John of Hazelgreen or Jock o' Hazeldean (
Roud
The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadsid ...
250,
Child
A child () is a human being between the stages of childbirth, birth and puberty, or between the Development of the human body, developmental period of infancy and puberty. The term may also refer to an unborn human being. In English-speaking ...
293) is an English-language traditional folk song. ''Jock of Hazeldean'' is a poem and song by Sir
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European literature, European and Scottish literature, notably the novels ''Ivanhoe'' (18 ...
based on a fragment of the ballad.
[Murdoch, Brian, "Who is Jock o Hazeldean?: The Various Lives of Walter Scott's Folksong", in Brown, Rhona and Lyall, Scott (eds.), ''Scottish Literary Review'', Volume 14, Number 2, Autumn/Winter 2022, Association for Scottish Literature, pp. 111 - 126, ] Versions of the ballad were published by Chambers, Kinloch and Buchan. The version printed by John S. Roberts (1887) was compiled from those of Kinloch and Buchan.
[Roberts, John S., ed. (1887) ''The Legendary Ballads of England and Scotland''. London: Frederick Warne; pp. 151-54]
Scott's ''Jock of Hazeldean'' was first published in 1816 in
Alexander Campbell's ''Albyn's Anthology'', printed alongside the tune to which it is now usually sung.
Synopsis
A man asks a maid why she is weeping; it is for the love of John of Hazelgreen. He offers to marry her to his oldest, or youngest, son if she will forsake him, and she refuses. Nevertheless, he takes her with him, and he proves to be John of Hazelgreen's father, and informs his son that he is marrying her that day.
The Jock of Hazeldean version has a different plot. The father of the groom tries to reconcile the woman to marrying his son, but she is utterly passive in the face of her prospective father-in-law's enticements, replying only by weeping. However, at the very end of the song, she turns out to have been playing a waiting game; she has disappeared with her lover Jock O'Hazeldean, eloping across the English-Scottish border.
See also
*
List of the Child Ballads
is the colloquial name given to a collection of 305 ballads collected in the 19th century by Francis James Child and originally published in ten volumes between 1882 and 1898 under the title ''The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.''
The ba ...
References
External links
''John of Hazelgreen''
Child Ballads
Year of song unknown
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