© SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without Is there an ecclesiastic code of early folk song and folk ballad collecting in Europe? Vilmos Voigt, Eötvös Loránd University Folklore Tanszék, Budapest It is an important but hitherto neglected topic to speak about the role of priests and clergyman in early collecting of folklore. Old and new summaries of European folklore research history (as e.g. Boberg, Cocchiara, Richard Dorson. more recently Peter Burke, ∗ etc.) insert in the biographies of the forerunners of folklore studies if they have been priests, but they do not describe any “ecclesiastic” code or pattern, common among the “priests— folklorists”. We might add that in describing 18 th -19 th century folklore research, some other “codes” have been separately scrutinized: e.g. the “mythological” and comparative (philological) schools etc. Further on the important spiritual movements or trends, as e.g. Enlightenment, Romanticism, Nationalism etc. are easily traceable also in folklore research histories of 18 th and 19 th centuries. The first important representative of the “ecclesiastic code” in early European folklore activity was the Anglican bishop, Thomas Percy (1729-1811). He studied at Christ Church College (Oxford), thus he has gained excellent knowledge of ancient poetry. Having been ordained as a priest, he was presented 1756 by his college to the vicarage of Easton Maduit, Northamptonshire, which he held together with the rectory of Wilby. From about 1760 he started his literary and theological publications. His first intention toward compiling the Reliques of Ancient English Poetry consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets, together with some few of later date we find in a letter dated by March 1, 1761. Percy for finding old manuscripts and publications could mobilize a chain of helpers: librarians, literary persons, museologists. Among his friends we find, of course, priests too. Percy thanks them in the Advertisement to his collection. As it is well known, the composition of the Reliques… goes according to the texts by their sources, and it is not representing any ∗ Because I mention well known folklorists, there is no need to give detailed biographical references. Besides of the works on history of folklore research in Europe the entries in Enzyklopädie des Märchens (see Ranke; Brednich 1977--, hitherto 13 volumes, to the entries 1 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without “clerical” rendering. Percy does not mention any religious topic in his lengthy introductory essay on Ancient minstrels in England. His intentions are of historical and philological character. Perhaps the same attitude is typical to his contemporary, Bishop Robert Lowth (1710— 1787) too, a professor of poetry at Oxford University, who, in fact, was one of the very first founders of comparative oral poetics. From its first edition (1765) Percy’s Reliques… has served for generations as an orientation point both for poetry and folk poetry: first in Great Britain, then in entire Europe. The reviewers have often mentioned the bishop's rank of Percy, but an ecclesiastic code in studying folklore was not favorized in their remarks. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744—1803) was a priest too. His influence on modern European folklore is beyond any question. Besides of having important functions of a clergyman, he was good theologian, a very learned historian, philosopher of the Enlightenment and very careful as philologist. Looking forward to higher education first he wanted to be a surgeon, however, at Konigsberg university he has studied philosophy. There he came into contact with Immanuel Kant. In 1764 Herder became a teacher at the (German) church school in Riga, and later he was an assistant clergyman there. In 1769 he had left the Baltic, and after intensive travels in West Europe, he has returned to Germany. From 1776 he was Lutheran superintendent, head clergyman of Weimar, which city at that time doubtlessly was the cultural capital of Germany. Beside his ecclesiastic positions, Herder was always better known as writer and as philosopher of history. By 1764 (i.e. before the publication of Percy’s collection !) Herder already has started to write on folk songs. On September 13, 1773 he has suggested to his publisher to compile a world anthology of folk songs. This collection was finally published in 1778. Its original title was Volkslieder . The second, enlarged edition, entitled as Stimmen der Völker in Liedern , came out in 1807. (On more modern, theoretical treatment of Herder’s work see e.g. Schirmunski; Gulyga; Dietze.) Herder’s systematization of the song texts is thematic and historical. He has grouped the texts together – if it was possible – from the same language and culture. Church or religion does not appear in any special chapter of the anthology. The introduction