Old Songs: Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads

by Amy Jeffs, Gwen Burns

Old Songs fuses short stories, histories, lyrics and illustrations in an enthralling reimagining of traditional folk ballads. Sunday Times Bestselling historian Amy Jeffs and Illustrator Gwen Burns combine forces to create a rich compendium, singing of travel, mystery, magic and the essential urges of humanity.

Featuring iterations of fairy tales and sinister descendants of Greek myths and bible stories, as well as a cast of lesser-known characters with names like Tam Lim, Child Wynd and Maisery, Old Songs threads a tapestry of Britain's landscape, history and cultures. At the base of hills we can visit to this day, elf queens kidnap hapless poets and carry them through rivers of blood; and at the foot of a tree whose offspring still stand in the forests of Northumberland, a girl mimes combing the hairless head of a dragon who was once her brother.

In spellbinding tales of brown-skinned girls who danced on their lovers' graves, of golden-masted ships captained by the Devil, of fiddles that cried "Murder!", of men kidnapped by fairies and boys married at fourteen, we find narrative motifs as ancient as humanity itself.

In the histories interconnecting the stories, we find the fantastical rooted in the everyday, bringing to light the real experiences of great swathes of people to whom such story-songs were not only familiar, but a way of escaping into the extraordinary and returning gratefully home. Bringing enchantment to familiar landscapes, ballads were created anew by each singer and passed down from fireside to fireside, at the knees of childhood nurses, in manuscripts and in early printed pamphlets. Now, ten stories are gathered here, beautifully recreated and illustrated for modern readers.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Folklore, Music, Folk Tales, Fairy Tales

247 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2025

About the author

Amy Jeffs is an art historian specialising in the Middle Ages. In 2019, she gained a PhD in Art History from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, having studied for earlier degrees at the Courtauld Institute of Art and the University of Cambridge. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

During her PhD Amy co-convened a project researching medieval badges and pilgrim souvenirs at the British Museum. She then worked in the British Library's department of Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern manuscripts.

Her writing is often accompanied by her own linocut and wood-engraved prints.

Amy is a regular contributor to Country Life Magazine.

Reviews

[Katherine Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I listened to this book on a sunny autumn afternoon on a stunning train journey from glasgow to fort William and it provided a perfect soundtrack. Jeffs voice and the music brought each tale to life alongside the modern contextualisation and often tragic characters. The undulating landscapes of purples, greens, reds and golds through hills, valleys, streams and lochs made it impossible not to get lost in the mythos.

[Catherine McCarthy]

I don't start rate, but this one jumped straight to my 'Best of 2025' shelf. Say no more.
This was not just a book, it was an experience, one that gave me hours of pleasure as I escaped the humdrum of the modern world and immersed myself in its artistry.
I fell in love with the cover as soon as I saw it on here, and treated myself to a hardback signed edition. Having read the intro, I decided to look up performances of the ballads, one at a time, on YouTube, which led me to discover several new singer/songwriters along the way, including Anais Mitchell who performed a beautiful rendition of Tam Lin alongside Jeeferson Hamer as well as Polly Paulusma whose animated performance of The Maid and The Palmer was exceptional. I will be seeking out more work by these performers.
So, back to the book...
Each night, having listened to a musical version, I read one of the stories as well as the corresponding ballad, delighted in the artwork and poured over the accompanying non-fiction section which highlighted the history etc. of each section.
I have not enjoyed a book as much as this since childhood. This is not just a book, it is a whole experience, one I will revisit and treasure throughout my life.
Thoroughly inspirational!

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Old Songs, Gwen Burns art takes these stories to another level, it’s a book filed with beautiful art; full page colour art, with lots of illustrations interwoven with text throughout bringing the story’s to life.
This is the perfect book to dip into between other reads, though on my second read, I couldn’t put it down until I finished. As well as the expected cruel mother-in-law character, witches, fairy queens and sprites you’ll meet a serial killer and learn the origin of the name of a sex toy…It’s full of surprises.
I’m a huge fan of mythology and fairytales and knew this was going to be a special book.
I enjoyed this as much as I’ve enjoyed any other fairytale or mythology retellings
I love that the original ballads are included at the end - I made a point to go back and read the original ones, particularly those that sounded if Scottish origin like ‘Tam Lin’
I was certain ‘Willie’s Lady’ must be wholly Scottish, and was surprised to discover there are versions recorded in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian traditions. I’m still not sure where it truly originated, that might be one rabbit hole I’ve jumped into already ………..

Thankfully, I was spared from making more countless trips down rabbit holes on my own. At the end of each story, Amy provides a thorough history for each ballad and its origins, exploring topics that are as relevant today as they were two centuries ago.
So many of these ballads have evolved over time, traveling across Europe to the US and back to Scotland and England. I imagine that centuries ago, communities firmly claimed these songs and stories as their own. Yet the beauty of the written word—as well as the songs of the stories themselves—is how they have carried, transformed, and adapted through generations and translations. While the plot, themes, and messages remain constant, these stories continue to resonate and connect us across time and distance.

