SIX

Love and Death

Students ballad-hunting in the southern Appalachians used to be advised to ask for “old-timey love songs” (on the theory that mountaineers would not know what “ballads” were). When they came back home and sang the pieces they had learned in their wanderings, families and friends often asked, “But why are they so sad?” This combination of clichés, that ballads are “love songs,” but “sad,” is not entirely inaccurate. Recent scholarly work from diverse critical schools confirms the impressionistic conviction that love and death are the great ballad subjects.

Three post-Lord, post-Buchan books, in particular, give serious attention to ballad meaning and to the leitmotifs in which that meaning often finds expression. Roger deV. Renwick, in English Folk Poetry: Structure and Meaning (1980), takes a structuralist approach to the ethic and world view expressed in traditional verse. Edith Randam Rogers, in The Perilous Hunt (1980), takes a literary approach to the use of symbols in European balladry. Flemming G. Andersen, in Commonplace and Creativity (1985), takes a narratological-linguistic approach to the connotations of commonplaces in Anglo-Scottish balladry. Application to Agnes Lyle’s ballads confirms the insights of these authors into the thematic roles of love and death in traditional English-language ballads and also suggests ways in which her repertoire is distinctive. Renwick’s analysis of the social structure of “euphemistic” ballads helps to explain why certain Lyle ballads end with love or, alternately, with death. Rogers’s analysis of six classes of symbols, all dealing with both love and death, casts light on obscure points in Lyle ballads. And Andersen’s analysis of the supra-narrative function of commonplace stanzas brings out subtleties in the narrative handling of love and death in the Lyle ballads. This analysis of leitmotif from these several points of view will tend to confirm the unity and especially the traditionally of the Lyle repertoire by demonstrating how the singer consistently frames her ballads within traditional limits. And it will confirm the creativity of the singer by demonstrating how she achieves nuance through exercise of choice within those limits.

Renwick touches on love and death in his chapter on “The Bold Fisherman” (e.g., 26, 41). But a more useful chapter for students of balladry is probably the chapter on “The Semiotics of Sexual Liaisons,” in which the love-death opposition is related to the comic or tragic outcome of the love affair. In this chapter Renwick sets up a three-part classification for those English folksongs which include sexual acts as part of their content. He calls the three types the symbolic, the metaphoric, and the euphemistic.¹ In the first type, the sex act is represented symbolically and somewhat abstractly, as in the following two examples from among many he cites:

and (a little more explicit):

The first piece is probably not about cuckoos, and the second is not about flowers, at least not primarily; flowers and cuckoos function as symbols in these songs. There is, accordingly, no one-to-one correspondence of elements in the symbolic action with elements in the symbolized sexual action; it makes no sense to ask what is the singing, and what is the flying, and what is the red, and what is the blue. In metaphoric songs, another of Renwick’s types, there is such a correspondence, as the following example illustrates:

In this example music is not a symbol but a metaphor, and the one-to-one correspondence between musical references in the dialogue and aspects of the sexual encounter is quite clear. The third type (which Renwick places second), is euphemistic in that it uses the “reasonably decorous” speech of ordinary conversation, in which the sex act is represented by a euphemism, as in “The Baffled Knight” and “The Basket of Eggs,” two of Renwick’s examples, or in the following stanza from Agnes Lyle’s “Lord William”:

In euphemistic songs girls indulge in “wantonness and play,” until they “go with child.” Young men “lie with” their partners, or even, as in “Bonnie Baby Livingston,” they “stow them clean away.”

Drawing on analysis of 92 English euphemistic songs, Renwick builds a model of the sexual code expressed in songs of this type (72). The signifiers in the model are five oppositional pairs of personal traits related to territory, experience, social status, personality, and motive: Is the character acontex-tual (e.g., a sailor), or does the character have a particular territorial context (e.g., a village maid)? Is the character older and more experienced or younger and more innocent? Is the character high-born or lowly? Is the character blessed with a strong and innovative personality or a weak and conventional one? Finally, does the character court over the strong opposition of some authority figure, or does the character court for intrinsic motives (i.e., for pure love)? Renwick labels his oppositions masculine and feminine, but the terms assertive and passive will serve the purpose here.² The basic message of the model is that a character who exhibits passive traits will have a tragic (or at least unsuccessful) experience in a sexual liaison with one who exhibits assertive traits. The experience can become comic (ending happily), if the passive one can exhibit at least one assertive trait—though even that may not be enough.

