The Singer and the Scribe: European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures (Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 75)

The Singer and the Scribe European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures

75

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena) - Guillaume van Gemert (Universiteit Nijmegen) - Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen) - Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) - John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) - Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) - Sven H. Rossel (University of Washington) - Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College) - Horst Thomé (Universität Kiel) herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redakteure: Norbert Bachleitner & Alfred Noe Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

The Singer and the Scribe European Ballad Traditions and European Ballad Cultures

Edited by

Philip E. Bennett and Richard Firth Green

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1851-8 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004 Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgements This volume of essays began as a colloquium of the Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies Programme of the University of Edinburgh, held on Saturday 27th May, 2000, at the Robertson Music Centre, St George’s School, Edinburgh. One paper, read on that day but not included in the volume at the request of the speaker, was given by Dr Mary-Ann Constantine of the Department of Welsh, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. The other speakers at the colloquium are marked by an asterisk in the list of contibutors at the end of the volume. My thanks go first to my fellow organisers of the colloquium, Dr Roger Collins, Department of History, and Dr Fran Colman, Department of English Language, University of Edinburgh. I also wish to thank the Research Committee of the Faculty Group (Arts, Divinity, Music) of the University of Edinburgh for financial support, and St George’s School for donating the venue and providing generous hospitality. Finally my thanks are due to Joanne Naysmith, Administrative Secretary in the Division of European Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh, for her great patience and meticulous work in preparing the colloquium and the volume that has proceeded from it, and to Thomas Nicholas at the Ohio State University for overseeing the presentation of the final manuscript copy. Philip E. Bennett, February 2004

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Contents

Philip E. Bennett and Richard F. Green

Introduction

5

Roderick Beaton

Balladry in the Medieval Greek World

13

Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia

Love Story or Heroic Deed? (The Two Faces of Russian Balladry: Bylinas and Ballads)

23

Huw Lewis

From Oral Adventure Story to Literary Tale of Enchantment: the case of the Count Arnaldos ballad

37

Manuel da Costa Fontes

A Morte do Rei D. Fernando and Floresvento: two rare Portuguese epic ballads

51

Ad Putter

Fier Margrietken: a medieval ballad and its history

69

William Layher

Looking up at ‘Holger Dansk og Burmand’ (DgF 30)

89

Philip E. Bennett

The Suppression of a Ballad Culture: the enigma of medieval France

105

Richard Firth Green

F.J. Child and Mikail Bakhtin

123

Charles Duffin

Echoes of Authority: audience and formula in the Scots ballad text.

135

Margaret Sleeman

Estrea Aelion, Salonica Sephardic Tradition and the Ballad of Imprisoned Virgil

153

Roger Wright

Spanish Ballads in a Changing World

169

Thomas A. McKean

The Stewarts of Fetterangus and Literate Oral Tradition

181

List of Contributors

209

Index

211

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Introduction Philip E. Bennett Richard Firth Green The purpose of this volume is not to provide a comprehensive history of the European ballad, nor to offer a complete comparative typology. It is rather to investigate the various ways in which literate and non-literate, or para -literate, cultures have interacted in various parts of Europe (and the New World as an extension of European culture by migration) to shape the development of the ballad as a text for reading and a poem for singing from what may be debatable origins in the late Middle Ages to the last years of the twentieth century. Coverage, even within this limited framework, is not meant to be exhaustive. Celtic balladry, whether Brythonic or Goedelic, is omitted, as is High German. The main thrusts of the volume are towards the Iberian world, Hispanic and Portuguese, and the Anglo-Scots traditions, with supporting studies of Dutch, French, Greek, Norse and Russian ballad traditions. A central problem for all who write about ballads is to arrive at a workable definition of the object being studied, for without such a definition it is difficult to see how any kind of external history can be undertaken at all. Nonetheless, many have refused to give abstract, theoretical definitions. Typical of the ‘connoisseurship’ approach is that of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Ballads where, before giving his own selection of illustrative quotations from poems included in the anthology, he first quotes W.P. Ker: If the reader interrogate me concerning this Idea of the Ballad, as Mr Pecksniff demanded of Mrs Todgers her Notion of a Wooden Leg, Professor Ker has my answer prepared: — ‘In spite of Socrates and his logic we may venture to say, in answer to the question “What is a ballad?” — “A Ballad is The Milldams of Binnorie and Sir Patrick Spens and The Douglas Tragedy and Lord Randal and Childe Maurice, and things of that sort”’. 1

This notion, that the ballad cannot be defined, merely identified by an instinct born of experience, is, of course, quite inadequate, and more recent scholars have tried to establish the contours of the genre. Their efforts, however, which are frequently more prescriptive than descriptive, are usually based on English and Scots traditions, or, where a broader international view is taken, using the Anglo-Scots ballads as a yardstick. This has been notably true of English-speaking scholars from either side of the Atlantic: Albert B. Friedman’s excellent attempts to pin down the genre tended to err in that direction,2 and even William J. Entwistle, still the only anglophone scholar to attempt a comprehensive study of European balladry, began his chapter ‘What is a Ballad?’ by referring to Sir

1

2

The Oxford Book of Ballads, chosen and edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910; repr. 1963), pp. xiii-xv. Friedman, Albert B., The Ballad Revival, studies of the influence of popular on sophisticated poetry (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 6 et pass.; Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd ed. 1974), pp. 62-64.

The Singer and the Scribe Patrick Spens.3 Entwistle’s final working definition, however, is far broader than anything that the study of Anglo-Scots conventions in isolation might mandate: ‘any short traditional narrative poem sung, with or without accompaniment of dance, in assemblies of the people’.4 Central to almost all definitions is this notion of ‘tradition’, with a consequent opposition between ‘traditional’ (understood as ‘popular’ as a synonym of ‘folk’) and ‘literary’ ballads, the latter almost invariably being dismissed as aesthetically inferior to the former as products of balladry. This view is particularly enshrined in Gerould’s otherwise seminal study of what is significantly termed the ‘ballad of tradition’, in which qualitative hierarchy is established between the products of a rural, northern, anonymous ‘folk’ and those of southern, urban ‘rhymesters’, including the authors of broadside ballads, which otherwise are seen as a crucial link in the transmission of the popular ballad.5 Yet even such apparently fundamental sociological distinctions are not universally accepted as a basis for aesthetic judgment. In the Hispanic tradition, for example (despite the habitual division of the romancero into ‘ancient’ or ‘traditional’ and ‘artistic’ branches), they are simply unknown.6 Indeed, though modern scholars, such as Roger Wright in his article in this volume, may distinguish between folk romances and the products of literate poets from Góngora to Lorca, the habit among Spaniards has been to treat the romancero as a unified cultural good. This can clearly be seen in the nineteenth-century Tesoro de los romanceros, in which, for example, anonymous romances dealing with the life of the Cid are freely mixed with those on the same topic composed by Lope de Vega and Lorenzo de Sepúlveda,7 the same mixture being apparent in all the other thematic sections into which the volume is divided. The question of nomenclature, and of making sure we are comparing like with like, is one of the thorniest in ballad scholarship, and one which this volume highlights by its range of studies, without seeking to resolve the issue. A central problem is caused by the adoption in English in the eighteenth century of the word ‘ballad’ (which originally denoted a dancesong) as the name for a particular type of closely focused, dramatised and impersonal narrative poem, 8 which has caused much controversy over the boundaries separating the

3

Entwistle William J., European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), p. 16. Entwistle, European Balladry, pp. 16-17. 5 Gerould, Gordon Hall, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), pp. 115, 241- 43. 6 Even ways of classifying the romances vary from authority to authority: Colin Smith links the romances viejos and romances juglarescos as traditional types against ‘diverse kinds of romance aritificioso’, Spanish Ballads, ed. by Colin Smith (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964), p. 20, while Dorothy Clotelle Clarke divorces the romances juglarescos from the anonymous, traditional romancero viejo associating them with romances eruditos and artisticos by individual poets, whether identifiable by individual name or not, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, pp. 712-13. 7 Tesoro de los romanceros y cancioneros españoles, históricos, caballerescos, moriscos y otros, ed. by Don Eugenio de Ochoa (Paris: Baudry, 1838), pp. 128-210. 8 The definition is first given by Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition, p. 192, and taken up by Friedman, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, loc. cit.; for the dates of the use of ‘ballad’ to describe narrative poems see Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition, pp. 235 and 250. 4

6

Introduction ballad from other types of traditional song on the one hand and from narrative romances and epics on the other. The most sensitive area is undoubtedly in defining the very permeable boundary between ballad and folksong in general, although this boundary is seen as vital by David Fowler in establishing his thesis that the Anglo-Scots ballad emerged only in the fifteenth century by the conflation of metrical romances with folk lyrics (carols, riddling songs and so forth).9 The porous nature of this border, if one takes a comparative international view, is nowhere better illustrated than by the lack of a clear taxonymy in French, where the chanson populaire (‘folksong’) is not subject to further classification. At various times the ‘ballad’ has been dubbed romance (borrowing the Spanish word), complainte and chanson épico-narrative. This lack of clarity in isolating a type of poetry in the French tradition, although the existence of the kind from at least the seventeenth century is regularly admitted, has led to the paradoxical position, as Philip Bennett’s contribution seeks to show, that the ballad is often held to be unknown in France at just that period, the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, when ballads, frequently exploiting French cultural materials, are seen to be developing across much of the rest of western Europe. An equally telling fluidity on the ballad-folksong border can be seen in the case of the song type of the Baffled Knight, which tells the story of how a young lady or princess preserves her virginity when meeting a knight in the country by assuring him she will marry him if he escorts her home, then escaping from him and mocking him for his lack of sexual enterprise. Fowler refuses to see this as a ballad, equating it with riddling songs or with ‘light romantic and comic pieces’ dealing with the battle of the sexes,10 yet essentially the same scenario is presented by the Spanish Romance de la Infantina, with the exception that in the Spanish version the knight pronounces satiric condemnation against himself for not striking while the iron was hot.11 The Count Arnaldos Ballad, analysed in this volume by Huw Lewis, offers another Iberian instance of the way the lyric impulse can be inextricably woven into a ballad’s narrative structure, while even in the more austere Anglo-Scottish tradition, as the association of the haunting lyric ‘O Waly, Waly,’ with the ballad of Jamie Douglas shows, such interweaving is not entirely unknown. Tristram P. Coffin and Francis Gummere (the latter famous for the now-discredited theory of the communal genesis of the ballad) could hardly be further apart in their views of ballad origins, yet both would agree on the primacy what Coffin calls ‘the emotional core’ of the ballad over its narrative components.12

9

Fowler, David C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1968). pp. 1819. Despite his statement in these pages that the popular ballad crystalised in Britain in the fifteenth century Fowler’s insistance on using only manuscript evidence for the existence of ballads, his belief ‘that a given ballad took the particular shape it has about the time it was written down, unless there is specific evidence to the contrary’ (p. 5), and his rejection from the canon of all the earliest surviving poems normally considered to be ballads effectively mean that the earliest ballads available for study according to him belong to the sixteenth century. 10. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, pp. 20; 9-30. 11 Romancero viejo, ed. by María de los Hitos Hurtado (Madrid: Edaf, 1997), pp. 165-67. 12 The Critics and the Ballad, ed. MacEdward Leach and Tristram P. Coffin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 246.

7

The Singer and the Scribe Even on the other boundary, that on which the ballad approaches such traditional narrative forms as the epic and the romance, Fowler sees what he calls a ‘rounded tune’ (p. 89) as being of utmost importance in defining ballads.13 Both Gerould, in studying the English tradition, and Davenson, in analysing French chansons populaires, note the importance of Gregorian chant as the foundation of ballad melodies,14 though due caution should be applied before ascribing universal characteristics to ballad tunes. Roger Wright, in this volume, indicates the wide range of musical styles adopted in different parts of the Hispanic world for singing romances, some much more elaborate than others, and while Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia points out that the nature of the supporting music is one feature distinguishing the Russian ballada from the bylina, the latter, which, as Rogatchevskaia argues in her contribution, should really be equated with epics, have frequently been considered as belonging to the same tradition as western ballads.15 If the context of oral tradition, as a living if unconscious concept, and oral transmission, as a mechanism of diffusion, have been vital to the ballad’s survival as a distinctive poetic kind, such transmission has been practised throughout the whole period of the existence of the ballad as a recognisable genre in a milieu which is essentially literate. Since ballads are generally considered to have been sung and disseminated by an unlettered ‘folk’ this paradox should be explored. Romantic communalist theories of the origins not only of ballads but also of epics posited, usually implicitly rather than explicitly, a state of society that would equate with the Germanic tribes of the migration period or pre-Christian Celtic peoples not in contact with Rome. The importance of Rousseau’s notions of the pre-societal Golden Age and of Enlightenment theories of the Noble Savage should not be underestimated in the generation of traditionalism as an explanation of ballad and epic origins, yet western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, if we accept this as the likely period of the emergence of the ballad in most of the areas covered by this book, is far removed from any society isolated from the culture of the book. Whatever role is assigned to clerics, minstrels and jongleurs / juglares in the composition and performance of ballads, both they and their

13

14

15

8

Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad, p. 80. This can be taken too far, however, as when he excludes all the Robin Hood material from his view of the corpus of ballads because the poems refer to themselves as ‘talkynges’. It should be noted that Middle English vocabulary is as imprecise in this sphere as is Old and Middle French. The Middle English Dictionary lists ‘talkinge’ as a ‘tale’ while ‘song’ is glossed as a ‘poem’: in neither case is the mode of delivery specified. Equally ‘singen’ has the meaning ‘to recite’ as well as ‘to sing’, and ‘talken’ is associated with ‘dytees’ glossed as ‘songs’, with examples offering the Latin equivalent ‘carmina’ (Middle English Dictionary, consulted at http://ets.udml.umich.edu/m/med/). Nor need the comparative length of a ballad like The Gest of Robin Hood mean that it was invariably recited; The Hunting of the Cheviot is also a substantial narrative, yet Sir Philip Sydney famously reports hearing it sung by a ‘blinde Crowder’. For these reasons, it would be hazardous to conclude that Robin Hood poems were not sung, or at least chanted, and to deny them the status of ballads. Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition, pp. 216-23; Davenson, Henri (Henri-Irénée Marrou), Le Livre des chansons, introduction à la chanson populaire française, Les Cahiers du Rhône (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1944; repr n.p. [Paris]: Club des Libraires de France, 1958), pp. 65-69. For example by Entwistle, European Balladry, pp. 354-80, though he does distinguish them from most western European ballads.

Introduction audience, as well as the non-professional or ‘semi-professional’ singers equally active in the tradition, cannot have failed to be aware of the whole range of texts, ecclesiastical, legal and lay, which, while being diffused orally to most receivers, proclaim by their very existence the centrality of the written word with its inherent if relative stability and authority.16 On the one hand modern definitions of literacy, which often apply as much to writing as to reading and include criteria such as the ability to sign one’s name, are not applicable in a medieval context.17 On the other, in this case (as in so many involving arguments over the oral dissemination of literature in the medieval and early modern worlds) what is more important than the ability to decipher a greater or smaller amount of written text is a mind set which is aware of the existence and importance of books. This is to be sensed even in some of the very earliest ballads, which often seem to depend upon more prestigious medieval narrative genres. For Fowler the dominant genre is the romance, but this is another area where a broader European outlook will tend to complicate assumptions based on a narrower Anglo-Scottish perspective. While Fowler is not alone in assuming that early ballads represent a popularising of aristocratic medieval romances,18 several of the essays in this collection serve to challenge this idea, and rather than positing some kind of generic attraction between the two forms, we might do better to think of the ballad as taking colouring from whatever prominent literary types happen to coexist with it. In Russia, as Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia shows, national epics were collected and written down comparatively late, so it is perhaps unsurprising to find Russian ballads characterised not as popular romances but as ‘lower epic songs’. To make a similar observations about the birthplace of Homer and Hesiod might seem absurd, but the epic ‘demotiko tragoudi’ described here by Roderick Beaton are similarly late, the product of Greece’s heroic struggle for independence. Unlike Rusian ballads with their frequently nameless heroes, however, Greek akritika may celebrate national heroes like Basil Digenes Akrites. Similarly the great Scandinavian hero, Ogier the Dane, was being celebrated in ballads from late fifteenth-century Sweden, whence, as William Layher shows, he found his way into a fascinating church mural. If Swedish audiences could be entertained by stories of Holger Dansk, and Dutch ones, as Ad Putter reminds us, by tales of the Germanic hero Hildebrand, Portuguese audiences were apparently no less receptive to tales of the Spanish Cid, and Manuel da Costa Fontes demonstrates how epic material from medieval Iberia has been preserved down modern times in ballads from the Portuguese-speaking world. Even in 16

Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition, pp. 220–22; Friedman, Albert B., The Ballad Revival: studies in the influence of popular on sophisticated poetry (University of Chicago Press, 1961) studies the interaction of literate and non-literate or para-literate forms from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. In this volume Roger Wright, Margaret Sleeman and Thomas McKean consider the interplay of the oral and the written in the repertoires of twentieth-century singers, particularly in the case of those who sing predominently in the home or to a restricted social circle and who do not perform to wider groups for any form of reward. 17 See Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to written record, England 1066-1307, 2 nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), and Brian Stock, The implications of literacy : written language and models of interpretation in the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1983). 18 See Holger Nygard, ‘Popular Ballad and medieval Romance’, in Folklore International, ed. by D. K. Wilgus (Hatboro, Pennsylvania: Folklore Associates, 1967), pp. 161-73; and Thomas J. Garbáty, ‘Rhyme, Romance, Ballad, Burlesque, and the Confluence of Form’, in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. by Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books,1984), pp. 283-301.

9

The Singer and the Scribe the Anglo-Scottish tradition, the influence of late medieval romance is far from omnipresent. One would be hard pressed, for example, to categorise either the pro-Scottish heroic ballad of the Battle of Otterburn, or its pro-English counterpart, the Hunting of the Cheviot, as romances. No doubt the fact that these are early ballads from a remote and lawless border region, helps explain their epic qualities, but if further evidence were needed that no necessary generic connection exists between the ballad form and that of the literary romance, we might cite the later dependence of the much-maligned early-modern broadside on newspapers and chapbooks. By the sixteenth century, when in the west all but the most remote communities had their priest, lawyer and frequently schoolmaster, literary sensibilities had penetrated many traditional communities. Such a community on the borders of Brittany is portrayed by Noël du Fail in his Propos rustiques, a collection of ‘village tales’ representing local oral tradition in the mid-sixteenth century. Notably the village has a former schoolmaster turned wine maker who reads from his small library (the Shepherd’s Calendar, Aesop’s Fables, the Romance of the Rose) on the same festive occasions as the villagers tell their tales.19 It is also at this time that we find many ballads circulating, not for ‘court’ use but among what would be regarded as traditional target audiences of singers, on broadside sheets in Britain and in Spain on the equivalent pliegos sueltos.20 The parish of Myddle in Shropshire, described by Richard Gough a century and a half after du Fail, gives an interesting insight into the way such ballad communities might develop. Gough himself was an educated man, able to quote Virgil and turn rustic epitaphs into Latin, but he was alert to the popular culture of his own village. At one point he tells of a son of the parish who had gone to sea, been captured by ‘the Turks of Tangiers’, and escaped only after a series of hair-raising adventures. His fortunes temporarily restored, the man ‘came downe to Myddle, and was there at what time they were singing ballads abroad in Markett townes of this adventure’.21 All of this has implications for our understanding of the ways in which oral traditions in general and specifically ballad composition and singing as a sub-set of such traditions operate in what should be termed para-literate communities. The pressures imposed by the sense of the authority of the text, the sourcing of materials in the learned tradition and the interplay between memorisation and formulaic re-composition of song materials cannot but shape the transmission of the ballad.22 Equally significantly the acceptance that the oral ballad tradition does not exist in vacuo only to be contaminated and killed by contact with the literate has implications for the perception of the vitality of ballad production in the modern world. The ballad ceases to be the ethnographic museum piece it is so often regarded as being, and is re-instated as a living part of contemporary culture. In this volume Margaret Sleeman’s study of the singing of Mrs Aelion from the London Sephardic community, and Thomas McKean’s account of the multifold influences on the singing of

19

Du Fail, Noël, Propos rustiques, ed. by Gabriel-André Pérouse and Roger Dubuis, Textes Littéraires Français, 445 (Geneva: Droz, 1994), pp. 49–50. 20 Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition, ch. 9, ‘Ballads and Broadsides’, pp. 235–54; Smith, Spanish Ballads, pp. 18– 21. 21 Richard Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), p.115. 22 These phenomena have been studied by Finnegan, Ruth, Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 16-24; 246-62.

10

Introduction the Stewart family from Aberdeenshire reveal most comp ellingly the ways in which tradition is kept alive, renewed and expanded even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Although for increasingly obvious reasons ballads in all traditions are treated as literary or at least as ethnographic artefacts, performance — singing or reciting —remains central to the ballad as cultural phenomenon, and this perception informs a final group of essays in this collection that seek to explore the inner history, as it were, of the ballad through a reconstruction of the aesthetic demands made upon it by its audience. Charles Duffin gives us the most theorised account of such an approach, using what he calls ‘the critical authority of the non-literate audience’ as a yardstick against which to measure the formal qualities of ballad narrative. On the other hand Richard Green’s attempt to gauge a thematic pattern (in this case Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque) with such a yardstick suggests that the approach works better with form than content, ballad audiences proving too disparate, both temporally and geographically, to be easily classified by any such reductive typology. Ad Putter’s application of six of Axel Olrik’s laws of folk narrative to the medieval Dutch ballad Fiere Margrietke offers a far better illustration of the way Duffin’s oral aesthetics might play out in practice. ‘What allows the ballad to be told briefly,’ Putter writes, ‘without authorial explanation regarding motivation, cause and effect, and so on, is its participation in a shared world of understanding. The ballad is short because so much is understood’. In one way or another all the studies in this book seek to reach across the bare and often enigmatic words of recorded ballad texts to the shared experience of the audiences for which they were composed and performed. It is here that a pan-European perspective can prove most valuable, reminding us that just as there can never be one monolithic folk audience, so there can be no typical ballad singer and no single reductive entity we may regard as an ur-ballad. It is part of the perennial fascination of ballad scholarship that what is told and what is understood must always vary from place to place and from era to era, yet such variety will always occur within a set of recognis able parameters, shaped by clearly identifiable forces. We hope that this volume has gone some way towards deepening the recognition of these parameters and these forces.

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Balladry in the Medieval Greek World

Roderick Beaton The term ‘ballad’ is a latecomer in the Greek language, imported in the second half of the nineteenth century, and applied almost exclusively to foreign works and their conscious literary imitation in Greek. But the nineteenth century was also the time of the discovery, and dissemination for the first time in writing, of a thriving Greek oral tradition whose roots, its first ardent promoters declared, went back hundreds and in some cases even thousands of years.1 This is the tradition now known in Greek as demotiko tragoudi, a term equivalent to the German Volkslied, the English ‘folksong’, and their cognates in other languages. Collected in large numbers during the nineteenth century, these songs had become established by the end of that century as the ‘unwritten history of the nation’, a unique — and uniquely Greek guarantee of the continuity of language and culture through centuries of foreign oppression, and also as a reference point for poets, journalists, politicians and almost every kind of public utterance, comparable to the King James Bible or the plays of Shakespeare in English.2 Most twentieth-century histories of Modern Greek literature begin with these folk songs, assuming, rather than demonstrating, their historical primacy in the formation of a modern Greek language, of collective moral and political values, and of a common aesthetic. The story of the rediscovery and reception of Greek demotiko tragoudi between about 1820 and the 1950s, runs closely parallel to the story of the reception of western balladry which begins about half a century earlier. Not all of the rich variety of song types encompassed by demotiko tragoudi can be compared to western ballads. Greek folklorists at the turn of the last century established a typology which despite its dubious historical premises, in some cases, is still in use today. In the first place, about half of the collected corpus consists of lyrical songs, whose prevalent themes are love, death and exile. These do not concern us here. Nor does the sizeable category of songs devoted to the lives, and particularly to the violent deaths, of the klefts, the brigands of the late eighteenth century who during the Greek war of independence of the 1820s found themselves cast in the unlikely role of freedom-fighters and as successors to the victors at Marathon and Salamis. Although some of their thematic material and stock formulae may well be much older, these are narrative songs which recount events historically placeable in the period 1750–1922 (when endemic brigandage was finally, and officially, stamped out in Greece). Other songs again, such as the famous

1

2

This begins with the bilingual collection, in two volumes, with a long introduction, highly coloured with the Romantic spirit of the time, by Fauriel, Claude, Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824-25). See Beaton, Roderick, Folk Poetry of Modern Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 1-12; for references to the major collections see pp. 213-20.

The Singer and the Scribe account of the last mass in the cathedral of St Sophia before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans on 29 May 1453, in its many variants, do take us back to the threshold of the Middle Ages. But these songs are brief, and few in number. 3 The Greek equivalent of western balladry is to be found in two categories of song which the folklorists have somewhat arbitrarily separated. These are known as akritika and paraloyes.4 The thematic range and characteristic style of these two types of song provide the best grounds for comparison with aspects of the medieval ballad tradition in the west.

