The Expedition to Birting's Land, and Other Ballads

These are the songs your ancestors sang before they knew how to forget them. Collected and rendered by George Borrow, these ballads thrum with the raw pulse of medieval legend: King Dierick and his iron-clad knights riding toward Birting's Land to face an enemy who has declared war upon their honor. But the battlefield holds stranger dangers than mortal steel. A witch rises into the night sky transformed into a crane, her sorcery threading through the battle like a dark current, and the men who march forward must contend not only with swords and spears but with forces that bend the laws of the natural world. Beyond this central saga of valor and supernatural dread, the collection folds in smaller ballads of love found and lost, of nature's indifferent beauty, and of human emotion stripped down to its most elemental. The language is old, but the hunger in these verses feels eternal. For readers who crave poetry that moves like a river toward war, these are the raw materials of myth before anyone sanitized them into fairy tales.