The Scottish Ballad: Towards Survival in the 21 St Century

83 SUZANNE GILBERT , Stirling The Scottish Ballad: Towards Survival in the 21 st Century Figuring prominently in Scottish culture over centuries, ballads have reflected national concerns at significant times of upheaval. Strife over disputed boundaries between Scotland and England in the 16 th century leading up to the 1603 Union of Crowns manifested itself in the so-called "debateable lands" and sparked the high-spirited outlawry of the Border ballads. Loss of parliamentary sovereignty in 1707, described as "the end of an auld sang," propelled the self-reflection so central to the explosion of Scottish vernacular expression in the 18 th century, when ballads gained new cultural and poetic importance. And questions of political identity underlay the mid-20 th - century "Folk Revival," which introduced some of Scotland's most renowned ballad- singers. Indeed, as Sarah Dunnigan argues, ballads are themselves "debateable lands" that open up hermeneutic possibilities (Dunnigan 2005, 1); their very nature renders them appropriate for examination early in the 21 st century, when devolution and the constitutional future of Scotland are at the forefront. Ballads fulfil different functions now than in earlier times, but they are nonetheless deeply embedded in Scotland's consciousness. Given the ballad's legacy in Scotland's cultural production, this essay will trace dominant constructions over time in order to assess the genre's manifesta- tions and significance in the 21 st century. As a genre the ballad has remained highly recognizable: "tales of marvel, love and butchery, told in a style strikingly distinct from that of most poetry" (Buchan 1972, 1). This simple description captures the primary subjects of Scottish ballads, includ- ing supernatural encounters as in "Tam Lin," tragic romance as in "Love Gregor," and violent revenge as in "The Burning of Auchindoon." The description also points to ballads' most recognizable trait; they tell a story in a peculiar way, in stanzas that pace the dramatic action, employing devices such as incremental repetition, heavily coded "formulaic" language, and images juxtaposed in "a series of rapid flashes" (Hodgart 1950, 28). They are narrative songs, characterised by the interdependence of text and tune: "[T]he music that carries the words and keeps them alive in tradition is an inte- gral and ultimately inescapable half of the subject" (Bronson 1962, vol. 1, xviii-xix). Fundamental, too, is their emotional core. As Thomas A. McKean observes, "within balladry there is complex human emotional interaction, combined with striking im- agery polished by use and memory" (McKean 2003, 10). But ballads are "awkward things," as David Buchan acknowledges: "Few literary genres give so much pleasure to so many kinds of people and yet pose such refractory problems for the scholar and critic" (Buchan 1972, 1). The "ballad enigma" (Hustvedt 1930, 4) has inspired repeated attempts at definition as well as divergent critical lines of enquiry; and from the beginning, literary and cultural agendas have shaped the genre. Disciplinary approaches to ballads do not speak the same language, nor value the same features, and influential formulations have shifted the sense of what a ballad is and how it functions in culture. Literary studies of Scottish ballads, emerging from 18 th -century antiquarians' fascination, have been marked by emphasis on diachronic, retrospective assessments of the genre and its position in the canon, particularly its Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 23.2 (September 2012): 83-93. Anglistik, Jahrgang 23 (2012), Ausgabe 2 © 2012 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 84 SUZANNE GILBERT , Stirling place within a national poetry, over centuries. This approach has also been influenced by the drive to collect and classify variants of ballads, begun by the Danish scholar Svend Grundtvig and applied to British balladry in Francis J. Child's monumental The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898); it is here, as James Moreira argues, that "the program to not only describe but rigidly define the ballad begins" (Moreira 1999, 98). Influenced by classification, but from an entirely different direc- tion, ethnographic studies have featured synchronic treatments of ballad types, regional distribution, and cultural function, with an insistence on song, "tradition- bearing" and, more recently, performance. Theresa Catarella has identified four paradigms of past ballad studies, which may still be found in current research. She aligns configuration of the ballad as a "relic" with the antiquarian endeavours leading up to the Enlightenment, where a second paradigm emerges in Romantic notions of the ballad as the voice of a "people" or a "nation." A third paradigm traces the ballad as an "inferior adaptation and assimila- tion of 'higher' culture." Catarella's fourth paradigm marks a point of difference between the first three frameworks and more recent folkloristic or ethnographic understanding of the genre: "the ballad exists through change and is defined by its variabil- ity" (Catarella 