The lyrics of 'Scarborough Fair'

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My most recent assignment in my fingerstyle guitar lessons is to learn the Paul Simon guitar backing for 'Scarborough Fair'. I naturally turned to Youtube to listen to the track - yes, it's intricate and beautiful and eerie and haunting.

But what about the lyrics...? I realised I'd never properly listened to the narrative counterpoint before. Baffled, I asked ChatGPT for an explanation.

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"The song is a splice — half medieval riddle, half 1960s lament — and the join is not original to the folk tradition. It is Paul Simon’s intervention.

1. The older ballad: impossible tasks and estranged lovers

Scarborough Fair descends from a much older English and Scottish ballad, often catalogued as The Elfin Knight. The structure is simple and slightly uncanny: a man — or sometimes a woman — sets the other a series of impossible tasks as the price of reconciliation.

Make me a shirt without seams.

Plough me an acre between salt water and sea sand.

Reap it with a sickle of leather.

These are not agricultural instructions; they are logical traps. The subtext is: you can’t do this, so we’re finished. In some variants the other party replies with equally impossible counter-tasks, restoring a kind of equilibrium. It is courtship turned into a duel of paradoxes.

The herbal refrain — parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme — is older still, probably a floating mnemonic or symbolic tag, sometimes glossed as remembrance, strength, fidelity, and so on. But really it works more as atmosphere than doctrine.

2. The Martin Carthy connection

In the early 1960s, Martin Carthy was performing a stark, modal arrangement of the song in the British folk revival. Paul Simon heard this during his time in London and effectively borrowed the structure and guitar setting. That part — melody, modality, fingerstyle pattern — is traditional by way of Carthy.

3. The counterpoint: Simon’s addition

The second voice — the one that begins “On the side of a hill, in the deep forest green...” — is not traditional. That is Simon’s addition.

It is a separate anti-war lyric, often referred to as Canticle. Simon had already been working with lines from an earlier song, The Side of a Hill, and he wove them in as a counter-melody. The technique — two independent texts sung simultaneously — is closer to Renaissance polyphony than to a straightforward folk ballad.

So you end up with two different structures laid over one another:

Voice 1: timeless, static, ritualistic — impossible tasks, broken relationship, herbal refrain.

Voice 2: historical, directional — soldiers, generals, graves, the machinery of war.

The effect is not really narrative but juxtaposition. The old world of riddling lovers floats above a modern world of mechanised death. They do not resolve into each other; they rub against each other.

4. Why it works

The pairing is not arbitrary. Both strands deal, in their different idioms, with futility.

The lover’s tasks cannot be completed.

The war achieves nothing; the soldiers march towards oblivion for causes already hollowed out.

Simon’s real stroke was to notice that a seventeenth-century emotional stalemate and a twentieth-century geopolitical stalemate share the same skeleton: human effort expended under conditions that make fulfilment impossible.

5. Conclusion

The war lyric was not part of the original Scarborough Fair. It was a 1960s graft by Paul Simon: elegant, audacious, and in truth the thing that turns the piece from a beautiful folk relic into something much stranger and more durable. Without it, you have a riddle. With it, you have a meditation on futility across centuries."

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