The Flowering Thorn: International Ballad Studies
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Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1-1-2003 The loF wering Thorn Thomas A. McKean Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Folklore Commons Recommended Citation McKean, T. A. (2003). The flowering thorn: International ballad studies. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Flowering Thorn International Ballad Studies INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 1 9/25/03, 02:16 INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 2 9/25/03, 02:16 The Flowering Thorn International Ballad Studies edited by Thomas A. McKean A project of the Kommission für Volksdichtung and the Elphinstone Institute Utah State University Press Logan, Utah INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 3 9/25/03, 02:16 Copyright © 2003 Utah State University Press All rights reserved Utah State University Press Logan Utah 84322–7800 Cover and book design and typesetting by Thomas A. McKean. Cover photograph: Hawthorn (Cratægus monogyna ), Schivas, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, June 2003, Thomas A. McKean. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The flowering thorn : international ballad studies / edited by Thomas A. McKean. p. cm. “A project of the Kommission für Volksdichtung and the Elphinstone Institute.” Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87421-568-4 (alk. paper) 1. Ballads—History and criticism. 2. Folk literature—History and criticism. I. McKean, Thomas A., 1961- ML3545.F596 2003 782.4’3—dc22 2003018611 INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 4 9/25/03, 02:16 CONTENTS Introduction 1 Now Shes Fairly Altered Her Meaning: Interpreting Narrative Song 17 Healing the Spiders Bite: Ballad Therapy and Tarantismo Luisa Del Giudice 23 Music, Charm, and Seduction in British Traditional Songs and Ballads Vic Gammon 35 Places She Knew Very Well: The Symbolic Economy of Womens Travels in Traditional Newfoundland Ballads Pauline Greenhill 55 A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Positive Masculinity in the Ballads Sung by Scottish Women Lynn Wollstadt 67 Jesting with Edge Tools: The Dynamics of a Fragmentary Ballad Tradition Gerald Porter 77 The Servant Problem in Child Ballads Roger deV. Renwick 91 May Day and Mayhem: Portraits of a Holiday in Eighteenth-Century Dublin Ballads Cozette Griffin-Kremer 101 Malign Forces that Can Punish and Pardon: Structure and Motif 131 An Oddity of Catalan Folk Songs and Ballads Simon Furey 135 Barbara Allen and The Gypsy Laddie: Single-Rhyme Ballads in the Child Corpus William Bernard McCarthy 143 The Motif of Poisoning in Ukrainian Ballads Larysa Vakhnina 155 Contexts and Interpretations: The Walled-Up Wife Ballad and Other Related Texts Nicolae Constantinescu 161 Recapturing the Journey: Cruxes of Context, Version, and Transmission 169 The Life and Times of Rosie Anderson Sheila Douglas 175 Scholar, Antischolar: Sir Alexander Grays Translations of the Danish Ballads Larry Syndergaard 183 George Collins in Hampshire David Atkinson 193 From France to Brazil via Germany and Portugal: The Meandering Journey of a Traditional Ballad J. J. Dias Marques 205 The White Fisher: An Illegitimate Child Ballad from Aberdeenshire Julia C. Bishop 219 INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 5 9/25/03, 02:16 Regions, Reprints, and Repertoires 245 Ballad Singing in New Deer Katherine Campbell 249 Old Flemish Songbook Reprints Stefaan Top 257 Chants Populaires Flamands (1879): A Scholarly Field Collection and an Early Individual Repertoire Isabelle Peere 265 The Corpus of French Ballads Michele` Simonsen 285 The Slovenian Folk and Literary Ballad Marjetka Gole Kauèiè 295 Scotlands Nordic Ballads Frances J. Fischer 307 Simon Frasers Airs and Melodies (1816): An Instrumental Collection as a Source of Scottish Gaelic Songs Mary Anne Alburger 319 Purement scientifique et archéologique: The Mediating Collector 337 The Case against Peter Buchan Sigrid Rieuwerts 341 Ballad Raids and Spoilt Songs: Collection as Colonization Valentina Bold 353 The Contribution of D. K. Wilgus to Ballad and Folksong Scholarship David G. Engle, James Porter, and Roger deV. Renwick 363 Acknowledgements 377 Notes on the Contributors 379 General Index 383 Song Title Index 387 INTRO Flowering Thorn.p65 6 9/25/03, 02:16 1 Introduction Thomas A. McKean Thoull break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro the flowering thorn: Thou minds me o departed joys, Departed never to return. Robert Burns1 The flowering thorn expresses the dual nature of the ballad: at once a distinctive expression of European tradition,2 but also somewhat tricky to approach from