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Ballads
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The Supernatural: A Complete History
In this course, Professor Nick Groom (University of Exeter) explores the history of the supernatural in English and American literature. The course begins by thinking about two of the key sources of supernatural literature, looking in the first module at the popular ballad tradition in Renaissance England, and in the second at the genre of Revenge Tragedy that flourished on the English stage in the late 16th and early 17th century. In the third and fourth modules, we turn to the figure of the vampire, looking first at the earliest vampires in Classical and Judaeo-Christian mythology, before turning in the fourth module to the vampire in Victorian England – culminating with Bram Stoker's Dracula at the end of the 19th century. After that, in the fifth and sixth modules, we think about the experience of the uncanny, first in general terms and then in relation to Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. In the seventh module, we think about the presentation of ghosts in English literature, before moving on in the eighth and final module to think about how supernatural literature developed in America – and looking in particular at Toni Morrison's 1987 novel, Beloved.
Ballads
In this module, we think about the influence of the popular ballad in the development of the supernatural in literature, focusing in particular on the importance of the English Reformation, the kinds of ballads that were recited or sung in the Early Modern period, and the importance of explicit and extreme violence in these ballads.
Reading List:
– 'Lamkin', F. J. Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, No. 93
– 'The Unquiet Grave', ibid., No. 78
– 'The Cruel Mother', ibid., No. 20
My name's Nick Groom.
00:00:03And I'm professor in English, at the University of Exeter.
00:00:04This series of talks is about the supernatural,
00:00:08the supernatural primarily in literature.
00:00:11I'm going to begin by considering
00:00:14some of the popular traditions.
00:00:16Where does a supernatural come from in literature?
00:00:19If we look at the early modern period,
00:00:24it's coming from three particular areas--
00:00:26from a work about the Counter-Reformation
00:00:31called Foxe's Book of Martyrs, which
00:00:35describes the suffering of Protestant martyrs executed.
00:00:37It comes from the popular ballad tradition,
00:00:42and also from the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobian stage,
00:00:47notably revenge tragedy.
00:00:51Each of these proved to be very significant,
00:00:54not only in constituting the supernatural as a genre,
00:00:58but also in developing a sense not only of
00:01:05the British culture, but of a particular English character
00:01:07or identity.
00:01:13They give an eerie glimpse of the elf world.
00:01:15They describe dreadful persecutions.
00:01:20And they're often undecidable, indeterminate, ambiguous,
00:01:25in the way they consider the relationship between fantasy
00:01:31and reality.
00:01:34The sorts of standbys that we have,
00:01:36the ways in which we anchor our identity
00:01:42and belief and understanding are being challenged, and broken.
00:01:45They're being fractured and dismayed in these works.
00:01:51Together, they give the English imagination,
00:01:57particularly the literary imagination,
00:02:03an extraordinary carnality, by which
00:02:05I mean a focus on the body.
00:02:07There are accounts of mutilation and mayhem.
00:02:10The body is always being attacked, or prised apart,
00:02:13or dissected, or tortured.
00:02:18This is not unlike what's happening
00:02:21in the country at the time, with the union
00:02:24and disunion of England and Wales and Scotland.
00:02:27You might want to think how that threat of fragmentation
00:02:32haunts a play, such as King Lear.
00:02:36And these songs and narratives and plays
00:02:41resound with questions of existence.
00:02:43What lies within?
00:02:47What's inside us?
00:02:48Is it the soul?
00:02:49Is it a ghost?
00:02:51Or is it just a question, an enigmatic emptiness?
00:02:52Ballads, I'll begin with ballads.
00:03:00Ballads are popular verse narratives.
00:03:02They could be sung, recited, or read.
00:03:05They were very popular, because they
00:03:09helped to fill the void being left following
00:03:11the Reformation-- the Reformation
00:03:14of Henry VIII, the dissolution of monasteries--
00:03:16that swept away the ritual and the order,
00:03:19but also the art and ceremony of the Roman Catholic church.
00:03:22This leaves an imaginative space.
00:03:28People are no longer exposed to that level of pageantry.
00:03:31One area that they turn to is singing songs
00:03:36and telling ballad narratives, in order
00:03:41to satisfy their imaginative yearnings for the spectacular.
00:03:44The world of balladry is, therefore, archaic.
00:03:51It's old fashioned.
00:03:53It's merry England.
00:03:54It's populated with heroes, and lovers, and villains,
00:03:55and outlaws, and elves, and the fairies.
00:03:58But it's also lawless.
00:04:02The prince is a very capricious, and violence
00:04:04is explicit and extreme.
00:04:07It's also frequently inexplicable.
00:04:09The perpetrators often go unpunished.
00:04:12Their motives are frequently obscure.
00:04:17Their values are, at best, amoral.
00:04:20And so, retribution and redemption are very rare.
00:04:24When they do come, they are often
00:04:29driven by the supernatural, by supernatural agencies
00:04:31and powers.
00:04:35As if when doom strikes, there is no escape from it.
00:04:36The appalling tale of Lamkin, for example,
00:04:42tells of the cold-blooded torture of a baby
00:04:44in order to rouse his mother, the lady of the house.
00:04:46"We'll prick him, and prick him all over with a pin..."
00:04:49And the nurse held the basin for the blood to run in.
00:04:52The mother is raped and murdered.
00:04:56The narrative waltzes in blood.
00:04:59Here's blood in the kitchen.
00:05:02Here's blood in the hall.
00:05:03Here's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall.
00:05:04But Long Lamkin's motives are never revealed.
