Francis James Child

Francis James Child was an American scholar and folklorist at Harvard University, known for The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, the collection now called the Child Ballads. He became Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory in 1851, and in 1876 Harvard made him its first professor of English to keep him from Johns Hopkins. Using the methods of comparative philology and corresponding with the Danish scholar Svend Grundtvig, he gathered some 305 ballads with their variants, published in parts from 1882 to 1898, the last after his death in 1896. His studies also shaped how Chaucer's grammar and pronunciation are understood, and in 1888 he founded the American Folklore Society.