Public-domain ebook
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 1 (of 5)
Language: en2,066 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Mythology, Legends & Folklore·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #44969.
About this book
This volume is the first of Francis James Child’s five‑part collection of English and Scottish popular ballads, reproduced here in an unabridged form that preserves the original spelling, dialect forms, and typographical conventions of the 19th‑century edition. The opening pages explain that the text contains multiple languages and a variety of archaic orthographies, with only minor typographical corrections made; footnotes, bold type for ballad references, and symbols indicating missing lines are all retained. After a dedication to Frederick J. Furnivall, Child outlines his painstaking effort to gather manuscripts from Scotland, Canada, the United States, and major libraries, acknowledging the many scholars and collectors who supplied material. The contents list then introduces the first dozen ballads, each accompanied by extensive scholarly notes and corrections that span the whole volume.
Written in the scholarly yet accessible voice of a Victorian editor, the work combines meticulous textual criticism with a genuine enthusiasm for folk tradition. Its dense apparatus, footnotes, variant readings, and editorial symbols, will appeal to readers who enjoy close study of historic verse, folklore scholars, and anyone fascinated by the linguistic richness of early English and Scots song. Those with a taste for archival detail rather than a streamlined narrative will find this collection rewarding.
The opening · free to read
This book contains material in multiple languages, and numerous examples of archaic, non-standard and dialect forms of English. Therefore no attempts to standardize spelling would be appropriate. The only changes to the text are to resolve typographical errors etc. which are listed at the end of the book. Minor corrections to format or punctuation have been made without comment.
This Plain Text version of the e-book includes unicode (UTF-8) characters and diacritics which should appear in the following list:
ā macron ă ĭ breve ć ń ś ẃ acute accent Č č ě Ř ř Š š ž caron/hacek ȝ yogh ł l with stroke (Polish etc.) Œ œ oe-ligature ş cedilla † dagger or upright cross symbol αβγδε Greek script
[a'] and ['s] denote editorial insertions of contracted forms, not special characters: e.g. on page 299 [a'] is an editorial insertion of "a'" (for "all"); on page 309 ['s] is an editorial insertion of "'s" (for "has"?).
underscore symbols represent italic typeface ~tilde symbols~ represent roman typeface within italics ALL CAPS represent small caps typeface #number signs# represent bold typeface $dollar symbols$ represent gesperrt (s p a c e d o u t) text ^x or ^{x, y} represents superscript text _x or _{xyz} represents subscript text
Bold mark-up is widely used to denote the distinctive font used by the author for ballad version references.
Some sections of ballads are set in differently sized type and indicated in the introductions. Usually this is smaller type, but in the case of ballad 39, larger. These passages are indicated by means of further indentation and side-lining (|) in the left margin. Ballad 53 versions M and N are entirely in smaller type, but without explanation.
Footnotes have been numbered from [1] to [427] sequentially throughout the whole volume, but are presented at the end of each ballad or section to which they refer.
A line of 7 spaced dots indicates a missing line of poetry. A line of 7 spaced asterisks indicates missing poetry material of one or more stanzas; this is distinct from a "thought break" or sub-section separator of 5 widely spaced asterisks such as follow these notes.
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