Transcriber's Notes
This book contains material in multiple languages, and numerous examples of archaic, non-standard and dialect forms of English. Therefore no attempts to standardize spelling would be appropriate. The only changes made to the text are to correct typographical errors etc. which are listed [at the end of the book]. Minor corrections to format or punctuation have been made without comment.
Footnotes have been numbered sequentially throughout the book but are presented at the end of each section or ballad to which they refer.
Unicode characters have been used for special symbols and diacritics in the text. These should appear in the following table:
| ā | macron |
| ă ĭ | breve |
| ć ń ś ẃ | acute accent |
| Č č ĕ Ř ř š Š ž | caron/hacek |
| ȝ | yogh |
| ł | l with stroke (in Polish etc.) |
| Œ œ | oe-ligature |
| ş | s with cedilla |
| † | dagger used to represent upright cross symbol |
Greek symbols are also rendered with Unicode characters, but a Latin transliteration is provided in the "hover-text".
Note that [a'] and ['s] denote editorial insertions of contracted forms: e.g. on page 299 [a'] is an editorial insertion of "a'" (for "all"); on page 309 ['s] is an editorial insertion of "'s" (for "has"?).