Heroic and domestic ballads The songs known conventionally as akritika have heroic themes. Their world is the male domain outside the house. The hero is either male, or in an extreme case, a warrior-maiden, an Amazon figure who takes on a male role. The protagonists in these songs fight. They do little else. They fight alone, and always against enormous odds. If their enemies are ordinary mortals, these come in thousands; if wild beasts, they are the fiercest: usually lions and bears. Often these enemies are supernatural creatures, of either indeterminate shape or with the ability to change shape at will: such as the drakos (a pleasant spoken young man who can suddenly transform himself into St George’s fearsome adversary), or the deceitful lamia (distant kin to the subject of Keats’s poem in ballad style). The most memorable of all the hero’s adversaries, whom he encounters in a great many variant versions from all over the Greek world, is Charos, the personification of death. Charos in the Greek tradition is a grim old curmudgeon, in laments often ridiculed as a bloody-minded functionary, hen-pecked by his wife or mother: the sort of petty bureaucrat to whom all appeals are vain. In these heroic songs, when it is the hero’s turn to be summoned by the black horseman, Charos, he refuses. Instead he pays his adversary the compliment of treating him as an equal. The hero, whose attributes represent life at its most vibrant, challenges his opposite, Death, to single-combat, unarmed, on the village threshing floor. To emphasise the hardness of the struggle, this arena is not made of the usual beaten earth, but of marble, bronze or iron. This is the full text of a version transcribed in Crete and first published in 1876: Eat and drink, sirs, and I shall tell you a tale. I shall tell you a tale about a hero, about a young man I saw out hunting on the plains, he was hunting and coursing hares and after wild goats. As he runs the young man grabs a hare, with a leap a wild goat, the plumed partridge he leaves far behind.

3 4

Beaton, Folk Poetry, pp. 95-111. Still the fullest definition and explanation for these terms is to be found in Kyriakidis, Stilpon, ‘Mnemeia tou logou: asmata’, in idem, To demotiko tragoudi: synagoge meleton, ed. by A. Kyriakidou-Nestoros (Athens: Ermis, 1978), pp. 61-65 (first published 1923), although many of the underlying assumptions have been quietly dropped since the 1970s. For newer approaches to the subject see Loukatos, D., Eisagoge sten ellenike laografia (Athens: Cultural Foundation of the National Bank [MIET], 1978); Sifakis, Grigoris, Gia mia poietike tou ellenikou demotikou tragoudiou (Heraklion: University of Crete Press, 1988); Kapsomenos, Eratosthenes, Demotiko tragoudimia diaforetike prosengese (Athens: Arsenides, 1990).

14

Roderick Beaton But Charos [Death] passed by and he was mad with jealousy. ‘Take off, young man, your clothes, take off your weapons, bind your hands in the shape of the cross, for me to take your soul.’ ‘I won’t take off my clothes, nor will I take off my weapons, I won’t bind my hands in the shape of the cross, for you to take my soul.’ But you and me, as man to man, and both of us brave heroes, come, let’s wrestle on the iron threshing floor, so as not to shatter the mountains or lay waste the town.’ They went and wrestled on the iron threshing floor, and nine times the youth threw Charos down and on the ninth time Charos lost his temper. He takes the young man by the hair, and pushes him to his knees. ‘Let go, Charos, of my hair and take me by the arms, and then I’ll show you what pallikaria [brave young men] are made of.’ ‘This is how I take them all: all the pallikaria , beautiful girls I take, and mature fighting men, and infant children and their mothers too.5

So long as they fight on human terms, the hero keeps the upper hand: life is stronger than death. Death wins his inevitable victory at the end, but only by cheating. Male heroism is shown at its apogee in taking on the unequal struggle with death, and the strategy of these songs makes the defeated hero the moral victor. These are perhaps the best known, and best loved, of all Greek folk songs. The other principal activity of the hero in the akritika is the abduction of a bride. Having successfully abducted her, the hero has then to fight to prevent others carrying her off in turn. There is a whole code of warfare around bride-snatching, and the corresponding defensive activity, in these songs. Though a hero will perform extraordinary feats to protect his home and his womenfolk, these acts are motivated not by a rosy picture of domestic bliss, but by the imperative of preserving male honour intact.6 By contrast, the second group of narrative songs, conventionally termed in Greek paraloyes, can be said to focus on domestic life, or at least on conflicts within, rather than outside, the home. Here the primary role is often played by women. Some commentators have emphasised the role of the supernatural in these songs, and their connection with popular traditions and superstitions. In fact, the supernatural forms part of the familiar world of almost all Greek folksongs. In the heroic songs too, horses and birds regularly talk; the most memorable adversaries are mythical or legendary beings; the intervention of 5

Jeannaraki, A., Asmata kretika meta distichon kai paromion (Leipzig: 1876), p. 142; reprinted in Ioannou, G., Ta demotika mas tragoudia (Athens: Tachydromos, 1966), p. 30 (the translation retains the tenses of the original). There is no modern anthology of this group of songs, as there is for e.g. the paraloyes, but most of the standard collections, from that of Politis, N.G, Eklogai apo ta tragoudia tou ellinikou laou (Athens: 1914), onwards, include a section headed ‘akritika’. 6 See Mackridge, Peter, ‘None but the Brave Deserve the Fair: abduction, elopement, seduction and marriage in the Escorial Digenes Akrites and modern Greek heroic songs’, in ‘Digenes Akrites’: new approaches to Byzantine heroic poetry ed. by Roderick and David Ricks (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), pp. 116-30.

15

The Singer and the Scribe nature by supernatural means is taken for granted. A persuasive study by Margaret Alexiou demonstrated that a group of the best known of these songs, featuring the supernatural, ring the changes on a central conflict within the family group, namely that between blood kinship and marriage kinship, between the centripetal demands of the nuclear family and the centrifugal forces that threaten it through the need to find marriage alliances outside.7 The most celebrated of all the paraloyes — which already in the nineteenth century was being compared to Burger’s Leonore and a range of Balkan oral variants — is called The Song of the Dead Brother.8 A mother has nine sons and one daughter: there is some evidence that this was thought of traditionally as the ideal family size and composition. A marriage suit for the daughter, usually named Arete, comes from a faraway city. The brothers advise their mother against acceptance, but the youngest, Kostantinos, is for the match. Kostantinos travels a lot; he vows he will keep in touch and that, in extreme need, he will bring the daughter back to visit her mother. So the daughter is married and leaves home. A plague then strikes, in which the brothers, including Kostantinos, all die, and the mother is left alone ‘like stubble on the plain’. She curses Kostantinos and reminds him of his vow. Such is the power of a mother’s curse and of a solemn vow unfulfilled, that the dead Kostantinos rises from his grave. Taking, in one version, a cloud for his horse, a star for his saddle, and the moon for company, he rides off to bring his sister back. During the return journey, through a macabre series of questions and answers with her brother, the unsuspecting Arete slowly discovers the truth, that she is riding with a dead man. In keeping with the Greek tradition Kostantinos is not an insubstantial ghost, that familiar figure from the northern European ballad tradition and tales of the supernatural, but a physical corpse: a zombie or revenant, for which the Greek term, from Serbian, is vrykolakas. In almost all versions the end is tragic: Arete arrives home in time to die in the arms of her mother who dies at the same moment, though in other versions she is transformed into a bird. As Alexiou reads this song, an overemphasis on family ties at the expense of marriage ties leads to the destruction of the entire family, since Arete, who would otherwise have survived the plague to prolong the family line in her new home, is doomed by the embrace of her dead brother. 9 Another well-known song, whose theme runs along a rather different axis, is known in Greek as the Bridge of Arta although among approximately three hundred collected variants, several other locations for the bridge are mentioned. This is immediately recognisable as a version of a tale-type, often called a ballad, found throughout southeast Europe. 10

7

Alexiou, Margaret , ‘Sons, Wives and Mothers: reality and fantasy in some modern Greek ballads’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 1 (1983), 73-111. 8 Politis, N.G., ‘To demotikon asma peri tou nekrou adelfou’, Deltion tes Istorikes kai Ethnologikes Etereias tes Ellados, 6 (1885), 193-261; for a translated version see Alexiou, ‘Sons, Wives and Mothers’. 9 To demotiko tragoudi – paraloyes ed. by G. Ioannou (Athens: Ermis, 1970), pp. 31-43 (introduction and three versions). 10 For worldwide variants see The Walled-Up Wife: A Casebook, ed. by A. Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); on the Greek versions: Megas, G. A. Die Ballade von der Arta -Brücke: eine vergleichende Untersuchung (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1976).

16

Roderick Beaton In the Greek versions, a master-builder directs a large labour-force to build a bridge across a river. The size of the labour-force suggests the high prestige of the project. But what is built by day mysteriously falls down each night. The master-builder is in despair, until the spirit of the river addresses him directly, and demands the sacrifice of the masterbuilder’s wife, without which the bridge will never stand firm. The master-builder is in despair, but finally consents. He tricks his wife into descending into the foundations of the bridge, then orders his underlings to throw in stones and mortar after her. Some versions end the story there, but in those which continue, the victim responds by placing a curse on the bridge and all who cross it. But the master-builder reminds her that she has a brother who may one day cross, and so she is persuaded, as she dies, to bless the work instead.11 In this, and many other songs, it is noticeable that the central role is played by a woman. The Dead Brother is only one of many songs of this type in which the husband and father, the traditional pillar of the patriarchal household, is not even mentioned. In The Bridge of Arta, the man is shown as weak and vacillating; his prestige project is completed only through the willing sacrifice of his wife. Here too, in the argument that it is her brother who may one day cross the bridge, what the song ends by privileging is blood kinship over the marriage relationship. Stylistically, there is no difference between the two types of song, akritika and paraloyes. Length is typically between about thirty and about seventy lines, with the longest reaching a little over a hundred lines. Rhyme is unknown in Greek until the fourteenth century, when it enters literary poetry in Crete through close cultural contact with Venice. In most types of oral narrative poetry, rhyme has always been the exception.12 The prevalent metrical form is the fifteen-syllable iambic verse, known to Byzantine literature by the name of politikos, a term which probably means ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’. In narrative songs the fifteen-syllable verse is almost always end-stopped, has an obligatory caesura after the eighth syllable, and a fixed stress-pattern at the end of each half-line: masculine at the end of the first hemistich, feminine at the end of the second. This comes very close to the English and Scottish ballad rhythm: The King sits in Dunfermline town Drinking the blood-red wine...,

with the addition of an obligatory, unstressed syllable at the end of the second line (or halfline), which fits the characteristic stress-pattern of the language.13 Narrative style is generally abrupt, sometimes almost telegraphic, with a high proportion of dialogue and frequent switching of tenses. These songs have generally been praised for their immediacy and striking imagery. Events follow one another without causal links. When sung (though we have no sound recordings from before 1930, and most date from after the 1950s), the melody often demands repetition of all or part of a metrical line, and it

11

12

13

Paraloyes, ed. cit., pp. 44-8 (introduction and two versions); for discussion in English see Beaton, Folk Poetry, pp. 120-4 (reprinted in The Walled-Up Wife, pp. 63-71). Beaton, Roderick, The Medieval Greek Romance (London: Routledge, 2nd edition, 1996), pp. 199-206; idem, Folk Poetry, pp. 148; 151-92. Alexiou, Margaret, and David Holton, ‘The Origins and Development of Politikos Stichos: a select critical bibliography’, Mantatoforos, 9 (1976), 1- 40; Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, pp. 98-100.

17

The Singer and the Scribe is common in some regions for a musical phrase to encompass a line together with part of the line which follows, which may be broken off in mid-word, and then started again from the beginning. The musicologist Samuel Baud-Bovy gave this technique the name strophe cleftique, and it may be peculiar to the Greek tradition.14

Historical context Both the akritika and paraloyes have been assumed, sometimes on very shaky grounds, to be of great antiquity, and their supposed historical origins are even enshrined in the (conventional) names by which they have been baptised by Greek folklorists. Akritika are understood to be songs belonging to the epic cycle surrounding the medieval Greek hero Digenes Akrites, whose exploits were sung on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine empire before the twelfth century. Paraloyes, in the first half of the twentieth century, were systematically compared to the plots of ancient Greek tragedy, from which they are supposed to be directly descended through the popular mime performances of late antiquity. The word paraloye, attested in only a single song text recorded in the late nineteenth century, is said to corroborate this origin, being a shortened form of parakataloge, a term which may have denoted some such theatrical performance in the fourth century AD. Although studies of Greek oral tradition are no longer primarily directed to affirming the antiquity of motifs, or to shoring up national claims to cultural continuity from a remote past, these designations are still in use and these definitions are still repeated in standard anthologies and textbooks.15 The alleged connection of the paraloyes with ancient Greek theatre does nothing to help us understand either the songs or their historical background. Similarly, the term paraloye, although now an accepted part of the language, has no real authority within the song tradition itself, and certainly does not prove the continuity or derivation that its adoption presupposes. This is not to say, of course, that the tradition from which these songs derive may not be very old. But the specific connection with ancient tragedy is no more than a distraction. With the akritika we are on slightly safer ground. The exploits of Basil Digenes Akrites were recorded in the same fifteen-syllable iambic metre as the heroic songs in a manuscript from South Italy whose most recent editor dates it to around 1150. The same story is told in no fewer than five further manuscripts of the fifteenth century. One of these, in a markedly more popular style, it has been vigorously proposed in recent years, preserves a version datable to the early twelfth century. This epic tale (or perhaps epic manqué) was rediscovered in 1869 and first appeared in print in 1875, just at the time when folklorists were active in recording and collating songs from the oral tradition. The names Digenes and Akrites (or Akritas) also occur in the heroic songs, although not very often and never

14

Baud-Bovy, Samuel, ‘La strophe des distiques rimés dans la chanson grecque’, in Studia Memoriae Belae Bartok Sacra (Budapest: 1956), pp. 365-83. 15 See note 4 above.

18

Roderick Beaton together. But this was sufficient reason for the whole group of heroic songs to be named akritika, and once again the designation has stuck.16 It is not, however, only the names that link the heroic songs with the Byzantine epic. The medieval poem, in all its versions, extols very much the same code of heroic behaviour as we find in the songs: bride-snatching takes up more than half the story; single combat against enormous armies, against a warrior-maiden, against wild beasts, and a drakos that can change its shape, account for much of the rest. At the end, the hero, still young, faces the one adversary he cannot overcome, death. Disappointingly, however, there is no trace, in any of the medieval versions, of the single combat against Charos, the personification of Death, which in the song tradition marks the high point of the ideal of male heroism. In addition to this common ground with the written epic of the twelfth century, the akritika preserve some historical memory of combat on a remote eastern frontier. The Euphrates is a common landmark, warriors fight on horseback wielding sword and mace, and many songs preserve elements of Byzantine military vocabulary which have elsewhere dropped out of use. There is little doubt that some, at least, of these songs do preserve memories of Byzantine warfare and, probably, of the male heroic code as it may have existed between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, at a time when Byzantine power extended throughout Anatolia and into Mesopotamia. Corroboration for this can be found in the Byzantine epic of Digenes Akrites, which probably acquired written form in or about the early twelfth century and is likely to derive from an earlier form of this same tradition. There is also a much shorter heroic narrative song, preserved in two manuscripts of the fifteenth century, the song of Armoures, which confirms the existence of verse narratives of this type, at least by that period.17 It must be emphasised, however, that with the exception of its probable influence on the written Digenes Akrites, and of the single ballad-type text of the fifteenth century, the tradition of Greek oral narrative songs during the Middle Ages has left no direct evidence of its existence. Manuscript evidence from the seventeenth century shows all the recognisable features of the more recent tradition fully developed by then; and, of course, the wealth of material transcribed from oral tradition, beginning in the early nineteenth century, is without question the product of a long, but not otherwise specifiable, oral tradition.

Oral and literary traditions We do, however, have evidence that songs similar to the ones we know from later periods did exist in the Greek world from at least the twelfth century. Consideration of this evidence raises the question central to the present volume: the relation between ‘the singer and the scribe’.

16

The best way to approach this poem and the scholarly controversy that has raged since the 1870s is through the edition of the two most important manuscripts by Elizabeth Jeffreys: see Digenis Akritis: the Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions, ed. and trans by Elizabeth Jeffreys, Cambridge Medieval Classics, 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also the essays collected in Digenes Akrites, ed. by Beaton and Ricks). 17 Included in the edit ion of the E version of Digenes Akrites (in Greek only): Alexiou, Stylianos, Vasilios Digenes Akrites kai ta asmata tou Armoure kai tou Yiou tou Andronikou (Athens: Ermis 1990).

19

The Singer and the Scribe The Modern Greek vernacular makes its first appearance in Greek literature during the twelfth century. Leaving aside the evidence of Digenes Akrites, whose earliest written form is still much disputed, we find the vernacular used in a small number of court poems of the mid-twelfth century.18 These bear affinities with goliardic poetry in the west, and are almost certainly at least partly parodic in intent. But they do use the same verse-form as we find in the later song tradition, notably with the mid-line caesura and the stylistic tendency to build a line of out of two parallel or contrasting half-lines. One of the group of poems known as Ptochoprodromika (Poems of Poor Prodromos) makes a parodic allusion to ‘Akrites’ as the epitome of a hero; another, perhaps more tellingly, parodies the style of heroic single combat with the mace, in a scene where the hen-pecked husband is shut out of the kitchen and does battle with his wife using a broom-handle! Although the source here might be an already-written version of the exploits of Digenes, the style and some of the vocabulary are close enough to those of the later recorded akritika to make it virtually certain that oral songs of this type, in this verse-form and with this subject-matter, were in circulation in Constantinople in the mid-twelfth century.19 Later, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, narrative poetry in the vernacular becomes relatively well-developed in Greek. Many of these texts, in length between a few hundred and twelve thousand lines, belong to the genre of the love-romance; others are versified chronicles, more or less fictionalised history (the Tale of Belisarius), or allegorical tales of the natural world. Once again, the standard verse-form is the fifteen-syllable line with its fixed caesura; and from the fourteenth century onwards we increasingly find recognisable phrases, images, and sometimes even whole lines, that will turn up again many centuries later in songs transcribed from the oral tradition. Since there is, with very few exceptions, no trace of the subject matter of these narratives in the later ora l tradition, the likeliest explanation for this is that these stock elements and memorable images were taken up by literary writers from the oral tradition, rather than that originally literary compositions later bequeathed these — but only these — elements to the oral tradition. This picture is complicated, however, by the fact that we find evidence, increasingly, for popular dissemination of originally literary works from the fifteenth century onwards, and some literary texts, such as the romance Erotokritos, written in Crete at the end of the sixteenth century, subsequently enter the oral tradition and take on a life of their own, down to the twentieth century. None of these, however, seems ever to have become fully assimilated into the tradition of either the akritika or the paraloyes.20

18

Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, pp. 13-15. Hesseling, D.C., and H. Pernot, Poèmes prodromiques en grec vulgaire (Amsterdam: 1910), see Poem I, lines 155-97; Poem 3, lines 164-73; Eideneier, Hans, Ptochoprodromos, Neograeca Medii Aevi, 5 (Köln: Romiosini, 1991) with German translations: see Poem I, lines 155-81; Poem IV, lines 189-544. 20 See Beaton, Medieval Greek Romance, pp. 164-206; idem, ‘Orality and the Reception of Late Byzantine Vernacular Literature’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 14 (1990) 174-84; idem, ‘Les fortunes de Digénis Akritis: de l’épopée médiévale au symbole du nationalisme grec’, in Formes modernes de la poésie épique: nouvelles approches, ed. by Judith Labarthe-Postel (Colloque, Université de Tours, 25-27 April 2002: forthcoming). 19

20

Roderick Beaton

Conclusion The evidence for balladry in the medieval Greek world is, then, indirect, but none the less strong. The rich tradition of short oral narratives in verse, represented by collections made since 1820 has almost certainly been in existence, and in some degree of coexistence with written literature since at least the twelfth century. This is not to claim that individual songtexts can be precisely dated. The oral tradition, though conservative, can be assumed never to have been static. But it seems most probable that a tradition closely equivalent to the ballad tradition in the West formed part of the cultural horizon of the later centuries of the Byzantine Empire, and also of the Greek-speaking lands under western rule after the Fourth Crusade of 1204. Even if we cannot hope to recover the earlier medieval context in which these songs took shape, they still offer a great deal both to admire as poetry and to set alongside the better documented traditions of other parts of Europe.

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Love Story or Heroic Deed? (The Two Faces of Russian Balladry: Bylinas and Ballads)

Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia Aroused by F.J. Child’s publication of English and Scottish ballads public interest in and scholars’ attention towards ballads have never faded.1 The first collection of Russian folk songs was compiled in the eighteenth century and published only in 1804,2 although the collecting of folk songs on a regular basis started in the middle of the nineteenth century.3 In the early anthologies Russian folk songs were not classified systematically and their genres were not specified. Most of the published pieces were called songs, but later the term bylina4 was also adopted, although this did not correspond to how singers would define the songs they had been performing. Traditionally, all narrative songs were called stariny (which derives from the word ‘staryi’ — ‘old’ and means something that happened a long time ago) to distinguish them from purely lyrical and ritual songs. Since some folk pieces did not seem to fall into the category of bylinas (an epic song with a strong heroic and national message) the word ‘ballad’ started to appear in specialist literature on folklore. It was P.V. Kireevskii, a nineteenth-century Russian scholar, who recognised the difference between bylinas and ‘other songs’ and published them in a separate section in his volumes.5 A.I. Sobolevskii also distinguished between the two genres and coined the term ‘lower epic songs’ applying it to those songs which are now commo nly acknowledged as ballads.6 While the word ‘ballad’ was internationally accepted as a term for ‘a number of different

1

See, e.g., these classical works on balladry: Gummere. F.B., The Popula r Ballad (London-Boston-New York: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd and Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 1907); Hart, W.M., Ballad and Epic. A Study in the Development of the Narrative Art (Boston: Ginn & Co, 1907), Cohen, H.L., The Ballade (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915); Hustvedt, S.B, Ballad Book and Ballad Men (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1930); Entwistle, W.J., European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939). For more information see Edson, Richmond, W., Ballad Scholarship: an annotated bibliography (New York-London: Garland, 1989). 2 References will be to the editions of the anthologies available in the UK: Danilov, Kirsha, Drevnie rossiiskie stikhotvoreniia, sobrannye Kirshei Danilovym (Moscow, 1958). 3 Kireevskii, P.V., Sobranie narodnykh pesen Kireevskogo, Vol. 1, 2. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983); Gilferding, A.F., Onezhskie byliny, zapisannye A.F.Gilferdingom letom 1871 goda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1949-1951); Rybnikov, P.N., Pesni, sobrannye P.N.Rybnikovym (Moscow: Tipografiia A.Semina, 1861-1862 (vol. 1-2), Petrozavodsk, 1864 (Vol. 3), and St Petersburg, 1867 (Vol. 4)). 4 The word ‘bylina’ derives from the Russian verb ‘byt’ (to be) and has the meaning of ‘something which has really happened’. 5 Kireevskii, P.V., Sobra nie narodnykh pesen Kireevskogo. 6 Sobolevskii, A.I., Velikorusskie narodnye pesni (St Petersburg, 1895).

The Singer and the Scribe forms in music and poetry, each of which has as much right as any to be so called’, 7 it also made its way into the Russian academic tradition probably with the help of western Slavonic scholars for whom the very existence of balladry in the western Slavonic traditions was not as questionable as in Russian and other eastern Slavonic cultures. The term was therefore introduced and a collection of songs under the title Russkaia ballada (Russian Ballads) was published by V.N. Chernyshev and N.P. Andreev in 1936. 8 Neither the definition of the Russian ballad, nor its main characteristics were established by the authors. The question remained debatable for decades until the 1950s and early 1960s when D.M. Balashov made an outstanding contribution to the study of this genre, publishing his pioneering collection of ballads with a detailed introductory article in which he explained his understanding of the definition of the genre.9 Although with hindsight he can be criticised for inconsistency and errors, contemporary scholars would often refer to his works, which are commonly recognised as classical. The principal question which had to be solved by slavists, then, was that of the definition and characteristics of the genre, because the term ‘ballad’ was acquired form foreign traditions to name a phenomenon which had never previously been called a ballad in Russian or eastern Slavonic folk practice. Strangely enough reading the literature on western European balladry we find similar concerns and debates focused on the issue of genre. Those scholars who deal with western balladry usually operate with definitions close to that once formulated by T. Pettitt: a ballad is ‘a narrative song, current in popular tradition, which tells its story in a particular, specified way’. 10 Over the years research has identified other fundamental features of traditional ballads, such as the nature of their narrative, including the objectivity of narration, verbal repetitions and commonplaces or formulae. 11 At the same time F.G. Andersen points out that ‘in the absence of a clear-cut definition, it has been customary simply to define ballads by example, as songs similar in kind to those in Child’s volumes.’ 12 Having discussed and analysed some other prominent features and elements which can be exploited to characterise ballads, Andersen comes to the conclusion that ‘ballads are both relatively easy to spot, in terms of narrative technique, and extremely difficult to characterise, in terms of varying ways in which this technique is employed to express distinct cultural meanings in different circumstances.’13

7

Gerould, G.H., The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. vii. Russkaia ballada, ed. by V. I. Chernyshev, with an introduction by N.P. Andreev (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1936). 9 Balashov, D.M., Narodnye ballady (Moscow-Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1963). 10 Pettitt, T, ‘Introduction. Ballads as Narrative’, in The Ballad as Narrative, ed. by F.G. Andersen, O. Holzapfel, T. Pettitt (Odense University Press, 1982), p.1. 11 In recent years V. Propp’s talerole analysis was also applied to ballads. This attempt could also be seen in the context of solving the problem of the definition of the genre. See, for example, Buchan, D., ‘Talerole Analysis and Child’s Supernatural Ballads’, in The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. by J. Harris (Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 60-77. 12 Andersen, F.G., ‘Technique, Text, and the Context: formulaic narrative mode and the question of genre’ in The Ballad and Oral Literature, p.19, which also gives an overview of the literature on this particular problem. 13 Andersen, F.G., ‘Technique, Text, and the Context’, p. 38. 8

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Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia From this it becomes clear that one of the key issues of definition is the so-called ‘cultural meaning’ or ‘cultural context’ that shapes ballads and influences their narrative techniques. Since oral traditional cultures of any nation preserve more of the original national features than written cultures, the use of similar terms applied to different pieces of folklore can be problematic. 14 Therefore, it can be productive to examine what Slavonic researchers and slavists understand by a ‘ballad’ and determine whether this approach has any correlations to the approach adopted by the majority of scholars interested in western European balladry. It can be seen at first sight that the terms ‘ballad’ and ‘epic’ have different meanings when applied to western European and Slavonic traditional cultures. Since the place of epic poems (literature) is occupied in Europe by the Edda, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf, the Poema de Mio Cid or the Chanson de Roland, ballads (oral, traditional culture), although connected with epic poems and sometimes dependant on or derived from them, 15 would not claim the status of the national epic. 16 The situation in Slavonic cultures is different. In those Slavonic countries where Orthodox Christianity was adopted as the official religion,17 literatures were almost entirely clerical and no lay impact was possible before the beginning of the seventeenth century. This means that the national epic poems (originally pagan) would be less likely to be incorporated into the written culture than in Catholic countries. As a result, eastern and southern Slavs did not create fully developed epic poems in written form (e.g. the Russian Slovo o polku Igoreve [The Lay of Igor’s Campaign] is more of an epic-like poem or, as some would prefer to name it, vestiges of an epic tradition in literature than a full-blown epic), and balladry (oral epic songs) acquired the features that in the western tradition would be split up between literary epic poems and ballads.18

14

15

16

17

18

This idea was developed in his chapter on Slavonic popular ballads by Kravtsov, N.I., Problemy slavianskogo folklora (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), pp. 167-99. Hart, W.M, Ballads and Epic. A Study in the Development of the Narrative Art (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1907). A. N. Robinson, a Russian scholar, who examined Russian mediaeval literature and culture in the context of other mediaeval literatures and cultures, argued that lay literatures in western European vernacular languages expanded so quickly that they ‘took over’ the epic genres of national folklore and eventually put an end to the oral transmission of epic poems: Robinson, A.N. Literatura Drevnei Rusi v literaturnom protsesse srednevekov’ia XI-XIII vekov (Moscow: Nauka, 1980), p. 169. Western Slavs developed under circumstances which could be held comparable to conditions in other European countries. On Russian and Slavonic epic traditions see such fundamental works as Russian Epic Studies, ed. by R. Jakobson and E.J. Simmons (Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1949); Putilov, B.N., Russkii i iuzhnoslavianskii geroicheskii epos: Sravnitel’no-tipologicheskie issledovaniia (Moscow: Nauka, 1972); Propp, V.Ia., Russkii geroicheskii epos. 1st ed. (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo Universiteta, 1955; reprint: Moscow: Labirint, 1999); Zhirmunskii, V.M., Narodnyi geroicheskii epos: Sravnitel’no-istoricheskie ocherki (Moscow-Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1962); Rybakov, B.A., Drevniaia Rus’. Skazaniia. Byliny. Letopisi (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1963); Meletinskii, E.M., Proiskhozhdenie geroicheskogo eposa: Rannie formy i arkhaicheskie pamiatniki (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vostochnoi literatury, 1963); Slonim, M., The Epic of Russian Literature, from its Origins through Tolstoy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). Some more recent works worthy of note are: Arant, P.