a scholarly perspective, requiring a range of disciplines to illuminate its rich com- position. Much of this latter quality has to do with the very features that charac- terize ballads, erzählenden Lieder, or narrative songs.3 These include an appearance of fragmentation, a wide range of cultural and social referents, com- plex, evocative symbolic language, and variation. The notable multiformity of meaning, text, and tune is mirrored in scholarship, too. The Flowering Thorn is therefore wide ranging, with articles written by world authorities from the fields of folklore, history, literature, and ethnology, employing a variety of methodologiesstructuralism to functionalism, reper- toire studies to geographical explorations of cultural movement and change. The twenty-five selected contributions represent the latest trends in ballad scholar- ship, embracing the multidisciplinary nature of the field today. The essays have their origins in the 1999 International Ballad Conference of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (KfV), which focused particularly on ballads and social context, performance and repertoire, genre, motif, and classification. The revised, tailored, and expanded essays are divided into five sectionsthe interpretation of narra- tive song; structure and motif; context, version, and transmission; regions, re- prints, and repertoires; and the mediating collectoroffering a range of examples from fifteen different cultures, ten of them drawing on languages other than English, resulting in a series of personal journeys to the heart of one of Europes richest, most enduring cultural creations. While articles are tightly focused on their central themes, they naturally create cross currents that enrich the entire book. Some of these common themes, seen from very different perspectives, include gender issues, collecting and editing as cultural translation, the vigorous life of literary ballads in the oral tradition, 1 2 Introduction the reemergence of class as a significant aspect of both text and performance, and the long-running dynamic relationship between oral and printed sources. On a fundamental level, though, each article explores the creation of meaning: semantic meaning based on close textual analysis; structural and thematic meaning emerg- ing from study of commonplaces, verse form, and characterization; cultural mean- ing as embodied in performance and transmission; and meaning as created through the mediations of collection, edition, and translation. To a great extent, the essays collectively address questions of cultural stability, often at the heart of any discus- sion of tradition, showing the multifaceted, and subjective, nature of meaning, function, and significance in the ballad world. What is it, then, about ballads, some of the finest specimens of human creativity (Dundes 1996: xi), that allows such diversity of interpretation? Balladsas hard to define as they are easy to recognize, in Hodgarts memo- rable phrase (1962: 10)survive through varying fashions and cultural changes, moving back and forth between oral and written traditions, and maintain a fierce existence in the modern world, coming again into bloom when sung (see Bronson 195972: ix). In surviving through change, they achieve a kind of cultural stabil- ity, a phrase which may, in some ways, be thought of as synonymous with tradition. Paradoxically, if there is one characteristic shared by traditional songs throughout the world, it is variation (see Coffin 1977: 119), but variation and change that takes place within a particular, relatively stable framework. While the popular ballad may no longer be popular in literal terms, nor in school curricula as frequently as it once was, it remains one of the most intriguing of all artistic expressions. The narrative song tradition, wrote David Buchan, gives expression to the cultural preoccupations ofand sometimes the sense of identity ofa given group (1994: 377), and more than that, as Brendáin Ó Madagáin has shown in Ireland, song can function as emotional release on occasions when feelings were such that ordinary speech was inadequate (1985: 143). For the Inuit, songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices (Rasmussen 1931: 321). In Romanian and Slovenian tradition, an entire world of legend is played out through the medium of these songs (see, for example, Constantinescu in this volume; Ispas 2000; and Kumer 1988). In Germany, songs can combine the real and the histori- cal to yield a rounded vision of human experience (Dittmar 1985: 531; also com- pare Vargyas 1979; Buchan 1976). In Spain, Mexico, Hungary, and Italy, to name just a few countries with strong traditions, ballads can become Introduction 3 the substance of social