Since one signifier suffices for a euphemistic song, although some include more, the possible combinations of elements from the model are many. Renwick identifies 13 applications (“precepts”) among his 92 songs. Though his first group of applications, to songs about prostitutes, does not apply to Agnes Lyle’s songs (none of hers are about prostitutes), his other two groups of applications are quite apt. The second group of applications is to songs about the eternal triangle of husband, wife, and lover. Here Renwick observes that the husband who is passive in his relationship to his wife will have a tragic experience. “Little Musgrave” would seem to be a weak application of this principle: Lord Barnabas, the husband, has a definite context, and is out of that context, a “feminine,” or “passive” trait according to the model, when his wife, taking an active role, seduces Mossgrey. A stronger example is Jamie Douglas, who passively accepts what people tell him about his wife and locks himself in his room. So too, Linlyon is conventional and passive enough to let Barbara Livingston write to her lover, trusting to his defined context for protection. Other weak husbands are the bridegrooms in “Fair Janet,” “Hind Horn,” and “Lord William.” A sad example of this principle is the King of Onorie, who loves the fair maid “passively,” motivated by intrinsic reasons, “for womanheid / And for her fair beautie.”

Adulterous lovers, Renwick observes, will likewise come to grief if they stray out of their defined context. Mossgrey is the most obvious victim of this principle. Though Renwick frames the principle in terms of wife and lover, “Mary Hamilton” demonstrates its applicability to “the other woman” as well as to “the other man.” Besides straying out of her proper context, Mary Hamilton makes other “passive” mistakes, such as engaging with someone older, more experienced, and higher-born, and getting pregnant. But Renwick discusses these latter applications of the model in connection with man-maid relationships, not in connection with adultery. This principle has an “escape clause,” as Sweet William and Hind Horn demonstrate at their lovers’ weddings: Innovative action can turn tragedy to comedy.

The Lyle ballads suggest further applications of the Renwick model to triangular love relationships, applications not covered in his list of “precepts.” In “Little Musgrave” and again in “Gypsy Laddie” a low-born man who indulges in adultery with a high-born lady comes to grief. Lady Barnabas seems to come to grief because she initiates the liaison for intrinsic reasons (Mossgrey is good looking), and because she remains passive when the warning horn blows. “Bonnie Baby Livingston” suggests two more applications: that the innovative wife can circumvent her husband and that if she loves for intrinsic reasons, she may come to grief nonetheless.

Renwick’s final set of precepts concerns relationships between a man and a maid. In his folksong sample the most important principle of all is that a liaison with an acontextual man will lead to grief, unless the maid can be resourceful, like the girl in “Basket of Eggs,” who hands her lover the baby in an egg basket. But except for the “Basket of Eggs” and “Broken Token” fragments, none of Agnes Lyle’s ballads clearly demonstrate this principle. It may have some application to “Babylon,” in which the outlyer seems at first an acontextual man. A second important principle is that a rape or seduction attempt will be unsuccessful for the man if the maid can be innovative. A version of “The Baffled Knight” is Renwick’s example of this principle at work. The strongest example in the repertoire is “Babylon,” in which the two weak sisters are destroyed but the innovative sister escapes death. The love ballads that end tragically illustrate other applications of the model. “Fair Janet” and “The Cruel Mother” (along with “Mary Hamilton”) have heroines who make the conventional passive mistake of becoming pregnant, and “Fair Janet,” “Twa Sisters,” and “The Braes o’ Yarrow” have heroines who love for intrinsic reasons. The unambiguously happy love ballads in the repertoire also conform to Renwick’s model. “Johnie Scot” is a complex example. The heroine exhibits the passive traits of love for intrinsic reasons as well as pregnancy. But she, to quote Renwick, “succeed[s] in escaping the tragedy by means of a sanction—by possessing the masculine trait of social status at least equal to, or even higher than, her male partner’s” (81). “Lord William” demonstrates Renwick’s final principle, that a liaison “in a neutral context with a partner of equal age, experience, and social status” (82) can end happily. William and his beloved are beyond the sea, both young and innocent, and of modest station. In terms of the model, they are made for each other.

