range, as ballads often do, from Fairy Tales in verse form all the way through to accounts of historical events, with historical characters, perhaps a little refined for story form. Many are recognizably popular forms of medieval Chivalric Romances.

Many of them are heavy on dialect, especially the Border Ballads, those collected on the English-Scottish border. Metrical considerations means that using standard English often requires a total rewrite. This also helps keep the number of Evil or Overbearing Mothers high compared to Wicked Stepmothers since the scansion and meter of "mother" note Two beats, emphasis on the first and "stepmother" note Three beats, with a primary emphasis on the first and a secondary emphasis on the second. are not interchangeable. A Wicked Stepmother appears in different ballads than the Evil Matriarch.

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Many Murder Ballads are Child Ballads. Robin Hood has so many that Child lumps them all together in their own volume.

Child Ballads may be thought of as the Scottish/English branch of a larger collection of Medieval Ballads. Medieval ballads are found in all countries around the North Sea, from Iceland to Sweden.

Those interested in a more thorough and detailed discussion might wish to check out this post and comment thread .

Child Ballads with their own page:

Tropes common in the Child Ballads:

Abhorrent Admirer: "Kemp Owyne" (#34), "Alison Gross" (#35). Folklorists refer to this trope as the loathly lady, and the abhorrent admirer is typically under a curse; when that is broken, she reverts to her true form, which isnt at all abhorrent.

Attempted Rape: In "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (#4), the knight tricks the protagonist into running off with him, only to reveal that he intends to rape and kill her. Fortunately, she kills him instead.

Bedroom Adultery Scene: In "Our Goodman" (#274) the husband finds more and more evidence that his wife is cheating on him, until he finally catches the lover in the bedroom. The wife tries to explain he's really a milkmaid. The husband sarcastically notes that he's never seen a milkmaid with a beard before.

Being Evil Sucks: The bandit learns this the hard way in "Bonnie Banks o'Fordie" (#14)

Beware Of Hitch Hiking Ghosts: "The Suffolk Miracle" (#272) has this plot (with a horse instead of a car). In the ballad, the hitchhiker is the protagonist's lover, who died of grief when her father prevented him from seeing her; it also makes use of the reappearing garment device (in this case, a handkerchief which shows up in the man's grave).

BrotherSister Incest: "Sheath and Knife" (#16), "The Bonny Hind" (#50), "Lizie Wan" (#51), "The King's Dochter Lady Jean" (#52), and "Brown Robyn's Confession" (#57)

Burn the Witch!: In some versions of the ballad "Young Hunting" (#47; a.k.a. Earl Richard/ Love Henry) the lady gets punished this way for killing her lover. Certain versions also include her trying to pin the murder on her maid, who gets acquitted because she won't burn no matter what the king's men try.

Creepy Crows: Several ballads depict ravens and crows as creepy, but most especially "The Three Ravens" and its more cynical variant, "The Twa Corbies" (both are #26).

Death by Childbirth: In "Sheath and Knife" (#16), the pregnant woman goes with her brother to give birth.

Death by Sex: Very common.

Disproportionate Retribution: In the versions of the ballad that give him a motive, Lamkin is a stonemason who brutally murders a lord's wife and infant son because the lord didn't pay him.

Distressed Dude: Tam Lin.

Domestic Abuse: In "Wee Cooper of Fife" (#277) the cooper beats or threatens to beat his wife for refusing to do housework.

Double In-Law Marriage: "Rose the Red and White Lily" not only ends with a pair of sisters marrying a pair of brothers, the brothers are their stepbrothers.

Downer Ending: Many ballads play this trope straight, others have endings that would have been considered happy in days past, but fall short of the mark by today's standards. Some "happy endings" are pretty horrific to modern audiences. Ballad 110, wherein we learn that if a young woman is raped and the perpetrator is single, she will be forced to marry her rapist, whether she wants to or not.

pretty horrific to modern audiences.

Even Evil Has Loved Ones/My God, What Have I Done?: "Bonnie Banks o'Fordie" (#14). An outlaw comes upon three sisters in the woods. He threatens each one in turn to make her marry him. The first two refuse and are killed. The third threatens him with her brother or brothers. He asks after them and discovers that he is the brother. He commits suicide.

Even the Guys Want Him: "Willie O'Winsbury" (#100), also known as "John Barbour" or "Tom the Barber." In each version, the king's daughter becomes pregnant by the title character, and the king decides to give his blessing to the match after seeing how handsome the young man is. The version recorded by Pentangle contains this lyric: But when he came the king before,

he was clad all in the red silk.

His hair was like the strands of gold;

his skin was as white as the milk.

"And it is no wonder," said the king,

"That my daughter's love you did win.

If I were a woman, as I am a man,

My bedfellow you would have been."

The Fair Folk: True to older folklore, most of the fairies and elves who appears in the ballads are right bastards. In "Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight" (#4), the Elf knight entices the protagonist to run away with him (though whether by means of flattery or magic depends on the version) and turns out to be The Bluebeard who intends to rape and kill her, as he's done to numerous other women in the past. She outwits him, though, and kills himself instead. In "King Orfeo" (#19), the king of the fairies kidnaps the protagonist's wife, Heurodis, just because he can. In "The Queen of Elfan's Nourice" (#40), a woman is kidnapped to nurse the children of the Fairy Queen. In "Hind Etin" (#41), Lady Margaret is abducted by the eponymous Hind Etin and bears him seven sons.



The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: "The Twa Sisters" (#10) is about two sisters who are in love with the same man. It ends in murder.

Karma Houdini: In some versions of "The Twa Sisters", the older sister gets their lover and all his land scot-free, leaving the miller who robbed the younger sister's corpse (or, in particularly dark iterations, pulled her out while she was still alive to take her gold ring and then threw her back) to take all the blame.

Law of Inverse Fertility: Unmarried women become pregnant very easily.

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: In "Gil Breton", the child's birth comes with magical affirmation of his paternity, to avert this.

Morality Ballad: The constant use of Death by Sex in many of the ballads results in this trope.

The Mourning After: "The Unquiet Grave" (#78) initially plays this straight. In the end, though, it's subverted: The living lover's incessant grief prevents their beloved from resting in peace.

Murder the Hypotenuse: The older sister in "Twa Sisters" (#10) and the Nut-Brown Maid in "Lord Thomas and Fair Annet" (#73) both do this.

Offing the Offspring: The cruel mother in "The Cruel Mother" (#20) and the maid in "The Maid and the Palmer" (#21) killed their own babies.

Our Ghosts Are Different: Though, in ballads, it's always a bad idea to be in love with a dead person, they're not necessarily evil per se. Ghosts and other revenants can pop up to drive their killers crazy ("The Cruel Mother", #20), or just to say goodbye ("Sweet William's Ghost", #77; "The Wife of Usher's Well", #79).

The Pardon: Often asked for, not always granted.

Parental Marriage Veto: Very common.