A Parting Gift

        This section of English 211 focuses on forms of literature that might be called "Middle and Upper Class."  The "folk literature" in English gets only occasional notice in the anthology, but one famous popular literary form is worth knowing about, the "ballad."  Typically composed about contemporary or legendary events in short rhyming stanzas, ballads circulated by oral transmission among the poor and workings classes in Great Britain and the American colonies (especially in Appalachia).  In the late C18 and C19, collectors like Robert Burns and Francis J. Child traveled the north, west, and south of England, Scotland, and Wales to collect and transcribe these ballads before they were lost to memory.  The most famous single collection of these ballads are known as "the Child ballads," named for their collector.  To read some Child ballads, click here.  I recommend "Sir Patrick Spense" and "Tam-Lin," a great Halloween song, but they're all great.  The make one think of long winter evenings by a peat fire listening to songs older than the hills.  Most are in Scots dialect, but say the words out loud and you'll usually be able to figure them out.