Epic with Ballad: The Long Song and the Short

1An epic opening

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurl'd to Pluto's gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

Homer, The Iliad, Book 1, lines 1–8, translated by Alexander Pope (1715)

In eight lines the epic announces itself: a vast subject ("woes unnumber'd"), a hero of a whole people (Achilles, the greatest Greek warrior), an appeal to a goddess, the Muse, to sing through the poet, the gods' involvement ("the will of Jove") and a grand, formal style. The poem then plunges into the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon ("Atrides"), in the tenth year of a war, and runs to more than fifteen thousand lines.

2An African epic

The Epic of Sundiata comes from the Mande peoples of West Africa and has been passed down for centuries by griots (jeli or jali in the Mande languages), hereditary singers and historians. It tells how Sundiata, mocked as a child because he could not walk, finally stands, goes into exile, and returns to defeat the sorcerer-king Soumaoro Kanté and found the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. Like the Iliad, it has a hero who carries a people's history, supernatural powers on both sides, long lists of names and clans, and a performer who reminds the audience that he speaks with the authority of his ancestors. Griots perform it aloud, often to the music of the kora, and no two performances are exactly the same.

3A ballad

Sir Patrick Spens (traditional Scottish ballad), opening and closing stanzas

The king sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking the blude-red wine;
'O whare will I get a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o' mine?'

O up and spak an eldern knight,
Sat at the king's right knee;
'Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailor
That ever sail'd the sea.'

…

O lang, lang may the ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Before they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing to the strand!

…

Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour,
'Tis fifty fathoms deep;
And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens,
Wi' the Scots lords at his feet!

Text from The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1900 (1900)

Between the stanzas quoted, the king sends Sir Patrick to sea in winter; he laughs, then weeps, knowing the danger; a sailor sees "the new moon … wi' the auld moon in her arm", a sign of storm; and the ship goes down. The ballad never tells us who suggested Sir Patrick or why the voyage was needed. It leaps from scene to scene and lets the ladies waiting on the shore tell us the ending.

4What they share and where they part

Both forms grew out of performance, which explains their shared love of repetition: formulas help a singer remember and help a listener follow. But the epic is a public monument to a nation's past, while the ballad is a local, human story with large gaps for the listener to fill. The irony of "Sir Patrick Spens" is all in what it leaves out: the king who sends men to die is never blamed in words, only by the image of the drowned lords "at his feet", still serving their captain at the bottom of the sea.