Lecture The Literature of the 15th century. Robin Hood Ballads

3. The Classification of Ballads
According to the most popular version all the traditional ballads can be divided into 3 groups:
Riddling Ballads. The traditional lore (знание) & magical knowledge are to be found in them. Although most of them are simply ballads, they sometimes conceal the shadows of ancient native British traditions. For example, many of them contain riddles or questions which is very typical of British tales. The characters are to answer the questions in order to win the fight, to pass the monsters, to save themselves or their friends.
Necromantic Ballads. These are the remains of an ancient necromantic tradition of the crossing of the threshold between life and death. In fact, Necromancy means the discovery of information or seeking for advice from the dead. The dead have already got the wisdom which one can get only when he leaves that world.
Other World Ballads. They deal with other world and with a journey of a human into it whether by privilege or by enslavement. These ballades were originally collected in the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century from oral traditions from all over England and Ireland.

4. Unique Features of the Medieval English and Scottish Ballads
Most of them were probably composed between 1200 and 1700 in Northern England and Scotland. Their origins are controversial. Most of them were not written down until the 18th and even the 19th century. The medieval English and Scottish ballads have many features that make them unique and different from all the other types of writing:
1. A musical ballad was one of the easiest ways to carry a message because it often had a refrain and a certain rhythm. The refrains are simply the two last lines of a stanza. When repeated they helped to add suspense to the stories as well as to make stories easier to remember. Similar to the refrain some additional repetition was often used to add the suspense. The difference is that additional repetitions had slight variations slowly progressing the story every time that the story was repeated.
2. Many ballads are about death and morbid subjects because during that period many people were dying from different deceases and it was not uncommon for ballads to be stories about death. They even had slight humor because death was very common in everyday life.
3. Some of the most popular ballads survived many generations. In fact, because they were never written down in those days, there may exist hundreds of versions of one and the same ballad.
4. Ballads of this time were generally written in stanzas called quatrains. These stanzas usually contained the 1st and the 3rd lines with 6 syllables.

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