Transcriber's Note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully aspossible. Some minor corrections of spelling and puctuation havebeen made.
The cover image for the e-book version was created by the transcriber.
The
Oxford Book of
Ballads
Chosen & Edited by
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
TO
THE ONE SURVIVOR
OF THREE MEN
TO WHOM ALL LOVERS OF THE BALLAD
OWE MOST IN THESE TIMES
FRANCIS JAMES CHILD
FREDERICK JAMES FURNIVALL
AND
JOHN WESLEY HALES
As in The Oxford Book of English Verse I tried torange over the whole field of the English Lyric,and to choose the best, so in this volume I havesought to bring together the best Ballads out of the wholeof our national stock. But the method, order, balance ofthe two books are different perforce, as the fates of theLyric and the Ballad have been diverse. While theLyric in general, still making for variety, is to-day moreprolific than ever and (all cant apart) promises fruit toequal the best, that particular offshoot which we call theBallad has been dead, or as good as dead, for two hundredyears. It would seem to have discovered, almost at thestart, a very precise Platonic pattern of what its bestshould be; and having exhausted itself in reproducingthat, it declined (through a crab-apple stage of Broadsides)into sterility. Therefore this anthology cannot be broughtdown to the present day, and therefore the first half of itcontains far finer poetry than the second.
But it may be objected that among Ballads no suchthing as chronological order is possible; and that, if itwere, I have not attempted it. ‘Why then did I notboldly mix up all my flowers in a heap and afterwards sitdown to re-arrange them, disregarding history, studiousonly that one flower should set off another and the whole[Pg viii]wreath be a well-balanced circle?’ I will try to answerthis, premising only that tact is nine-tenths of the anthologist’sbusiness. It is very true that the Ballads have nochronology: that no one can say when Hynd Horn wascomposed, or assert with proof that Clerk Saunders isyounger than Childe Maurice or Tam Lin older than SirPatrick Spens, though that all five are older than TheChildren in the Wood no one with an ounce of literarysense would deny. Even of our few certainties we haveto remember that, where almost everything depends onoral tradition, it may easily happen—in fact happens notseldom—that a really old ballad ‘of the best period’ hasreached us late and in a corrupted form, its original goldoverlaid with silver and bronze. It is true, moreover, thatthese pages, declining an impossible order, decline also thepretence to it. I have arranged the ballads in sevenbooks: of which the first deals with Magic, the ‘SeelyCourt’, and the supernatural; the second (and on thewhole the most beautiful) with stories of absolute romancesuch as Childe Waters, Lord Ingram