Selections from English and Scottish Popular Ballads

Text: all selections marked with a are from English and Scottish Popular Ballads edited from the Collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904). Punctuation, case, and spelling are reproduced as in the originals; not all variants of each ballad are presented here, stanza numbers have been removed, and explanatory headnotes may have been edited for brevity. Definitions (via hypertext link) are taken from the Glossary of this edition. Texts from other sources may not conform to these criteria.

Titles followed by [DT] are from The Digital Tradition (in its new home at Mudcat Cafe); many of these texts are modernized.

For more on the Child Ballads, see the fascinating work (still in an early stage) being done by the "Traditional to Digital" Project Group of Glasgow University Computing Science, which is putting together a multimedia version of the Child Ballads.

• "Cruel Mother" (#20) [DT]
  
• "King Henry" (#32) [DT]
  
• "Laidley Worm" (#36) [DT].
• "The Wee Wee Man" (#38) [DT].
  
• "Proud Lady Margaret" (#47) [DT]
  
• "Clerk Saunders" (#69) [DT]
  
• "Sweet William's Ghost" (#77) (variant A); see also "Lady Margaret" [DT].
  
• "The Unquiet Grave" (#78) and two variants: "The Unquiet Grave" and "The Unquiet Grave" 2 [DT].
  
• "The Wife of Usher's Well" (#79), "The Wife of Usher's Well" 2 (#79) , and "Lady Gay" (#79) [DT].
• "James Harris (The Daemon Lover)" (#243; variant F) ; see also "The Demon Lover" (variant F, some modernization) [DT].
  
• "Grey Cock" (#248) and "Grey Cock (2)" [DT]
  
• "Willie's Fatal Visit" (#255) [DT]
  
• "The Suffolk Miracle" (#272). The Sargent/Kittredge text of the ballad, with headnote.
  Three variants are available online: "The Suffolk Miracle", "Suffolk Miracle" 2, and "The Holland Handkerchief" [DT].
  
• "The Mermaid" (#289) [DT].
  

Child's original 5-volume collection of ballads presents a number of variants of each work, sometimes more than twenty; the Sargent/Kittredge "reader's edition" used here presents just a few variants of each ballad, sometimes only one. This Web site presents only one variant of each ballad, although other variants available elsewhere on the Web may be listed; the boldface capital letter preceeding each text indicates which of the Child variants is used. All headnote text for each ballad is from the Sargent/Kittredge edition.