In every book I’ve read by Amy Jeffs, her passion for stories to live on and be told or retold is palpable and rises above all else. Her enthusiasm is infectious - It brings me so much joy - It’s such a beautiful thing.

A solid 5* read. If you like poetry, fairytales, myths and legends or historical fiction this is a book you need, it’s a must buy.

[The Journey Writer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will you break the spell of the fairy queen to save your love, if you know how?
Will you marry a woman because she promised you lifelong wealth? Or would you rather be turned into a giant worm?
Whom do you believe: the mother who threatens the labouring wife, or the one who saves her son from a witch?
When the songbird becomes a man with a golden harp, playing a sinister lullaby, do not follow him.
Will you listen to a stone’s story?
And when the violin’s tune reveals the murderer, do you dare to listen?

Old Songs contains ten stories inspired by traditional ballads from the British Isles, accompanied by Amy Jeffs’ fascinating interpretations that connect the first listeners and modern readers.

Earlier this month, I travelled to the UK for the Oxford International Song Festival, drawn by its theme “Stories in Song.” Before the opening concert, I spent a few wonderful days with friends in Bristol. As if by design, I encountered this book — Old Songs by Amy Jeffs, illustrated by Gwen Burns.

I’m forever thankful to my friend who brought this book to my attention, and to the kind and insightful bookseller at @waterstonescribbs (I wish I remembered your name!) for her thoughtful recommendations. I love, love, love this book.

Why do I love songs, and even travel for them? I found my answer in Amy Jeffs’ epilogue:
“(Old Songs) tell us about ourselves. They tell us that we can be cruel. They tell us that we can be brilliant. They give permission to escape into stories, music and art, not out of cowardice or dereliction of duty, but to see beyond ourselves, to transcend, and find, even challenge, the edges of our worlds.”

If you love hauntingly beautiful stories filled with mystery, eeriness, and wisdom, what are you waiting for? Treat yourself to Old Songs.

#oldsongs #TamLin #LadyIsabelandtheElfknight

[Jonathan Crain · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Old Songs: Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads," Amy Jeffs and Gwen Burns have created a rare kind of historical synthesis—one that preserves the strange vitality of the past rather than reducing it to scholarly footnotes. Drawing on ten traditional ballads from the Child collection, the book reimagines these stories as new narratives. It pairs them with historical 'commentaries' that explore the social, political, and emotional realities from which they first arose. The result is a work that doesn't simply annotate history, but restores its pulse.

Each chapter is built around a familiar story—"Tam Lin," "Willie's Lady," "The Brown Girl," "Thomas the Rhymer," among others—and moves between retelling, historical investigation, and commentary. The 'commentaries' are not digressions but illuminations, tracing how these tales of love, death, and enchantment were once entangled with witch trials, child marriages, and the politics of gender and sovereignty. Jeffs, a medievalist and art historian, writes with precision and care, never mistaking myth for metaphor alone. Her guiding premise—that these ballads reveal 'the imaginations of a vanished throng'—is borne out through meticulous research and moments of startling intimacy.

"Old Songs" is genuinely unique because it allows the multimedia elements to land with full force. This is a book that asks to be seen and heard at the same time. Burns's illustrations—expressive watercolors that draw on historical costume and folk tradition while preserving a distinctly modern humor and wickedness—aren't decorative additions but integral readings of the stories. These illustrations interpret the ballads as surely as Jeffs's prose does. Natalie Bryce's musical arrangements, developed from early ballad melodies and recorded for the audiobook, complete the work's three-way conversation between word, image, and song.

The ideal way to experience "Old Songs" is with the physical book open in front of you while the audiobook plays—watching Burns's paintings as Jeffs narrates and Bryce's music enters. There's an intimacy in Jeffs's voice, a sense that she's not reading to you but inviting you into a conversation she's been having with these songs for years. When the music begins—sometimes eerie, sometimes playful, always unsettling in its nearness to the old melodies—the stories stop being objects of study and become something alive again. Bryce's arrangements, drawn from early ballad melodies, are alive with feeling. They are haunting—carrying grief, rage, and survival. Listening while looking at Burns's fierce watercolors, you understand what the book is doing: showing you that history was lived by people who felt as much as we do.

Thematically, the book confronts enduring questions about agency, prejudice, and the permeability of the human and the otherworldly. Women in these ballads act, suffer, and resist; their stories reflect both the constraints and the defiance of their time. When you read a tale like "The Trees So High"—about a woman forced to marry a boy “not done growing,” it acquires tragic immediacy when placed beside real early modern marriage records. Elsewhere, "The Brown Girl" becomes a study in racialized beauty and revenge, a mirror to the “white European fantasies” that continue to shape cultural ideals today.

Jeffs avoids the sentimentality that often clings to ‘folk revival.’ Instead, she argues for a living relationship with the past—one that accepts the ballads' strangeness as evidence of their truth. "Old Songs," Jeffs writes, 'tells ten short stories inspired by traditional ballads, with histories to bind them to the past and bring them to life for the present.' That line captures the book's quiet conviction: that scholarship and storytelling are not opposites, but allies.