Renwick’s sample tends to focus on women in songs of courtship and on men in songs of adultery. Consequently, he says very little about the conditions under which a man may love successfully or unsuccessfully. The tragic husband in “Sheath and Knife,” at least marginally a euphemistic sexual song, demonstrates only “passive” qualities: he loves for intrinsic reasons, he takes the trip at his wife’s suggestion, and he goes hunting, again at her suggestion, while she has her baby. Hind Horn, on the other hand, succeeds by being innovative. Johnie Scot, finally, is innovative, acontextual (a Scots soldier in England), and doubly defiant, (since the authority figure is both father and king).

This analysis of the Lyle repertoire in terms of the Renwick model for euphemistic folksongs reveals things about both balladry and the model and suggests several conclusions. In the first place, all seventeen of the ballads with explicit sexual content are consistent with the model. This statistic is somewhat surprising in view of Renwick’s statement in the following chapter of his study that “the Child ballads would have had little referential function, being antique pieces referring to a world past and gone, quite beyond the reach of the company’s [i.e., the company assembled in a pub in the late nineteenth century] experiential present” (117). This consistency between the Renwick model, derived from English folksongs, and these seventeen ballads, representative of the Lowland Scots tradition, suggests that the model applies to classic ballads as well as to broadside ballads and “folksongs” in the narrowest sense of that term and to Lowland Scots songs as well as to English songs. If the model articulates a worldview, as Renwick holds, then this conclusion reinforces the impression that Lowland Scotland and England share a common set of sexual mores and attitudes. The next thing to notice is that Renwick’s 13 precepts do not exhaust the applications of the model. Beyond the world of “folksong,” in the world of balladry, further types of situations are imagined, and the implications of the model in these further situations are worked out. Finally, matching the model to the Lyle ballads reveals that the two components which figure most often in this repertoire are social disparity and love for intrinsic reasons.³ The next chapter will return to this bit of data.

In The Perilous Hunt Edith Rogers examines six motifs or symbols common to international balladry from Britain to Russia. The book, though weak in over-all impact, is rich in individual insights into both Spanish and Anglo-Scottish ballads. Her thesis is that visual images are signalers of the emotional content of a ballad:

Deceived by the seeming simplicity of style, we may fail to give due credit to the subtle means of implying, suggesting, or insinuating; but thinking back on a ballad we have heard, we find that somehow we know much more than we were told in words. We are aware, for example, of the intentions, expectations, emotions, sufferings, strengths, or failings of a girl. Or again, we know, long before the narrative reaches that point, whether the hero is going to triumph or to die. Should we now have the ballad repeated, we are likely to find that the explicit information in the text is about the girl’s dress or the man’s dog, and that there is no mention of the girl’s mood or the man’s imminent fate.

My point is that the verse about the dress or the dogs is precisely what made us aware of all the things unsaid. . . . The literal meaning of the image is not displaced by, but coexists with its figurative meaning. This, while not the exclusive property of the poetic diction of ballads, is one of its essential characteristics. (2)

Because Rogers, like Andersen, is discussing connotations and because the symbols she identifies are sometimes encapsulated in English ballad commonplaces, there is some overlap between the Rogers and Andersen studies.

