The Brother Avenged, and Other Ballads — A Reader’s Guide

Recurring Motifs and Structural Patterns

Across the ballads, certain motifs recur with striking consistency. The act of shooting an arrow appears in multiple poems, often as a decisive, irreversible action. In 'The Brother Avenged,' the narrator shoots twelve 'Kempions' (champions) and later the Swedish king. The arrow is described as 'yard-long' and 'sharp, sharp,' emphasizing its lethal precision. Another recurring element is the use of numbers: twelve judges, eight years of hiding, fifteen leagues ridden. These precise figures lend a folkloric, almost ritualistic quality to the narratives. The ballads also share a common structure of incremental repetition, where lines or stanzas are repeated with slight variations, building tension and emphasizing key moments.

Contrasting Tones: Revenge and Romance

The collection juxtaposes violent revenge ballads with tender love poems. 'The Eyes' is a lyric celebrating the 'witcheries' of Sophy Ribeaupierre's eyes, with the speaker willing to trade 'my kingly crown, / My troops and victories' for a kiss. The tone is courtly and hyperbolic, in stark contrast to the grim determination of 'The Brother Avenged.' Yet both share a preoccupation with intense emotion—whether lust for vengeance or romantic desire. The love poems often employ a simpler, more repetitive structure, as in 'The Eyes' where the refrain 'The eyes, the eyes' is repeated. This variety suggests Borrow's skill in rendering different ballad traditions, from the heroic to the amorous.

Editorial Context and Source Material

This edition, printed privately in 1913 by Thomas J. Wise, is limited to thirty copies. The text is transcribed from a pamphlet, and a footnote directs readers to compare stanzas in 'The Brother Avenged' with those in 'The Elves' from another Borrow translation. This cross-referencing indicates that Borrow often reworked similar material across multiple collections. The catalog classifies the work as 'Science Fiction & Utopias,' a category that seems at odds with the medieval ballads presented. The ballads themselves contain no futuristic or utopian elements; they are firmly rooted in legendary pasts. Readers should approach the catalog subject with caution, as the excerpts offer no evidence of science fiction content.

The ballads in this collection reward attention to their formal qualities—the repetition, the precise numbers, the sudden violence. Borrow's translations preserve the starkness of the originals while adding a rhythmic energy that propels the narratives. Readers interested in comparative balladry or the transmission of folk motifs will find much to examine, particularly in the interplay between the heroic and the lyrical. The limited edition status and the editor's notes also invite reflection on how these texts were curated and presented to a private audience in the early twentieth century.

There’s something about these old ballads—their stern justice, their ghosts—that makes me think of the other worn volume on my shelf, The Southern war poetry of the Civil War — Reading Companion, where loss also sings itself into permanence. Both feel less like reading and more like overhearing a distant, stubborn grief. I find I miss that company.