THE HOUSE CARPENTER

Considering the title of the ballad, the reader expects to read about a man that somebody calls to build a house or about the house of a carpenter. The ballad could also be about the love story between a carpenter and a woman.

The ballad consists of fourteen quatrains, but the rhyme-scheme is not fixed.

A narrator tells the story and introduces the protagonist: he is a man who has just returned from the sea, in order to see the woman he likes. He says that he gave up richness for her, but she replies that she's married. He invites her to run away with him and promises he will maintain her. So she kisses his son and follows the man on a boat. Two weeks go by and the woman starts weeping because she misses his son and the following week the ship sinks in the deep. The two lovers can't reach Heaven, but they go to Hell.

The characters of the ballad are just sketched and the reader knows them trough their interaction (it seems as if the reader could listen to the precise words of the characters). The relationship between the man and the woman is on the same level: it seems as if they were both straight forward. What's more, they are poor people, because they use a very simple language. The man embodies the typical  stereotype of the demon lover, while the woman represents the classic married woman that wrongly falls in love with another man.

As a consequence, tragic love story is the topic of the ballad.

The reader can note the presence of some devices typical of ballads, like: alliterative meter (grass, grows, green; salt salt sea) helps memorization and gives to the reader some details about the setting; syntactic deviation (cried he instead of he cried) and refrain (never shall I see anymore; what hills?; the salt salt sea) make the ballad catchy and memorable;  internal rhyme (go/along and ten/man)  links words in order to make memorization easy; hyperbolic language in the 6^th line underlines the swagger of the protagonist; finally the reader can note the presence of the expression they had not been gone but about three/two weeks that is used in numerous ballads (it is typical of archaic texts and underlines the trouble of someone, while waiting for someone else). A lot of German - rooted words appear in the ballad (sprang a leak, wee, spun), because it was a popular genre of entertainment during the Middle Ages.

Also, the reader has to consider the religious context in which ballad was born: the lovers of the text can't go to Heaven because he induced her to abandon her family, to betray his husband. In summary, there is a religious message in the text: it invites the reader to play fair.