Rogers finds that the hunt, her first symbol, usually functions as a hint, a prelude to what is to come, usually either love or death. The Lyle repertoire provides several examples of hunts with such a presaging function. In the first stanza of “Johnie Scot” the association of hunting with love is almost metaphorical:

In “Earl Richard” associations of hunting with love and with death combine as Earl Richard, out hunting, stops to visit his old girlfriend on his way to see the new one, and the scorned lady stabs him. Hunting is likewise a prelude to death in “Sheath and Knife,” but this time it is the beloved who dies. The association of hunting with death by murder, as Rogers points out, is easily understood. Her examples, three Danish ballads, could almost be variants of the repertoire version of “The Braes o Yarrow”:

In Danish ballads family feuds reach a bloody settlement when the hostile parties meet in the woods. Three ballads end with a fatal clash between the hero and the lady’s brothers, whose permission to court their sister he has failed to ask (DgF 303, 415, 416). (21)

In stanza 8 of “The Braes o Yarrow” the brothers even ask, “Come you here to hawk or hound?” The hero’s statement in stanza 9, implying that he has left hawks and hounds at home, corresponds to a second function of hunting imagery in balladry: A successful hunt, as in “Johnie Scot,” indicates the integrity of a hero, but an unsuccessful hunt indicates the hero’s disintegration. In stanza 9 the unsuccessful hunt motif has been reduced to its simplest form, absence of hawk and hound. A hero without his hawk and hound is a hero doomed (Cf. Rogers 1980, 36). Note that this motif, signalling the reversal of the hero’s fortunes, is introduced in the exact center of the ballad; in emotional structure as in stanzaic structure, annular symmetry sometimes prevails.

Rogers’s next symbol, the game, is rare in the Lyle repertoire. The most common connotation of games is love. The commonplace about 24 ladies playing ball, as both Rogers and Andersen assert, singles out one player as the flower of them all. The implication would seem to be that she will be a flower at the game of love, just as she was at the game of ball. Her free ballplaying is too attractive to resist. Ballplaying is thus a prelude to sexual activity, usually adultery or abduction. Andersen is puzzled by a second use of ball playing, that in “The Cruel Mother” and “The Twa Brothers.” Rogers clarifies the confusion: games, with their highly controlled structure, serve as symbols of fate (54). Thus, when the cruel mother spies her boys playing at ball, fate enters the story. In Agnes Lyle’s version, the relentless march of the second half of the ballad reinforces this interpretation of the function of the ball playing. Similarly, the twa brothers playing a game of ball can not avoid their sad fate in Child 49. Indeed, the primary function of games in all ballads may be as symbols of fate: their function as symbols of love may be a special case, an indication of the fated and fatal quality of the love to come.⁴

Clothing, the third symbol which Rogers analyzes, is one of the most ubiquitous symbols in ballads as in life. It frequently indicates the beauty of the wearer. Thus, when Hind Horn gives his beloved a broad gown, he is acknowledging her beauty, and when the miller admires the younger sister’s silver slippers and ribbons many, he is admiring the girl’s multiple charms. Rich clothes, in addition to symbolizing beauty, often symbolize wealth, status, and love (60). When the Lady of Cassillis leaves with the Gypsy Laddie, she trades her silken cloak for a plaidie. In putting off her silk, she is putting off wealth, status, and the love of her husband. But not completely. She retains her gown, stockings, and shoes. When the Gypsy Laddie sells these he is selling what is left of her wealth, beauty, status, and what is left of her love for him. Another subtle example of this sort of clothing symbolism occurs in “Hind Horn.” Returning to his own land on his sweetheart’s wedding day, Hind Horn discovers that his beauty, wealth, and status have not served to secure love. So he niffers clothes with a beggar. To gain all, he is willing to lose all. His act of disguise, functional on the level of plot, is a kind of a death on the level of meaning; and unless the grain of wheat die it remains itself alone.

Giving clothing can serve as a kind of expiation (66). Thus, when the cruel mother sees the pretty boys in her father’s hall she wants to dress them in silks so fine. But it is too late. The boys reject this act of expiation. But at least the cruel mother had wrapped her dead sons in the “sattins was on her head.” Mary Hamilton does not even do so much. She signals her initial cruelty by putting her child in a piner pig—a small pot—instead of wrapping it well.

