Gothic Ballads

Abstract

Gothic ballads, with their dead babies, seduced nuns, abandoned mermaids, undead knights, and malicious monks, enjoyed a heyday in Germany and England from the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Steeped in folk and oral traditions, these neo‐primitivist ballads were a transitional genre – derived from a partly oral tradition and a partly written one – and as such they mediated in their very existence a culture in rapid flux, partly singing and partly writing its way into modernity. The ballad is perhaps one of the most inconsistent genres in its implications, highly traditional and providential, while its later manifestations appear to advocate the need to renounce superstitions in favour of the emerging rationalistic code of conduct that bourgeois Europe was tentatively embracing. One of the earliest attempts to define the ballad as a genre can be found in Bishop Thomas Percy's ‘Appendix II: On the Ancient Metrical Romances’ attached to his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Percy's need to construct a dark Northern origin for Britain, shrouded in mists of obscurity, suggests for Clifford Siskin ‘a mysteriously romantic time that gave way to an enlightened present; it also includes our ongoing fascination with what Gothicism – with its strange mix of chivalry haunted by trips to Catholic countries and hints of the forbidden East – was and, to a large extent, still is … a site for the symbolic violence of selective forgetting and remembering’ (1988: 11).