The ballad came to Ireland from England and Scotland from around the beginning of the 17th cent., its popularity increasing as the English language spread. The ballad in Irish is almost unknown [but see lays]. Ballads are most often first-person narratives told in rhyming quatrains of Hiberno-English, and dealing with matters such as love and war. Nonliterary in origin, they were circulated orally by itinerant singers and through the sale of broadsheets. Ballads reflecting the physical and emotional traumas of emigration were composed throughout the latter part of the 19th cent. Many published Irish ballads arose from the 19th-cent. attempt of Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy to provide a ‘ballad history of Ireland’ in The Spirit of the Nation (1843) as a means of raising political awareness. A dolorous attitude towards the lost kingdoms of Gaelic Ireland, combined with a more practical aspiration towards modern nationhood, is characteristic of the verse that featured prolifically in The Nation, The Shamrock, The Irishman, and various publications launched by James Duffy & Co. The ballad proved adaptable for the drawing-room as in the comic entertainment of Percy French. Writers of the literary revival made extensive use of the form, e.g. Padraic Colum in ‘She Moved Through the Fair’.
Bibliography
Hugh Shields, Narrative Songs in Ireland (1990).