25

The Singer and the Scribe Since the terminology has been clarified to some extent19 it can be understood why those researchers who deal with western balladry would use the term ‘ballads’ when discussing Russian bylinas and other Slavonic folk songs similar to them. 20 Bylinas were chosen to represent Russian balladry probably because other genres of Slavonic folk songs were less known to scholars, who were not specialists of Slavonic folklore. While not trying to bridge the gap in one short paper, I would like simply to point up certain issues which have not received enough attention from specialists of either western or Slavonic traditional cultures. In this article the term ‘balladry’ will be applied to all narrative folk songs existing in both Slavonic and western European folklore, 21 although the distinction between the bylina and the ballad as sub-genres within Slavonic balladry will be particularly stressed.22 As in various western oral traditions the principle quality of Slavonic balladry (in the wide sense of this term which in the practice of slavists would be a synonym of ‘epic genres’) is also its narrative nature. According to Iu.I. Smirnov, one of the most prominent writers on Russian and Slavonic balladry, the various genres of southern, eastern and western Slavonic traditions, some of which are unique to their own traditions, can be summarised as follows. In the tradition of the southern Slavs seven groups of ballad-like (epic in Smirnov’s terminology) songs are presented:

19

20

21

22

M., Compositional Techniques of the Russian Oral Epic, the bylina (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990); Hritsa, S., Ukrainskaia pesennaia epika (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1990); Bailey, J., Study of Russian Epic Verse by Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, and Taranovsky: reconsideration and continuation (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996). The division between so -called western and Slavonic balladry is one of the theoretical assumptions which has been made. To clarify this point, however, it should be recognized that balladry in Europe is not homogeneous; as Bengt Jonsson indicates, ‘The Scandinavian medieval ballad is an unusually well-defined genre (with a restricted number of stanzaic forms and easily recognisable style), consisting of some 830 types. Borderline cases are strikingly few, and although there are clear subgenres or categories within the genre, I particularly want to stress that we are dealing with what is fundamentally one single genre. In this respect the Scandinavian ballad – like many of the English or Scottish Child ballads – differs from songs labelled as ballads elsewhere, for example in Germany, where narrative songs appeared in many different forms and do not constitute one special genre’, Jonsson, Bengt R. ‘Oral Literature, Written Literature: the ballad and Old Norse genres’, in The Ballad and Oral literature, ed. by Harris, p.140. Entwistle, W.J., European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939); Magnus, L.A., The Heroic Ballads of Russia (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1921). See also the entry on the ballad in Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Spain, as well as England and Scotland, possess impressive ballad collections […] In no two language areas, however, are the formal characteristics of the ballad identical. For example, British and American ballads are invariably rhymed and strophic (i.e. divided into stanzas); the Russian ballads known as byliny and almost all Balkan ballads are unrhymed and unstrophic’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com . However, this does not mean that we can agree with a view that all narrative songs should be considered epic; Czernik, S., Polska epika Ludowa (Wroclaw — Kraków, 1958). In the western academic tradition it is more common to speak about types of ballads (border ballad, historical ballad, broadside ballad, etc.) rather than about genres. In the Slavonic academic tradition the term genre is heavily exploited.

26

Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia songs with mythological plots; iunak songs (with a strong heroic element); ballads; early historical songs; robbers’ songs; songs based on Christian plots and legends; late historical songs. Eastern Slavs have, bylinas; ballads; early historical songs; robbers’ songs; Christian songs; late historical songs. In the Russian tradition all six groups are found whereas the Belorussian and Ukrainian traditions would have their own variations (for example the Ukrainian duma cannot be considered as a complete equivalent to the Russian bylina). The tradition of the western Slavs would be represented by such genres as ballads, robbers’ songs, Christian songs, and late historical songs.23 It is also worth mentioning that eastern and southern groups of Slavs would have more similarities in their epic traditions due to similarities in geographical position and historical circumstances (for example, the domination of the Golden Horde in Russia and Turkish rule in the Balkans), while western Slavs were much more influenced by European balladry.24 The most relevant distinguishing features of Russian balladry can be summarised as follows: Russian balladry will share with other national traditions such characteristics as oral transmission, narrative structure, set formulae, focus on a single situation and conflict, minimisation of characteristics and descriptions, dramatic effect achieved through purposeful actions and abruptness, certain tunes associated with particular plots.25 Russian balladry was virtually extinct by the time systematic research started (even then it was located mainly in the far North of Russia) and since the 1950s and 60s no new texts and presenters could be found. Russian balladry existed exclusively in oral form — no such phenomenon as broadsides was known in Russia. A relatively weak mythological and supernatural element (unlike, for example, in the Czech tradition). 26

23

Smirnov, Iu.I., Slavianskie epicheskie traditsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1974), pp. 90-91. For example, among Czech scholars there is a tendency to study the Czech ballad in the entire European rather than Slavonic context: see Nejedlá, J., Balada v promene doby (Praha: Ceskoslovenský spisovatel, 1989). 25 The importance of examining ballad tunes has been stressed in recent studies carried out by specialists in traditional music, as for example, Mukharinskaia, L.S., Iakimenko, T.S. ‘Kizucheniiu muzykal’noi tipologii narodnykh ballad’, in Pamiati K.Kvitki (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1983), pp. 111-121; Marchenko Iu.I., Petrova, L.I., ‘Balladnye siuzhety v pesennoi kul’ture russko-belorussko-ukrainskogo pogranich’ia’, Russkii folklor, 27 (1993), 205-255; 28 (1995), 290-348; 29 (1996), 110-191. 26 Harkins, W.E., ‘K sravneniiu tematiki i kompozitsionnoi struktury russkoi i cheshskoi narodnoi ballady’, in American Contributions to the Sixth International Congress of Slavists, ed. by W.E. Harkins (The HagueParis: Mouton, 1968), pp. 133-63. 24

27

The Singer and the Scribe A relatively weak Christian element in balladry (Christian culture flourished in literature and in some other literature-related genres of folklore, such as dukhovnyi stikh — ‘spiritual poem’). The Russian bylina and ballad are distinguished from historical songs27 which either tell of specific historical events and people (for example, songs about Ivan the Terrible) 28 or depict typical historical situations (for example, such widespread songs as Avdot’ia Riazanochka29 and Tatarskii polon (The Tatar imprisonment) which tell of Russian women captured by the Tatars).30 Heroic plots and ‘family’ stories are usually split up between the bylina and the ballad,31 although this point is debatable. As this paper is entitled ‘Love Story or Heroic Deed?’ this last point is of great interest to us in the context of the development of Russian balladry, and its impact on Russian literature and culture. In the case study below we shall examine the features which bylinas and ballads share as forms of Russian balladry and their specific characteristics which allow 27

Some scholars (Smirnov, Iu.I., Slavianskie epicheskie traditsii; Azbelev, S.N., Istoricheski pesni, ballady (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1986); Putilov, B.N., Istoricheskie pesni XIII-XVI vekov (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1960) and Geroicheskii epos i deistvitel’nost (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988) etc. would include at least some historical songs in balladry, whereas others would argue that the nature of these songs is completely different, as, for example Kravtsov, N.I., Problemy slavianskogo folklora (Moscow: Nauka, 1972). Having no intention to solve this complicated problem I tend to accept the first approach, as it is more universal and accurate when applied to the songs created in the seventeenth century. Close links between the historical song, the bylina and the povest’ (narration), one of the genres of medieval Russian literature, were demonstrated in the analysis of the story of the heroic life and death of M.V. Skopin -Shuiskii, one of the brightest politicians and generals at the Time of Trouble (the beginning of the seventeenth century): Stief, C., Studies in the Russian Historical Song (København: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1953); Azbelev S.N., Istorizm bylin i spetsifika fol’klora (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982). 28 See Perrie, M., The Image of Ivan the Terrible in Russian Folklore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 29 A.O. Amel’kin has discovered that this song had a precise historical foundation: see Amel’kin, A.O., ‘O vremeni vozniknoveniia pesni ob Avdot’e Riazanochke’, Russkii folklor, 29 (1996), 80-85 which automatically settles the question of whether this song should be considered a ballad or a historical song. It is interesting to compare this with the findings in Rieuwerts, S., ‘The Historical Moorings of ‘The Gypsy Laddie’: Johnny Faa and Lady Cassillis’, in The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. by Harris , pp. 78-96, where the problem of a historical foundation does not call in question the balladic nature of the song. At the same time the approach to historical songs demonstrated in A. Amel’kin’s paper is not universally approved by all slavists: specialists on the southern Slavonic popular tradition would include all historical songs in balladry. See, for example, Czajka, H. Bulgarska i DFHGR ska historyczna SLHGE ludowa (Wroclaw-Warszawa-Kraków, 1968); Braun M. Das Serbokraotische Heldenlied (Göttingen, 1961). 30 For more on this distinction see Kravtsov, N.I., Problemy slavianskogo folklora (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), pp. 184-85. The author also argues that, from the wide range of songs centred on the story of imprisonment found in all Slavonic countries, these should not all be automatically considered historical songs – most of them would possess characteristics of the ballad. 31 N.I. Kravtsov calls this feature one of the ‘specific characteristics’ of Russian balladry compared to western European, and especially English and Scottish, balladry.

28

Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia us to treat them as different genres. As a result we hope to discover which characteristics of the ballad provoked its transformation from a form of the traditional folksong into modern forms of literature, folklore and even mass culture.32 As a rule, slavists would differentiate the bylina from the ballad 33 on the following grounds: the types of stories they tell (content), the type of hero on whom the story is centred (content), the narrative techniques they exploit (form), the length of songs: bylinas are usually longer than ballads (form), the music which accompanies the songs (form), 34 the time when these genres were established, when they were most popular and when their popularity faded (historical context), 35 the forms of their disintegration: the bylina became too complicated for oral transmission, and younger singers started to transmit the stories in prose, whereas ballads were taken over by lyrics and lost most of their narrative nature (historical context), 36

32

The impact of balladry on modern culture was analysed by J. Culík, although he concentrated on the process of studying the ballad tradition rather than on examining texts of ballads: Culík, J., ‘Folk Song – The Collectors, the Scholars and the Public. The development of English, Scottish and Czech Folk-Song Scholarship: a comparison’, Scottish Slavonic Review, 21 (1993), 85-112. 33 I.Iu. Smirnov also argues that together with ‘classical’ ballads other ballad-like songs should be analysed. Ballad-like songs in his interpretation are either songs that changed their function in traditional culture, becoming, for example, part of a ritual (which Russian ballads never were), or songs with some literary elements; see Smirnov, I.Iu., Vostochno-slavianskie ballady i blizkie im formy (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), pp. 67. An overview of other approaches is given by Burlasová, S., Kompozícia balady ako kritérium žánru (Praha, 1983) and Burlasová, S., Katalóg slovenských naratívnych piesní (Bratislava: Veda, 1998). 34 For an example of thorough research based on the Belorussian ballad see Mozheiko, Z.Ia., Pesni belorusskoogo poles’ia , Part 1 (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1983); part 2 (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1984). 35 Although most of the bylinas that have survived over the years and are presented now in anthologies and collections were created no earlier than in the thirteenth century, many specialists would agree that they possess certain features that prove their formation as a genre as early as the tenth or eleventh century. At the same time V.Ia. Propp, the author of the first and still the only complete monograph on the Russian bylinas in which almost all aspects of the poems are examined, suggests that the genesis of bylinas should be studied in the context of mythology; see Propp, Russkii geroicheskii epos. Since the fifteenth century very few new bylinas have been created; however, the tradition of oral transmission did not dry up completely until the end of the nineteenth or the middle of the twentieth century. Ballads first appeared in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries in Russia while the active life of the genre ended in the eighteenth century when no new songs were created. 36 Smirnov, I.Iu., Vostochno-slavianskie ballady i blizkie im formy (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), p. 7; Astakhova, A.M., V.V. Mitrofanova, and M.O. Skripil’, Byliny v zapisiakh i pereskazakh XVII-XVIII vekov (MoscowLeningrad: Nauka, 1960). For further analysis see Harkins, W.E., ‘Epicheskie i liricheskie elementy v

29

The Singer and the Scribe the social status of the audience: the audience for the bylina in the Middle Ages included the cultural elite, and only later did the bylina become common among peasant communities, while the ballad was incorporated into the popular (mass) culture from the very beginning. As far as story types and character types are concerned it is now a commonplace that bylinas tell stories of fighting for Rus’ (the medieval name for Russia), a Prince (a lord), or for a wife (the oldest stories are based on the mythological motifs of obtaining a woman). The stories are centred on the heroic deeds of the bogatyrs (sing. bogatyr’), such wellknown heroes as Il’ia Muromets, Dovrynia Nikitich, Alesha Popovich, Sviatogor, Mikhaila Potyk and others (several dozens in total). The Russian ballad concentrates exclusively on family and love stories and is focused on ordinary and often unnamed people, which is unknown in the bylina. I. Horak considers there to be four groups of typical stories: stories about lovers; stories about husbands and wives; stories about parents and children; stories about sisters and brothers.37 I. Smirnov, however, proposes another classification based not solely on the characters involved in the story but also on the situation these characters are in: mother and son / daughter; a stranger / enemy is looking for a girl; a hero is looking for a girl.38 However, when we start analysing individual texts it becomes clear that a combination of all possible distinctive features is not normal; moreover, borderline cases occur with great frequency. Therefore from our point of view they deserve special attention. One of the most popular stories presented in almost all Slavonic traditions (including those of western Slavs) is a story about brothers who oppose their sister’s love for the young man she desires.39 In the Russian tradition this type of story can be both a ballad and a bylina: the most widespread titles are Alesha Popovich and Elena Petrovichna or Alesha Popovich and the Sister of the brothers Petroviches.40 Within each genre there are several variants, offering a variety of structural elements.41 The common element of the story in all its variants is the

slavianskoi ballade’, in American Contributions to the Ninth International Congress of Slavists, ed. by P. Debreczeny, Vol. 2, Literature, Poetics, History (Slavia, 1983), pp. 189-200. 37 Horak, I., ‘Les ballades populaires slaves’, Revue des études slaves, 39 (1961), 33. 38 Smirnov, Vostochno-slavianskie ballady i blizkie im formy, p.12 39 Story N 46 in I. Smirnov’s list of narratives common in Slavonic balladry: see Smirnov, Slavianskie epicheskie traditsii, pp.127-128. 40 The bylina is known in 23 variants collected in the northern provinces of Russia and in Siberia. In the central provinces of Russia and in Belorus only ballads based on the same story have been collected. 41 Balashov, Narodnye ballady, pp. 75-81; Putilov, B.N., Byliny (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel, 1957), pp. 411-413; Grigir’ev, A.D., Arkhangel’skie byliny i istoricheskie pesni, sobrannye v 1899-1901 gg., Vol.1 (Moscow, 1904), songs Nn 54, 72, 81, 85, 97, 100, 118, 125, 128, 173; Kireevskii, P.V., Pesni, sobrannye Kireevskim,

30

Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia brothers’ discontent with their sister’s lover (rarely – her husband) and the murder or attempted murder of the sister, or of both the sister and her partner. The plot is an international one and can be found in other ballad traditions. The fact that the popularity of this story spread across Europe seems to prove its international character rather than support W.J. Entwistle’s theory of cultural borrowings.42 The bylina Alesha and Elena Petrovichna was thoroughly studied by V.Ia. Propp;43 however, he treated ballads with condescension and was not interested in those variants of this song which represented the ‘tastes of the Philistines’.44 The artificial exclusion of the ballad from research could not be productive. In our opinion, in his study of this song V.Ia. Propp exaggerated the pathos of the story. He probably did so partly owing to his desire to challenge his predecessors (‘bourgeois scholars’ in his words) who had claimed that, because it had been created relatively late, this bylina should have been presented as an example of the decadence of the genre and the hero, Alesha Popovich. V.Ia. Propp tried to show that Alesha and Elena Petrovichna was a late adaptation of an ancient story about winning a bride through combat. He also argued that all the characteristics necessary to call this song a bylina were in place in this particular case and that the ‘Philistine spirit’ (usual for ballads from V.Ia. Propp’s point of view) had not spoiled the story, at least in those versions which could be called bylinas. V.Ia. Propp’s conclusions that the bylina was definitely the first to be created and was only later ‘spoiled’ and given the form of the ballad is also questionable. Doubts about V.Ia. Propp’s speculations become stronger if we consider the entire ‘checklist’ of the bylina and ballad features found in different versions of the story.

The story and its elements Bylina At the feast (in Kiev and/or in Prince Vladimir’s presence – optional) the brothers are boasting of their obedient sister who is kept shut at home and has not been seen by anyone. Bogatyr’ (hero) Alesha replies that he has seen her (in an intimate situation – optional, but intimate relations are implied). The brothers go home to murder their sister (the style of the murder varies). Alesha rescues the girl and marries her (the brothers disapprove of this – optional). For bylinas the ‘rescue operation’ is indispensable. In most of the versions Alesha’s heroism and strength are not really impressive: in some of them the girl herself encourages Alesha to act, in others Alesha succeeds by ruse. In the majority of the versions

42

43 44

Vol. 2 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1983), pp. 64-67; Astakhova, A.M. et al., Byliny Pechory i Zimnego Berega (Moscow-Leningrad: Nauka, 1961), pp.357-62; 415-16. ‘The ballad of Dobrynja and Aljoša is certainly related to the German Moringer; and the ballad-novelette in which he casts doubt on the chastity of the Petrovici’s sister […] reproduces in part the Imogen story, of Italian origin; it is to be found also in the Greek ballad of Maurianos, so that there is no way of determining how it entered Russia. Its foreign origin is, at least, assured’, Entwistle, European Balladry, p. 364. Propp, Russkii geroicheskii epos, pp.418-27; 583-84. Propp, loc. cit. This position was relatively common among Soviet scholars and even those who specialised in the study of ballads had to stress constantly that they would distinguish between traditional, popular, ballads and late, bourgeois, ones.

31

The Singer and the Scribe Alesha rescues the girl when the brothers are away which means that in any case Alesha does not fight for her. Ballad The story in ballad form can deploy various motifs for the start of the conflict: either the lover (Alesha Popovich or others) publicly (usually at a feast) boasts of his relations with a young girl, 45 or a young man shoots an arrow and breaks a girl’s window thereafter they become lovers 46 and while the brothers interrogate him about his presence in their house he tells them the truth. The ending of the story also displays several variants: 1) only the girl is to be murdered by her brothers, the lover (Alesha Popovich only) saves her and they marry in church; 2) both are murdered and two birch trees grow up in their memory;47 3) only the young man is murdered by the brothers while the sister commits suicide and her brothers regret what they have done. Other motifs can also be incorporated into this story in other Slavonic traditions which are not discussed here. In both bylinas and ballads this story is presented as a love story, not a heroic one. There is no fight in the story and it appeals to listeners because of the love and death dichotomy.

The character / hero Bylina: The name of Alesha Popovich appears in the vast majority of variants, although this character does not resemble the classical image of this bogatyr’ in other bylinas. Ballad The character might be called Alesha Popovich, or Ivan Dudorovich, or Fedor Kolyshchatoi, or he might not be given a name at all. The loss of the name is probably a signal that it was not really important for the idea of the story and was not connected to Alesha Popovich as a hero.

Narrative techniques The narration in both the bylina and the ballad is framed by built-in verbal repetitions which develop the formulaic style shared by the two genres. Nevertheless, the two forms can be distinguished by the intensity of formulaic usage. The comparison of the opening episodes of the bylina and of the ballad (here only those versions of the ballad which begin with the argument at the feast are taken into consideration) shows that the introductory episode takes 33 lines or more 48 in the bylina and 21 or 22 lines in the ballad. Although formulae are still

45

The same motif occurs, for example, in the ballad Molodets i korolevna – A Guy and a King’s daughter: see Balashov, Narodnye ballady, pp. 83-86, or in the bylina Dunai i Nastas’ia -korolevichna – Dunai and Nastas’ia, King’s daughter: see Putilov, Byliny, pp. 414-16. 46 Similar motifs in the bylina Dovrynia i Marinka, Putilov, Byliny, pp. 292-98. 47 A contamination of two well-known motifs can also be seen in this variant: the motif of transformation into a tree and the motif of young, innocent lovers buried together. 48 In some versions there is a long introduction dealng with Alesha’s wanderings and whereabouts, and an explanation of how he eventually decided to visit Vladimir’s feast to have a good drink: see Astakhova, et al., Byliny Pechory i Zimnego Berega, pp. 357-58.

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Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia heavily used, the tendency to compress narration is clearly seen in the ballad. For example, in the bylina the narrative style would force a singer to follow a certain verbal pattern: U Vladimira-kniazia byl pochesten pir, Da vse na piru napivalisia, Da vse na chestnom naedalisia , Da vse na piru priraskhvastalis’: Da inoi khvastat zolotoi kaznoi, Kak inoi khvastat molodoi zhonoi, Kak inoi khvastat konem ezzhalym-e, 49 Kak inoi khvastat bykom kormlenym-e. [At Prince Vladimir’s feast everyone eats and drinks a lot, and having got drunk everyone starts to show off. One brags about the gold he has, another brags about his young wife, another brags about his excellent horse, another brags about his healthy ox.]

The two brothers who also attend this feast have nothing to boast of except their sister. In their speech the verbal pattern elaborated above should be repeated in full: only then would it be one hundred percent complete: ‘Uzh vy oi esi, dva bratelka! Ne p’ete, ne edite, nichem ne khvastaete’. – ‘Uzh my chem zhe budem khvastati? Ishsha netu u nas zolotoi kazny, Ishsha netu u nas molodoi zhony, Ishsha netu u nas byka kormlenogo, Ishsha netu u nas konia ezzhalogo, – Tol’ko est’ u nas edna sestritsa, 50 Ishsha ta zhe Elenushka Petrovna-svet.’ [Why don’t you, brothers, eat and drink, why don’t you show off? – What do we have to brag about? We don’t have gold, we don’t have young wives, we don’t have a healthy ox, we don’t have a excellent horse. We only have our sister, our sister – Elena Petrovna.]