00:05:08He dies mute and unrepentant on the gallows.
00:05:11The only thing he leaves behind, his only testimony,
00:05:15are his crimes.
00:05:18Now ballads dwell on sex, and rape, and torture,
00:05:20and mutilation, dismemberment, decapitation, death, even
00:05:24in some cases, cannibalism.
00:05:29There's an emphasis on the physical realities
00:05:32of suffering.
00:05:35Death isn't presented as an escape or a state of grace.
00:05:37It's not a form of sacrifice.
00:05:40It's simply a crushing reassertion
00:05:42of the material nature of existence and history.
00:05:45What we really have here is the beginning
00:05:50of the true crime narrative, that
00:05:53fascination with time and place and situation
00:05:56and forensic details.
00:06:00And this is something that Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs,
00:06:02also echoes.
00:06:08The style of Foxes Book of Martyrs
00:06:10is very much of having witnesses to these executions
00:06:12and martyrdom, that go into great detail
00:06:16about the precise forms of torture,
00:06:19the sufferings of the body, the last words, the number
00:06:22of witnesses, the time and the place where
00:06:25it took place, and so forth.
00:06:27And again, this is a very physical and carnal account.
00:06:31There is no redemption perhaps, here.
00:06:36But there are ghosts that begin to haunt these tales.
00:06:39Of course, ghosts have no place in a Protestant theology.
00:06:44They're souls in purgatory, a remnant of Roman Catholicism,
00:06:48and a state of purgatory being rejected by Anglicanism,
00:06:53in 1563.
00:06:57So at best, ghosts could only be understood
00:07:00as being demons, sent to tempt.
00:07:03They were delusive.
00:07:06But it's there, the fact that they're on the threshold,
00:07:08they're on the boundary between life and death,
00:07:12that makes them so appealing to the imagination,
00:07:16so tenacious and so popular in these uncanny tales.
00:07:20It's interesting that ghosts in ballads
00:07:26are often actually rotting, themselves.
00:07:29They're not wispy shadows or wraiths.
00:07:32They're horribly corporeal, decomposing
00:07:36before the eyes of their lovers, or they're
00:07:40premonitions of death.
00:07:43In The Unquiet Grave, which is a song from this period,
00:07:45a dead lover is roused after a year and a day.
00:07:50His true love craves a kiss.
00:07:54But he says that, your mourning me has now going on too long.
00:07:57"You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
00:08:02but my breath smells earthy strong.
00:08:04If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,
00:08:08your time will not be long."
00:08:11So he's saying a year and a day, that's fine for mourning.
00:08:13But beyond that, you will end up--
00:08:16the kiss will be fatal.
00:08:20You'll end up being killed.
00:08:21But the fact that he's saying this as a rotting corpse,
00:08:23not as a perfect idealized vision of that lover,
00:08:26is something which is very suggestive
00:08:30about the imagination of this time,
00:08:32that the fascination is with the physical remnants of the body.
00:08:34The whole notion of the other world, a fairy or elf lands--
00:08:41and this is a land which is folklorically
00:08:46associated with the realm inhabited by the fallen
00:08:49angels--
00:08:52is presented as being consistent with, or overlapping,
00:08:54the everyday world.
00:08:59In The Cruel Mother, the mother kills her own babies.
00:09:01But she inadvertently summons the supernatural,
00:09:07by leaning against a thorn.
00:09:10Because a Hawthorn is traditionally
00:09:11the gateway to fairy land.
00:09:14The mother then summons her dead babies,
00:09:17and is condemned by them.
00:09:21"Heavens for us, but Hells for thee."
00:09:22She's going to be punished for this.
00:09:25So we have a weird mix here, of a Catholic theology
00:09:27and folklore.
00:09:34It really shows how certain beliefs and customs,
00:09:35before the Reformation, end up taking refuge, if you like,
00:09:39in a superstition.
00:09:43Now, I want to say they're both magical and also really amoral,
00:09:45these are.
00:09:49With elves are presented, the fairy folk are
00:09:50presented, again, as being tangible,
00:09:53as being physical creatures, and also
00:09:56subject to their own strange laws of fairy.
00:09:58Thomas the Rhymer, who has legendary powers and prophecy
00:10:02after visiting fairy, is a ballad
00:10:08that describes how he's compelled to leave the perilous
00:10:11realm, because he's in danger of taken by fiends as part
00:10:14of their hellish tithe, or their tax, on elf land.
00:10:19And in fact, he disputes with the queen
00:10:23of fairy in the ballad.
00:10:26And also, of course, he finds that he
00:10:28thinks he's only been away for a short time, turns out that
00:10:30he's been away for years.
00:10:32In another fairy ballad, Tam Lin,
00:10:35the seducer of Lady Margaret, escapes to elf lands,
00:10:37but is cursed by the queen at fairy for what he's seen there.
00:10:43This outdated Christian eschatology,
00:10:47this supernatural structure, underpins the superstitious.
00:10:52These are fragments.
00:10:58These are bits and pieces.
00:10:59These are remnants, or ruins, of earlier Christian traditions.
00:11:01It's a very strange brew, if you'd like.
00:11:04But it would prove to have very powerful, dramatic impact
00:11:08when it came to the stage, in revenge tragedy.
00:11:13
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Groom, N. (2018, August 15). The Supernatural: A Complete History - Ballads [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-supernatural-a-complete-history/english-ghosts
MLA style
Groom, N. "The Supernatural: A Complete History – Ballads." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/the-supernatural-a-complete-history/english-ghosts