Experienced as its creators intended—as a synthesis of text, image, and sound—"Old Songs" becomes something close to ritual. This isn't sterile history—it's experienced through sight and sound before it settles into understanding. It's a work that takes its subject seriously without pretending that the past was better or simpler than the present, and it invites the reader, as Jeffs does, to take the risk: 'Beware of the deep dark water, reader—or, to hell with it—dive right in.'

[anna marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

i enjoyed reading this but i did feel like it engaged wit the ballads it chose on a really surface level at points & then at other times was making a lot of whirlwind connections between other texts that were more about saying there is a network of symbols and meanings that is continuous between a lot of historical moments (idk if i agree so clearly w that tbh) than saying anything particularly interesting about the ballads themselves. i think my main difficulty tho is that we barely get any real contextualising or engagement with the collector[s] of the ballads & especially the man who collected the majority of the ballad versions that were used in this book. i think at the beginning the introduction should have at least talked more about the criticisms & pitfalls with using child's versions as a stable corpus when clearly there are issues around that and around his own manipulating of ideas of 'traditional ballads'. there is a little mention of anna brown/gordon's modfiyin the ballads that she collected & collated but even then it was a few throwaway sentences! i felt there was also a vagueness about what parts of history were supposed to matter to each ballad too.... i ofc was interested when early modern dates/events/etc were brought up but it was all too brief !! i did rly enjoy the illustrations - some more than others, but especially alison gross dancing w a little snake :) <3 when i asked for this book for a gift i didnt realise there were also retellings of each ballad in it, i thought there was more just ~ a version of the ballad & then a discussion of it, so the retellings surprised me and i didnt dislike them but i could have done without them tbh, then there could have been more space for close reading & historical scholarship ! it is all pretty lucidly written tho so that's nice :)

[W.S. Luk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my full review on my Substack

“So let us begin, for here are treasures. But beware the woodbine winding round the homely cottage beams. Beware the sound of bridle bells on the night of Hallowe’en…”

This book was a troublemaker at my local Waterstones. Despite the staff��s best efforts, they couldn’t locate it on the nonfiction shelves, and it took a while before I realised it’d inexplicably migrated to Hardback Fiction.

In fairness, it’s an apt mistake: OLD SONGS combines historian Amy Jeffs’ scholarly analyses of English and Scottish folk ballads with short fictional retellings of their narratives, all accompanied by Gwen Burns’ beautiful illustrations. Capturing music in prose is never easy, but in images of bells chiming “true as sunrise” or birds flying through a lush orchard with “juice-stained feathers”, it conjures up the lushness of these centuries-old melodies.

And like this bookshelf-hopping volume, OLD SONGS’ contents equally refuse categorisation. There are monstrous women aplenty in these tales, but also brilliant, defiant ones—“The Brown Girl” depicts a brown-skinned woman spurned by her lover for a paler rival, who has her revenge when he dies of illness and she dances on his grave, while “Tam Lin” and “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” depict women who survive deadly trials involving faerie queens and serial-killer knights...

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s like they sat out create the a beautiful book - and an equally beautiful audiobook. Robert Macfarlane, Luke Sherlock, Amy Jeffs, they all know the value of a good illustrator. But an illustrator will not save a bad book. Luckily, it’s not a bad book. It’s actually a rather wonderful book. In common with Sherlock and Macfarlane Amy Jeffs makes a tapestry of social history and stories, and creates fascination out of nothing.

Take some primary mediaeval sources, add a layer of academia, a little feminism, and the skill of a storyteller, and you’ll find yourself with this book, Old Songs.

Anyone really wants to know what England’s heritage is, should just check Amy Jeffs, Robert Macfarlane and Luke Sherlock. They know.

[Edward Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my life. Such a well selected and translated collection of old British ballads. The stories within are sometimes frightening, often heartbreaking and always magical. It's so fascinating to see glimpses of more universally well known fairy tales and folk stories in the narratives which invented those tropes. You feel as though you have entered a portal to a forbidden world, one where the inner workings and fabric of these islands' ancient storytelling tradition are laid bare.

This is a genuinely magnificent and rich text which I would recommend to anyone who wants to further understand what lies at the root of the culture of the British Isles.

[Tom Fordham · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an intriguing and thought provoking audiobook that explores a selection of old ballads and the stories behind them. Amy Jeffs's illuminating narrative style is absorbing as always, but what set this audiobook apart is that they included recordings of these ballads, interpreted by Natalie Brice. This book gives you an insight into the thoughts and fears of the people who lived during the golden age of folk ballads, the themes they explored and the emotions they felt. I recommend this short listen to those who are looking for a fascinating slice of musical history.

[ana &#x1f352; · Rating 5 out of 5]

jeffs’ portrait of these folk songs is inspirational and accessible. it’s a magical love letter to the power of storytelling and the world beyond human making. it weaves nature, boundaries, place and person all into one incredibly interesting book. “neither the dead or ballads need us, but don’t we need them?”

[Em · Rating 5 out of 5]

exquisite

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely collection.

[Steve Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautifully illustrated book with the stories behind ten traditional songs

[J Grimsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great set of stories