The same technique is fundamental to the narrative structure of the Russian ballad, although compared to the bylina the narrative economy of the ballad is stronger and affects even such fundamental principles of narrative technique as repetition. At the same time there is one variant of the bylina which is extremely long,51 although the length does not seem original. The expansion of Vladimir’s role in the story, the extended introductory episode where Alesha’s wanderings are described, the emergence of Ilia Muromets, another hero (bogatyr’), who suggests his help in the rescue operation, though there is no need for it (no battle is mentioned in the bylina) and some other details seem extraneous and make us think that they were all added later to make the story resemble a bylina more closely. In the Russian tradition the ballad exploited the same narrative techniques which had been first established in the bylina, and this makes the question of origins more

49

Putilov, Byliny, p. 411. Ibid. p. 411. 51 Astakhova, et al., Byliny Pechory i Zimnego Berega, pp. 357-62. 50

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The Singer and the Scribe complicated. Although narrative techniques were simplified to enable the ballad to achieve more intense emotional effect, the similarities between the two forms of Russian balladry are very deep. In our opinion the correlation between the two genres (in which the bylina’s position is that of a first-born) does not necessarily have an effect on the history of every single story. The analysis of the bylina and the ballad versions shows that the essence of the story is that of a song of tragic love. It seems reasonable to argue that this international love story was initially adopted by the Russian tradition in the form of a ballad, as it is a primary objective of the ballad and not of the bylina to narrate stories about love and arouse sympathy for the characters. The bylina, as I indicated above, has different objectives and traditionally never concentrates on love stories. Therefore we can suggest that this story of a young girl and her lover started its life as a ballad and later, in those provinces in the north of Russia and Siberia where the bylina was still a living and productive genre in peasant communities and where the tradition of singing bylinas was stronger than that of ballad singing, the ballad was turned into a bylina.52 It was extended, associated with Alesha Popovich (probably because he is the youngest and the most rascally hero in the Russian bylinas) and a happy ending celebrating Alesha’s heroic deed was introduced. Consequently, the formal features of the genre took over the story transforming it into a bylina. If this theory is correct it becomes clear how such a lengthy and unnecessarily detailed variant as the one that I have discussed above could have been created. The priority of the ballad form in this case also explains how motifs not strictly belonging to the main story appeared in late versions of bylinas about Alesha Popovich and Elena Petrovichna (for example, Alesha frankly describes his meetings with the girl and accuses the brothers’ wives — more new characters in the story — of adultery). 53 It seems like these additions compensate for the lack of drama which the listeners were looking for in such stories. As a result, the long and detailed bylina looks like a compromise, having the content of a ballad and the form of a bylina. As the Russian ballad at the very start was oriented towards popular rather than towards elite culture, the listeners’ enthusiasm for empathising with the characters and for putting themselves into the characters’ shoes was much greater than similar emotions that the presentation of the bylina could have provoked. In my opinion, this is the key issue that distinguishes the Russian ballad from the bylina. When the bylina gradually changed its status in society and consequently its audience, the ballad came to influence the bylina, as we can see in our case study, where one plot was transformed from ballad form to bylina form. The main attribute of the ballad in Russian balladry is the possibility of imitating suffering, fear, pain — everything, in fact, which people would normally like to avoid in real life — fulfilling exactly the role that soap-operas do to modern popular culture. The Russian ballad is one of the folklore genres which fills this gap in popular culture. In contrast, the function of the bylina was to commemorate the glorious past and to establish the idea of national identity. Having adopted this opinion, we can see that it becomes easier

52

53

A.M. Astakhova mentioned this as an assumption in her commentaries appended to the publication of this bylina. However, she did not develop the idea: see Astakhova, A.M., Byliny Severa. Mezen’ i Pechera, Vol. 1 (Moscow-Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1938), pp. 34 & 553. Astakhova, et al., Byliny Pechory i Zimnego Berega, pp. 357-62.

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Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia to give reasons for the cruelty and violence that the ballads are full of; in the following passge a girl threatens a boy who offended or harassed her: Ia veliu brattsam podstrelit’ tebia, Podstrelit’ tebia, potrebit’ dushu, Ia iz kostochek terem vystroiu, Ia iz rebryshek poly vysteliu, Ia iz ruk, iz nog skam’iu sdelaiu, Iz golovushki edbovu sol’iu, Iz sustavchikov nal’iu stakanchikov, Iz iasnykh ochei – chary vinnye, Iz tvoei krovi navariu piva. [I shall ask my brothers to shoot you, I shall ask my brothers to take away your soul. I shall build a house of your bones, I shall make the floor in the house of your ribs, I shall make a bench of your arms and legs, I shall make a bowl of your scalp, I shall make cups of your joints, I shall make wine glasses of your eyes, I shall 54 brew beer of your blood.]

The function of imitation can be assigned not only to the ballad but also to some folklore genres in prose. However, this is indeed the function that gave the traditional Russian ballad the power to transform itself into lyrics and revive itself in the form of the modern popular ‘cruel’ song. On the other hand, having lost its traditional area for transmission, the bylina was transformed into short pieces in prose. The place of a historical account of the glorious past was either taken over by historical songs or went out of favour with society. Therefore the bylina lost not only its form but, what is probably more important, its function. Although the links between the traditional popular ballad, the literary ballad which was flourishing in the Romantic era and was initiated in Russian literature though translations of British and German Romantic authors and the modern popular ballad labelled a ‘cruel romance’ or a ‘city romance’, deserve special research, it is obvious that the function of the ballad was demanded by people, and the traces of the traditional form of the Russian ballad can be found in literature and modern popular culture.

54

Balashov, Narodnye ballady, pp. 142. The list of examples can be extended.

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From Oral Adventure Story to Literary Tale of Enchantment: the case of the Count Arnaldos ballad

Huw Lewis Whenever we study the oral culture of any language, few factors can make research more difficult, or more interesting, than the need to untangle the complicated web of alterations, confusions and intrusions from other sources that have contributed to the development of a particular tale or, in this case, a ballad. Such changes may take place as the result of a deliberate attempt to make a narrative more suited to a new locale, through inadvertent confusion with other narratives or local lore, or, as is often the case in the Spanish ballad tradition, through borrowings (ranging in length from a half-line to several lines) from other ballads, as deemed appropriate by the singer or scribe. Thus it is not surprising to find several variant forms of the most popular ballads (some of these coming, not from the Peninsula itself, but from North Africa and even Latin America), and this is certainly the case with the family of ballads that is to provide the focus of this paper, whose probable evolution from an oral adventure story to a literary gem evoking magical powers and contact with the supernatural otherworld provides an excellent case study of the factors that can contribute to an oral narrative’s evolution. This study will attempt to show how such change may have taken place, and to explain how an apparently innocuous tale became one of the most lauded and studied ballads of the Spanish language, reaching beyond the confines of its own time and place to influence creations as diverse as Longfellow’s ‘The Sound of the Sea’, and Antonio Gala’s 1994 collection of essays, A quien conmigo va, where the writer offers some of his reflections on life (the title, meaning ‘Whoever accompanies me’, is a quotation from the ballad). Of all Hispanic ballads, the Romance del Conde Arnaldos is one of the most beautiful and haunting, but its ‘meaning’ has baffled a host of critics, who have interpreted it variously as a simple adventure story,1 a Christian allegory,2 and an allegory of frustrated love.3 The folkloric background to this ballad has also attracted some attention,4 and it has been argued that El Conde Arnaldos may be related in theme and content to a group of ballads from European tradition concerning the Wild Host. The extant versions of this

1

Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Poesía popular y poesía tradicional en la literatura española (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), p. 14. 2 Hart, Thomas R.,‘“El Conde Arnaldos” and the Medieval Scriptural Tradition,’ Modern Language Notes, 72 (1957), 281-5. 3 Hauf A., and J.M. Aguirre, ‘El simbolismo mágico-erótico de “El infante Arnaldos”’, Romanische Forschungen, 81 (1969), 89-118. 4 Spitzer, Leo, ‘Notas sobre romances españoles’, Revista de filo logía española, 22 (1935), 153-74; ‘The Folkloristic pre-Stage of the Spanish Romance “Conde Arnaldos”’, Hispanic Review, 23 (1955), 173-87.

The Singer and the Scribe ballad are at least as numerous as the interpretations of the critics, for it is to be found in: a sixteenth-century chapbook; the Cancionero de Londres (1471–1500), where it is attributed to Juan Rodríguez del Padrón; the Cancionero de romances of 1550; the Cancionero de romances of unknown date; various Sephardic sources. Whatever their own interpretation of the ballad, however, all critics agree with Menéndez Pidal that the ballad (or its most truncated form, at least, as found in the Cancionero de romances of unknown date) is a masterpiece (‘una obra maestra’)5 of Spanish balladry. The following version is the one which Pidal considered to be the jewel in the crown of the Spanish ballad tradition (this and all other English translations are my own): ¡Quién hubiese tal ventura sobre las aguas del mar, como hubo el conde Arnaldos la mañana de San Juan! Con un falcón en la mano la caza iba a cazar; vio venir una galera que a tierra quiere llegar. Las velas traía de seda, la ejarcia de un cendal; marinero que la manda diciendo viene un cantar que la mar facía en calma, los vientos hace amainar; los peces que andan nel hondo, arriba los hace andar; las aves que andan volando, nel mástel las faz posar. Allí fabló el conde Arnaldos, bien oiréis lo que dirá: Por Dios te ruego, marinero, dígasme ora ese cantar. Respondióle el marinero, tal respuesta le fue a dar; Yo no digo esta canción 6 sino a quien conmigo va.

Who could have had such good fortune on the waters of the sea as did Count Arnaldos the morning of St John’s day! A falcon in his hand he went out hunting, and saw a galley approaching the land: its sails were made of silk, and its rigging of pure sendal; the sailor at its helm came singing a song which calmed the sea, and made the winds drop, and made the fish from the deep swim near the surface, and the birds flying above came to perch on the mast. Then spoke Count Arnaldos, hear what he had to say: -In God’s name, sailor I ask you to teach me your song. The sailor replied, this is what he said: -I only teach my song 7 to those who accompany me.

This narrative clearly raises a host of questions (who is the sailor, what is the strange power of his song, what is the ‘good fortune’ that Arnaldos is about to enjoy?), and over the years these obscurities have led many to believe that the ballad recounts an encounter with supernatural forces. In an attempt to counterbalance the Romantic interpretation of the ballad as an expression of ‘primitive’ superstition and belief in the supernatural, however, Pidal pieced 5

Menéndez Pidal, Poesía popular, p. 10. Romancero Antiguo, ed. by Juan Alcina Franch, 2 vols (Barcelona, 1971) II, 473-74 (hereafter RA). 7 The original of this version, as well as of most of the other texts discussed here, may be found in RA vol. 2. 6

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Huw Lewis together what he described as a fuller version of the ballad based on the combination of the sixteenth-century chapbook and twentieth-century Sephardic sources.8 The first half of the following translation reproduces the chapbook, the second half the Sephardic addition: ¡Quién hubiese tal ventura sobre las aguas de la mar, como hubo el infante Arnaldos la mañana de San Juan! Andando a buscar la caza para su halcón cebar vio venir una galera que venía en alta mar; las áncoras tiene de oro, las velas de un cendal; marinero que la guía va diciendo este cantar: Galera, la mi galera, Dios te me guarde de mal, de los peligros del mundo, de fortunas de la mar, de los golfos de León y estrecho de Gibraltar, de las fustas de los moros que andaban a saltear. Allí habló el infante Arnaldos, bien oiréis lo que dirá: Por tu vida, el marinero, vuelve y repite el cantar. Quien mi cantar quiere oír, en mi galera ha de entrar. Tiró la barca el navío y el infante fue a embarcar; alzan velas, caen remos, comienzan a navegar; con el ruido del agua el sueño le venció ya. Pónenle los marineros los hierros de cautivar; a los golpes del martillo, el infante fue a acordar. Por tu vida, el buen marino, no me quieras hacer mal: hijo soy del rey de Francia, nieto del de Portugal; siete años había, siete,

8

Who could have had such good fortune on the waters of the sea as did prince Arnaldos the morning of St John’s day! Heading out to hunt to feed his falcon he saw a galley approaching on the high sea: its anchors were made of gold, and its sails of pure sendal; the sailor at its helm came singing a song — My galley, my dear galley, May God protect you from harm, from the perils of the world, and the fortunes of the sea, from the Gulf of Lions and the Straits of Gibraltar, from the Moorish vessels that are ready to pounce. Then prince Arnaldos spoke, hear what he had to say: — I beg you, sailor, come back and repeat your song. — Whoever wishes to hear my song must come on board my vessel. The ship sent out its longboat, and the prince went on board; they raised the sails and dropped the oars, and headed on their way; the sound of the water lulled him to sleep. Then the sailors clapped him in irons; the sound of the hammer caused the prince to wake. — I beg you, good sailor, do not cause me harm: I am the son of the king of France and grandson to the king of Portugal, for seven years now, seven,

RA vol. 2, 4. 75-76.

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The Singer and the Scribe que fui perdido en la mar. Allí le habló el marinero: Si tú me dices verdad, tú eres nuestro infante Arnaldos y a ti andamos a buscar. Alzó velas el navio Y, se can a su ciudad Torneos y más torneos, Que el conde pareció ya.

I have been lost at sea. Then the sailor spoke: — If what you say is true you are our prince Arnaldos and it is you we have come to find. The ship raised its sails And returned to its home port Tournament followed tournament For the Count was found at last.

In this version the details concerning the mesmerising effect of the song on the sea, fish, and birds have clearly been omitted, to be replaced by the text of the song itself (this being a simple invocation unto God to keep the vessel safe from the dangers of the sea), which is also included in the highly corrupt version reproduced in the Cancionero de Londres. It was on the basis of these two additions  the text of the song and the new, expanded, ending  that Menéndez Pidal came to the conclusion that the dream-like, supernatural air generated by the ballad had received undue attention, and that originally this was really nothing more than a simple adventure story. Nevertheless, this conclusion is based on a number of dubious assumptions, the first and foremost of which is the presumption that the ending of the twentieth-century Sephardic version faithfully reflects what would have been the ballad’s ‘original’ ending; in fact, this ending could be a much later addition, as is the case with the other, highly unsatisfactory endings that have been associated with it, one example being the version of the poem attributed to Juan Rodríguez del Padrón, where the ending has blatantly been culled from the Ballad of Count Olinos, with little or no regard to the logical development of the story, for, following the text of the sailor’s song, we are here told the following: Oídolo ha la princesa en los palacios do está: — Si saliéredes mi madre, si saliéredes de mirar y veredes cómo canta la sirena de la mar. — Que non era la sirena, la sirena de la mar, que non era sino Arnaldos, Arnaldos era el infante, que por mí muere de amores, que le quería frustrar. ¡Quién le pudiese valer, 9 que tal pena no pagase!

The princess heard him from the palace where she lives: — If you came out, mother, if you came out to look you would see how he sings, the siren of the sea. — That is not the siren, the siren of the sea, that is just Arnaldos, Arnaldos the prince who languishes for love of me, which I do not return. If only he could be helped so that he should not suffer so much pain!

Here, not only has the ballad been transformed into a tale of unrequited love, but the borrowing has also led to the illogical twist that it is now Arnaldos who is apparently singing, and not the sailor as we had been told in the first half of the text! Furthermore, we 9

RA vol. 2, 474-75.

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Huw Lewis must also wonder about the reliability of the chapbook as a means of reconstructing the ‘orignial’ version of the ballad, for the inclusion of the text of the sailor’s song in the sixteenth-century text could itself have been brought about by the intrusion of a source as corrupt as the Cancionero de Londres, where we are also told, strangely, that Arnaldos is hunting lizards (lagartos) when he encounters the ship. This reference itself indicates how easily incongruencies can find their way into textual variants such as this, for the identification of lizards as Arnaldos’s prey is itself probably the result of a scribe mistranscribing, or mis -copying ‘la garça’ (heron) which, according to the 1550 Cancionero de romances, is his quarry. The failure to identify the strangeness of hunting lizards is also an indication both of the lack of close attention often paid by scribes to the logic of their text, and also the fact that, with the passage of time, this particular ballad becomes increasingly associated with exotic and alien pursuits. If interference from a similarly erratic source has indeed taken place in the chapbook, then this would completely undermine its value as evidence of the ballad’s ‘original’ theme and content. Furthermore, Spitzer10 has astutely drawn attention to a series of problems and incoherences in Menéndez Pidal’s reconstruction: 1. We are told that Arnaldos has a ventura at sea, yet he is out hunting on dry land when the poem opens. This is not explained convincingly by Pidal. 2. What is so special about the sailor's song, and why will he not repeat it? The text of he song given by Pidal is hardly worth being so closely guarded. 3. Why does the sailor wish to lure Arnaldos on board his ship? If he is really out searching for his long-lost lord, what advantage could he possibly hope to gain by abducting a complete stranger? 4. Why does Arnaldos fall asleep when he boards the ship in the extended version of the poem? Finally, we must bear in mind that even if Menéndez Pidal’s reconstruction of the ballad is accurate, we are still faced with the fact that at some stage in its development an unknown (and for evermore unknowable) imagination saw fit to re-shape the text, giving it that haunting quality which evokes contact with the supernatural. Even if its origins were mundane (and this fact is by no means proven), the ballad was later transformed into something far more enduring and significant, with more than a hint of the extraordinary. There is, moreover, one other version of the ballad which we must take into account before proceeding to a closer examination of the text itself. Bénichou,11 also collating material from Sephardic sources, published yet another version of the Arnaldos ballad (a token, perhaps, of the danger of relying too heavily on one modern variant as a means of reconstructing the notional ‘original’ ballad), which is interesting in a number of respects. First, the protagonist’s name is no longer Arnaldos but Fernando, although he is referred to by the more archaic title, infante. It is the longest of all extant variants of the ballad, containing the sailor’s song but not the reference to the joyous feasting at the end. It provides us with some information about Arnaldos/Fernando’s estate: he is a successful 10

Spitzer, ‘The Folkloristic Pre-Stage’. Bénichou, P., ‘Romances judeo-españoles de Marruecos’, Revista de Filología Hispánica, 6 (1944), 255-79 (at pp. 268-69). 11

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The Singer and the Scribe leader in battle and has captured seven cities together with Rome itself. Disappointingly, however, this longer version does little to help clarify any of the more obscure aspects of the shorter text. The reference to Fernando’s ‘rescue’ is indeed made all the more baffling because it is difficult to imagine anyone in less urgent need of succour than this mighty conqueror! We will see, however, that the incoherence of this version will, paradoxically, help our attempts to unravel the complex web of confusions and omissions that has clouded our understanding of the development of this family of ballads; an analysis of some of the ballad’s central motifs will elucidate this point.

1. The good fortune at sea The poem opens by alluding to Arnaldos’s adventure and good fortune at sea, the wording of which is highly reminiscent of the Ballad of Floriseo: ¡Quién hubiese tal ventura en haberse de casar como hobo Floriseo 12 cuando se fue a desposar ...

Who could have been so fortunate when he came to be married as was Floriseo the day he went to be wed!

In itself, this obvious repetition is not surprising, as it is common for such formulae to be borrowed from one ballad to another. However, Menéndez Pidal himself suggests that Floriseo could be the source of some of the material in Arnaldos,13 and the likelihood of this is further reinforced by the fact that even specific details are echoed, to the extent that the former also includes a description of a beautiful ship from which a melodious song emanates, mesmerising fish and birds alike. Significantly, Floriseo and his companions are not confronted by a sailor at this stage, but by a beautiful maiden (doncella hermosa), who lulls the hero to sleep and takes him to her mistress, who, in turn, puts him under a spell, forcing him to give her his love and to stay with her as her consort; in this way we are given a plausible reason for the abduction of the protagonist: so that he may become a supernatural maiden’s lover. The appearance of a damsel rather than of a sailor on the ship is also far more in keeping with this motif as it is found elsewhere, especially in early Celtic tales and in French romance, where women are far more common than men as representatives of the supernatural otherworld. The whole description of Floriseo’s kidnapping is, indeed, more logical and detailed than that of Arnaldos, and provides us with an important key to the significance of some of the references in the latter, as will soon become apparent. Returning to the opening lines of Arnaldos, we remember that we are told of the protagonist’s good fortune at sea. Folk belief frequently associates the supernatural with water, and we are often told of supernatural beings who sail across water in search of some sought-after mortal. In most of these traditions, the protagonists are approached by female supernatural beings, and while male emissaries are not entirely unknown, they are far less common; it is therefore possible that a female messenger has been replaced by a male sailor in this ballad. Picking up on these associations between water, boats and the otherworld, Débax and Martínez Mata in an analysis of this ballad have indeed suggested that it may tell of an encounter with the supernatural, although their interpretation lays particular 12 13

RA vol. 2, 424-25 . Menéndez Pidal, Poesía popular, pp. 16-17.

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Huw Lewis emphasis on associations with death, pointing out that many traditions place the land of the dead on the other side of a water barrier.14 Certainly, this interpretation has its merits, and is particularly relevant when we broach the question of the ballad’s relationship to the theme of the Wild Host. Interestingly, of all the Hispanic ballads allegedly related to this theme, Arnaldos is the only one where the abductor and the abducted are of the same sex: in all the others a male abductor makes off with a female victim. Thus, through the fusion of the two possible sources already mentioned  Floriseo and the Wild Host  a male emissary may have been substituted for a female one in the Arnaldos ballad, causing the tale either to evolve in the following manner, or at least to evoke some of the following connotations in the minds of those who eventually transformed it into the truncated account of an encounter with the supernatural: (i) by analogy with Floriseo or similar narrative, we are presented with a situation whereby a supernatural being (originally female) sails across the sea in a ship of wondrous craftsmanship; (ii) this damsel sings a song that mesmerises birds and fish, who congregate around the ship and so give added testimony to its marvellous origins; (iii) the damsel approaches Arnaldos and attempts to lure him to the supernatural otherworld, eventually being forced to cast a spell on him in the form of a song that lulls him to sleep; (iv) in this way he is captured and abducted, the purpose of his abduction being so that a supernatural maiden may win or force his love. With the intervention of the theme of the Wild Host, coupled with increasing ignorance of the significance of individual motifs and primitive beliefs, a number of these motifs become confused. The female enchantress now becomes male (or, in Pidal’s reconstructed text, a number of sailors), the more common sex of the abductor in Wild Host tradition; Arnaldos is still lulled to sleep, but, in an attempt to rationalise the misunderstood motif of the enchanting song we are told that it is the soporific effect of the lapping of the water that brings about the stupor; and, surprisingly, Arnaldos must also be clapped in irons to prevent him from escaping. This more physical and violent manifestation of the abduction motif brings us closer to this theme as it is found in other traditions concerning the Wild Host, where abduction is associated with that most extreme of all forms of violence, death. Finally, since the abductor is now male, the original reason for the abduction (an attempt to realise pas sionate desires) is now illogical and irrelevant, and is consequently omitted from this altered version of the story; since the significance of the Wild Host as a portent of death also seems to have been lost (explicitly, at least), the new ending owes more in its conception to Floriseo’s rescue from the hands of Laciva, the sorceress who had put him under her spell: when Arnaldos awakes from his enchanted sleep, it is as if he is returning to ‘reality’ after seven years of enforced separation from his orig ins and conscious, mortal existence. This reading also clarifies some of the incoherencies of Bénichou’s version of the ballad: if Fernando has been living under a spell, then in spite of his martial success he is still in need of being rescued from the clutches of his abductor. Thus Débax and Martínez Mata’s interpretation faithfully reflects one of the most important elements which has contributed to this ballad’s development, death certainly being a theme which seems to underlie the whole of this text, although it would be a mistake to regard it as the main focus, either at its conception or later. 14

Débax, Michelle, and Emilio Martínez Mata, ‘Lecturas del “Conde Arnaldos”’, reprinted in Francisco Rico and Alan Deyermond eds, Historia y crítica de la literatura española 1/1. Edad Media: primer suplemento (Barcelona: Crítica, 1991), pp. 224-9, at 227-8.

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The Singer and the Scribe The fact that the adventure takes place on St John’s Day (24 June) is also of no mean importance. As Hauf and Aguirre indicate in their discussion, St John’s Day may be associated in popular belief with misfortune, especially in the form of abduction, a theme which is also intimately linked with that of the hunt. Thus, at the very beginning of this ballad, we have a fusion of three separate contexts for abduction in popular lore: the arrival of a seafaring enchanter/enchantress, St John’s Day, and the hunt.

2. The Hunt The hunt is a central feature in this ballad. Once again, it parallels Floriseo, where the hero and his retinue are out hunting when they encounter the marvellous ship and its supernatural passenger. The motif of the hunt in the romancero and other ballad traditions has been discussed and elucidated by Edith Rogers,15 who shows the different contexts in which this motif may arise, and the different functions it may perform. Sometimes, hunting is mentioned without special emphasis, merely as the habitual activity of a knight; it is a means of getting him out into the countryside to a place where he might experience some adventure. But the hunt can also be an important feature of the ballad, perhaps as a symbol for the love-chase, or as a prelude to death, or else either as an activity which leads the protagonist to the dwelling-place of supernatural or enchanted creatures, or, finally, as the threshold or point of transition from this to an imaginary/marvellous world. It is in the latter category that she places the Arnaldos ballad. Without question, the hunt functions on a variety of levels in this poem. Symbolically, it may represent the love quest, as Hauf and Aguirre have suggested. This is particularly true of the corrupt Cancionero de Londres version of the ballad where the amorous dimension is brought to the forefront from the outset: ¡Quién hubiese tal ventura con sus amores folgar, como el infante Arnaldos 16 la mañana de San Juan!

Who could have had such good fortune enjoying the fruits of love as did prince Arnaldos the morning of St John’s day!

If this ballad is at all related in theme to a tale similar to that of Floriseo, then the allusions to the love-chase are certainly not out of place here, for in the prose romance, Floriseo, we learn that the sorceress Laciva falls in love with the protagonist and retains him at her court as her protector and consort; ironically, therefore, Floriseo here turns out to be the hunted rather than the hunter. Considering the development of all versions of the Arnaldos ballad, it is reasonable to assume that we are being presented with a similar case of entrapment and role-reversal. Such reversals are well-attested in folk tradition, where hunters of noble descent frequently find that they are the unsuspecting prey of some supernatural adversary, or the quarry sought by some benevolent protector. Indeed, chivalric romance from its very conception is at pains to stress the twin roles of the king or nobleman as a ruler in society but also as the servant of his God (or gods and goddesses in the case of the pagan tales which are the ultimate source of some of these romances), and the necessity of his fulfilling

15

16

Rogers, Edith Randam, ‘The Hunt in the Romancero and Other traditional Ballads’, Hispanic Review, 42 (1974), 133-71; idem, ‘The Perilous Hunt: Symbols in Hispanic and European Balladry’, Studies in Romance Languages, 22 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980). RA vol. 2, 474-75.

