Gone Medieval – "Love and Death in Old Songs" (September 30, 2025)

Episode Overview

This episode of Gone Medieval, hosted by Dr. Eleanor Janega, delves into the rich, haunting world of medieval and traditional ballads—story songs that embody centuries-old hopes, fears, and dreams. Dr. Janega is joined by historian and writer Amy Jeffs (author of Old Songs: Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads), musician Natalie Brice, and illustrator Gwen Burns. Together, they explore the origins, forms, and enduring resonance of ballads, interspersing their discussion with live performances and insights into the collaborative creative process behind Amy’s new book.

Defining the Ballad: History, Form, and Living Tradition

[05:53]

• Dr. Janega opens by tackling the question of definition: What is a ballad, and how is it distinct from other folk or troubadour songs?

• Amy Jeffs explains:

  • "A ballad in literary terms can be defined as a narrative poem often written in quatrains… but in reality, it often disobeys those rules. And maybe it’s more helpful to think of them just as story songs." —Amy [06:30]
  • The term "ballad" itself is relatively late and originally referred to a dance form.
  • Attempts to categorize ballads strictly are often at odds with their organic, evolving oral tradition.

• The project behind Old Songs was conceived as a multimedia collaboration from the start—stories, music, and illustration developed in tandem to create a unified, immersive work.

  • "All three threads of the project should sort of happen simultaneously and emerge together and influence each other." — Amy [09:40]

The Creative Collaboration

[10:00]

• Gwen Burns (illustrator) and Amy Jeffs describe how their mutual dream ("to illustrate an anthology of folk song") led them to collaborate, and how Natalie Brice (composer) soon joined.

• Their working style—discussing ideas, sharing sketches and musical drafts, and letting each other's perspectives shape the outcome—mirrors medieval practices of collective creativity and adaptation.

  • "We were all in our respective hermitages… then we’d meet at the pub and we’d talk about the feelings behind the stories." —Amy [12:15]

Performance & Analysis: The Demon Lover and Medieval Resonances

[13:13 – 14:17]

• The group performs The Demon Lover, a ballad about a woman tempted by a supernatural figure from her past.

• Amy draws parallels between The Demon Lover and motifs in Marie de France’s works, highlighting how such stories echo across centuries.

  • "Once she gets on [his ship], in some versions, there’s no mariners... it’s quite evocative of Marie de France’s narrative, where he finds this ghostly ship just floating in a harbour… a fossil of that kind of storytelling tradition." —Amy [13:18]

• Notable quote from the ballad, capturing its otherworldly and ominous imagery:

  • "What hills are yon, Yon pleasant hills that the sun shines sweetly on? O yawn are the hills of heaven, he said, where you will never win." —Sung by Natalie [14:17]

Transmission and Survival: How Ballads Pass Through Time

[15:02]

• Amy Jeffs discusses the obstacles and fascinations of tracing ballads back to their medieval origins.
  • "Part of this project for me as a historian, was trying to find some instances where we can say with certainty this is medieval… sometimes, there’s one or two instances, for instance, Thomas the Rhymer, where you can say, this definitely is a medieval ballad or a medieval narrative, at least that’s been turned into a ballad." —Amy [15:02]
  • The Child Ballads (Francis James Child’s 19th-century collection) are the main textual source, offering extensive commentary on versions and motifs across Europe.

Women, Sin, and Redemption in Ballads

[20:00 – 26:30]

• The hosts examine recurring themes:

  • The "dangerous" or "fallen" woman, sin and temptation, and biblical echoes.
  • Amy notes, "Women constantly, in ballads, put men’s heads on their laps. It’s an extremely powerful and dangerous thing to do to a man in the world of balladry." [21:06]
  • Discussion of Judas (the earliest recorded English ballad) and The Maid and the Palmer, both featuring women who erase or complicate traditional biblical roles.
  • The group explores modern interpretive lenses—mental illness, societal pressures—bringing empathy and nuance to characters once painted as villains.
    • "Maybe she has postpartum psychosis. You know, if we're going to read it within a more modern, forgiving context." —Natalie [22:58]

• They perform a haunting Irish variant, The Well Below the Valley.

  • "Green grow the lilies, oh down among the bushes O..." —Natalie [25:58]

• The Cherry Tree Carol: Shows how biblical and local landscapes blend in ballad tradition, as Mary and Joseph’s journey is shifted from the deserts of the Middle East to snowy medieval Britain.

  • "That endures as a ballad into the post-medieval period and beyond to the present day. I think that’s, you know, really fascinating: how more local landscapes come to kind of totally transform the aesthetic of these narratives." —Amy [26:14]

The Role of Women in Ballad Tradition & Performance

[32:08]

• Amy details how women have shaped the ballad tradition, from rural oral transmission (e.g. Anna Gordon in 18th-century Aberdeenshire) to singing and selling broadsides on street corners in urban centers.
• Ambiguity, agency, and humor are highlighted:
  • "There’s a touch of humor about a woman singing a song about a terrifying infanticidal mother while she’s there rocking a baby… wanting to see in the past a kind of nuance and a subtlety of meaning that allows these women more agency and personality than being simply victims or simply Madonna." —Amy [33:37]

