"The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age"
About this Quote
There is a quiet deflation built into Abercrombie's sentence: he takes two beloved repositories of English romance and shrinks their grandeur to scale. The Border Ballads and the Robin Hood cycle arrive in the popular imagination as doorways into a nation’s misty “heroic age.” Abercrombie’s point is that the door opens onto something far smaller and more local than the label suggests. “Clearly suppose” is doing sly work here. He’s not arguing with the ballads’ content so much as with the social world they presuppose: a culture where heroism is intelligible because life is organized around tight geographies, tight loyalties, and tight horizons.
The subtext is a critique of literary inflation. Calling something a “heroic age” can be a way of laundering social violence into glamour: raiding becomes adventure, outlawry becomes justice, feud becomes folklore. By insisting it’s “circumscribed,” Abercrombie implies these songs are less about epic nation-building than about border economies, local power, and the everyday stakes of survival in marginal regions. “Not very important” is the sharper barb. He’s resisting the Victorian and Edwardian habit of turning folk material into a national origin story, a usable past that makes England feel ancient and coherent.
Context matters: writing in the early 20th century, Abercrombie sits near academic and poetic movements eager to categorize “stages” of culture. He accepts the category but punctures its prestige. The rhetorical move is anti-mythmaking, reminding readers that ballads are brilliant precisely because they are parochial: they transmit intensity, not empire.
The subtext is a critique of literary inflation. Calling something a “heroic age” can be a way of laundering social violence into glamour: raiding becomes adventure, outlawry becomes justice, feud becomes folklore. By insisting it’s “circumscribed,” Abercrombie implies these songs are less about epic nation-building than about border economies, local power, and the everyday stakes of survival in marginal regions. “Not very important” is the sharper barb. He’s resisting the Victorian and Edwardian habit of turning folk material into a national origin story, a usable past that makes England feel ancient and coherent.
Context matters: writing in the early 20th century, Abercrombie sits near academic and poetic movements eager to categorize “stages” of culture. He accepts the category but punctures its prestige. The rhetorical move is anti-mythmaking, reminding readers that ballads are brilliant precisely because they are parochial: they transmit intensity, not empire.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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