1994, 469-472). Though overlapping in some cases, these paradigms nonetheless serve as reference points for understanding how Scottish ballads are re- Winter Journals ceived. Also to be considered is the changing emphasis on the forms of expression through which ballads are appreciated and delivered (as poetry or song). This essay will examine the Scottish tradition in its preoccupation over time with ballads as poetic texts and as songs, and it will posit a way forward for ballads in terms of adaptabil- ity in the 21 st century. for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution A Scottish Tradition In 1954, Stanley Hyman cited a string of ballads – among them "The Twa Sisters," "Sir Patrick Spens," "Johnie Cock," "Mary Hamilton," "The Bonny Earl of Murray," "Lamkin," "The Cruel Mother," "The Twa Corbies" and "ThePowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) Demon Lover" – and called the Scottish ballads "a folk literature unsurpassed by any in the world," part of "as rich a poetic heritage as any we know […]. If we seek language that is simple, sensuous, and passionate, a corpus of more than a dozen tragic Scottish ballad texts constitutes almost a classic tradition" (quoted in Henderson 2004a, 26). Parallel to ballad scholarship, a succession of Scottish writers – among them Robert Burns, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid, Nan Shepherd, Willa Muir, Muriel Spark and Liz Lochhead – have engaged in various ways with ballad narratives, motifs, structures and language in their own work. Muir dedicated a book, Liv- ing with Ballads (1965), to the subject; and Muriel Spark read ballads obsessively as a child and reported in her autobiography: "The steel and bite of the ballads, so re- morseless and yet so lyrical, entered my literary bloodstream, never to depart" (Spark 1992, 98). That ballads have formed a strand of Scotland's poetic achievement is clear. They comprised a substantial amount of material chosen by the English collec- tor Thomas Percy for his influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Dis- tinguishing 'northern' ballads from 'southern' ones, Percy found a mixture of qualities in ballads written in the Middle Scots used in the Scottish-English Borders: "The old Minstrel-ballads are in the northern dialect, abound with antique words and phrases, Anglistik, Jahrgang 23 (2012), Ausgabe 2 © 2012 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) THE SCOTTISH BALLAD : TOWARDS SURVIVAL IN THE 21 ST CENTURY 85 are extremely incorrect, and run into the utmost licence of metre; they have also a romantic wildness, and are in the true spirit of chivalry" (Percy 1794, 1: liv). Despite the homogenising effect of centuries of ballad criticism that has subsumed Scottish ballads into a 'British' cultural tradition, they have benefited from depiction as a "distinct and very important species of poetry" (Child 1908, vol. 1, 464). Reflecting on regional diversity in ballads, David Atkinson finds that "[t]o a significant extent […] the respective ballad traditions in regions like English or Scotland or Newfoundland remain simply empirically different from one another" (Atkinson 2002, 245); and David Buchan argues that the narrative song tradition "gives expression to the cultural preoccupations of – and sometimes the identity of – a given group" (Buchan 1994, 377). Certain features may be observed regarding predomi- nantly Scottish ballads, among them "a widely shared Scottish idea that the ballads, resonant of earlier times, offered a kind of evocative history" (Brown 2011, 192). Scottish historical ballads may be closely linked to the areas of the country in which the events are thought to have occurred; for example, the reiving ballads such as "Ja- mie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead" and "Kinmont Willie" are closely associated with the Scottish-English Borders. In another type of ballad, the supernatural element is especially strong. Comparing English and Scottish variants of "The Daemon Lover," Emi- ly Lyle observes that while the supernatural appears in both, "the 'spirit' of the English version is replaced by the much more powerful figure of the devil himself in the Scot- tish form" (Lyle 1994, 14). Scotland has more ballads revolving around fairies, such as "Tam Lin" and "Thomas Rymer," while the English tradition has produced a great- er number of ballads making reference to Christianity (Atkinson 2002, 242). Bothy ballads flourished in north-east Scotland, capturing farming life and practices at a particular time and place. Ballads turning on laconic or macabre humour, such as variants of "Twa Corbies," often bear the stamp of Scottish origins; and ironic juxta- positions that challenge Scottish feudal hierarchies recur in classic ballads such as "Sir Patrick Spens." The Scots language has proved particularly apt for depicting the narratives and dialogue of ballads. Overall, as Lyle suggests, "over a period of several centuries Scotland seems to have initiated ballads and to have provided an especially hospitable environment for those that came from elsewhere" (Lyle 1994, 13).

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