LORD RANDAL

The ballad is mainly the recording of a dialogue. Its structure follows the tipical four-line stanza. Its questioning syntax reinforces memory and therefore the ballad was very popular and it also was easy to be handed down.

The protagonist of the text is an aristocratic young man as the intelligent reader can see from the title. Popular taste was attracted by aristocratic families and situations. In adiction, the supernatural cought their attention. The setting of the ballad was the tipical one of the Medieval taste: the greenwood.

The first quatrain introduces the situation; Lord Randal's mother asks her son where he has been because he look tired and he feels like fainting. The son answers that he has been at the wood. Repetition, high density of "m" sound, refrain and punctuation, all together create an atmosphere of suffering and impending that. Righ from the start the ballad displays the passionate relation-ship between mother and son during the Medieval Ages; the mother addresses he as "my handsome young man" making clear he' attractive and young. Of course, the mother's sense of possessivness is signaled by the repetitive use of the possessive adjective "my". The sound "m" is recurrent, seven times in the following stanza. It is tipical sound of somebody who is complaining.

In the second stanza almost the same from the phonological level Lord Randal answers his mother's curioity, she wants to know where he has been and it appears clear that Lord Randal has probably been under a spell, a negative one unfortunatelly. The intelligent reader can't find clear close to decide if the semantic choice (true love) is a parody or the resul of an illusion.
It appears that people from aristocracy mainly spent their time hunting, that is they were not compelled to gain a living and were generally brought up by people who were supposed to be at their service.
The reader understands thjis immediately by the use of the imperative, nine times occurring in the ballad (). Men especially if they are first child detained power, property and money and as result, women and wives in any family depended on the relationship they had with the main people.
Besides the expression "Mak my bed soon" lets the intlligent reader suppose, there is something wrong with Lord Randal's health, textualy probably because Lord Randal's "true love" gave hime something dangerous. "Eals fried in a pan". The food sounds the tipical one given by withces which is may be masked under the veil of attractive beautiful women. This explains for the tipical mentality of the middle ages, accoriding to which women roules were clearly defined: they could be daughters, wives, mothers or nouns; if they didn't conforming to such standards they could be considered dangerous that is: attractive, prostitutes or witches. In short, Medieval society established a social divide between men and women that still exist and explains for the dominant male roules that civil western society still haunts.

In contemporary society the 70% of female violence is still played inside the family and generally speaking acted by people from main gender. This also explain why Lord Randal necessarlly have to be the victim of such a supernatural power, simbolically transfigured under the shape of a female witch.

Witches played their spellson men in the forest where they generally performed their pagan rites to which common women and men were not invited and punished in case they decided to attend.
Therefore "Lord Randal" is a very interesting text to really understand the mentality of the Medieval Ages, it provides the reader information about lifestyle in the social classes, the relation-ship between men and women inside and outside the family, the pension of the oldest son, the roule of witchcraft, the economic destiny of the family, the roule of animals inside the family (with a distinction between animals in the aristocracy: Lord Randal died to get with his hawks and hounds, while the common people used to bring up animals to survive, to eat and to work).