The Ballad: they began to appear throughout Europe around the time when the idea of

courtly love was gaining popularity amongst the nobility. While they often dealt with similar
themes of heroism and loyalty, ballads were an essentially popular tradition of the
uneducated and illiterate which recalled the early oral verse of the Celts and the Anglo-
Saxons. Ballads generally used simple language and were composed of short stanzas of two
or four lines which usually rhymed in some way. Just as the scop [ANGLO-SAXON POET] had
done, the balladeer relied on a stock of phrases which could be combined in new ways.

For this reason ballads tend to be repetitive in structure as this makes them easier to
remember. A repeated unit of text is called a refrain. In the earliest examples of ballads, the
refrain was identical for each stanza and guaranteed a particular emotional effect which may
be comic or elegiac, in the same way that the choruses of modern pop songs can excite us
simply because of their familiarity. The stories are usually tragic, but unlike their high culture
equivalents, often have an underlying sense of black humour.

Ballads can be classified in many different categories: border ballads celebrate the rivalry
between the English and the Scottish people; outlaw ballads such as the cycle of Robin Hood
celebrate the lives of outlaws or criminals; ballads of magic tell stories about fairies, witches
and ghosts; town ballads served as subversive commentary on difficult urban conditions.

Most later ballads involved some form of social or political protest, satire or polemic.

Lord Randal Analysis: The version we read of Lord Randal belongs to the so-called
‘Supernatural Ballads’ (Ballads where supernatural characters such as fairies, elves and
ghosts play an important role in the story). This version does not seem magical at first sight,
but if we take into account what the Celtic/Anglo-Saxon culture and mythology left us, the find
the word greenwood in the first stanza is the keyword to understanding what happened and
why the main character was poisoned. A ‘greenwood’ was a sacred place in the forest
inhabited by fairies and elves. Most people were afraid of going there. They thought that if
they walked or rode through it they might be kidnapped by the Queen of the Fairies and taken
to Fairyland. The fairies were the owners of the greenwood and men could neither hunt nor
pluck flowers there without their permission. Some people believed there was also the
entrance to the Other World and that from there the spirits of the dead came out on
Halloween night to ride around the world along with the fairies and elves.

Lord Randal decides to hunt, and by making that decision he challenges the taboo and enters
the greenwood with his hounds and hawks. Strangely enough he meets his ‘true love’ who is
waiting in the greenwood with a pan filled with fried eels. THIS ENCOUNTER IS ABSURD IF
WE LOOK AT IT FROM A LOGICAL POINT OF VIEW:

-how did she know that he would hunt in that part of the forest?
-what was a girl going in the middle of the forest with a pan in her hands?
-was she waiting for him?

It is likely that the girl appeared when she realised that the man was hunting. Even Lord
Randal’s mother suspected that someone was waiting for him in the greenwood that is why
she asks him who did you meet?
How come Lord Randal accepted to eat the eels fried in a pan when there was plenty of game
he could hunt? The only possible answer is that it was not his true love that he met but a fairy
in disguise with the features of his real girlfriend. The fairy was there to defend the
sacredness of the place and cast a spell on him with her magic powers. By doing so she
punished him for the breaking of the taboo. Symbolically the fairy may represent Nature’s
revenge upon those who enter her realm with violence. Celtic folklore also teaches us that if
you eat the food of the fairies you cannot eat anything else and you die because you cannot eat
earthly food anymore.

Another anthropological interpretation would explain why Lord Randal goes to the
greenwood. He is a handsome young man who is supposed to demonstrate that he is worth of
entering the world of adults and taking the place of a dead father (Lord Randal owns
everything so it is evident that the father had died some time before). Hunting alone,
challenging the dangers of the forest for some days, was a means, in ancient societies, to
overcome fear and to become a man. It is a rite of passage. If you win you become a member
of the tribe you live with because you have shown your virility. If you lose you may face death.

Another important feature of this ballad is the testament. You may think that it is cruel to ask
a dying man about his last will. It was not so in the Middle Ages where most people could
neither write nor read. To know the last will before death could prevent people from
quarrelling later. Lord Randal followed the rules of his times by giving his elder brother the
whole estate that had to remain the property of a single owner. His sister inherited gold and
silver as dowry for her marriage [by doing so Randal tells us that she is not married yet]. In
the last stanza he left hell and fire to his true-love. He was still spelled and could not realise
that it was a fairy who had poisoned him. The trick played on him by the fairy had worked
properly. Lord Randal did not understand what his mother had understood.