or the comments do not raise such questions either. It is typical when Herder is quoting e.g. Luther, he is paying him a hommage not to a priest, only to as a learned person, who spoke “Ve....”) give usually exact references. On Hungarian “mythological” folklorists see my 2 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without wisely on songs. At the opening page of the book there is a typical reference from Luther’s Tischreden (No. 968, vol. II., p. 490, and No. 5603, vol. V., p.274 – in sligthly modernized spelling by Herder).: “Die Musika ist eine schöne herrliche Gabe Gottes und nahe der Theologie”. It is a nice sentence indeed – but it is not at all an ecclesiastic reference to the folk songs. Herder’s anthology, with its not-systematizing the folk songs according to genres, was a general editorial method in that time. I must confess that I do not know, who was the very first folklorist in Europe, who has arranged the published folk song texts according to genres and sub-genres of the folk poetry. From the second half of the 19 th century a new, “generic” arrangement became the most popular. The famous Des Knaben Wunderhorn – alte deutsche Lieder (by Achim von Arnim and Bettina Bretano, in three volumes, 1806-1808) has singled out only one generic group (“Kinderlieder” at the end of the whole publication), i.e. the German “children’s songs. We could find folk songs by ritual or religious background in the publications, but never in a specially separated chapter, and nor with ecclesiastic commentaries. We can continue to list the clergymen involved in early European folklore research. I will just briefly mention one particular case: Hungary. The first significant publication of Hungarian folk songs -- Népdalok és mondák (Folk Songs and Tales) in three volumes, 1846-1848 -- was edited by a literary man, János Erdélyi (1814—1868), who was later working as professor of literature and philosophy at the Sárospatak Calvinist seminar. The collection contains several hundred song texts (and a few folk narrative texts too). The material is grouped into a dozen of “books”’ presenting different genres of folk poetry. In the first volume we find 476 songs in 13 “books”. Here the seventh “book” (“sacred songs”) contains 10 texts, which are old church songs and calendar custom’s songs. The second volume does not contain similar songs. We do not find religious songs in the third volume either. Erdélyi wrote extensive commentary to the publication, but there he is not dealing with the problems of the ecclesiastic code. And, if from about 1400 Hungarian folk songs he labeled only 10 as “sacred”, it was indeed a neglectable quantity. Today, after one-and-half century of folk song research in Hungary, we summarizing paper (Voigt 1997—1998), with further references. 3 © SPIN and the author www.spinnet.eu Do not quote without might say that the amount of Hungarian folk songs related to church or to religion may be at least 10 %, i.e. much higher, as it was represented in the collection by Erdélyi. Those songs existed already in the mid of the 19 th century without any doubt among the Hungarian folk, but they were not considered as folk songs, and they were not printed in folk song collections. Another classic edition of Hungarian folk poetry was the Vadrózsák (Wild Roses – 1863), compiled by the Unitarian (Antitrinitarian) bishop, János Kriza (1811—1875). His collection contains more than 500 songs, and the collecting was started by the 1840s. Among Kriza’s collaborators we find his fellow priests too. The grouping of the songs was made according to linguistic dialects (!) of the Székelys (Hungarians) in Transylvania, and we do not find any special “religious” chapter in the book. Of course, in the anthology there are quite a few songs, ballads, legends and tales with religious background. The proportion is the same for the unpublished part of Kriza’s collection, which is available in his heritage at the archives of the Hungarian Academy in Budapest. If we sum up the achievements of early folk song collections in Europe, we do not find there a specific interest towards religious folklore traditions. On the other hand, it is understandable that priests as collectors and publishers did not pay much attention to blasphemic, dirty or anticlerical folklore. If we knew more thoroughly the background of the manuscripts and collections behind the publications, perhaps we could find traces of preventive censorship as regards of several genres of folk poetry. With this statement I do not insist that Erdélyi or Kriza in fact had seen such texts and then, deliberately they have purge or exclude them. But it is still a curious fact that in an early collection (1813) of commonly known Hungarian songs Ötödfélszáz énekek (450 songs) by Ádám Pálóczi Horváth (1760—1820), among the songs we find about one third of erotic, sarcastic, anticlerical, revolutionary etc.