ballad
ballad, short narrative folk song, whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing. The term ballad is also applied to any narrative composition suitable for singing.
France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain, as well as England and Scotland, possess impressive ballad collections. At least one-third of the 300 extant English and Scottish ballads have counterparts in one or several of these continental balladries, particularly those of Scandinavia. In no two language areas, however, are the formal characteristics of the ballad identical. For example, British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (i.e., divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as byliny and almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic; and, though the romances of Spain, as their ballads are called, and the Danish viser are alike in using assonance instead of rhyme, the Spanish ballads are generally unstrophic while the Danish are strophic, parcelled into either quatrains or couplets.
In reception, however, the ballad’s technique and form are often subordinated to its presentation of events—especially ones presented as historical, whether factually accurate or not—and their significance to the audience. The ballad also plays a critical role in the creation and maintenance of distinct national cultures. In contemporary literature and music, the ballad is primarily defined by its commitment to nostalgia, community histories, and romantic love.
Elements
Narrative basis
Typically, the folk ballad tells a compact little story that begins eruptively at the moment when the narrative has turned decisively toward its catastrophe or resolution. Focusing on a single, climactic situation, the ballad leaves the inception of the conflict and the setting to be inferred or sketches them in hurriedly. Characterization is minimal, the characters revealing themselves in their actions or speeches; overt moral comment on the characters’ behaviour is suppressed and their motivation seldom explicitly detailed. Whatever description occurs in ballads is brief and conventional; transitions between scenes are abrupt and time shifts are only vaguely indicated; crucial events and emotions are conveyed in crisp, poignant dialogue. In short, the ballad method of narration is directed toward achieving a bold, sensational, dramatic effect with purposeful starkness and abruptness. But despite the rigid economy of ballad narratives, a repertory of rhetorical devices is employed for prolonging highly charged moments in the story and thus thickening the emotional atmosphere. In the most famous of such devices, incremental repetition, a phrase or stanza is repeated several times with a slight but significant substitution at the same critical point. Suspense accumulates with each substitution, until at last the final and revelatory substitution bursts the pattern, achieving a climax and with it a release of powerful tensions. The following stanza is a typical example:
Then out and came the thick, thick blood,
Then out and came the thin,
Then out and came the bonny heart’s blood,
Where all the life lay in.
Oral transmission
Since ballads thrive among unlettered people and are freshly created from memory at each separate performance, they are subject to constant variation in both text and tune. Where tradition is healthy and not highly influenced by literary or other outside cultural influences, these variations keep the ballad alive by gradually bringing it into line with the style of life, beliefs, and emotional needs of the immediate folk audience. Ballad tradition, however, like all folk arts, is basically conservative, a trait that explains the references in several ballads to obsolete implements and customs, as well as the appearance of words and phrases that are so badly garbled as to indicate that the singer does not understand their meaning though he takes pleasure in their sound and respects their traditional right to a place in his version of the song. The new versions of ballads that arise as the result of cumulative variations are no less authentic than their antecedents. A poem is fixed in its final form when published, but the printed or taped record of a ballad is representative only of its appearance in one place, in one line of tradition, and at one moment in its protean history. The first record of a ballad is not its original form but merely its earliest recorded form, and the recording of a ballad does not inhibit tradition from varying it subsequently into other shapes, because tradition preserves by re-creating rather than by exact reproduction.