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Huw Lewis his duty to those people under his protection. The hero of a romance therefore both leads and is led, serves and is served, hunts and is hunted. It might even be said that the vital task which all heroes of chivalric romance must accomplish before achieving their ultimate goal of sovereignty is that of reconciling the essentially dual nature of their existence as intermediaries between this world and divine will. Constantly trapped on a threshold between two modes of existence, the mortal and the supernatural, it is inevitable that they should continually find the traditional roles they assume being challenged and their own identity (as leader, lover, hunter) being subverted and even overturned. It is fitting, therefore, that in Arnaldos the hunter should himself be lured into a trap, one which itself has possible associations with the love chase. As well as possibly acting as symbol for the love chase, the hunt in the Arnaldos ballad also acts as an introduction to the strange events that follow, a function which it performs for a number of reasons. A hunt often takes place in a forest, an environment which is apt to evoke images of enchantment and of the unknown, where strange beings may dwell, and where it is easy for a man to be separated from his companions and lose his way. It is therefore an ideal environment for the marvellous and for the unknown. The hunt also has close links with the theme of the quest, and as such is an appropriate prelude to an adventure which might furnish the hero with a store of experiences and insights of inestimable value to him in future life. But the significance of the hunt in the Arnaldos ballad transcends even this interpretation. Again, comparison with the prose Floriseo provides us with important additional information. We learn that the eponymous hero of this romance possesses a magical sword which has the particular property of protecting its bearer from all forms of enchantment and sorcery. However, because he is engaged in the peaceful and social activity of hunting, Floriseo is without his sword, and so gives Queen Laciva precisely the opportunity she has been waiting for in order to lure him into her clutches. Evidently, the hunt performs a vital function here, for its conventions place the protagonist in grave personal danger; without his protective sword, Floriseo is as vulnerable as any other mortal to the spells and enchantments cast by his enemies, and it is really only through sheer good fortune that his fate is not much worse, for it had been Laciva’s original intention to kill him, until his beauty and charm won her heart. Certainly, Floriseo could be described as having enjoyed good fortune in this respect, and his situation is somewhat comparable to that of Fernando in the version of the Arnaldos ballad collected by Bénichou: Fernando is himself a great warrior and leader in battle, and it is again the hunt that suggests his vulnerability when he is confronted with the unexpected while unprotected by the normal martial apparatus. Arnaldos, too, is seemingly devoid of any protection or accompaniment: in each case the hunt places the protagonist at a disadvantage for he is moved outside the usual security of the court or even his own powers, and at the mercy of the supernatural. As has been mentioned, this ballad is but one of many which may be connected with the Wild Host, a theme which, though of Germanic origin, was widely known throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. Popular belief maintained that Woden, the Germanic god of death, or a substitute (the Devil, Herod, or even King Arthur) at certain times of the year led a horde of tormented souls over the world in a frenzied hunt for innocent, living victims. Spitzer also relates ‘la chasse sauvage’ to the ‘danse macabre’, the belief that the spirits of the dead become engaged in an eternal dance. All these traditions reflect a belief in the 45

The Singer and the Scribe existence of malicious supernatural beings who, using the element of surprise, brute strength, or enchantment, attempt to trap and abduct unwary mortals. It is to this belief that Spitzer relates our ballad, adducing primarily the same theme as it is found in Rico Franco, aragonés, where the protagonist carries off a beautiful maiden against her will. Significantly, this ballad also opens with a hunt. Of all Hispanic ballads of this type, Rico Franco, aragonés is undoubtedly the closest in theme and content to the Germanic Halewijn, although it should be noted that the exact details of the damsel’s abduction do not appear in this Spanish ballad, and no mention is made of any form of charm or enchantment which might have caused her to fall into Rico Franco’s clutches. Furthermore, it is significant that in this ballad, as in practically all the others on the theme of the Wild Host, it is the abductor, and not the abducted, who is depicted as being out hunting. In Arnaldos, on the other hand, the reverse is true, which seems to indicate that more factors have interfered in the development of this ballad than simple analogy with the Germanic Wild Host. It must, therefore, be emphasised once more that the motif of the hunt performs a completely different function from that in the Wild Host, and that, by transferring the role of hunter from the abductor to the abducted, the emphasis has been shifted, the hunt being used, not as a symbol of death, but as a threshold between this and the supernatural world, as Rogers has correctly indicated. However, it is also interesting that in Rico Franco the damsel should have been abducted from a castle, for, if we turn our attention once more to the version of Arnaldos collected by Bénichou, we see that an oblique reference to the motif of the hunt is combined with abduction from a castle, where Fernando (as the protagonist is called in this version) first hears his falcon crying out with hunger, and then climbs the ramparts of his castle, from whence he sees the strange ship approaching. This version, more than any of the others, highlights the extent of the confusion in this part of the ballad: here the hunt motif is only fleetingly touched upon by means of the reference to the falcon, and is developed no further. Indeed, the fact that the falcon has not yet been fed indicates quite clearly that a hunt has not yet taken place, although one is undoubtedly pending. The hunt is passed over because its significance has been lost and its relevance to the ‘plot’ is highly questionable: Fernando is abducted by sailors on board ship (with no obvious link with the Wild Host), and seems to be taken from within the safety of his own castle (which allows no room for the hunt as a threshold to a supernatural world). This version is a prime example of how the function and meaning of such motifs may change radically over the centuries, their significance sometimes being lost altogether with the passage of time. Nevertheless, remnants of these ideas continue to survive in most versions of the ballad, and, as we begin to understand some of their (albeit unconsious) connotations in folk belief, it becomes easier to understand how the transformation of this ballad from adventure story to tale of enchantment might have taken place.

3. The Boat The description of the boat gives added weight to the notion that this ballad tells of a supernatural encounter. Its workmanship is in keeping with descriptions of supernatural boats elsewhere, which are frequently described as standing out from the ordinary, either in workmanship, in their means of propulsion and navigation, or both. Certainly, a ship with gold anchors, silk sails and rigging made of sendal stands out from the ordinary, and is apt to conjure images of wondrous origins. 46

Huw Lewis It may also be relevant that two different words  navío (ship) and galera (galley)  are used to refer to the ship in its various extant texts. The former, or some variant thereof (nave; nao) has been in common use in Castilian since earliest times; certainly, nave was used by c. 1140, and navío by 1275. 17 Galera, on the other hand, may only be traced to the second quarter of the fifteenth century or, in the form galea, to the beginning of the thirteenth, although it was known in Catalan by 1120. 18 If our sources are correct, in medieval times these two words were used in very different contexts: according to Corominas, galera was usually used of a merchant ship, while Martín Alonso indicates that it was used predominantly of a ship powered by oars (and Menéndez Pidal’s twentiethcentury Sephardic text indeed mentions the use of oars).19 Navío seems to be a word used for a fighting ship;20 certainly, it is a large ship with sails, capable of withstanding very harsh weather.21 Furthermore, it is likely that galera  derived from the Greek galea and probably passing into Castilian from French and Catalan 22  had more currency on the Mediterranean seaboard than the Atlantic, where navío would have been more common. In both French and Italian the word for a galley (galère and galea respectively) was synonymous with the idea of a prison ship, and of course in 1605 Cervantes himself depicts his most famous creation, Don Quixote, freeing prisoners bound for the Spanish galleys from their chains. It may not be a total coincidence and irrelevance, therefore, that Arnaldos should himself be clapped in irons by his abductors. The use of galera in certain versions of this ballad (especially since this is the term used by the sailor in his song), may therefore be a later development, which would provide a further indication that the text of the sailor’s song did not form part of an earlier version of the ballad. Alternatively it may simply be a product of Arnaldos’s assimilation into Mediterranean tradition, a possibility further strengthened by the sailor’s reference in his song to Moors, whose threat would have been felt most strongly on the Mediterranean seaboard. In either case, it seems likely that references to the ship as a galley are comparatively late additions to the text, as is, in all probablility, the sailor’s enchanting song. This brings us to a consideration of other matters relating to this haunting melody.

4. The Song Reminiscent of the song of the Sirens of Classical tradition in its ability to enchant and captivate those who hear it, this song is, nevertheless, different in many respects: it is sung by a single, male sailor rather than by a group of female enchantresses; and it is sung by someone on board ship, captivating someone who is on dry land, rather than vice-versa. In those versions of the ballad where the text of the song is included, it completely loses its supernatural connotations and becomes a much more banal incantation beseeching God to protect the ship against the dangers of the sea. Elsewhere, however, the very ambiguity caused by its omission adds to its haunting attraction, and, even today, the reader can still 17

Corominas, J., and J.A. Pascual, Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano e hispanoamericano, 6 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1980), IV, 219. 18 Corominas and Pascual, Dicionario crítico, III, 34-35. 19 Alonso, Martín, Diccionario medieval español (Salamanca, 1986), s.v. ‘galera’. 20 Alonso, Martín, Diccionario medieval español, s.v. ‘navío’. 21 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Barcelona, 1943), s.v. ‘navío’. 22 Corominas and Pascual, Diccionario crítico, III, 34-35.

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The Singer and the Scribe feel, like Arnaldos, the burning desire to learn the sailor’s song and to surrender to its soothing melody. In analogous fashion, Floriseo, both in the prose romance and in its ballad counterpart, is lulled to sleep by the enchanting song of a damsel who approaches in the marvellous boat, and who ultimately derives her power from the enchantress, Queen Laciva. The song in Arnaldos is also closely parallelled in the Ballad of Count Olinos, reinforcing theories concerning their common origins and connections:23 ¡Conde Olinos, conde Olinos es niño y pasó la mar! Levantóse conde Olinos mañanita de San Juan; llevó su caballo al agua, a las orillas del mar. Mientras el caballo bebe, él se pusiera a cantar: — Bebe, bebe mi caballo; Dios te me libre de mal, de los vientos rigurosos y las arenas del mar. Bien lo oyó la reina mora de las altas torres donde está: — Escuchad, mis hijas todas; las que dormís, recordad, y oirédes a la sirena 24 cómo canta por la mar.

Count Olinos, Count Olinos was a child and crossed the sea! Count Olinos arose the morning of St John’s day; he took his horse to the water on the shores of the sea. While the horse drank he began to sing — Drink, drink my horse; may God keep you from harm, from strong winds and the sands of the sea. The Moorish queen heard him from the high tower where she dwells. — Listen, all my daughters; those of you that are asleep, awake, and you will hear the siren, how he sings out at sea.

The wording here and in Arnaldos is so similar as to make it imp ossible not to conclude that some interference has taken place (it should be noted that conclusion of the version of Arnaldos attributed to Juan Rodríguez del Padrón in the Cancionero de Londres borrows extensively from the Ballad of Count Olinos, proving that connections were certainly made between these particular two texts). However, it is also possible that the Olinos ballad has borrowed from Arnaldos: it makes no sense that Olinos should take his horse to the seashore to drink, nor that he should ask for protection for his horse from winds and sand; moreover, the Moorish queen clearly believes that the song is coming from somewhere out at sea, not from Olinos. Is this, therefore, yet another confused version of the events in Arnaldos, where the protagonist and his horse are on the seashore when he hears the sailor’s song? In all events it is clear that both ballads depend heavily on the enchanting power of the song as a means of capturing the attention of all concerned, and thus, in both cases, the song is vital in the development of the ‘plot’. Without it, there can be no abduction; without it, there can be no love interest; without it, there is no ballad.

23 24

Entwistle, W.J., ‘El Conde Olinos’, Revista de filología española, 35 (1951), 237-48. RA vol. 2, 554.

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Huw Lewis

5. Arnaldos’s Sleep In our ballad, the effect of the wind or of the waves could be regarded as an attempt to explain the protagonist’s sleep rationally; but they could also be regarded as instruments of some unseen supernatural power. The truncated version of the ballad tells us that the sailor is capable of controlling animals and the elements alike; whether it is his song or the sound of the wind and waves that induce Arnaldos’s sleep, there can be no doubt that the sailor is the controlling force, and all doubts in this respect must be removed by comparison of this ballad with the prose Floriseo and its ballad counterpart, where the soporific effect of the damsel’s song is left beyond doubt. Sleep, especially when it is induced by some sort of enchantment is, like the forest, the hunt, or the seashore, a liminal milieu that acts as a boundary between the world of mortals and the otherworld (be the latter a land of supernatural beings, or the afterlife). In the same way that the hunt takes the protagonist into the ‘wilderness’, the no-man’s land between this world and the next, and as water, too, is depicted as a half-way house between the world of mortals and the beyond (traditional riddles often refer to the propitious properties of boats, which also represent half-way states, for anyone in a boat is neither in water nor on dry land), 25 so sleep is regarded as a middle stage between this world and the next, consciousness and death. Thus it comes as no surprise that, especially in later, euhemerised accounts, sleep is frequently the catalyst for an encounter with the supernatural otherworld, pagan or Christian, either through a vision, or by direct, physical contact, as is the case here. Arnaldos’s inexplicable loss of consciousness when he is in a most vulnerable position therefore further intensifies the supernatural air of this poem, and the idea that it relates an encounter with something otherworldly. As we have seen, all the classic elements of an otherworld tale are patently present in El romance del Conde Arnaldos: the hunt that first brings the protagonist into contact with the supernatural; the boat that carries him away; the enchanted sleep that marks his transition from one state to another, possibly from the immediately recognisable reality of the world of mortals to the dream-like, ‘unreal’ surroundings of the otherworld; the strange animals and beautiful music that so often act as a marker indicating the presence of the supernatural. But these elements are arranged in a fashion quite unlike any that can be found elsewhere. Certainly, the theme of the Wild Host is echoed in some of the tale’s structure, but it is by no means the only element which has contributed to the evolution of this particular ballad. The echoes of a traditional account of a hero’s journey to an otherworld abode are brought to the fore by comparing this text with its parallel, Floriseo, but corruption and confusion with the theme of abduction (embodied in the Wild Host) may have brought about several important changes to the text, or to its interpretation in popular belief, not least of these being the substitution of a male sailor for what might originally have been a female messenger. With the passage of time even the Wild Host’s deadly associations were lost from memory, causing yet more disjointedness and confusion, and giving rise to the addition of new but highly unsatisfactory endings. As the ballad evolved, associations were forged, modified and discarded, forever changing the significance of the ‘original’ text,

25

Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘Riddling Treatment of the “Watchman Device” in Branwen and Togail Bruidne Da Derga’, Studia Celtica, 12/13 (1977-8), 83-117.

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The Singer and the Scribe Clearly, a highly complex and confused web of beliefs and associations underlies this ballad, ones which, in spite of our modern ignorance of much of their original connotations, continue to cojnure-up images of the strange and the unearthly, and so ensure the continuing status of this ballad as the one of the jewels of the Spanish ballad tradition. As Antonio Gala asks in his 1994 volume, ‘What was the significance of that song to the sailor?’ It may be impossible for us to know the full answer to this question, but for us the mysterious song embodies a myriad of possibilities, brought into being by the evolution of a song born in the oral tradition, and fossilised for future frustration and delight in a truncated text that has fired the imaginations of audiences from the sixteenth century to the present day.

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A Morte do Rei D. Fernando and Floresvento: two rare Portuguese epic ballads *

Manuel da Costa Fontes As the citations in the works of about fifty early authors demonstrate, ballads were very popular in Portugal during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,1 but, unlike what happened in Spain, no one bothered to compile them. This confers special importance on the modern Portuguese ballad tradition, for it provides the only adequate documentation of what existed in the early period. Almeida Garrett began to investigate it in 1823, and thousands of ballads have been collected since then.2 In Brazil, the first collection is a *

The following abbreviations are used for works regularly cited in this study: C1344 = Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344, ed. by Luis Filipe Lindley Cintra, 4 vols (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1951-90). Cantos = Braga, Teófilo, Cantos Populares do Arquipélago Açoriano (Oporto: Livraria Nacional, 1869). CVR = Crónica de Veinte Reyes (partly ed. in Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Reliquias de la poesía épica española, acompañadas de ‘epopeya y Romancero I’, ed. by Diego Catalán, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1980), pp. 24056). Ferré = Ferré, Pere, Vanda Anastácio, José Joaquim Dias Marques, and Ana Maria Martins, Romances Tradicionais ([Funchal]: Câmara Municipal, 1982). PCG = Primera crónica general de España, ed. by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, with a study by Diego Catalán, 3rd ed., 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1977). Primav. = Wolf, Fernando J., and Conrado Hofmann, Primavera y flor de romances, ed. by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, in Antología de poetas líricos castellanos, 8, “Obras Completas,” 24 (Santander: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1945). RPI = Fontes, Manuel da Costa, O Romanceiro Português e Brasileiro: Índice Temático e Bibliográfico (com uma bibliografia pan-hispânica e resumos de cada romance em inglês) / Portuguese and Brazilian Balladry: A Thematic and Bibliographic Index (with a Pan-Hispanic bibliography and English summaries for each texttype). Selection and Commentary of the Musical Transcriptions by Israel J. Katz. Pan-European Correlation by Samuel G. Armistead. (Madison, Wisconsin: The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1997). VRP = Vasconcellos, José Leite de, Romanceiro Português, Acta Universitatis Conimbrigensis, 2 vols (Coimbra: Universidade, 1958-1960). 1

2

Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina, Estudos sobre o romanceiro peninsular: romances velhos em Portugal (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 2nd ed. 1934). For a more detailed survey of the work undertaken since 1967, see RPI, 1, 29-32. See also Marques, José Joaquim Dias, ‘Ballad Collecting and Ballad Research in Portugal’, in Ballad and Ballad Studies at the Turn of the Century. Proceedings of the 30th International Ballad Conference (Bucharest: Deliana, 2001), pp. 14249; idem, La investigación sobre el romancero portugués (manuscript: 1967-2000). José Joaquim Dias Marques read a draft of the present chapter, and I would like to thank him for his important observations.

The Singer and the Scribe manuscript with eight versions compiled by Inácio Raposo in 1853, but, since it did not reach print until much later, 3 it was Celso de Magalhães who published the first Brazilian ballads in 1883. 4 So far, every state in the country has been investigated.5 The number of ballads collected throughout the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world is negligible. There are five text -types from Goa, probable fragments of a particularly popular poem, Bela Infanta (RPI, I1),6 from Sri Lanka, two ballads in the creole dialect of Malacca, and a poor version of Bela Infanta from the Cape Verde Islands (RPI, 1: 33-34), but, as far as I can determine, nothing has been collected in the former colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, St. Thomas and Prince, Macau and Timor. Since the ballad constitutes a pan-European phenomenon, except for a few text -types created in Portugal, most of the early ballads in the country came through centrally located Castile, which, besides exporting poems that had crossed the Pyrenees, contributed a good number of ballads of its own creation. Thus, Luso-Brazilian balladry constitutes a branch of the pan-Hispanic tradition as well. Within this context, Portugal represents a conservative, lateral area closely related to the Northwestern block of the Iberian Peninsula, which includes Galicia, Asturias and Leon, preserving some ballads that have disappeared elsewhere, a few text -types that survive only in the rich tradition of the Sephardim, and a good number of ballads that, although documented elsewhere, remain extremely rare. This paper will focus on two such ballads, the epic A Morte do Rei D. Fernando, which combines three text -types (RPI, A7 + A8 + A10) derived from the Castilian Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando y cerco de Zamora (eleventh century), and Floresvento (RPI, B10), a Carolingian poem derived from the French Floovent (twelfth century). In addition to their epic origin, both poems reflect intermediate, condensed versions of the lengthy songs on which they are based.7

I. According to epic sources, King Ferdinand I divided his kingdom among his children as he lay dying in 1065. Sancho inherited Castile, Alfonso received León, and Galicia went to

3

Ribeiro, Joaquim, and Wilson W. Rodrigues, ‘Romanceiro tradicional do Brasil (textos do século XIX)’, in 1.o Congresso Brasileiro de Folclore. Anais, 3 vols (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério das Relações Exteriores, 195253), 2, 23-112. 4 Magalhães, Celso de, A Poesia Popular Brasileira, ed. by Bráulio do Nascimento (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1973). 5 RPI, 1: 32-33; Nascimento 1972. 6 I refer to RPI’s classification next to ballad titles because, in addition to samples, that catalogue provides Luso Brazilian and pan-Hispanic bibliographies for each text-type, including pan-European correlations by Samuel G. Armistead and musical selections by Israel J. Katz. 7 In the pages that follow, I synthesise findings presented in four previous papers: Fontes, Manuel da Costa, ‘A Sephardic Vestige of the Ballad ‘Floresvento’, La Cronica, 10 (1982), 196-201; idem, ‘The Ballad of ‘Floresvento’ and its Epic Antecedents’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 32 (1985), 309-19; idem, ‘The Ballad “A Morte do Rei D. Fernando” and the “Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando y cerco de Zamora”’, Anuario Medieval, 8 (1996), 108-51; idem, ‘Uma Nova Versão do Romance “A Morte do Rei D. Fernando”’, Estudos de Literatura Oral, 2 (1996), 115-23.

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Manuel da Costa Fontes Garc ía. The King’s two daughters, Elvira and Urraca, were given the cities of Toro and Zamora, respectively. Being the oldest, Sancho felt that he should have inherited the whole realm. He eventually managed to take León, Galicia, and Toro from his siblings, and was killed in 1072, as he laid siege to Urraca in Zamora. 8 These events formed the basis for a lost epic known to us through its prosification in the Crónica Najerense (twelfth century),9 the PCG (thirteenth century),10 the CVR (thirteenth century),11 the Portuguese C1344, and several ballads.12 Menéndez Pidal thought that there were two epics on the subject, one on the partition and another on the tragic consequences, but, as Charles Fraker argued, there was only one poem. 13 Three of the ballads derived from this poem are Doliente estaba, doliente (á-o; Primav., no. 35), which portrays Fernando in his deathbed, surrounded by three legitimate sons and a fourth, illegitimate one; Morir os queredes, padre (á-a; Primav. 36), where princess Urraca receives Zamora after complaining to her dying father that he has forgotten her in his will; and Afuera, afuera, Rodrigo (á-o; Primav. 37), which is based on a meeting between the Cid, Sancho’s second-in-command, and Urraca, during the siege of that city. In 1548, Martín Nucio published the three ballads together on folios 157r-158v, placing Afuera first, and thus out of sequence.14 In 1550, however, he printed them in correct order, linked with transitions that allow them to be read as one poem, for, despite the omission of Sancho’s death, they synthesise the events that occurred between 1065 and 1072 in a broad, coherent manner. I stress the transitions in question below:

2

4

Doliente se siente el rey esse buen rey don Fernando los pies tiene hazia oriente y la candela en la mano a su cabecera tiene arçobispos y perlados a su man derecha tiene a sus fijos todos cuatro

In pain was the King, good King Fernando, his feet facing the East, a candle in his hand. At the head of the bed archbishops and prelates, and at his right all four of his sons;

8

Historically, Urraca and Elvira’s inheritance was lordship over all royal monasteries in Castile and Leon, and, rather than having inherited Zamora, Urraca probably started a rebellion against Sancho in that city. For the historical background, see Reilly, Bernard E., The Kingdom of León-Castilla under King Alfonso VI (10651109) (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 14-67; Reig, Carola, ‘El cantar de Sancho II y cerco de Zamora’, Revista de Filologia Española (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1947), Anejo 37, pp. 7-27. 9 Cronica najerense, ed. by Antonio Ubieto Arteta, Textos Medievales, 15 (Valencia: Anubar, 1966). 10 Primera Crónica general de España, ed. by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, with a study by Diego Catalán, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 3rd ed. 1977). 11 CVR, pp. 240-56. 12 Clavero, Dolores, Romances viejos de temas épicos nacionales. Relaciones con gestas y cronicas (Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1994), pp. 191-313. 13 Fraker, Charles F., ‘The Beginning of the Cantar de Sancho’, La Corónica, 19 (1990-91), 5-21. 14 Nuncio, Martín, Cancionero de romances impreso en Amberes sin ano, ed. by Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1945).

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The Singer and the Scribe

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los tres eran de la reyna y el vno era bastardo esse que bastardo era quedaua mejor librado arçobispo es de Toledo maestre de Santiago abad era en Çaragoça de las Españas primado. Hijo si yo no muriera vos fuerades padre santo mas con la renta que os queda vos bien podreys alcançarlo. Ellos estando en aquesto entrara Vrraca Fernando y buelta hazia su padre desta manera ha hablado.

three were the Queen’s, a bastard was one. He was the richest, and so would remain, Toledo’s Archbishop, Grand-Master of Santiago, Abbot in Saragossa and Primate of Spain. ‘If I wasn’t dying, my son, you’d be Pope, but with all this money you still have hope.’ In the middle of this Urraca Fernando came in , and turning toward her father, these words she spoke.

Morir vos queredes padre

‘My father, you’re dying,

san Miguel vos aya el alma mandastes las vuestras tierras a quien se vos antojara a don Sancho a Castilla Castilla la bien nombrada a don Alonso a Leon y a don Garcia a Bizcaya a mi porque soy muger dexays me deseredada yrme yo por essas tierras como vna muger errada y este mi cuerpo daria a quien se me antojara a los Moros por dineros y a los Christianos de gracia de lo que ganar pudiere hare bien por la vuestra alma. Alli preguntara el rey, Quien es essa que assi habla? Respondiera el arçobispo Vuestra hija doña Vrraca. Calledes hija calledes no digades tal palabra que muger que tal dezia merescia ser quemada alla en Castilla la vieja vn rincon se me olvidaua Çamora auia por nombre Çamora la bien cercada

may your soul find it’s rest! You have given your kingdom as you thought best, you’ve offered Sancho proud ancient Castilla, León to Alfonso, Biscay to García, but I am a woman, and left with no home. I’ll wander the kingdom a woman alone and offer my body to all men I see, to Moslems for money, to Christians for free, and the money I make for your soul it shall be.’ Then the King asked: ‘What woman so speaks?’ The Archbishop replied: ‘Your daughter Urraca’ ‘Silence, my daughter, those words should be spurned, a woman who says them deserves to be burned! There’s a place in Castilla that now I recall, the town of Zamora with fortified walls,

Manuel da Costa Fontes 16

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de vna parte la cerca el Duero de otra peña tajada del otro la moreria vna cosa muy preciada quien vos la tomare hija la mi maldicion le cayga. Todos dizen amen amen sino don Sancho que calla. El buen rey era muerto Çamora ya esta cercada de vn cabo la cerca el rey del otro el Cid la cercaua del cabo que el rey la cerc a Çamora no se da nada del cabo que el Cid la cerca Çamora ya se tomaua Assomose doña Vrraca assomose a vna ventana de alla de vna torre mocha estas palabras hablaua.

the Duero runs by it, it’s on a steep hill, and the old Moslem quarter is beautiful still; who captures it from you, my curse is on them!’ All except for Don Sancho they all say ‘Amen!’ As soon as the King died Zamora was besieged, the King from one side, the Cid from the other. On the King’s side they did not give an inch, but on the Cid’s side the city began to fall. Urraca appeared, she leaned out of a window, from a tower without a spire she spoke these words.

