Popular British Ballads, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 4 (of 4)

These are the songs your grandmother's grandmother sang. Collected in the late Victorian era but dating back centuries, the ballads in this volume preserve the raw, uncensored heart of British folk tradition: lovers who die for each other, ghosts who return from the grave, villages swallowed by the sea, and shepherds who murder their wives without remorse. R. Brimley Johnson's anthology gathers ballads passed down through generations of oral telling, preserving the primal stories that kept audiences rapt before novels, before cinema, before any of it. Here is "The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire," where flood waters rise and church bells ring too late, and where a woman named Elizabeth is lost to the sea. Here are tales of love and betrayal, of the supernatural, of ordinary people caught in extraordinary tragedy. The language is plain, almost stark, but therein lies its power. These are the stories that taught a culture how to think about love, death, and the worlds beyond our own. For readers who want to understand where storytelling came from, for lovers of folk tradition and oral history, for anyone who believes the simplest words can carry the heaviest weight.