LORD RANDAL

The ballad is mainly the recording of a dialogue. Its structure follows the typical 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 test was attractive by aristocratic families and situations. In addition, the supernatural caught their attention. The setting of the ballad is the typical 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 looks tired and he feels like fainting. The son answers that he has been at the wood. Repetition, high density of men sound, refrain and punctuation create an atmosphere of suffering and impending. Right from the start, the ballad displaces the passionate relationship between mother and son during the Middle Ages: the mother addresses Lord Randal as "my handsome young man" making clear that he is attractive and young. Of course the mother's sense of possessiveness is signed by the repetitive use of the possessive adjective "my". The sound "m" is recurrent: seven times in the first stanza. It is the typical sound of somebody who is complaining.
In the second stanza almost the same from the phonological level Lord Randal answers his mother's curiosity: she wants to know where he has been and it appears clear that Lord Randal has probably been under a spell, a negative one unfortunately. The intelligent reader can't find clear close to decide if the semantic choice "true-love" is a parody or the result of an illusion. It appears that people from aristocracy mainly spent their time hunting that is they were not complain to gain a living and were generally brought up by people who were supposed to be at their service. The reader understands this immediately by the use of the imperative, nine times occurring in the ballad (make my bed soon). Men especially if the first child detained power, property and money and as a result woman's life in any family depended on the relationship they had with the main people. Besides the expression "make my bed soon" lets the intelligent reader suppose there is something wrong with Lord Randal's mother, textually probably because Lord Randal's "true-love" gave him something dangerous (eels). The food sounds the typical one given by witches. Witches may be masked under the veil of attractive beautiful women. This explains for the typical mentality of the Middle Ages, according to which women roles were clearly defined: they could be daughters, wives, mothers or nuns. If they didn't conform to such standards, they could be considered dangerous that is attractive, prostitutes or witches. In short, Medieval society established a social divided between women and men that still exists and explains for the dominant main role that civil western society had. In contemporary society the 70% of female violence is still played inside the family and generally speaking acted by people from that ages. This also explains why Lord Randal necessarily had to be the victim of some supernatural power, symbolically transfigured under the shape of a female witch. Witches played their spells on men in the forest where they generally performed their pagan rites to which common women and men where 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 Middle Ages. It provides the reader information about life-style in the social classes, the relationship between women and men inside and outside the family, the position of the oldest son, the role of witch craft, the economic destiny of a family, he role of animals inside the family (with a distinction between animals in aristocracy: Lord Randal died together with his hawks and hounds while the common people used to bring up animals to survive, to eat and to work). The mother, in the sixth quatrain, is worried about her and her son's future. They understand that he was poisoned by the true-love, she who he met in the forest.