The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by the late Francis James Child, was published in ten parts, forming five large volumes, from 1882 to 1898. It contains three hundred and five distinct ballads, but the number of texts printed in full is much larger than this, for Professor Child's plan was to give every extant version of every ballad. Thus of No. 4, 'Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight,' he published nine different versions; of No. 58, 'Sir Patrick Spens,' eighteen; of No. 173, 'Mary Hamilton,' twenty-eight, — and so on. Each ballad has an introduction dealing with the history and bibliography of the piece, and containing a full account of parallels in foreign languages, and, in general, of the diffusion of the story, with other pertinent matter. There are also exhaustive collations, elaborate bibliographies, an index of published ballad airs, a collection of tunes, — and, in a word, all the apparatus necessary for the study of this kind of literature.
The present volume offers a selection from the materials collected and edited by Mr. Child, and is prepared in accordance with a plan which he had approved. Each of the three hundred and five ballads in his large collection (except Nos. 33, 279, 281, 290, and 299) is represented by one or more versions, without the apparatus criticus, and with very short introductions. The notes, which are necessarily brief, give specimens (and specimens only) of significant stanzas from versions not included in the volume. The numbers (1-305) and letters (A, B, etc.) correspond to the designations used in the large collection, and there is, in every case, an implied reference to that work for further information. For instance, 'The Twa Sisters' (No. 10) is here represented by two versions, A and B, selected from those published by Mr. Child, which (as the note on p. 642 indicates) are twenty-seven in number. To A is prefixed (both in this volume and in the large collection) a memorandum of the four sources (a, b, c, d) from which Mr. Child derived this version. The text, as printed on pp. 18, 19, is identical with the text of a as edited by Mr. Child, but the variant readings, fully registered in the large collection, are omitted. The short introduction to No. 10 is extracted from Mr. Child's eight-page introduction, to which the student who wishes to pursue the subject will naturally have recourse. Mr. Child's own words are retained whenever that was possible. The present volume, it will be observed, is neither a new edition of the collection of Mr. Child nor a substitute for it. It differs from that work in scope and purpose. Yet it is, in a manner, complete in itself. It affords a conspectus of English and Scottish ballad literature which, it is hoped, may be useful to the general reader and may lead those who feel a more particular interest in the subject to acquaint themselves at first hand with the full collection of texts and other apparatus in Mr. Child's admirable volumes.
The Glossary is based on that in the larger work. It is not intended to furnish material for linguistic investigations, but merely to assist the reader.
For obvious reasons, it has seemed best to reproduce the List of Sources entire. For other bibliographical lists the large collection may be consulted.
The general Introduction has been written especially for this book. It attempts to sum up, as simply and judicially as may be, the present state of a very complicated discussion.
The portrait of Mr. Child is from a photograph belonging to Miss Catharine Innes Ireland.
Professor Neilson has had the great kindness to relieve the editors of the difficult task of preparing the glossary, and Miss Ireland has rendered invaluable assistance in proof-reading. Without the help of these generous and self-sacrificing friends the appearance of the book would have been long delayed.
Cambridge, Mass., March 16, 1904.
This page most recently updated on 29-Nov-2010, 17:32:03. Return to main index