A fuera a fuera Rodrigo

‘Get away, proud Rodrigo,

el soberuio Castellano acordarse te deunia de aquel tiempo ya passado quando fuiste cauallero en el altar de Santiago quando el rey fue tu padrino tu Rodrigo el ahijado mi padre te dio las armas mi madre te dio el cauallo yo te calce las espuelas porque fuesses mas honrrado que pense casar contigo mas no lo quiso mi pecado cassaste con Ximena Gomez hija del conde Loçano con ella vuiste dineros comigo vuieras estado bien casaste tu Rodrigo muy mejor fueras casado pexaste [sic] hija de rey por tomar de su vasallo. Si os parece mi señora bien podemos destigallo mi anima penaria si yo fuesse en discrepallo.

Castilian son! You ought to remember the times that have gone, when you were armed a knight before the altar of St. James; my father was your sponsor, you, Rodrigo, his godson. My father gave you the arms, my mother gave you a horse, and I put on your spurs so as to honor you even more; I thought we would marry but that couldn’t be, for you married Ximena Gómez, daughter of Count Lozano. With her you had riches, when you should be with me. A good marriage, Rodrigo, but it wasn’t the best, you married a vassal and spurned a Princess.’ ‘If you wish it, Urraca, I’ll abandon my wife.’ ‘My soul would suffer if I were to disagree.’

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The Singer and the Scribe 14

16

A fuera a fuera los mios los de a pie y de a cauallo pues de aquella torre mocha vna vira me han tirado no traya el asta hierro el coraçon me ha passado. Ya ningun remedio siento 15 sino biuir mas penado.

‘Be gone now, be gone, my soldiers and knights! From that tower without a spire an arrow has pierced me tonight, the shaft isn’t metal but it’s wounded my heart, and for all of my life I’ll be hurt by the dart.’

The first transition is found at the end of Doliente (vv. 11-12). As Menéndez Pidal demonstrated,16 rather than being invented by Nucio, those verses are traditional, for they correspond to the following passage in the CVR: ‘Ellos en esto estando, entro la ynfante doña Vrraca con todas sus dueñas por el palaçio, metiendo bozes e faziendo el mayor llanto del mundo, llamando e diziendo: ¡Padre señor! ¿que fiz yo porque ansy finco deseredada?’ (247.14-16). [When they were in the middle of this conversation, Princess Urraca came into the palace with all of her ladies, shouting and crying very loudly and saying: ‘My Father and Lord, what did I do in order to be left without an inheritance?’] The second transition appears at the end of Morir (20 -25). Wolf and Hoffmann refused to accept it as being traditional and placed it in a footnote (Primav. 36, n. 6), but it is extremely difficult to attribute those verses to Nucio or to anyone familar with the chronicles. According to the transition, the siege of Zamora begins as soon as Fernando dies (20), but the chronicles describe in detail the events that occurred between the death of the king in 1065 and the siege of the city in 1072. The PCG dedicates no less than 16 chapters (814-29) to those events. Contrary to what happens in the ballad (23), in the chronicles the Cid does not manage to take any part of Zamora. On the contrary, in an effort to prevent the siege, Sancho sends him as emissary to his sister Urraca, offering to exchange Zamora for other holdings. Rather than addressing the Cid from a turret, as in the ballad (24-25), the princess receives him in her palace (PCG, 2: 507a.4-5). Anyone familiar with the chronicles would have known better than to depart from them in such a radical manner. This clear process of condensation and novelización occurs as the events on which a poem is based are half-forgotten and altered through oral transmission. In the words of Menéndez Pidal, 17 in 1550 Nucio ‘no inventó de su cosecha esos versos de unión, sino que los halló, juntamente con dichas variantes, en la versión que le servía de norma para corregir el texto del Cancionero sin año’ [did not invent those linking verses on his own, but rather he found them, together with the aforesaid variants, in the version that he used in order to correct the text of the previous edition]. In sum, Nucio printed the three ballads as a trilogy in 1550 because they existed as one poem in the oral tradition. 15

The original text is taken from Cancionero de romances (Anvers, 1550), ed. by Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino (Madrid: Castalia, 1967); all translations accompanying quotations in this chapter are mine unles otherwise indicated. 16 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Romancero hispánico (hispano-portugués, americano y sefardí), 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953). 17 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Estudios sobre el Romancero, ed. by Diego Catalán, in Obras completas, vol. 11 (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1973), p. 120 .

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Manuel da Costa Fontes The ballad that follows, which I have entitled A Morte do Rei D. Fernando, also testifies to the traditional character of this trilogy, for it is still sung in Portugal as one poem. In Madeira and the Azores, it survives thanks to its contamination with Silvana (RPI, P1), a ballad about a girl whose father, who is often a king, asks her to go to bed with him. Due to space limitations, I will summarise this part of the ballad.18 When the king tells the girl that he wants to spend a night with her, she reminds him of the pains of hell, and he replies that the Pope would forgive their sin. Informed of what is happening, the queen goes to her husband’s bed instead, and, thinking that he is with his daughter, he is greatly surprised to discover that she is no longer a virgin. The queen reveals her identity and names the three children that she has already had, one of whom is ‘D. Pedro de Castilha’ (28b). Hearing this, the king curses his daughter.19 Although the epic trilogy that follows is free from contaminations, the first three of the four verses that correspond to Doliente (34-36) were changed from the original á-o to í-a, no doubt because of the influence of the preceding Silvana, which also rhymes in í-a: 34

36

38

40

42

44

46

18

19

Nisto o rei adoeceu para a morte, que morria, mandá’ chumar os seus filhos para fazer a partida. Q’ando chegou à sua casa, seu pai na cama o tinha, c’os pés coma um defunto, com a candeia na mão. —Senhor pai que ‘tás à morte, Dês te tome parte n’alma. Deixastes os vossos bens a quem vos não era nada, e sendo a vossa filha me deixastes deserdada. A João deixo as casas, a Pedro terras lavradas. Caminhou dali Silvana, como louca, desvairada. —Eu vou é por esse mundo como pobre, desgraçada, vou co’a minha roca à cinta, já que espada não m’é dada. C’a minha roca à cinta, mulher não tem outra arma. Nem de preto, nem de branco, de ninguém serei guardada. —Oh que vozes são estas

Then the King fell ill, he was bout to die, and sent for his children in order to do the partition. When she arrived at the house her father was in bed, his feet placed like a dying person’s, a candle in his hand. ‘Father, you’re about to die, may God have your soul. You’ve left everything to people who were nothing to you, and I, who am your daughter, find myself without an inheritance.’ ‘I’m leaving the houses to João, the ploughed lands to Pedro.’ Silvana walked away like a mad, bewildered person. ‘I’ll go through the world as a poor, disgraced woman, ‘I’ll go through the world as a poor, disgraced woman, My distaff at the waist, it’s a woman’s only weapon, and neither black nor white men will show me any respect.’ ‘What words are those,

What follows is drawn from a synthetic version. For a full account of the versions and the verses on which it is based: see Fontes, ‘The Ballad A morte do rey D. Fernando’, pp. 112-13. In this portion of the ballad, the existing versions exhibit no less than seven contaminations with other texttypes: see Fontes, ‘The Ballad A morte do rey D. Fernando’, pp. 114-20.

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The Singer and the Scribe 48

50

52

54

56

58

60

que eu oiço tão desmudadas? Que palavras são aquelas, mulher tão desaustinada? —É vossa filha Silvana, que a deixais deserdada. —Deus se não lembre de mim, se tal filha me lembrava, que eu deixava-lhe Sambóia, cercada, mui bem cercada. Por uma banda corre ouro, por outra prata lavrada. —Pa que quer’aquela terra, se D. João ma tomara? —Se D. João ta tomara, pro maldição lha deixara. Mas ‘inda o rei não era morto, já Sambóia era tomada, com duzentos cavaleiros por toda a roda cercada. —Tu não le lembras, Rodrigues, daquele tempo passado, qu’o rei era tê padrinho e tu eras seu afilhado, o meu pai te deu uma espada e minha mãe deu-te o cavalo, e eu dei-te as esporas de ouro para te ver aumentado, e p’agora vires buscar todo o meu novo estado?

disturbed words I hear? What words are those, and such a crazy woman?’ ‘It’s your daughter Silvana, because you’re leaving her disinherited.’ ‘May God forget me if I remembered that daughter; I’ll leave her Sambóia, Sambóia, with its fortified walls. Gold runs by it on one side, wrought silver on the other.’ ‘What do I want that land for? Don João will take it from me.’ ‘If he t akes it from you my curse will be upon him.’ The King was not yet dead, Sambóia was already taken, and completely surrounded by two hundred knights. ‘Don’t you remember, Rodrigues, the times that have gone, when the King sponsored you, you were his godson, my father gave you a sword, my mother gave you a horse, I gave you golden spurs so as to increase your honor, and now you come to take away all of my new property?’

The sixteen versions used to put together the preceding synthetic version of this ballad are from the isolated archipelagoes of Madeira 20 and the Azores,21 two conservative lateral areas in relation to the rest of Portugal. Estácio da Veiga published a synthetic version from the Algarve as well, but I have not included it because it represents a different subtype.22 20

21 22

Ferré, nos. 1-2, pp. 246-48, 250, 254; Purcell, Joanne B., Novo Romanceiro Português das Ilhas Atlânticas, 1., ed. by Isabel Rodríguez-García and João A. das Pedras Saramago (Madrid: Seminario Menéndez PidalUniversidad Complutense, 1987), 2.1-4; Marques, José Joaquim Dias, ‘Imagens e Sons do Romanceiro Português’, in El Romancero: Tradición y pervivencia a fines del siglo XX. Actas del IV Coloquio Internacional del Romancero (Sevilla-Puerto de Santa María -Cádiz, 23-26 de Junio de 1987), ed. by Pedro M. Piñero, Virtudes Atero, Enrique J. Rodríguez Baltanás and María Jesús Ruiz (Seville-Cádiz: Fundación Machado-Universidad de Cádiz, 1989), pp. 381-412 (at pp. 388-389); Fontes, ‘Uma nova versão do romance A Morte do Rei D. Fernando’, pp. 120-121. Cantos 4; Purcell 1987, 2.5-6. Veiga, S[ebastião] P[hilippes] M[artins] Estácio da, Romanceiro do Algarve (Lisbon: Joaquim Germano de Sousa Neves, 1870), pp. 19-22. Veiga tampered considerably with his version, but Dias Marques, who discovered the author’s original papers, demonstrated that he based himself on a traditional version: Marques,

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Manuel da Costa Fontes The contamination with Silvana may have occurred because, in the broadest terms, that ballad is about a father-daughter relationship, and, to a great extent, so is the early trilogy, where Urraca plays a central role. This broad theme could have triggered the contamination by itself. Although there is no hint of incest in the trilogy, there were rumours of such a relationship between the impetuous Urraca and her brother Alfonso.23 These rumours could also have played a role. Whatever the case may have been, the shared references to the Pope, three children and a curse may have contributed to the contamination as well. Whereas the king tells Silvana that the Pope can forgive their sin, in Doliente Fernando says to his illegitimate son, an archbishop, that he would eventually make him Pope if he were to live longer (9). When Silvana’s mother reveals her identity, saying that she has already had three children and that one of them is ‘D. Pedro de Castilha’ (28b), this echoes Morir, which, besides naming three children, stresses Sancho’s association with Castile (3). Finally, the king’s curse in Silvana also echoes Fernando’s curse against anyone who dares to take Zamora from Urraca in Morir (18). The portion of the Portuguese ballad that corresponds to Doliente has been condensed to only four verses (34-37). Since it is not possible to include here a detailed analysis of the transformations that have taken place,24 I will stress only the details in which the Portuguese ballad seems to follow the old Cantar better than Nucio’s version.25 As Joanne Purcell indicated,26 the verse ‘mandá’ chumar os seus filhos / para fazer a partida’ [he sent for his children in order to do the partition (35)] reflects the Cantar much better. According to the epic, the king ‘mando llamar a sus fijos e partioles el reyno ante que muriese’ [sent José Joaquim Dias, ‘Subsídios para o Estudo do Método Editorial de Estácio da Veiga no Romanceiro do Algarve’ in Actas do 1.o Encontro Sobre Cultura Popular (Homenagem ao Prof. Doutor Manuel Viegas Guerreiro), 25 a 27 de Setembro de 1997, ed. by Gabriela Funk (Ponta Delgada: Universidade dos Açores, 1999); for the original itself, see pp. 274-76. Contrary to the Insular renditions, this one opens with ‘A Morte do Príncipe D. João’ (RPI, C5), which is about the death of Prince John, son of the Catholic Monarchs. For additional studies of Veiga’s papers, see Marques, José Joaquim , ‘Os Manuscritos do Romanceiro do Algarve de Estácio da Veiga Existentes no Museu Nacional de Arqueologia’, O Arqueólogo Português, 11-12 (199394), 153-73; idem, ‘Contribuição para o Estudo do Romanceiro do Algarve de Estácio da Veiga à Luz de Manuscritos Inéditos (Tese de Aptidão Pedagógica e Capacidade Científica, Unidade de Ciências Exactas e Humanas, Universidade do Algarve, 1997). The latter includes a splendid study of this ballad (pp. 52-85). See also his forthcoming ‘O Dom Rodrigo.’ 23 Lévi-Provençal, E., and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, ‘Alfonso VI y su hermana la infanta Urraca’, Al Andalus, 13 (1948), 157-66. 24 Fontes, ‘The Ballad A Morte do Rei D. Fernando’, pp. 124-34. 25 The version from the Algarve refers to a will rather than to a partition because of the contaminatio n with A Morte do Príncipe D. João: ‘Fazer quero testamento / desta pobre holanda minha’, Marques, ‘Subsídios para o Estudo’, p. 275. 26 Purcell, Joanne B., ‘Recently collected ballad Fragments on the Death of Don Fermando I’, in Portuguese and Brazilian Oral Traditions in Verse Form / As Tradições Orais Portuguesas e Brasilieras em Verso , ed. by Joanne B. Purcell, Samuel G. Armistead, Eduardo M. Dias and Joanne E. March (Los Angeles: University of Southern California: 1976), pp. 158-167(at p. 164). In this paper, the author summarises the most essential findings presented in her doctoral dissertation, Purcell, Joanne B, ‘The Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando in Modern oral Tradition: Its relationship to sixteenth-century romances and medieval chronicles’ (PhD dissertation, University of California Los Angeles, 1976).

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The Singer and the Scribe for his children and divided the kingdom among them before dying (CVR 242.1-2)], but, at this point, Nucio’s version merely states that the king’s four sons are at his bedside (4), and refers to the partition only in an implied manner, indicating that the illegitimate son did better than his brothers (6). The portion that corresponds to Morir (38-56) is much better preserved, and may reflect the Cantar better than Nucio’s version in three instances. As Joanne Purcell pointed out,27 the verse in which the princess complains to her father that he has left her out of his will, ‘Deixastes os vossos bens / a quem vos não era nada’ [You’ve left everything to people who were nothing to you (39)], seems closer to the chronistic ‘partistes vos los reynos e a mi non me distes nada, e finco desanparada e lazrada’ [you partitioned the kingdom, gave me nothing, and so I’m being left destitute and in misery (CVR 248.1-2)] than Nucio’s corresponding verse, where Urraca says ‘mandastes las vuestras tierras / a quien se vos antojara’ [you’ve given your kingdom as you thought best (2)]. In the second instance, the Portuguese poem specifies that the king realises that the speaker is an extremely upset woman who shouts (47-48), whereas in its early congener he merely asks who has just said such words (10). Here the modern poem may reflect the Cid’s advice to Urraca in the prosified epic, where she asks him for his help in convincing her father to leave her an inheritance. The Cid tells her to follow him shortly after he enters her father’s chambers, ‘con vuestras dueñas faziendo muy grant llanto’ [crying very loudly with your ladies (CVR 246.17)]. Urraca puts the Cid’s advice into practice, for she enters with her ladies-in-waiting ‘metiendo vozes e faziendo el mayor llanto del mundo’ [shouting and crying very loudly (CVR 247.15)]. This parallels the ‘vozes tão desmudadas’ [disturbed words (47b)] that the king hears in the Portuguese ballad. Since these ‘vozes’ are very specific and reflect the circumstances of Urraca’s stormy entrance much better than Nucio’s version, the parallel is not likely to be a matter of pure coincidence. In all probability, at this point the modern ballad preserves an epic detail absent from its early congener. The third instance in which this part of the modern poem is closer to the Cantar occurs in the answer to the king’s query. In Nucio’s version, the archbishop replaces the Cid and replies to his father,28 revealing that the distraught woman is Urraca (11). In the modern poem, an unidentified speaker adds that Silvana is being left without an inheritance (49), thus paralleling the prosified Cantar, where the Cid replies: ‘Señor, es vuestra fija doña Urraca que finca deseredada e pobre’ [Sir, it’s your daughter Urraca, who is being left poor, without an inheritance (CVR 248.4-5)]. The Portuguese poem adds a new verse in which the princess protests to her father that ‘D. João’ will take the land that he is leaving her (53). It is only then that the king curses his son if he should do so (54). D. João, of course, stands for Sancho. Since the princess’s question makes good sense in view of the king’s answer, which in Nucio’s version appears somewhat gratuitous, the modern verse could easily derive from another early version.

27 28

Purcell, ‘Recently collected ballad Fragments’, p. 164. As Menéndez Pidal explained, Estudios sobre el romancero, pp. 119-20, the change probably came about through oral transmission, being triggered by the union of Doliente and Morir, because Doliente mentioned the archbishop, not the Cid.

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Manuel da Costa Fontes The Portuguese ballad compresses the already condensed transition that reached print in 1550 (20-25) even more, reducing it to only one verse that merely states that ‘Sambóia’ (Zamora) was taken as soon as the king died (55). 29 The modern ballad also adds one verse, according to which the besieging army consisted of two hundred knights (56). These knights may parallel the fifteen knights who, in the prosified epic, accompany the Cid in his embassy to Urraca: ‘et fuesse pora çamora con XV de sus caualleros’ [and he went to Zamora with fifteen of his knights (PCG, 2: 506b.30-31)]; ‘E foisse logo pera a villa cõ XV cavalleiros’ [And he went to the city right away, with fifteen knights (C1344, 3: 376.15)]. Rather than having introduced an innovation, the Portuguese poem probably retains here yet another epic detail absent from the sixteenth-century version. Like its early congener, the Portuguese poem then continues with Afuera, which is based on the meeting between Urraca and the Cid, condensing it from seventeen to a mere five verses (57-61). In the Insular renditions, the princess reminds the hero of their past friendship, but the lovers’ quarrel that follows in Nucio is omitted.30 The version from the Algarve, however, preserves this passage: Casaste com Ximena Gomes, filha do conde Lousã, com ela terás dinheiro, comigo foras honrado. —Como isso é assim, eu ta mando já matar. —Não permita Deus do céu, nem o seu sangue sagrado; casamento que Deus ajunta, que por mim seja apartado. [‘You married Ximena Gomes, daughter of Count Lousã, you may have riches with her, but I would’ve brought you more honour.’ ‘Since it’s that way, I’ll have her killed at once.’ ‘May not God in Heaven or His holy blood permit that a marriage that He blessed be undone on my account.’] 31

Contrary to Nucio’s version, where Urraca agrees to the Cid’s apparent offer to divorce his wife —the cryptic ‘destigallo’ in v. 12a seems to be a misprint for ‘desligallo’32 — the hero offers to kill his wife, but the princess refuses, saying that she does not want to be

29

30

31

32

This transition is also present in the version from the Algarve: ‘Noutro dia de manhã / Samora estava cercada’ [The morning after, Zamora was besieged], Marques, ‘Subsídios para o Estudo’, p. 275. At this point, the PCG merely states that Urraca and the Cid were raised together (2: 507a.9-11), but, as Armistead demonstrated, other chroniclers go out of their way in order to deny the existence of an affair between the two, which suggests that oral versions of the Cantar brought up the scandal preserved in Afuera : Armistead, Samuel G., ‘“The Enamored Doña Urraca” in Chronicles and Balladry’, Romance Philology, 11 (1957-58), 26-29; see now also idem, La tradición épica de las ‘Mocedades de Rodrigo’ (Salamanca: Universidad, 2000), pp. 49-52, Marques, ‘Subsídios para o Estudo’, p. 276. I have added the punctuation and changed the original’s arrangement from seven-syllable lines into two hemistichs in order to save space. This is how the word appears in another sixteenth-century version in Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Pliegos poéticos españoles en la Universidad de Praga, Serie Conmemorativa, 7, 2 vols (Madrid: Joyas Bibliográficas, 1960) 2, 121-24 (at p. 123).

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The Singer and the Scribe responsible for breaking up his marriage. As Dias Marques demonstrated (1997, 73), 33 the verses ‘comigo foras honrado’ [but I would’ve brought you more honour] and ‘Não permita Deus do céu,’ [May not Go d in heaven permit] which Nucio omits, appear in two other early versions.34 This confirms that the modern ballad is independent from Nucio’s trilogy, depending on another traditional version instead. Having omitted the affair, the Insular versions close with the princess asking ‘Rodrigues’ how he dares to dispossess her of her property in view of what she and her parents have done for him in the past (61). Since this verse makes perfect sense, it could well derive from another early version. In sum, Nucio’s trilogy, which represents a condensed form of the Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando y cerco de Zamora, does not seem to have been reprinted elsewhere. Rather than depending on Nucio, the Portuguese ballad reflects a different version, for, besides including verses that he omits, it follows the Cantar more closely at times, including additional epic details. Condensation, of course, is one of the main characteristics of oral transmission. As we will see in the pages that follow, this transformation of a lengthy epic into a much shorter poem is not unique.

II. The extremely rare ballad of Floresvento (RPI, B10), which derives from another epic, the French Floovent (twelfth century), including many elements from an Italian prose derivative, Fioravante (fourteenth century), survives in two archaic Portuguese lateral areas, Trás-os-Montes and the Azores.35 It may also have been sung in Brazil at one time, for there is a version of Veneno de Moriana (RPI, N1), which opens with a three-verse contamination from Floresvento.36 Since the Galician four-verse fragment collected in Castiñeira (Ourense)37 depends upon the versions from Trás-os-Montes, and the

33

34

35

36

37

‘Contribuição para o Estudo do Romanceiro do Algarve de Estácio da Veiga à Luz de Manuscritos Inéditos’ (Tese de Aptidão Pedagógica e Capacidade Científica, Unidade de Ciências Exactas e Humanas, Universidad do Algarve: 1997). Timoneda, Juan, Rosa española , in his Rosas de romances (Valencia, 1573), ed. by Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino and Daniel Devoto (Valencia: Castalia, 1963); Escobar, Juan de, Historia y Romancero del Cid (Lisboa, 1605), ed. by Antonio Rodríguez-Moñino, Introduction by Arthur L.-F. Askins (Madrid: Castalia, 1973). Although Escobar’s Historia y romancero del Cid dates from 1605, there is no question that his version is much older. For a full bibliography, see RPI, B10; I will point out the main differences between the versions from these two regions in my discussion. Lopes, António, Presença do Romanceiro. Versões Maranhenses (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 1967), p. 231. It is more closely related to the Azorean renditions, for, unlike the Continental versions, it states that the hero dishonoured seven maidens on Christmas Eve. Valenciano, Ana. Os romances tradicionais de Galicia. Catálogo exemplificado dos seus temas, Romanceiro Xeral de Galicia, 1 (Madrid-Santiago de Compostela: Publicacións do Centro de Investigacións Lingüisticas e Literarias Ramón Piñeiro-Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 1998) No. 11.

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Manuel da Costa Fontes contamination found in the Sephardic versions of El Conde Arnaldos is also incomplete, 38 the ballad is essentially Portuguese today. In the French epic, Clovis, King of France, places his son Floovent in the care of Senechaul, duke of Burgundy. As a prank, Floovent cuts off the old duke’s beard while he sleeps. This was considered to be a serious crime at the time, 39 because all honest men wore one (‘Adonc estoient tuit li prodome barbez,’ [All worthy men wore a beard in those days] v. 63), 40 and thieves, being forced to shave them off, were ashamed of appearing in public (vv. 69-70). Since the importance attached to a man’s beard was eventually lost — Fioravante, where the duke’s name is changed to Salardo, the insult does not seem to be as great41 — the ballad substituted the hero’s felony for a series of readily understood crimes. He destroys churches, cas tles and cities, murders babies and priests, and dishonours several royal maidens: 2 4 6

—Cruel vento, cruel vento, ah! roubador maioral! Derrubaste três igrejas, todas três em Portugal. Derrubaste três castelos, no reino de Portugal. Derrubaste três cidades, todas três em Portugal. Mataste três inocentes, todos três por baptizar. Mataste três sacerdotes, revestidos no altar. Desonraste três donzelas, todas três de sangue real.42 [“Cruel Vento, Cruel Vento, oh you biggest thief! You demolished three churches, all three in Portugal. You demolished three castles in the kingdom of Portugal. You demolished three cities, all three in Portugal. You killed three innocent children, all three still not baptised. You killed three priests covered before the altar. You dishonoured three maidens, all three of royal blood.”]

