Lord Randal 

Lord Randal is the title of a ballad. The reader can easily understand  the text may be about an aristocratic man by the word “Lord”. Right from the title the intelligent reader can imagine the setting of the story could be in an aristocratic family in which the protagonist is Lord Randal. 

In the ballad there are 10  four line stanzas in which the rhyme pattern is ABAA.  All the quatrains have the same words at the end of the first, third and fourth line (son-soon-doon) so it is a ABAA rhyme pattern. This 3 words are an anticipation of the ending of the poem: her son will die soon. The narrator is the mother of Lord Randal and there is a dialogue between her and her son. There is a very specific scheme where, in each quatrain, in the first two lines there are the mother’s questions and the in the last ones the answer of the son. There are lots of repetitions and incremental repetitions, as it usually happens in medieval ballads, to help memorization and also to make the story more intense. The language used is very simple and concrete and easy to understand by the medieval illiterate people by the use of dialects.

The first stanza gives the atmosphere and setting of the whole story. The mother of Lord Randal asks him where he has been. The repetition of the question makes the reader understand the mother was worried and the way she calls him (my son, my handsome young man) shows the way she loved him, her possessiveness and that he was a handsome man. He answers he has been at the greenwood and he is tired from hunting. Aristocratic man usually went hunting.

In the second stanza the mother asks him who did he meet there twice and he answers that he met this true love. The intelligent reader can understand that the young aristocratic man cannot have met a woman in the woods unless it wasn’t a witch or a magic creature, because women didn’t used to go to such dangerous places as the wood. ( The woods once where attended by witches and other magic creatures, according to the poems. )

In the third stanza is revealed the reason he feels bad. The spell he was cast on was a negative one and this can be understood by his answer, to the question of his mother “And what did she give you..”, “Eels fried in a pan”, which is a metaphor.

In the fourth and fifth stanzas it is described what else his “true love” did: she probably poisoned or casted a spell on his animals (hawks-hounds) too but they didn’t make it and died on the way back home.

In the sixth stanza there’s a turning point. For the first time the mother doesn’t make any question but  an exclamation telling him what she thinks. She understands that he is poisoned and he removes all doubt agreeing with her. Now “mak my bed soon” is seen as a last request before he rests peacefully.

The following 3 stanzas are about the wealth he’s going to leave to his family. Women totally depended on man in the Middle Ages; men were the owners of land and them who had all the money. The mother of Lord Randal was clearly worried about the heritage he was going to leave. Every stanza is about a member of the family: the mother, a sister and a brother. The intelligent reader can understand that the brother wasn’t old enough to look after the family economically and socially so the family’s future depends on what he’s going to leave them. Lord Randal answers he’s going to leave all his land to him; that means that the brother will become the new main male figure in the family.

The last stanza is about what he’s going to leave to his “true love”. He answers angrily he’s going to leave her hell and fire. That’s a curse after he realizes the real reason of his deadly existence.