The Balladists

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Geddie John. The Balladists

The Balladists

Table of Contents

PREFACE

CHAPTER I. BALLAD CHARACTERISTICS

CHAPTER II. BALLAD GROWTH AND BALLAD HISTORY

CHAPTER III. BALLAD STRUCTURE AND BALLAD STYLE

CHAPTER IV. THE MYTHOLOGICAL BALLAD

CHAPTER V. THE ROMANTIC BALLAD

CHAPTER VI. THE HISTORICAL BALLAD

CHAPTER VII. CONCLUSION

Отрывок из книги

John Geddie

Published by Good Press, 2019

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Mopsa—Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a' life; for then we are sure they are true.—Winter's Tale.

There is probably not a verse, there is scarcely a line, in the existing body of Scottish ballad poetry that can be traced with certainty further back than the sixteenth century. Many of them chronicle events that took place in the seventeenth century, and there are a few that deal with even later history. It may seem a bold thing, therefore, to claim for these traditional tales in verse the much more venerable antiquity implied in what has been said in the previous chapter. If we were to be guided by the accessible literary and historical data, or even by the language of the ballads themselves, we should be disposed to believe that the productive period of ballad-making was confined within two or at most three hundred years.

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