While much of the poetic excellence of a ballad comes through manipulation of the singer’s resources, poetic qualities also arise through the accidents of transmission (Coffin 1961, 250 ff.). “Mary Hamilton” offers a striking example. In those texts of the ballad in which the dead baby remains undiscovered and unadmitted, Mary believes she is going to a wedding or other pageantry in the Capital. She dresses accordingly. Not until she gets to the courtroom, or even the gallows, does she realize that, fooled herself, she has fooled no one. In Agnes Lyle’s version, and not in hers alone, Mary knows clearly that she is going to her execution. When stanzas about going to and dressing for a wedding become attached to a version like this one in which Mary has admitted murdering her child, the effect is startling. The wedding is her execution, her wedding with death. And the care with which she dresses for the occasion is a commentary on the great internal strength of this woman who is also a child-murderess. The fascination of the ballad centers on the great drama with which the protagonist plays out the scene of her own death. She dresses in a wedding dress of gold.⁵ She rebukes those who weep. She drinks a toast to all travellers who sail the sea between her birthplace and her deathplace. And finally she refuses a reprieve from the king himself, existentially choosing the hand which fate has dealt her:

Ironically her manner of bearing the shame of her death gives her a dignity which is immortal.

Some of the drama which attaches to this execution scene may come from the association, supposed or real, of the heroine with the court of Mary Queen of Scots. That Mary too played her execution to the hilt. The drama with which she conducted herself in her final hours was well known, and some of her reputation doubtless rubbed off on her maid-in-waiting. At the moment of execution Mary Stuart dropped off her gown of coal black and stood exposed in bodice and petticoat of blood red (Fraser 1970, 538).

Mary Hamilton by casting off her gown expresses symbolically her renunciation of the luxurious life she has led, a renunciation she will confirm by her words to her paramour in the final stanza. According to Andersen, the one who dresses herself in splendor is usually seeking to regain her lost love. Mary’s choice of vesture is thus doubly ironic. She dons the glistering gold only to doff it; she goes seeking her paramour only to reject him.

Fair Janet is a second character in the repertoire who dresses for a wedding which is simultaneously her own funeral. Unlike Mary, however, Agnes Lyle’s Janet rejects finery from the beginning: “Sma busking will serve me.”⁶ As Rogers suggests, dressing well would symbolize expectation of a happy marriage. Such, Janet knows, is not to be. Rejecting finery, Janet rejects hope (77).

Like clothing, hair is often used to signify physical beauty. In this northern European tradition it is most often yellow hair, as in “The Twa Sisters,” “Earl Richard,” and “Braes o’ Yarrow.” More specifically, as Andersen and Rogers both point out, combing hair expresses sexuality and sexual longing, whence the poignancy of references to hair juxtaposed with references to death. In “Braes o’ Yarrow” the wife combs her husband’s hair one last time before he rides off to be murdered beside the River Yarrow.

Andersen points out that references to sewing are functional equivalents to references to combing and convey the same message of sexual longing (1985, 109; cf. 112). Accordingly, Agnes Lyle sings:

where the A, F, and H versions of “Sir Patrick Spens” mention combs or combing. Whether sewing or combing, the lady yearns for her husband sexually and every other way, but her yearning is in vain.

If combing hair down indicates sexual longing, what is indicated by putting hair up? Mary Hamilton puts up the queen’s hair with gold combs. Does this detail indicate the queen’s sexual coldness? Does it indicate that in some way Mary saves the queen’s marriage by servicing her husband? Certainly the detail has endured in tradition persistently enough to indicate that it is a significant element in the affective structure of the ballad.

