"The False Knight Upon the Road" is a British ballad, collected and published as Child ballad 3, Roud 20. It features a riddling exchange between a schoolboy and a "false knight", the devil in disguise.[1] As to its provenance, it is presumed to not be much older than its first publication in 1824.[2]
Across numerous versions differing significantly in lyric content, the consistent themes are:[3]
The boy's ability to evade the devil may spring from the devil's inability to dumbfound him; gaining power over people by this means is a motif found in other folktales.[4] In some respect, the ability of the child to circumvent the fause knight can be seen as a rite of passage.
This ballad's narrative is quite clearly structured as a rite of passage the child's status as a speaker changes. His character is developed, transformed in a story that shows the different ways in which a person moves from one category to the next. The ballad portrays the speech contexts in which the confrontation between the child and a threatening adult is being performed, foreshadowing the speech contexts in which children and adults might interact as equals or, if he learns well, a child travels to school and then out into the world, revealing speech appropriate to and necessary for these contexts. The ballad implies that children in school should answer questions but here an adult in the form of a threatening stranger may be rebutted in a forthright manner. In addition to these very serious and quite obvious rationales of learning to speak well, there may be associated seemingly playful but profound functions in cognitive, social development.[5]
A Swedish variant features the little boy, but an old woman, presumably a witch, in the place of the knight.[4]
