What is a Ballad ?

Correct — C, (c) A popular story or folktale in verse.

A ballad is a form of verse, usually telling a story and often set to music. The traditional ballad was the popular poetry and song of England, Ireland and Scotland from the late Middle Ages until the nineteenth century, and it has three marks that together make the definition: it narrates, it is in verse, and it belongs to popular rather than learned literature. The keyed option names all three — a popular story or folktale in verse.

The other features follow from those three. Traditional ballads have no known author and no correct version; they were carried by oral tradition for centuries, so each survives in many variants, exactly as a folktale does. They are built for the ear: most use short stanzas, commonly four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, and they lean on repetition, with a line or a refrain returning stanza after stanza. Many were later printed and hawked as single sheets, the broadsides, and from the eighteenth century collectors began publishing volumes of popular ballads, which is how the oral stock reached print.

The word has since acquired a second, later life: from the end of the nineteenth century a ‘ballad’ also means a slow, sentimental love song, and that is the sense most people meet first today. The item is not asking about that sense — it asks what a ballad is as a literary form, and the answer is the narrative folk poem.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)A novel — ‘A novel’ fails on form before it fails on anything else. A novel is extended prose fiction; a ballad is verse, and usually short enough to be sung at a sitting. The two also differ in how they come into existence: a novel is written by a named author in a fixed text that can be reprinted exactly, while a traditional ballad is anonymous, transmitted by singing and reciting, and survives in competing versions with no original to appeal to. What the option shares with the right answer, and the reason it is offered, is narrative — both tell stories. That is a real point of contact and a useful warning: when a definition item offers several options that all involve storytelling, the discriminating feature is going to be the medium, not the fact of the story.
• (b)A historical narration — ‘A historical narration’ is the near miss on this list. Many famous ballads do recount historical or legendary events — border raids, battles, feuds, outlaws — and a candidate who remembers one of those is likely to reach for this option. But it describes the subject matter of some ballads rather than the form of any, and it is satisfied just as well by a prose chronicle, a school textbook or a memoir, none of which is a ballad. Two things are missing from it. The first is verse, which is what makes a ballad a ballad. The second is the popular, anonymous, orally transmitted character that the word ‘folktale’ in the keyed option carries: a great many ballads are not historical at all but tell of love, jealousy, the supernatural or plain domestic tragedy.
• (d)Musical comedy — ‘Musical comedy’ picks up the fact that ballads are sung and lands in the wrong century and the wrong genre. Musical comedy is a modern form of light stage entertainment with a plot carried by songs and dances; a ballad is a poem, sung by one voice and needing no stage at all. The confusion has a respectable ancestor, which is worth knowing: the eighteenth-century ‘ballad opera’ was a stage form that set new words to popular tunes, and its name comes from the same source. But that is a genre built out of ballads, not a definition of one. Comedy is also the wrong register: the traditional ballad’s standard subjects are violence, betrayal, love and death, and its typical ending is a grim one.

The ballad is the meeting point of three things a literature paper likes to keep separate: narrative, verse and song. Narrative, because a ballad tells a story with characters and an outcome, usually plunging straight into the action and moving by leaps rather than by explanation. Verse, because it is metrical and rhymed, most often in four-line stanzas with the rhyme falling on the second and fourth lines. Song, because it was made to be sung and its repetitions and refrains are the marks of a form carried in the memory rather than on paper.

Its other defining property is anonymity. A traditional or popular ballad has no author to name and no authoritative text; it is folk material, and like any folk material it exists in variants, each singer altering as he goes. That is why the keyed option puts ‘folktale’ beside ‘story’ — the ballad is the folktale’s verse cousin.

Against that, set the neighbouring terms an examiner may offer. An epic is a long narrative poem of heroic action, learned in its ambition and often attached to a named poet. A lyric expresses feeling rather than telling a story. An ode is a formal address to a person or thing. A sonnet is fourteen lines in a set rhyme scheme. An elegy laments the dead. Learning the ballad alongside these keeps the definitions apart, since the option list in this kind of item is generally built from the family.

Key facts

• A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music, and was characteristic of the popular poetry and song of England, Ireland and Scotland from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.
• Traditional ballads have no known author and no single correct version; they passed down by oral tradition, which is why each survives in many variants.
• They commonly use four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, and they rely on repetition and refrains — features that suit a form carried in the memory.
• Many ballads were printed and sold as single sheets, called broadsides, and from the eighteenth century collectors published volumes of popular ballads gathered from oral tradition.
• In later nineteenth-century usage ‘ballad’ also came to mean a slow sentimental love song, which is the sense most familiar today but not the literary one this item asks for.

Common traps

• Answering from the modern sense of the word, in which a ballad is simply a slow love song.
• Choosing an option because it shares the ballad’s storytelling. A novel tells a story too; the medium decides the item.
• Reading ‘historical narration’ as a definition. It names the subject of some ballads and omits both the verse and the popular transmission.
• Being pulled by the musical connection to a modern stage form; the eighteenth-century ballad opera is a genre made from ballads, not the meaning of the word.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is the feature that distinguishes a traditional ballad from an epic ?

  • (a)The ballad tells a story while the epic does not
  • (b)The ballad is a short popular poem, usually anonymous and orally transmitted, while the epic is a long heroic narrative poem
  • (c)The ballad is written in prose
  • (d)The epic is always set to music

  Answer(b) The ballad is a short popular poem, usually anonymous and orally transmitted, while the epic is a long heroic narrative poem — both narrate in verse, so length, register and authorship are what separate them. Option (a) is false of both, option (c) contradicts the definition of a ballad, and option (d) reverses the musical association, which belongs to the ballad.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A poem of four-line stanzas rhyming on the second and fourth lines, telling of a border feud, carried for two centuries by singers and surviving in six different versions, is best described as

  • (a)a sonnet
  • (b)an ode
  • (c)a ballad
  • (d)an elegy

  Answer(c) a ballad — the quatrains with alternate rhyme, the narrative of a feud, the oral transmission and the surviving variants are the standard marks of the form. A sonnet is fourteen lines in a fixed scheme, an ode is a formal address, and an elegy is a lament for the dead.