The Oxford Book of Ballads

These are the songs that England sang before there was television, before there was radio, before there was much of a printing press. They were passed from voice to voice, village to village, century to century, changing with each telling but keeping their raw, beating heart. Murder ballads and maritime adventures. Loves that transcend death and betrayals that end in blood. A young knight who trades his soul for three kisses from a fairy queen. A woman who dresses in her dead lover's clothes to win back his estate. A farmer who tricks the devil with a pitchfork and a prayer. Arthur Quiller-Couch assembled this collection in 1910 from the great scholarly archives of balladry, organizing the traditional songs by theme: magic and the supernatural, romance and tragedy, historical legend and hard-bitten comedy. The language is lean, stark, and violent, built for voices around a fire, and it still lands with force five centuries later. For anyone who thinks poetry must be delicate, these ballads will revise that assumption entirely.