The motif of yellow hair combines in “The Twa Sisters” with the motif of magic music, another important ballad symbol. In this ballad the song of the hair-strung fiddle has a clear narrative function, to effect the denouement by exposing the murderess. But the dramatic effectiveness of the song depends as much on its “supra-narrative function,” to borrow Andersen’s phrase. As Rogers puts it, “Allowing for all the variety in the character of the musicians and in the development of the stories, the music in the ballads discussed up to now can be said to express an ideal concept—supreme beauty or supreme love, or a fusion of both” (127). The cruel sister has deprived the heroine of life, of love, of all. But nothing, not even death, can deprive her of her yellow hair and her voice, this final double symbol of her beauty and her love (Cf. 125).⁷

The final symbol Rogers discusses is transformation, specifically the transformation of lovers into birds. Within the Lyle repertoire this sort of vestigial metempsychosis survives only in “Earl Richard.” The text is an instructive one to consider when reflecting on the vagaries of ballad transmission. Apparently the ballad “Young Hunting,” of which this text is a variant, has quite died out in Scottish and British tradition and never gained a foothold in northeastern North America. But in the southern United States it still flourishes in a truncated form. Like the southern American versions, Agnes Lyle’s text is also truncated. Motherwell closes his transcription with a line of x’s and the comment: “The catastrophe is wanting, but the lady’s treachery was discovered and she was burned.” In the missing final portion of the ballad the hero’s father accuses the girl of killing Richard. Divers or “duckers,” sent to look for the body, are unsuccessful until the bird tells them to try by night, floating candles on the water to discover the location by the brightness of the flame. When the murderess is confronted with the recovered corpse, the wounds of the corpse break out afresh. The murderess asserts that her maid, not she, is the guilty party, and the maid is sent to the stake. The flames refuse to do more than singe the maid a little for her complicity in the cover-up operation. But when the lady is tied to the stake, they consume her eagerly. No wonder Agnes Lyle had trouble with this “catastrophe,” and American singers dropped it completely! It is hard to see how such a complex denouement ever developed in balladry, but easy to see how it disappeared, especially in the simpler style of balladry which the nineteenth century came to prefer.

What seems to have happened is that singers like Agnes Lyle had trouble with the ending and tended to break off before the ballad was finished. The next “generation” of singers, knowing the song only up through the dialogue with the bird, fashioned from what they remembered a new and intriguing conclusion. Already in the long version of “Young Hunting,” the symbolic bird, like the birds in the Spanish ballad of “Conde Olinos” which Rogers discusses, has dropped the metempsychotic role and functions as instrument of revenge. In the Lyle version the refashioning has progressed a step further: the bird is now an incipient symbol of conscious guilt. In more recent American versions the refashioning is complete. These versions end with the bird confronting the murderess. This conclusion has an unsettling ambivalence about it. Though the body is safely out of sight, a little bird knows all, and the lady will never be able to enjoy an easy night’s sleep. Thus tradition has refashioned the bird. No longer the metempsychotic soul of the murdered lover, nor simply an agent of discovery, it is now the full-fledged embodiment of conscience. But what Rogers says of the birds in “Conde Olinos” still applies to the bird in “Young Hunting/Earl Richard”:

The changes in the function of the motifs suggest some reasons for . . . longevity. Whether a popular ballad lives or dies depends not so much on the quality of its ancestors as on its ability to evoke new associations that touch the values and concerns of successive generations. Those who would use the word “traditional” to denote something that has not kept up with the times fail to recognize that tradition—at least popular tradition—sustains only what is alive. (148)

The bird as symbol of guilt can find a place in a Christian worldview that does not allow much room for metempsychosis.

In addition to the bird, Agnes Lyle’s “Earl Richard” contains many other fine touches. The traditional language is often felicitous. Alliterative phrases include many classic epithets: “hunting horn,” “bow bendit,” “water wide,” and the oath by “grass-green growing corn.” The oath has intrigued scholars, including Child and Wimberly, who both considered it a survival of pagan practices (Child 1882-1898, 2: 137; Wimberly 1928, 362). At times the formulaic technique produces a gnomic quality, as in:

a chilling effect, as in:

or effective ballad understatement, as in:

The story contains scenes of high drama, and this version preserves the best of them: the murder/kiss, the ride with corpse booted and spurred, and the discovery that the bird knows all and can not be tricked. The final scene of more complete versions, when the fire singes the maid but consumes the lady, is ironic but not essentially dramatic, and requires a tiresome amount of exposition to prepare it. The candles floating on the water are the only redeeming element in that tiresome exposition. They appeal to the folklorist and to the comparative mythologist, but obviously to the traditional singer they have not been worth the trouble. The story of the knight, the scorned lover, and the bird has proved to be alive and evocative; the sequel to that story is now dead.