Besides increasing each crime from three to sevenfold, the Azorean versions state that they are perpetrated on Christmas Eve (‘Caminhou Flores e Ventos / uma noite de Natal, // 38

39

40

41

42

Armistead, Samuel G., with the collaboration of Selma Margaretten, Paloma Montero and Ana Valenciano, El romancero judeo-español en el Archivo Menéndez Pidal (Catálogo-índice de romances y canciones), 3 vols (Madrid: Cátedra-Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1978), H15; Fontes, ‘A Sephardic Vestige of the Ballad Floresvento ’, pp. 196-201. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Cantar de Mio Cid. Texto, gramática y vocabulario, 3 vols (3rd ed. Madrid: EspasaCalpe, 1954-56), 2, 498-99; Burt, John R., ‘Honor and the Cid’s Beard’, La Corónica, 9 (1981), 132-37. This and all the references that follow are from La Chanson de Floovant , ed. by F.H. Bateson (Loughborough: n.ed., 1938). The boy cuts off the duke’s beard, but the text does not establish a difference between bearded, honest men and beardless thieves (147). This and all the references that follow are to Andrea da Barberino’s version in I Reali di Francia, ed. by Giuseppe Vandelli and Giovanni Gambarin (Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1947). Fioravante = pp. 143-244. Sources: Vv. 1-2: Martins, P, and A. Firmino, Folclore do Concelho de Vinhais, 2 vols (Coimbra; Lisboa: Impressa da Universidade; Imprensa Nacional, 1928-39), 1, 219; v. 3: VRP 36; v. 4: VRP 37; v. 5: VRP 35; v. 6: VRP 34; v. 7.

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The Singer and the Scribe desonrou sete donzelas, / todas de sangue real’ [Flores e Ventos left on a Christmas Eve, he dishonoured seven maidens, all of royal blood] Cantos, 18), and add gambling to the crimes committed by the protagonist (‘Jogou cem dobrões de ouro, / marcados e por marcar [He bet a hundred gold doubloons, both marked and unmarked] ibid.). The fact that the Church forbade sexual relations, even between husband and wife, during Lent and during religious festivals (Armistead and Silverman 1977, 193-94), 43 increases the sin involved in the seven deflowerings tremendously. Since the references to castles, a city (Rome) and gambling already appear in the Sephardic contamination of Arnaldos, the substitution of the beard episode for a series of crimes probably goes back to the years that preceded the Spanish exodus, that is, to the end of the fifteenth century: 2 4

¡Quien tuviera tal fortuna sobre las aguas de la mar, como el infante Fernando mañanita de San Juan, que ganó siete castillos a vuelta de una cibdad! Ganara cibdad de Roma, la flor de la quistiandad; con los contentos del juego saliérase a passear. [Upon the high seas to have such good fortune

5

as Prince Fernando on St. John’s day morning! He won seven castles that surrounded a city, he won the city of Rome, flower of Christendom, 44 and happy with his winnings he went out for a walk.] (Bénichou 1968, 207)

As soon as he discovers what his son has done to Senechaul, the king, furious, determines to punish him with death, but changes his mind thanks to the intercession of the queen, banishing him for seven years instead: ‘Dame, ce dit le rois, je vos an doins le chief, / Entreci et .VII. anz mar i metrai le pié’ [‘Lady, says the king, I grant you his head, but it will go ill for him if he sets foot here these next seven years (vv. 139-40)]. In the Azorean renditions the mother, besides intervening, is the one to suggest that the death penalty be commutted to banishment (‘—Não mateis o nosso filho, / que bem custou a criar; // mandai-o p’ra terras longes, / fora do céu natural’ [Don’t kill our son, it was hard to raise him; send him far away, away from his homeland] Canto, 17). This is closer to Fioravante, where the distressed mother suggests the idea of exile to the injured Salardo, promising that her son would marry his daughter upon returning: ‘fategli dar bando del regno . . . e darògli la vostra figliuola per moglie’ [have him banished from the kingdom . . . and I will give him your daughter as wife (151)]. Floovent continues with the king’s proclamation forbidding his vassals from helping his son with money, horses or supplies, threatening those who failed to do so with severe punishment (vv. 147-53). As Menéndez Pidal indicated (1945, 56), 45 in the ballad the

43

Armistead, Samuel G., and Joseph H. Silverman, Romances judeo-españoles de Tánger recogidos por Zarita Nahón, Musical transcriptions by Israel J. Katz (Madrid: Cátedra-Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1977), pp. 19394. 44 Bénichou, Paul, Romancero judeo-español de Marruecos (Madrid: Castalia, 1968), 207 . 45 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, ‘Poesia tradicional en el romancero hispano-portugués’, in Castilla: La tradición, el idioma (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1945), pp. 41-73 (at p. 56).

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Manuel da Costa Fontes king’s provisions take the form of a curse, which, in Azorean variants, is at times proffered by the mother herself: Foge, foge, ó cruel vento, p’r’às bandas de além do mar. Nas terras donde passares, nem água t’hão-de qu’rer dar; as fontes donde beberem, logo se hão-de secar; a mesa donde comeres, logo se há-de escachar, e a cama donde dormires, em fogo s’há-de abrasar. [‘Flee, Cruel Vento, flee overseas. In the lands where you pass they won’t even give you water; the fountains where you drink will dry up at once; the tables where you eat will break up into pieces, and the beds where you sleep will go up in fire.’] (VRP, 35) —Não o mateis, senhor rei, que é o nosso filho carnal; desterrai-o para longe, longe do vosso reinado; que não tenha pão nem vinho, nem comida o seu cavalo! [‘Don’t kill him, my Lord and King, for he is our son; banish him far away, far from your kingdom, without bread and wine and food for his horse.’] (Cantos, 18)

The privations endured by Floresvento show that he suffers the consequences, for everyone refuses to sell him supplies (Cantos 18). This situation is not echoed in Floovent, where the hero does not endure any hunger, but although his father does not forbid people from selling him supplies in Fioravante, he becomes lost in a forest and goes without eating for two days: ‘La terza mattina, non trovando abitazione, s’inginnochiò e raccomandossi a Dio, perché la fame colla fatica molto lo noiava’ [On the third morning, unable to find any houses, he kneeled and commended himself to God, for hunger and fatigue bothered him greatly (155)]. Thus, once again, Fioravante coincides with the ballads in an important detail missing from Floovent. Although the protagonist’s amorous adventures are interwoven with his exploits as a warrior in both Floovent and in Fioravante, they acquire much more emphasis in the latter, where his mother, while preparing him for exile, ‘missegli una sopravesta verde, la quale significava giovane innamorato’ [put a green overcoat on him, which meant “enamoured young man (153)]. A disdained innkeeper’s daughter dies of grief when she realises that he would rather have Drusolina (201), whom he eventually marries. The women in the castle of Monfalcone, ‘quando lo viddono, tutte furono accese del suo amore’ [upon seeing him, all fell in love with him (213)]. In Floovent, the hero is involved only with two women, Florette and Maugalie (=Drusolina), marrying the latter. Consequently, the allusion to the dishonoured maidens must derive from a version which followed the Italian form of the poem more closely. Whereas in the epic the amorous episodes occur after the banishment of the hero, in Floresvento they are enclosed, through displacement and a considerable amount of condensation, within the initial series of crimes which have substituted for the insult to the aged preceptor. It should also be noted that the protagonist’s prowess in the

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The Singer and the Scribe amorous encounters has been grossly exaggerated in the ballads, for in the epic he is definitely consistent in his retreat before the enamoured maidens. The epic deeds have also been displaced to the beginning of the ballads, where they are echoed in the reference to the destroyed castles and cities which precedes the banishment. Obviously, this has been accomplished through a process of condensation similar to the one observed in the case of the exaggerated amorous adventures, and the hero’s role has been equally distorted: rather than acting like the mindless wrecker and assassin portrayed in the ballads, in Floovent and in Fioravante he is the opposite of the villain, always fighting on the side of truth and justice. In the Azores, some versions of Floresvento end with verses adapted from Claralinda (RPI, M1), a well-known ballad that tells how an adulterous wife is caught by her husband while trying to hide her lover in their bedroom, 46 but Floresvento adds a second lover: —Quem eram esses dois homens que estavam na minha sala? —Matai-me, homem, matai-me, que a morte tenho ganhado. —Não te mato, D. Branca, mate Deus que te criou, que isto tudo foram pragas que a minha mãe me rogou. [‘Who were those two men in my bedroom?’ ‘Kill me, my husband, kill me, for I deserve to die.’ ‘I won’t kill you, Branca, only the God who created you should, since this was because of the curses that my mother placed on me.’] (Cantos, 19)

From an artistic point of view, this contamination could, perhaps, be explained as a fitting retribution on the part of the oral tradition for the hero’s earlier transgressions, as well as a consequence of variants of the curse placed on him by his mother, who had wished ‘Que a mulher com quem casares / nunca te seja leal’ [May the woman you marry never be loyal to you (Cantos, 19; cf. VRP 36)], adding in one version: ‘Os filhos que tu tiveres, / nunca os há-de lograr’ [You will never enjoy the children you have (VRP 36)]. Fortunately, it is possible to establish at this point a precise parallel with an episode that takes place near the end of Fioravante. Biancadora, the hero’s mother, had promised to marry him off to Salardo’s daughter upon his return from exile, but he refused, choosing to keep his word to the beautiful Drusolina, an infidel’s daughter who had helped him before. When Drusolina gives birth to two male children, Biancadora, determined to obtain revenge, locks a servant, Antonio, in her daughter-in-law’s chambers while she is asleep, accusing her of adultery to her son. Enraged, Fioravante kills Antonio in Drusolina’s bedroom, but doubts his wife’s adultery when his sword fails to cut through her flesh. Biancadora insists on Drusolina’s guilt, swearing to put a curse on him if he fails to seek revenge: ‘Ma io ti giuro que, se tu non ne farai vendetta, che io ti darò la mia maldizione’ [But I swear that, if you fail to take revenge, I will curse you (222)]. Drusolina is then thrown into a furnace with her two children, but she prays to the Virgin for deliverance and comes out unharmed. Nevertheless, Biancadora convinces Fioravante to exile her with the children, claiming that she had escaped with help from the devil. The family is reunited after several adventures.

46

Pérez Vidal, J., ‘Floresvento and La esposa infiel’, Douro Litoral, 4:9 (1952), 37-40 .

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Manuel da Costa Fontes In Floresvento, then, the disloyalty of the hero’s wife and the suspect legitimacy of his children have been displaced, becoming part of the curse proffered by his mother at the beginning of the ballad, a curse which in turn represents, at least in part, a transformation of the penalties attached to his banishment by the king. The contamination with Claralinda was triggered by its thematic similarity with an episode found towards the end of Fioravante: the protagonist catches two men in his wife’s bedroom (one in Claralinda), but, unlike the adulterous Claralinda, Drusolina is innocent. Thus, Floresvento substituted a portion of a well-known ballad for a similar episode already present in its epic predecessor.47 In sum, Floresvento constitutes an abbreviated, condensed form of Floovent, whose existence can be explained only through a lost Iberian prototype. Since Floresvento has more in common with Fioravante, the Iberian poem was more closely related to the narrative’s Italian form, although it was still different from both versions, representing, therefore, a shorter, independent poem, which, in its turn, probably depended on an intermediate version in Provençal. Like the ballads, the Iberian epic probably rhymed mostly in á, and it was thanks to this condensed version that it managed to perpetuate itself with such a wealth of detail. Like Floovent, the Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando y cerco de Zamora also existed in a highly condensed form. Besides confirming the traditional character of Nucio’s trilogy, together with Floresvento, A Morte do Rei D. Fernando points to the transformation of a few lengthy epics into shorter, condensed versions that could be sung in a more reasonable amount of time. Thus, these two ballads constitute splendid, additional examples of the manner in which the modern oral tradition often sheds new light upon the past.

47

For an analogous contamination in another epic ballad, Celinos (RPI, B9), see Armistead, Samuel G. and Joseph H. Silverman, ‘El romance de Celinos: Un testimonio del siglo XVI’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 25 (1976), 86-94 (at p. 94).

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Fier Margrietken: a medieval ballad and its history Ad Putter The ethnographer Ruth Underhill was once told by a Papago singer: ‘The song is so short because we understand so much’.1 I am interested in what this aphorism might tell us about the popular ballad. Ballads, too, are short and compressed, though scholars have usually explained their terseness differently. Gordon Gerould, for instance, said of the ballads that ‘their compression, their centralization, with the impersonality that results from dramatic treatment of a theme, and above all, the swiftly moving action, are precisely the qualities that would arise, almost inevitably, from the practice of singing stories to brief tunes’.2 The ballad, in other words, developed its distinctive qualities in a process of natural adaptation to the circumstances of its production. The remark of the Papago singer adds to Gerould’s evolutionary perspective an important insight: what allows the ballad to be told briefly, without authorial explanation regarding motivation, cause and effect, and so on, is its participation in a shared world of understanding. The ballad is short because so much is understood. This essay is concerned specifically with a late medieval Flemish ballad, Fier Margrietken (‘Proud Maggie’), 3 and all that is understood by it. My aims are, in one sense, limited: I should like to make the ballad accessible in an English translation; to discuss its history — both the historical events that lie behind it and the processes of memorial transmission that shaped these events into song; and, finally, to consider the qualities that make it a ballad, and a beautiful one at that. I regret that I cannot do more to introduce readers to the medieval ballads of the Low Countries. This whole area is terra incognita to readers who have no Dutch, and ballad scholarship in Britain now all too often proceeds as if it did not exist.4 But since the stories of scholars, too, must be longer in proportion as less is understood, the urgent task of describing the field must be left to someone with more space (and more expertise). However, since in oral tradition, which kept Fier Margrietken 1

Ramsey, Jarold W., ‘The Wife Who Goes Out Like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: the art of two Oregon Indian narratives’, PMLA, 92 (1977), 9-18 (p. 9); reprinted in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: a reader, ed. by Elliott Oring (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), pp. 209-23. 2 Gerould, Gordon Hall, The Ballad of Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 212. 3 I translate fier as ‘proud’ for want of a word that captures all the connotations of the word: ‘spirited, pretty’, ‘courageous, adventurous’, and, particularly important in the traditional ballad (see n. 68) ‘unyielding to male suitors’. 4 Whence such unfortunate generalisations as David Buchan’s that ‘traditional balladry flourished in nonliterate, homogeneous, agricultural society, dominated by semi- independent chieftains, that is situated in a remote, hilly, or border region’: The Ballad and The Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972; repr. East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1997), p. 47. In Holland and Belgium and large parts of Germany ballads flourished in flat and urbanised land. A brief account of the Dutch and Flemish ballad is given by Entwistle, William, European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939). For more detailed surveys of the Dutch and the closely related German ballad see respectively Kalff, G., Het Lied in de Middeleeuwen (Leiden: Brill, 1884) and Kayser, Wolfgang, Geschichte der deutschen Ballade (Berlin: Junker and Dünnhaupt Verlag, 1936).

The Singer and the Scribe alive until at least the nineteenth century, every theme and every formula ‘has around it an aura of meaning which is put there by all the contexts in which it has occurred in the past’,5 the discussion of Fier Margrietken inevitably leads us into the larger tradition that gives the words and ideas of each single ballad their full effect. The ballad of Fier Margrietken may thus serve as a point of entry into the wider ballad context. As I hope to show, it may also afford us a rare insight into the processes by which history is transformed when it is remembered and retold in ballad form. For, unusually, even though both the ballad of Fier Margrietken and the murder of which it tells go back to medieval times, the historical events that lie behind the ballad are nevertheless remarkably well documented. Only rarely do we have this kind of information about a ballad; indeed, some say that it does not exist ‘for any song within the received tradition of popular balladry’. 6 On this point the evidence can speak for itself.

Margaret’s Murder and Cult One evening — the date was later officially fixed at 2nd September 1225 — Amandus and his wife were making preparations to join the Cistercian order at Villers-la -Ville (in present-day Belgium). They had saved money towards their upkeep, and were to set out the next day. Their preparations had come to the attention of a gang of criminals who entered their guesthouse, the St George’s inn on the Muntstraat in Louvain, under the pretence of being pilgrims in need of board and lodging. A servant girl, Margaret, was dispatched with a pitcher to fetch wine for the ‘guests’, probably from the winepress in the ducal vineyard; she returned to find the household murdered. Still clutching her pitcher she was taken first to a house on the outskirts of Louvain (where she was probably raped) and then, when the lady of the house became suspicious, to the river Dijle, where the robbers decided to dispose of her. It seems that one of the criminals had some compunction, offering to marry her; but Margaret had seen too much, and for an extra ten marks the man agreed to murder her himself, cutting her throat and stabbing her in the chest, and then dumping her into the river. However, the lady of the house, who had secretly followed them, witnessed the murder, and the story spread like wildfire the next day. The hunt for the killers was in vain, but fishermen later recovered her body and buried it on the riverbank. Some days later a mysterious light shone around her grave; the body was dug up and transferred to the collegiate church of St Peter in Louvain, where a wooden chapel was built adjoining the church walls: ‘And even to this day various miracles are wrought, so great were her merits, both in the place where she was killed, and also in the chapel to which her body was translated’.7

5

Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 148. Andersen, Flemming G., and Thomas Pettitt, ‘The Murder of Maria Marten: the birth of a ballad?’, in Narrative Folksong: new directions; essays in appreciation of W. Edson Richmond, ed. by Carol L. Edwards and Kathleen E. B. Manley (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 134-78. 7 Caesarius of Heisterbach, The Dialogue on Miracles, trans. by H. von E. Scott and C. C. Swinton Bland, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1929), I, p. 447. There is a learned, if occasionally fanciful, reconstruction of the events by Ollivier, Marie-Joseph,‘La Bienheureuse Marguerite de Louvain’, Revue Thomiste, 4 (1896), 592-618 and van Even, Edward, La Bienheureuse Marguerite de Louvain, dite Marguerite la Fière: sa légende, son culte, sa chapelle (Louvain: Peeters, 1896). I have drawn on Ollivier and Van Even, and on the entry on Margaret in 6

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Ad Putter There is no reason to doubt that this horror story, or at least something very similar, did indeed take place in Louvain. Caesarius of Heisterbach (ca 1180-1240), who is our earliest authority for it, was writing close to the events,8 and had personal informants at the Cistercian monastery of Villers which Amandus and his wife had hoped to join; the St George’s inn was used by the monastery’s lay-brothers, one of whom Caesarius adduces as an eye-witness to the diligence and humility with which Margaret served in the inn before her murder. 9 Very quickly a local cult of Margaret established itself. Sites associated with her became places of worship. Her room in the inn of St George was named after her. In 1308 the Beguine Margaret Utembruele built a chapel in the district where Margaret the Blessed had been abducted and Margaret the Beguine had been born, a district known as the ‘Bruel’, then infamous on account of its prostitutes. The wooden chapel in which Margaret’s bones rested was reconstructed ca 1435. It must have been a familiar landmark to locals. In a municipal act dated 18th July 1453, the location of a house belonging to ‘Henricus de Halen’ is given as opposite the chapel ‘dicte Tfier Margrietken’; in 1479 the builder Johan Oeghe was instructed to remove the roof tiles from the same house; again the specified location is ‘opposite Fier Magrietken’.10 In the 1540s the wooden chapel was replaced with a stone one, located inside the church walls, where Margaret’s shrine remains to this day. And of course there were miracles. Shortly after Margaret’s death, an old woman who sold soup on the market had disdainfully refused to join in with the crowd that was worshipping her at St Peter’s, dismissing the stories of her sanctity as ‘about as plausible as the chance of the pan of soup I have taken off the fire coming to the boil’; but no sooner had she uttered this slander than the soup came to the boil and, what is more, the pan never emptied — until a member of the gang that abducted and killed Margaret had the nerve to eat the soup. The villain and his confederates were immediately apprehended and sentenced to death. This miracle of the market-woman is told in the short Life of the Blessed Margaret of Louvain, from an anthology of saints’ lives entitled Hagiologium Brabantinorum, compiled ca 1480 by Johannes Gielemans at the monastery of Rouge-Cloître (near Brussels).11 Its account of Margaret’s murder generally agrees with that of Caesarius, but more detail is given. Thus Gielemans writes that the robbers had tried to rape Margaret, who had, however, been ‘protected by the shield of godly piety from her treacherous enemies, who attempted to take from her the precious treasure of her chastity.’ Her body, undefiled, had

Acta Sanctorum for information about her life and cult. A full and scholarly treatment of the legend (in Dutch) is currently being prepared by Gilbert Huybens. I am very grateful for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 8 The Dialogue is believed to have been completed in 1222; since Caesarius talks of the murder as having taken place ‘a few years ago’ the traditional date of 1225 is almost certainly too late. 9 Dialogue, p. 446. 10 van Even, Marguerite, pp. 37-38. 11 An edition of the text is available in AS, 2 September, pp. 582-94. For a description of the Hagiologium Brabantinorum see anon., Iohannis Gielemans (Brussels, 1895), pp. 11, 42-61; for further bibliography on the Rouge-Cloître manuscripts used by the Bollandists see Dubois, Jacques, and Jean-Loup Lemaitre, Sources et méthodes de l’hagiographie médiévale (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993), p. 40.

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The Singer and the Scribe floated into Louvain against the current, carried by fish. And none other than the Duke of Brabant (Henry I) and his wife had seen the mysterious light surrounding her corpse as they stood on the castle walls; they had led the solemn procession of courtiers and clerics which later accompanied the corpse to its resting place at St Peter’s. The Acta Sanctorum reproduces a seventeenth-century engraving, apparently inspired by an original wall painting in her chapel, 12 which shows Margaret afloat in the river — her mouth stuffed with a white ball to stop her from screaming, the wine pitcher standing on the riverbank, while from a castle window the duke and his wife look on. The wine pitcher remained, or turned up, in the hands of Amandus’s family, the prominent Absolons and their heirs, who entrusted it to the chapter so that it might be displayed on the great feast of Margaret, held every seven years on 2nd September. It is now in the possession of the chapter of St Peter’s, as is a white leather ball, which, like the wooden pitcher, had become an object of veneration.

The Ballad and its Date As stories are passed on they mutate. The classic book Remembering by the psychologist Frederic Bartlett is devoted to the study of such mutation.13 In a series of controlled experiments Bartlett set in circulation an oral story along a chain of subjects, from whose memory he took down the story after every stage of transmission. Bartlett discovered that the most powerful factor of narrative change is the conscious or unconscious influence of a ‘schema’, a deep structure of stereotypical patterns and norms which acts on remembered experiences or narratives by re-framing them in its likeness. This process of ‘schematisation’ is discernible even in the official written record of Margaret’s murder, which is clearly influenced by the genre of the saint’s life. It is interesting to see how the hagiographical schema operated on the main obstacle to her sanctification, which was that Margaret had probably been raped. A number of early chronicles state quite specifically that she was raped,14 while the offer of marriage in Caesarius’s earliest account may imply

12

AS, p. 584; van Even, Marguerite, p. 21. The series of paintings that now adorn her chapel today, by P.J. Verhaghen, date from 1760. I am grateful to Tom Shippey for taking the trouble to see the Chapel of the Blessed Margaret in St Peter’s on my behalf. 13 Bartlett, F. C., Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932). 14 See e.g. Chronyk van Nederlant van Jaere 1027 tot 1525, in Chroniques de Brabant et de Flandre, ed. by Charles Piot (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1879): ‘Item, MCCXVI […] Ende doen was vermoerd ende vercracht fiere Margriete te Leuven’, and Oud kronijkje van Leuven: ‘Int selve jaer (1225) wordden Tfir Magrietken vercracht ende vermoort, te Loven, en dit deden die vleeschouwers’ (cited in van Even, Marguerite, p. 19). verkrachten can mean to abduct in medieval Dutch, but I doubt that this is the intended sense in these two instances. A ‘saintlier’ account is given in the Klein Kroniek, in Codex diplomaticus Neerlandicus, ed. by M.C.A. Rethaan Macaré, 3 vols (Utrecht: Institute Historique d’Utrecht, 1853), III, p. 64, which states that Margaret, ‘nomine vulgariter Fier Margrietken, propter ejus castitatem interfecta est et in Dyeliam fluvium projecta ab iis, qui eam stuprare et florem virginitatis privare studebant’ (‘popularly named ‘Proud Maggie’, was killed on account of her chastity and thrown in the river Dijle by those who attempted to violate her and to steal the flower of her virginity’).

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Ad Putter rape.15 But in clerical versions of Margaret’s martyrdom, rape could not be accommodated since in the lives of women saints it is always narrowly avoided. Admittedly, St Lucy had contemplated the prospect of rape with equanimity on the grounds that it would double her reward in heaven — an argument that Margaret’s later apologists never fail to adduce16 — but God had intervened in time to protect Lucy’s purity. Loss of virginity may be threatened in medieval hagiography but never actually endured.17 Accordingly Gielemans remembers Margaret dying with her virginity intact, miraculously protected by God; in later versions she dies ‘defending her chastity’ or ‘refusing the solicitations of her murderers’, 18 and in the most creative rewriting she dies a virgin while travelling to Villers, where she was to take the veil. 19 However, in the official records, access to earlier written versions keeps the influence of the schema in check. In memorial transmission this constraint falls away, and the ballad of Fier Margrietken dramatically illustrates what may happen to a story when a memorial schema operates unchecked: Het soude een fier Margrietelijn Ghister avont spade Met haren canneken gaan om wijn; Si was daer toe verraden, ja verraden.

Proud Maggie was setting out, Late yesterday evening, With her pitcher to fetch wine; 20 She had been led on to this, yes led on.

Wat vantse in haren weghe staen? Eenen ruyter stille.

What did she find across her path? It was a silent knight.

‘Nu segt mi, fier Margrietelijn doe nu mijnen wille, ja wille’.

‘Now tell me, proud Maggie, You will do my will, yes will.’

‘Uwen wille en doen ic niet. Mijn moerken soude mi schelden;

‘I shall and will not do your will, My mum would tell me off;

Storte ic dan mijnen coelen wijn, Alleyne soude ic hem ghelden, ja ghelden.’

