Terminology

In English, the terms ‘ballad’ and ‘lay’ are commonly used when discussing individual items of verse of the kind in this book. The term ‘ballad’ is generally used here, with the occasional use of the term ‘lay’.  Both terms, however, are misleading to varying degrees. The word ‘ballad’ invites association of the corpus with the Scots and English narrative ballads (like ‘Sir Patrick Spens’) composed in common (stressed) metre, but the Gaelic ballads employ syllabic metre, and are not always concerned with narrative. ‘Lay’ is phonologically closer to laoi(dh), the Gaelic and Irish term sometimes used of a poem of this kind, but it is imprecise.  The term ‘lay’ does, nevertheless, suggest singing and music, which is an important dimension of this body of verse. Some scholars believe that laoi(dh) may have been applied to poems whose tunes were more melodious than the type of recitative normally associated with such verse. There were evidently some poems to which the term laoi(dh) was more commonly applied in the vernacular context. In Scottish Gaelic after 1700, it is most frequently used of poems which narrate the death of a single hero such as Diarmaid (Poem XIII) or Fraoch (Poem XXVII), popularly known as Laoidh Dhiarmaid and Laoidh Fhraoich respectively.

Gaelic tradition employs two further terms when referring to the ‘ballads’, namely dán and duan, both meaning ‘a poem’.  Dán is the more specific, since it is regularly applied to syllabic verse (i.e., poetry which employs lines with a certain specified number of syllables) and to any single poem within that category.  This is appropriate to the Gaelic ballads. Dán and duan may once have designated rather more perfunctory types of narrative verse, lacking the degree of conscious artistry sometimes deemed appropriate for a narrative elegy or celebratory eulogy known as a laoi(dh). The evidence suggests that the Gaelic terms may have been used with greater precision in the period before 1700, and that the gradual decay of the classical tradition has contributed to the problem of vague terminology.

The difficulty in employing a single generic term in either English or Gaelic is increased by the remarkably wide range of verse which comes within the category designated as ‘ballads’ or ‘lays’.  While it is true that many, indeed the majority, of items are narrative ballads, the corpus contains a large number of poems in which there is no significant narrative thread.  Such poems commonly eulogise warriors, reciting their pedigrees or offering chains of descriptive adjectives enumerating their qualities. The corpus also contains a substantial body of elegiac verse, lamenting the deaths of heroes, and listing their attributes.  We also find metrical word-pictures, describing the beauty of nature, the noises of birds and animals and the clamour of the hunt. The larger narrative ballads frequently combine these different strands in varying proportions.

Although generalisation is difficult, it is perhaps possible to see this varied range of verse as essentially celebratory and ‘heroic’, in the sense that it has to do with the lives, deaths and working environment of heroes.  In terms of its presentation, it acts as the metrical counterbalance to the profusion of heroic prose narratives which flourished within medieval Gaelic tradition.