As the above analysis demonstrates, all six major ballad symbols exhibit, in the usage of Agnes Lyle as well as in the usage of the larger European ballad community, associations with love and associations with death. The hunt is a prelude to love, or to death. Games, too, are preludes to love, but that love usually eventuates in death. Clothing is a gift of love, but shedding clothing is a kind of death. The act of combing hair expresses longing for love, a longing especially poignant if the love object is already caught in death. Magical music can induce love, and transcend death. Finally, violent death can transform the beloved into a bird of rumor or of conscience.

Like Rogers, Andersen emphasizes the connotative or affective aspects of ballad language, especially in Part III of Commonplace and Creativity, where he discusses the supra-narrative function of ballad formulas. This supra-narrative function is related to the emotional value of the narrated action:

Formulas typically serve as forewarning or as personal characterization: they will often signal the dramatic development towards the narrative climax, or they may be employed to portray the characters at the moment of crisis, outline their reaction to dramatic events. In either case the stylistic overtones derive from expressions of people acting. It appears that the formulas’ emblematic potential provides the only widespread instances of character portrayal in the tightly structured ballad genre, preoccupied as it is with getting the story told. The alternation between presaging and characterizing formulas is one of the decisive factors for the ballad’s peculiar dramatic narrative presentation. (288; italics in original)

Andersen goes on to point out that from the point of view of subject matter as opposed to function, the two main divisions are formulas of love and formulas of death. In some cases, the two subjects overlap.⁸

Fifteen of the Lyle ballads are included in Andersen’s tabulation of commonplace occurrence, but only four or five appear more than twice (see Table 1). Andersen himself is doubtful of the status of the “Mary Hamilton” stanza which begins: “She put not on her black clothing.” He suggests that it may be a variant of the “She dressed herself in scarlet red” commonplace. Or it may be a context-bound, formula-like stanza, by which he means a formula-like stanza which appears in only one ballad tradition (251). The same formula, however, seems to lie behind the following stanzas found in “Fair Janet” tradition:

The formulation is found, then, with comparable connotations in at least two traditions and so qualifies as a commonplace according to Andersen’s definition.

In these fifteen ballads Agnes Lyle utilizes, one or more times according to Andersen’s citations, a total of eighteen of the commonplaces (counting “She dressed herself in scarlet red”). In general, Agnes Lyle’s use is wholly traditional as Andersen defines the tradition. The present chapter has already suggested a number of the ways that an awareness of supra-narrative function can clarify a text. It only remains to make a few observations on the particular role of supra-narrative function in the Lyle technique.

When a commonplace has more than one supra-narrative function, Agnes Lyle may exploit this option. Thus, the commonplace “He mounted her upon a steed,” may have either positive or negative overtones. The one mounted may go freely and happily or may be forced. The aura the commonplace brings with it from its many uses to describe elopement lend it a special charm when it is used to describe Geordie’s lady carrying her love from the gallows. But its negative aura lends a note of foreboding to the scene in which the Eastmure King seems to rescue the threatened widow; the listener knows that, despite his kindly words, he is up to treachery. The commonplace “When Johnie looked the letter on” has a similar oppositional set of connotations. In “Geordie” the letter is an honest summons to help; in the three other ballads in which it occurs, it is a treacherous summons to entrapment.

