A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative story and set to music. Ballads were characteristic of particularly British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the nineteenth century and used extensively across Europe and later north America, Australia and north Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the eighteenth century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later twentieth century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song.right|thumb|Illustration by Arthur Rackham of the ballad The Twa Corbies
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A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative story and set to music. Ballads were characteristic of particularly British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the nineteenth century and used extensively across Europe and later north America, Australia and north Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the eighteenth century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later twentieth century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song.right|thumb|Illustration by Arthur Rackham of the ballad The Twa Corbies
The origin of ballads
The ballad probably derives its name from medieval French dance songs or ‘ballares' (from which we also get ballet), as did the alternative rival form that became the French Ballade. In theme and function they may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of epic storytelling that can be seen in poems such as Beowulf.J. E. Housman, British Popular Ballads (1952, London: Ayer Publishing, 1969), p. 15. The earliest example we have of a recognisable ballad in form in England is ‘Judas' in a thirteenth century manuscript.
The ballad form
Most, but not all northern and west European ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four line stanzas) of alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse, each of fourteen syllables. As can be seen in this stanza from ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet',
The horse| fair An|et rode| upon|
He amb|led like| the wind|,
With sil|ver he| was shod| before,
With burn|ing gold| behind|.
However, there is considerable variation on this pattern in almost every respect, including length, number of lines and rhyming scheme, making the strict definition of a ballad extremely difficult.
In southern and eastern Europe, and in countries that derive their tradition from them, ballad structure differs significantly, like Spanish romanceros like which are octosyllabic and use consonance rather than rhyme.
In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self contained story, often concise and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or comic. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and sometimes of entire stanzas.
