Stories from the English and Scottish Ballads

Über

Stories from the English and Scottish Ballads is a 1968 anthology of 15 ballads that have been collected and retold in prose or fairy tale form by Ruth Manning-Sanders, for easier reading. It is one in a long series of anthologies by Manning-Sanders. Most, if not all, of the tales within are prose versions of the historically famous Child Ballads. In a lengthy introduction, Manning-Sanders writes:
"For the people of the Middle Ages, the ballads took the place of story books, and they were made by the minstrels who roamed the country, singing their stories and accompanying themselves on the harp. ... The stories that the minstrels sang were on familiar themes. Tender stories of love, stirring stories of well-known battles, of daring raids and captures and rescues, exhilarating stories of heroic resistance and of the doings of bold outlaws, tragic stories of treason and sad deaths, comic stories, cruel and terrible stories, stories of that fairyland in which most men believed -- we find them all, sung in direct, vigorous verse to the accompaniment of the minstrel's music."