TABLE 1

Andersen Commonplaces in Lyle Ballads

The commonplace “Sat drinking at the wine” has slightly different functions, depending on context. In sea ballads, it presages a violent storm; in land ballads it presages a violent confrontation. Both uses are found in the repertoire, in “Sir Patrick Spens” and “Braes o’ Yarrow,” respectively. “Where will I get a bonnie boy” has a similar division of functions according as the context is sea or land. Thus, Young Patrick Spens seeks a bonnie boy to climb the mast and look out for land, but Geordie seeks a boy to carry a message. In “Fair Janet” the double function of the “He hadna ridden/sailed” formula is exploited in a single ballad. Andersen describes this double function as “ominous transition towards disaster at sea, or violent confrontation on land, in either case leading to imminent danger for the person engaging in the formula’s action” (260). The disaster at sea presaged in the stanza beginning “They had not sailed one league, one league,” is death from childbirth. This disaster, averted at sea, eventuates on dry land from the confrontations signalled by the second occurrence of the formula (in a form not noted by Andersen) in stanza 10, beginning “Fair Janet was nae weel lichter.” At the third occurrence of the formula, in stanza 19, the disaster can no longer be delayed:

Although bearing her child does not kill Janet at sea, as first presaged, the birth of this child sets in motion the train of events that ultimately kills her.⁹

Finally, “Johnie Scot” achieves suspense by exploiting the oppositional ambiguity of the commonplace “The first town he came to.” The commonplace usually occurs at the end of a ballad, with one of two functions. It may be the build-up to the happy wedding, as in Andersen’s example:

Or it may build up to the discovery that the loved one (whether sweetheart or sister) is dead. “The formula family embraces the two fundamental concepts of love and death that we have seen walking hand in hand throughout this study.”¹⁰ In the “Johnie Scot” tradition, however, the formula occurs early in the story, at a point where it is difficult to tell which supra-narrative function is being served. The oppositional ambiguity heightens the suspense by emphasizing the only two possible outcomes of Johnie’s journey: he will win his bride, or he will find her dead. Displaced as it is, however, the formula does not give away the outcome. Once again, in the realm of possibilities, love and death are conjoined.

Renwick, Rogers, and Andersen take different approaches in their quest to discover how the concrete visible elements of the ballad world, the characters, props, and actions, function to articulate a single value system. They discover that these symbolic elements, however manipulated by the analyst, still polarize around the opposite values of love and death.

In some ten of Agnes Lyle’s ballads, however, the love-death symbolism goes farther, and the opposites are identified. Weddings are funerals. Marriage kills. In some cases this annuling of oppositions may take place on the linguistic and symbolic level, as in “Mary Hamilton,” already discussed: Mary is going to an execution that has been called a wedding, and she dresses accordingly. But sometimes it may take place on the level of plot, as well. Fair Janet, for instance, is going to a wedding that she knows is her funeral, and she too dresses accordingly. Similarly, the outlyer bold in “Babylon” seeks a wife and finds death. The fair bride in “Eastmure King” wakes to find her wedding bed awash with the blood of her slain husband. Earl Richard’s decision to marry causes his death. The younger of the “Twa Sisters” dies because she is to marry. Barbara Livingston and the hero of Yarrow die because they have married. Hind Horn, as appeared above, has to undergo symbolic death to win his bride. In the pieces from the fragments too, insofar as they can be reconstructed, the opposition is regularly annulled. Fair Margaret blames her death on an unwise marriage; the heroine of the “Broken Token” marries one who has practically come back from the dead; and the hero of “The Week Before Easter” finds a wedding occasion to contemplate suicide. Even in the happy full-length ballad of “Lord William” the heroine tells her father:

The marriage-funeral motif has a foundation in tradition, but in this repertoire it undergoes particularly emphatic reiteration. It is probably impossible to determine the exact significance of this reiteration, beyond suggesting that in these ballads the love-death opposition deconstructs itself. Nevertheless, the wedding-funeral identification is pervasive enough to be designated a mark of the repertoire, distinguishing it from Scottish balladry as a whole, and characterizing it as the work of a single singer. The following chapter will consider such another distinguishing mark of the repertoire, pervasive distrust of the gentry.