Edward

(ca. 15th–16th century)

   The old Scottish folk BALLAD Edward is, like many similar ballads (LORD RANDALL, for example), a brief and suggestive narrative of domestic tragedy. Structured, like Lord Randall, as an increasingly tensionfilled dialogue between a mother and son, Edward tells the story of the son’s murder of his father—an act apparently suborned by the mother herself. The ballad begins with the mother’s question “Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid,/Edward, Edward,”—why, she wants to know, is there blood on Edward’s sword.He evades her question by first claiming that it is his hawk’s blood, then that it is the blood of his chestnut horse.When the mother refuses to believe either evasion, Edward reveals that the blood is his father’s.

   Asked what penance he will perform for the murder, Edward replies that he will sail over the sea.He will leave his towers and his hall, and, as for his wife and children, Edward says that they will have to beg through life. Surprise and shock underscore the climax of the ballad, where, in the powerful final stanza when the materialistic mother asks what he will leave to her, Edward answers that she will have from him only the curse of hell, because of the “counseils” that she gave him— implying that she herself has incited him to the bloody patricide.

   Edward was included in Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques (1765). Percy calls the poem a “Scottish ballad” and says that he received it in manuscript from Sir David Dalrymple. It was subsequently included as \#13 in Francis Child’s great edition of English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882). Variants of the ballad exist in Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and German, but none rivals the English version for suspense, artistic brevity, or shock value.

   Bibliography

   ■ Child, Francis James, ed. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 1882–98. Reprint, New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1965.

   ■ Percy, Thomas, ed. Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 3 vols. 1765. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1858.