1 -- a version of this paper was published in: Contexts of Pre-Novel Narrative. The European Tradition. Ed. Roy Eriksen. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994, pp. 341-72. this version uploaded: 8 November 2013 ǮWORN BY THE FRICTION OF TIMEǯ: ORAL TRADITION AND THE GENERATION OF THE BALLADIC NARRATIVE MODE Thomas Pettitt A frustrating feature of many fields of research in the humanities is the way fairly basic questions become the focus of discussion and controversy, only to fade from the scene without resolution, as scholarship moves on to other -- temporarily -- fashionable topics: This by way of apology for a study which addresses as apparently outdated a matter as the Ǯoriginǯ of the ballad. It was the dominant scholarly controversy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth when the ǮEnglish and Scottish popular balladsǯ first made their entry into the canon of English literature; it was not resolved at the time, and has not been resolved since, although it has from time to time re-emerged in slightly different guises. The following pages will offer a specific thesis on this question, together with appropriate documentation, but limited to the narrative mode characterizing the ballads; the origins of their more usual stanzaic forms, or rather the melodic structures which determine these forms (and the melodies themselves), will not be considered. By narrative mode I mean those features generally agreed to characterize the way the ballad, as a variety of traditional song, handles its story: an efficient, climactic structure, focusing on only the most vital events and moving quickly to their climax and resolution, and including only the most necessary information on persons and places; an impersonal presentation in which any emotions or opinions expressed are those of the protagonists rather than the narrator; the occurrence of patterns of conceptual and verbal repetition: that is of the incidence of similar events within the narrative (at distinct points or as a sequence), rendered in similar words; a formulaic phraseology ȋǮcommonplacesǯ) shared between the songs of a given (national or regional) tradition. 1 My thesis is quite simply that these characteristics are generated in the course of oral tradition, particularly under social rather than Ǯtheatricalǯ auspices: that is to say when