Magic, Rebellion, and the Otherworld: Thomas the Rhymer

[35:33 – 41:53]

• The ballad Thomas the Rhymer is performed and analyzed:
  • Based on a real 13th-century figure, it fuses prophecy, fairies, and political symbolism.
  • Scene setting quote:
    • "Her shirt was of the grass green silk, her mantle of velvet fine, and every tress of her horse’s mane was hung with 50 silver bells and nine." —Amy, quoting the ballad [37:46]
  • Discussion of the ballad’s "roads" as moral choices; the "path to righteousness" is overgrown because so few walk it.
  • The fairy queen is a powerful, ambiguous agent—perhaps a figure of power, rebellion, or both:
    • "Maybe she wants to shake things up politically in the land of the living. And so she throws Thomas back with a tongue that can never lie. And she's like, okay, let's see how you deal with truth, you bunch of weirdos." —Amy [44:07]
  • Medieval cosmology: Elfland as a 'subject state' of hell, an allegory for Scottish-English political dynamics.

Gender, Power, and Subversion

[44:27]

• The group discusses how the female figures of these ballads—fairy queens, witches, mothers—both subvert and reinforce expectations.

  • "You go somewhere where she's powerful, but she's in some ways like a...not a real-world threat because she's beyond the veil, but she's also very beautiful and… sexually available in a way, as long as you are willing to risk your immortal soul." —Amy [45:07]

• Ballads act both as warnings about women’s dangers and as subtle spaces for negotiation of female power.

Performance Practice, Preservation, and Illustration

[51:07 – 58:32]

• Natalie Brice discusses the survival of melodies across centuries; the same tune can be traced from 16th-century Scotland to contemporary folk singers.

  • "There’s something really beautiful about these very early melodies in that they aren’t obviously major or minor. They’re sort of set apart from the obvious keys that we now use. So there's this ambiguity ever present in them, which I really enjoy." —Natalie [51:08]

• Gwen discusses visualizing the fantastic:

  • For the Ballad of Allison Gross, she painted a "peachy, fleshy, flaccid worm"—a dragon that’s also a transformed, tragic man.
    • "It’s a very kind of peachy, fleshy, flaccid worm… It’s quite disgusting. I really enjoyed painting it. I think I love fantasy art and my father actually has painted a lot of dragons… So I really wanted to make a dragon that I hadn’t seen before." —Gwen [56:11]
  • The recurring motif of "a man's head on a woman's lap" is explored visually and psychologically:
    • "Having a man’s head on your lap… I think it does feel a little bit powerful." —Gwen [58:32]
    • "I feel like you could do something bad." —Amy [58:50]

Ballads’ Ongoing Resonance

[59:47]

• The endurance and adaptability of ballads are affirmed:
  • "You can just run into a woman and she'll be like, ah, Thomas the Rhymer, here it is… This is still a tradition that's ongoing and that you all are part of." —Dr. Janega [59:23]
  • The community aspect, shared between academia and living folk tradition, is emphasized:
    • "There's a lovely bit at the end of Tamlin… what the fairy queen threatens Tamlin with at the end of the ballad, where she's really angry with him." —Amy [61:16]
  • Even now, stories of love, betrayal, magic, and justice retain a primal human appeal.

Musical Highlights

Songs/Fragments Performed:

• The Demon Lover [13:13, 14:17, 18:50]
• The Maid and the Palmer / The Well Below the Valley [25:58]
• Thomas the Rhymer [37:46, 39:25, 40:42]
• Tam Lin [62:01]
• Lady Isabel ("And aye she wrestled and aye she swam…") [65:13]

Notable & Memorable Quotes

• "We can make paradigms and tables, but, you know, when something has emerged organically and as part of a living tradition, it will fall outside of the parameters we set." —Amy [08:06]
• "Everyone kind of understands the idea that there is a ballad out there… but before we get into all of that, I'm going to make us eat our vegetables and be a historian and define our terms." —Dr. Janega [05:53]
• "There’s nothing new under the sun, I’m telling you." —Dr. Janega [59:23]
• "No wonder these songs still have resonance today… It’s almost as though you want to circle back to these stories and get some justice for the people who are involved." —Dr. Janega [62:21]
• "This is just putting those stories into a world that's so—especially the traditional ballads with their kind of forests and the seas and rivers and other world… The secondary world universe is completely entrancing." —Amy [62:58]

Closing Song & Sentiment

[65:13]

• The episode closes with a stirring rendition of Lady Isabel, celebrating female agency and survival.

  • "And aye she wrestled and aye she swam and she swam to dry land; she thanked God most cheerfully the danger she overcame." —Natalie, Gwen, Amy [65:13]

Summary Takeaways

• Medieval and traditional ballads are a living tradition, blending history, myth, and melody.
• They offer a complex view of gender, power, morality, and magic—appealing, ambiguous, and ever-evolving.
• The collaborative process of the Old Songs project mirrors their communal, adaptive spirit.
• These ancient "fire-side" songs are still sung, felt, and debated, proving their perennial, haunting grip on the imagination.

For listeners and history enthusiasts alike, this episode provides both a scholarly and an emotional journey through some of the oldest and most resonant stories that Britain—and the world—still sings.