Lord Randal
Enjoy! 2
T3
p. 38
Enjoy!
Lord Randal and a lady full of mystery meet, and tragedy erupts. What can a poor mother do but ask one, two, three more questions? I can tell my son is sick, mothers have a heart for that; he is not just tired, he is dying. She poisoned him, and he was the more deceived. In the end all that is left of a young knight’s life is just livestock, gold and silver, houses and lands for his mother, sister and brother. And an everlasting curse for the femme fatale who killed him: who killed my son? The development of Lord Randal’s tragic fate and his final will
Language and style of the ballad
Climax of the ballad
The ballad opens with two people speaking. There is no precise reference to where and when the conversation is taking place, but we can infer that the setting is a castle and that it is (late) afternoon since the man has just come back from hunting. He is tired and sick and tells his mother a strange story. The young man went hunting in the “wild wood” where he met his lover. She prepared him fried eels for dinner; his dogs and hawk ate the leftovers and died soon after. There is no more doubt: Lord Randal’s true-love wanted to kill him for some reason that the reader doesn’t know. In the end, the mother, who is now aware of her son’s destiny, asks how he intends to share his worldly goods among his family. In his will he is leaving his cows to his mother, gold and silver to his sister and his houses and lands to his brother. These presents reveal Lord Randal’s love for and attachment to his family. They also reveal that he is a rich man. There is no direct reference to his social status, but from his oral will we know that he owned cattle, gold and silver, land and houses. Once his properties have been divided, his last words are a curse for his true-love to whom he leaves “hell and fire” because he wants revenge for his death. The ballad develops through repetition of a stanza with slight modifications as the story advances, until the final revelation. The repetition of vocatives (e.g. “Lord Randal my son/my handsome young man/mother”) is another device generally used in ballads, which were generally sung. Repetitions worked as refrains sung by a chorus, while a single voice sang the new lines. There are two main parts in the story. In the first part (stanzas 1-5) we are informed of Lord Randal’s ride, his visit to his lover and the food (fried eels) that she prepared for him. In stanza 5, we have a sneaking suspicion of what has happened when we learn that the dogs and hawk died after eating the leftovers. In the second part, what has happened is finally revealed to Lord Randal – and the audience/readers: the young Lord has been poisoned and is going to die. This part also contains the so-called oral testament, a device typical of the folk ballad in which, through the usual repetition of questions and answers, the main character is asked what he will bequeath to various people after his death. Like most ballads, this one too has two climaxes, which introduce two moments of “surprise” into the story. The first climax is at line 21 (“O I fear you are poisoned”, which is no longer a question but a statement) and is marked by a change in the structure of this and the subsequent stanzas, which all now start with “What”. The second climax instead appears in the last stanza, when we learn that Lord Randal has actually been poisoned by his true-love.
YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSE
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Though this traditional Scottish border ballad is one of the oldest narrative poems we know, it is alive and still sung today because it deals with timeless subjects. What
is there in this ballad that makes it appealing for you? Are there any ballads from contemporary songwriters that attract and intrigue you?
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