If I should spill my wine so cool, I’d pay for it alone, yes alone.’

‘En sorghet niet voor den coelen wijn, Mer sorghet voor u selven.

‘Never mind the wine so cool, But rather mind yourself.

Di waert is onser beyder vrient, Hi sal ons noch wel borghen, ja borghe.’

The taverner is a friend to us both, He’ll give us credit, yes credit.’

15

It is to be remembered that this is a time when marriage between rapist and rape victim constituted a legally recognised remedy for the victim. See Saunders, Corinne, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 56. 16 See the defence of Margaret, with a full list of authorities, in AS, p. 591. 17 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, pp. 130-31. 18 AS, p. 585. 19 Henriquez, J. C., Menologium Cisterciense (Antwerp, 1630). 20 I can find no support for the loose translation offered by the editors of l.4 as ‘Dat werd haar ongeluk’ (‘that was her downfall’); the sense of verraden that best fits the linguistic context (with adverbial daertoe ‘thereto’) is the primary sense of verraden ‘to lead astray (by evil counsel)’: Middelnederlandsch woordenboek, ed. by E. Verwijs and J. Verdam (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1927-52), s.v. verraden (1). The ballad tacitly assumes our knowledge of the legend: the request for wine is part of the villains’ false pretence that they have come to enjoy hospitality. In the words of the Papago singer: ‘The song is so short because we understand so much’.

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The Singer and the Scribe Hi namse in sinen witten armen

He took her by her snow-white arms

Heymelick al stille; Al in een duyster camerken Daer schafte hi doe sinen wille, ja wille.

Secretly, without a sound; In a darkened room He had his will with her, yes will.

Smorgens ontrent der middernacht

The following day around midnight

Si ghinc haer kanneken soecken, Daer lach die moeyaart ende hi loech: ‘Het staet daer teynden mijn voeten, ja voeten.’

She went looking for her pitcher, While the scoundrel lay and laughed: ‘It is standing at my feet, yes feet’

‘Mer dat daer teynden u voeten staet,

‘But for what stands there at your feet

Dat sal u noch lange berouwen. Ic hebbe noch drie ghebroeders stout, Si sullen u dat hooft af houwen, ja houwen.’

You will long be sorry. I have three bold brothers, They will cut off your head, yes head.’

‘Alle u ghebroeders stout

‘All your brothers bold and strong —

Die sette ick in mijn deeren. Ick sal alle dese somer lanck Met Grietken houden mijn scheeren, ja scheeren.

My heart goes out to them. For all this summer long I’ll amuse myself with Maggie, yes Maggie.’

Ende hi nam eenen snee witten bal, Hi stackse al in haer kele,

And he took a snow-white ball, He thrust it in her throat,

Hi schootse tot eenderen veynsteren, Hi schootse al in die Dijle, ja Dijle.

He flung her from a window, He flung her in the Dijle, yes Dijle.

Teghen stroom quam si ghedreven uut Aen sint Jans cappelle.

Against the current she was washed up At the chapel of St John.

Dat sach so menich fijn edel man, 21 So menich jonc gheselle, ja gheselle.

So many a nobleman witnessed that, So many a good fellow, yes fellow.

This ballad is no. 67 in the most important repertory of early Dutch ballads, Het Antwerps Liedboek (henceforth AL), printed by Jan Roulans in 1544. The date of the only extant print tells us little about the antiquity of Fier Margrietken, which, even in the form preserved by AL, is older. Firstly, the 221 songs in AL appear to have been accumulated over a period of years. The book is organised alphabetically, but the alphabetical sequence starts again at song no. 172, and then again at no. 210. The likely explanation for this is that the 1544 print was a conflation of at least one earlier edition.22 On the basis of historical songs about topical events, the first cycle (containing songs 1-171) can be dated to ca 1535. The only other internal information about the date of some of the ballads in AL is the rubric ‘an old

21

22

I have used the most recent edition by Vellekoop, K., and Wagenaar-Nolthenius, H., Het Antwerps Liedboek (Amsterdam: Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiedenis, 1972), 2 vols I have made a few changes with respect to punctuation and have regularised the refrain words ‘ja […]’, which the editors print only for the second and final stanza. I have not attempted in my translation to render the rhyme and assonance, but have tried to keep to the rhythm of the original. I rely here on the excellent study by Koepp, Johannes, Untersuchungen über das Antwerpener Liedbuch vom Jahre 1544 (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1929). See also Joldersma, Hermina, ‘“Het Antwerps Liedboek”: A Critical Edition’, 2 vols (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1983), I, pp. xxxv-xxxviii.

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Ad Putter song’ or ‘a new song’,23 which appears above some seventy songs in the collection. Fier Margrietken has no such rubric. In a few cases, versions of the ballads of AL are found in medieval manuscripts. The Dutch ballad of Brandenborch (AL 81), for example, is first found in a fifteenth-century manuscript; it goes back to a German original, which must be even earlier, though no German versions are extant before the sixteenth century.24 The ballads of Heer Danielken (AL 160) and Vanden ouden Hillebrant (AL 83) also derive from German ballads, versions of which have survived in manuscripts from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.25 More often our evidence for the antiquity of some of the ballads in AL is indirect. Popular ballad tunes were commonly recycled for the use of religious songs, some of which are preserved in books or manuscripts that predate AL. One of the best-loved Dutch ballads, Het daghet inden Oosten (AL 73), introduced by Roulans as ‘Een oudt liedeken’, had already been adapted into German by the fifteenth century,26 and its words and music inspired a number of religious contrafacta, including a German lyric of 1421,27 and two Dutch ones that survive in songbooks of 1539 and 1540.28 Possibly a Dutch contrafactum existed much earlier, for a fifteenth-century Life of St Gertrude, a Beguine in Delft (died 1358), derives her cognomen ‘Van Oosten’ from her habit of singing ‘daily for the love of Christ a song, beginning Het daghet inden Oosten’.29

23

‘A new song’, it must be emphasised, can very well be old, for ‘new’ in this context may simply mean ‘adapted to new circumstances, re-issued’. Thus in the following passage from the thirteenth-century Livre d’Artus — ‘Si comenca Grex un sonet novel quil ot apris en enfance’ (‘Then Grex began singing a new song which he had learned in his childhood’) —novel evidently cannot mean ‘new’ in our sense (The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. by H. Oskar Sommer [Washinton: Carnegie Institution, 1913], vol. VII, p. 161). In AL some songs designated as ‘Een nyeu liedeken’ (e.g. 29, 62) are actually adaptations of older German originals. 24 Koepps, Untersuchungen, p. 118. 25 Balladen, ed. by John Meier, 2 vols (Leipzig: Reclam, 1935), I, p. 21; Koepps, Untersuchungen, p. 62, and van Duyse, F., Het Oude Nederlandsche Lied, 3 vols (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1907), I, p. 40. In an attempt to demonstrate the priority of the French ballad in the evolution of the medieval genre, Lajos Vargyas argues that the songs Danielken and Hillebrant should not be regarded as ballads but as late heroic songs. In my view the distinctions he wishes to draw between the heroic song and the ballad are too fine: if, as he himself argues, the ballad usurped the place of the heroic epic in folk poetry, it should not surprise us that a number of early Dutch and German ballads resemble heroic poetry. This does not mean they are ‘not authentic ballads’. See Vargyas, Lajos, Researches into the Mediaeval History of Folk Ballad (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1967), pp. 261;276. 26 The earliest version survives in a manuscript datable to 1439. The scribe calls the ballad a ‘peasant song’. See, Balladen, ed. by Meier, I, 201- 02. 27 Kalff, Lied, p. 155. 28 Vellekoop and Wagenaar-Holthenius, II, 49. 29 AS, 6 January, p. 349. The source is another hagiographical compilation by Gielemans, Johannes, Novale Sanctorum (ca 1484), on which see Iohannis Gielemans, pp. 12, 61-80 and above, n. 10. van Duyse (Nederlandsch Lied, I, 123) explained the association of St Gertrude with Het daghet in den Oosten as a later rationalisation of Gertrude’s name; this is possible, though anyone attempting to rationalise ‘Van Oosten’ might have opted for something more obvious.

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The Singer and the Scribe Many Dutch and German ballads are thus incontrovertibly medieval. While we have no clear evidence for the existence of any German and Dutch ballads before the thirteenth century,30 thereafter the grounds for speculation become firmer. 31 In 1233 a pilgrim on her way to Marburg heard a German song about the tragic separation of St Elisabeth of Hungary and St Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, who left her to go on crusade, where he died in 1227.32 Some verses of the song have survived in a fourteenth-century German Life of St Louis: Ir ein daz ander umbeving gar früntlich da mit armen; groz jamer durch ir herze ging, wen sold diz nicht erbarmen?

They embraced each other Most lovingly in their arms; Great sorrow pierced her heart, Who would not feel pity for this?

The extract has all the appearance of a ballad stanza. One of the earliest Dutch historical songs in ballad stanza (from a manuscript copied shortly after 1525) tells the story of St Elisabeth and St Louis’s daughter, Sophia (1224 -1284), who married Duke Henry II of Brabant, and who, according to the ballad (though not fact), died in childbirth, just as her husband returned from war: Al doen hij op die camer trat, Hoe drufelijc dat sij op hem sach. ‘Sijt welcoem mijn prins mijn here 33 Nu sidt welcoem mijn alre liefste man.’

And when he stepped into the room, How piteously she looked at him. ‘Welcome to you, my prince, my lord, Welcome to you, my dearest man.’

The events of 1244 that lie behind the ballad are only dimly remembered in the ballad, but a couple of centuries of memorial transmission may well account for this. A parallel can be drawn with the German ballad Der edle Moriger, whose hero is a distant shadow of the historical Minnesänger Heinrich von Morungen (early thirteenth century). In the ballad Moriger leaves his lady for seven years and returns just in time to rescue her from a marriage with his vice-regent. Could the ballad go back all the way to the thirteenth century? It is a distinct possibility, for the dolorous parting of Moriger from his wife was already the stuff of legend by the end of the thirteenth century, when an Austrian poet expressed the pain of separation by recalling, just as the ballad does, how ‘der Morungaer’ had parted with sorrow from his love.34 Although the thirteenth century may have been the breeding ground for a handful of early German and Dutch ballads, in the form we read them they tend to be the products of

30

For speculations (based on slender evidence) concerning the existence of the ballad in the early Middle Ages see Metzner, Ernst Erich, Zur frühesten Geschichte der europäischen Balladendichtung: der Tanz in Kölbigk (Frankfurt: Athenäum Verlag, 1972). A summary of Metzner’s theory in English can be found in his article ‘Lower Germany, England, Denmark and the Problem of Ballad Origins’, in The European Medieval Ballad, ed. by Otto Holzapfel (Odense: Odense University Press, 1978), pp. 26-39. 31 Schneider, Hermann, ‘Ursprung und Alter der deutschen Volksballade’, in his Kleinere Schriften zur germanischen Heldensage und Literatur, ed. by Hermann Schreider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), pp. 96-106. 32 Kayser, Geschichte, p. 18. 33 Middelnederlansche Historieliederen, ed. by C. C. van de Graft (1904; repr. Arnhem: Gysbers en Van Loon, 1968), p. 47. 34 Kayser, Geschichte, pp. 20-21.

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Ad Putter the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This pattern is consistent with the situation in other European countries. There is, for instance, sporadic evidence from England and Denmark that ballads existed by the thirteenth century: the Judas ballad is extant in a late thirteenthcentury manuscript;35 the opening of (what may be) a Danish ballad occurs in a manuscript copied ca 1300, 36 but here, too, hard manuscript evidence becomes more substantial by the end of the medieval period. Riddles Wisely Expounded (Child 1), St Stephen and Herod (Child 22), Robyn and Gandeleyn (Child 115), and a number of Robin Hood ballads (Child 118-19, and perhaps 121) survive in fifteenth-century manuscripts. In Scandinavia, a fragmentary stanza (the ‘Greenland stanza’) based on Hervarar saga was written on a map of Greenland from 1427.37 Later (ca 1500) there are fragments of the Danish ballads The Knight Transformed into a Hart and Marsk Stig.38 This brief overview of ballad chronology gives us a sense of what the bounds of possibility for dating Fier Margrietken are. It is not impossible that the ballad developed from a song composed in the immediate aftermath of Margaret’s murder, but, since her cult continued unabated, the ballad may also have been prompted by later commemorations: by the building of a chapel dedicated to her in ‘the Bruele’ in 1308; by the reconstruction of her wooden chapel at St Peter’s in 1436; or by any of the seven-yearly feasts in her honour. I think that this last possibility is more likely, since, like these ritual acts of remembrance, the ballad is commemorative, and seeks to honour her relics by restoring them to the lifestory that gave them meaning: the pitcher of wine guarded by Margrietken with such childlike innocence stands on the altar of the blessed Margaret every seven years; the white leather ball, venerated by her devotees, is the ‘snow-white ball’ thrust in Margrietken’s throat. And as Margaret’s worshippers would on her feast day, the ballad remembers her martyrdom as if it happened today. Margrietken leaves home ‘late yesterday evening’, and is killed the next day (‘Smorgens’). In true ballad fashion, the distant past is re-imagined as the here-and-now; 39 in the editors’ words, ‘the old legend is presented as the latest news’. But perhaps the story’s chronology implies, as its objects do, a far more precise relationship 35

36

37 38 39

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by Francis James Child, 5 vols (Boston, Riverside Press, 188298), no. 23. I see no reason for doubting, as some do, that the Judas poem is a ballad. An extreme position, that there are no genuinely medieval English ballads, is taken up by Fowler, David C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1968), but Fowler ignores the wider European picture. A cautious survey of the evidence for medieval England is given by Buchan, David, in ‘British Balladry: Medieval Chronology and Relations, in European Medieval Ballad’, ed. by Holzapfel, pp. 98-106. More recently Richard Firth Green has forcefully argued the case for the medieval English ballad in ‘The Ballad and the Middle Ages’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 163-84. Steenstrup, Johannes, The Medieval Popular Ballad, trans. by E.G. Cox (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), p. 254. In his recent study of the Scandinavian ballad, David Colbert argues that the Scanian couplet should not be regarded as a ballad fragment, though he, too, finds indirect evidence of the existence of ballads in the thirteenth century in the occurrence of ballad commonplaces in a number of Swedish romances, the earliest being Herr Ivan (1303). See The Birth of the Ballad: the Scandinavian medieval genre (Stockholm: Svenskt Visarkiv, 1989). Colbert, Birth of the Ballad, pp. 56-61. Steenstrup, Medieval Popular Ballad, p. 253. For example, the opening of Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight (Child 4) – ‘Fair Isabel sits in her bower sewing’.

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The Singer and the Scribe to Margaret’s cult. For if the evening that Margrietken sets out is our ‘yesterday’, then our point of temporal reference is the day she dies. We appear to be dealing with a ballad that was intended for Margaret’s feast day, and the ballad’s ‘yesterday’ may be a way, not just of bringing the past back to life, but of remembering the liturgical significance of the day on which the song was meant to be sung. At any rate the ballad must be considerably older than the date of publication of AL. A possible clue to its eventful textual history is the reference in the last stanza to St John’s chapel: ‘Teghen stroom quam si ghedreven uut / Aen sint Jans cappell.’ Conceivably, the reference is to one of the two St John’s chapels that existed in medieval Louvain.40 Or perhaps, as the editors assume, ‘sint Jan’ is simply a corruption of ‘sint Pieter’, since ‘a St John’s chapel is nowhere mentioned in the legend of St Margaret’. But there is more to be said. Fier Margrietken survived in oral tradition well into the nineteenth century. In 1900 Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel took down a version of the ballad (Machrietje) from oral tradition in West-Vlaanderen:41 Des avonds in het klaar manesching, Als Machrietje wierd uitgelaten, T was om te halen den rooden wijn, En dat op eenen avond late.

In the evening in the clear moonshine When Maggie was let out, It was to bring some red wine home, And that was late one evening.

Machrietje onder haar weugetjes kwam, Den stout ruiter die kwam haar tegen:

Maggie was on her way, The bold squire came up to her:

‘Waar ga je, waar ga je, Marchrietje, men lief? Zeg mij, en vanwaar zijn al jen weugen?’

‘Whereto, whereto, Maggie, my love? And tell me why are you on the road?’

‘Vanwaar dat al mijn weugetjes zijn? En dat zal ik u zeere zeggen!

‘My reasons for being on the road? I will tell you without doubt!

Sturt gij mijn kannetje met rooden wijn, En dat zalt gie diere vergelden.’

If you spill the wine in my pitcher, You will dearly pay for it.’

Hij nam Machrietje bij haren hand En hij smeet ze in de riviere:

He took Maggie by the hand, And he threw her in the stream,

‘Ligt hier, ligt daar, Machrietje, men lief, En je ligt in de koele riviere!’

‘Lie here, lie there, Maggie my love, And you are lying in the river cold.’

Maar door den stroom van’t klaar watertjen Is Machrietje naar Gent gaan varen;

But through the current of the waters clear, Margaret floated to Ghent

De koopmans van Gent, se hen Machrietje verken, The merchants of Ghent, they knew her well, En dat al aan haar roode wangen. By the redness of her cheeks.

40 41

Machrietje haddede een ringetje aan, En wat stoeg daarop geschreven?

Maggie wore a little ring, What was written thereon?

Alsdat den stouten ruiter, haar lief, Hadde Marchrietje zoo kwalijk misdreven.

That the bold knight, who was her love, Had so badly mistreated her.

Gilbert Huybens, personal communication. Iepersch Oud-Liedboek: Teksten en Melodieën uit den Volksmond Opgeteekend, 2 vols (Ghent: J. Vuylsteke, 1900-1902).

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Ad Putter Den dag passeerde en den avond kwam aan

The day passed and the evening came,

Ze hebben den stouten ruiter gevangen; Ze hen hem in vier kaartieren gekapt, En aan elken poort een deel g’hangen.

They have captured the squire so bold; They have cut him in four parts, And hung one part on each gate.

Al die dat niet gelooven en wilt, En ze meugen al vrij gaan kijken: Toe Gent, al binnen Sint -Janskapel, En daar ligt Machrietje te kijken.

All those who are incredulous Are at liberty to go and see. In the chapel of St John in Ghent, There Margaret lies to be seen.

Although the story has been resituated in Ghent, this ballad is recognisably a version of Fier Margrietken, as is shown by various family resemblances. For instance, while in the first stanza the words have changed, the rhyming sounds, always more tenacious in memorial transmission,42 have been well preserved,43 as has the second couplet of the third stanza. And, crucially, we have found another St John’s chapel, not in Louvain, but in Ghent — and with it an explanation for the change of setting in Fier Margrietken. Though originating in Louvain, the ballad may have spread to Ghent and attached itself to the city’s most prominent landmark, the parish church of St John (now the St Baafs Cathedral). 44 Purists may regret the ‘error’, but ballads have always owed their longevity to their ability to adapt to new places and so ensure their continuing relevance. A spectacular example of the ballad’s adaptability is Earl Brand (Child 7), which travelled from Scotland to America, where it lost its original place-names and acclimatised to its new surroundings. An Appalachian singer who recited a version of Earl Brand told the ballad collector that the story ‘happened way back yonder in Mutton Hollow. I was there myself’. 45 It would thus appear that Machrietje descends from the original medieval ballad of Fier Margrietken in a long line of memorial descent, though of course there is no absolute certainty. Perhaps AL remained in circulation, in which case Fier Margrietken may have passed into oral circulation much later. Unlikely: the book was banned in 1546, and the only surviving copy was discovered some three centuries later in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel. 46 Perhaps Machrietje was inspired by a reading of Fier Margrietken in a modern edition of AL. Unlikely: for if Machrietje goes back to the single nineteenth-century edition of AL (by Hoffman von Fallersleben [1855]), it would be hard to explain the drastic transformation of the original song. It may be simpler to see Machrietje as a witness to the long-lasting vitality of Fier Margrietken in the oral tradition of Flanders. 42

43

44

45

46

See Rubin, David, Memory in Oral Traditions: the cognitive psychology of epics, ballads, and counting-out rhymes (New Work: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 83 and Buchan, Ballad and Folk, pp. 155-60. ‘Spade’ at l. 2 of Fier Margrietken has been modernised to ‘late’, while l. 4 of the original ballad, which would be comprehensible only to those who know the legend of Margaret, has been rationalised St John’s church was rededicated to Ghent’s patron saint, St Bavo, in 1539, and became the city’s cathedral in 1560. See Dictionnaire d’histoire et géographie ecclésiastiques, ed. by R. Aubert (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1912-), s.v. Gand. St John’s church may well have had in its possession a relic of Margaret of Louvain; but unfortunately all medieval relics were destroyed in the religious troubles of the sixteenth century. I should like to thank the present archivist of St Baaf’s, Ludo Collin, for his help on the early history of the cathedral. Scarborough, Dorothy, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains (1937), cited by Hodgart, M.J.C., The Ballads, 2 nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1962), p. 139. See Joldersma, ‘Antwerps Liedboek’, for the history of AL.

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The Singer and the Scribe

From History to Ballad The earliest recorded version of Fier Margrietken already has behind it a history of transmission and subsequent evolution. Its genuine popularity is further attested by two religious lyrics that appropriated the ballad tune. One is extant in a songbook of 1565, also printed in Antwerp.47 The other appears in Het Nieuw Amsterdams Liedboek of 1591; a rubric specifies: ‘to the tune of Het zou een fier Margrietelijn / des avonds also spade’.48 We notice that the second line has changed: the durior lectio ‘Ghister avont spade’ in AL has been replaced by the vague ‘des avonds also spade’ (‘Late in the evening’), 49 presumably because, in Amsterdam, the association of the ballad with the saint and her feast day was no longer understood. And only a long history of oral tradition can plausibly explain how the authentic story of Margaret’s murder was reconfigured around the enduring schemata that guide our memories of life and narrative. I want to argue that the two most powerful schemata that shaped the style and substance of Fier Margrietken and brought about the drastic changes to the original story of Margaret’s murder are the ballad genre and, more specifically, the widespread ballad type of the wilful daughter. Let me begin with the influence of the ballad genre. In his seminal essay ‘Epic Laws of Folk Narrative’, Axel Olrik delineated the laws governing the world of folklore and folksong (die Sagenwelt).50 While Olrik considered these ‘laws’ to be superorganic, that is, ‘requiring no reference to other orders of phenomena for an explanation of [their] origin, development, and operation’,51 many of his laws seem to me to reflect the ingrained habits and conditions of thought of non-literate societies. Nevertheless, Olrik’s laws continue to be relevant, since they describe most accurately what can and cannot happen in ballads, and so allow us to predict what must be added to or subtracted from life if it is to be remembered in ballad form. I should like to list the most pertinent laws, followed by a brief discussion of their implications for the ballad in general and Fier Margrietken in particular. 1. The Law of Opening and the Law of Closure ‘The Sage begins by moving from calm to excitement, and after the concluding event, in which a principal character frequently has a catastrophe, the Sage ends by moving from excitement to calm’. 52 Ballads respect the law of opening in a number of ways. They may often begin with literal stasis — ‘Lady Margaret sat in her bower door’ (Child `104B), ‘In Oostenrijk daar staat een huis’ (van Duyse, 18) — or with an introductory line: ‘It was a knight in Scotland 47

Vellekoop and Wagenaar-Nolthenius, Antwerps Liedboek, II, 46. van Duyse, Nederlandsch Lied, I, 100. In his edition of Fier Margrietken Van Duyse actually prints these two lines instead of those of AL. For the reasons I have indicated I consider it far more likely that AL is closer to the archetype. 49 Compare t he even vaguer nineteenth-century version: ‘Op eenen avond late’. 50 In The Study of Folklore, ed. by Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 131-41. The essay was originally published as ‘Epische Gesetze der Volksdichtung’, Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum 51 (1909), 1-12. 51 The definition is taken from Alan Dundes’s introduction to Olrik’s essay (Study of Folklore, p. 129). 52 Olrik, ‘Epic Laws’, p. 132. 48

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Ad Putter borne’ (Child 9A), ‘Wie wil hooren een goet nyeu liet?’ (van Duyse 22). But a more economical solution is the use of an auxiliary verb that adds an ingressive aspect to the action: Daer soude haer een maget vermeyden (AL 22) [A maiden was going out to amuse herself] Daar zou ‘er een magetje vroeg opstaan (van Duyse 32C) [A little maiden was to rise early]

In English the construction was + infinitive or the past progressive is the closest equivalent to this use of zoude, which positions us towards the past as if it were ahead of us.53 As the examples above show, Fier Margrietken begins in classic ballad style: ‘Het soude een fier Margrietelijn’. We embark upon the past as if it were the future. The law of closure, on the other hand, is typically observed by the ballad in a conclusion that releases us from the tension of the story and moves us into a different temporal modality. Olrik himself cites ballads as his examples: ‘Hundreds of folksongs end, not with the death of the lovers, but with the interweaving of the branches of the two roses which grow up out of their graves. In thousands of legends, one finds […] the punishment of the villain appended to the principal action’. 54 The final stanza of the nineteenth-century version of Fier Margrietken illustrates Olrik’s point, for it ends fittingly with the quartering of the murderer. 55 The version in AL is subtler, and has a closer analogue in the Dutch ballad Te Gherbeken binnen (AL 152), which tells the dramatic story of two lovers murdered by a jealous husband, but which ends on a calm and lingering note in the final couplet. Hi namse daer beyde te gader, Hi stackse in eenen sack, Hi worpse al inder masen Die mase die was nat. Hie worpse al inder masen Daer stont so menich here, so menich edel man, Die dat met beweenden ooghen saghen an.

He took them both together, He put them in a sack, He threw them in the Maas, The river Maas was wet He threw them in the Maas. There stood so many a lord, so many a lord Who saw this with tears in his eyes.

Fier Margrietken similarly concludes on a rallentando as the corpse drifts into the view of the community who will tell her story: Teghen stroom quam si ghedreven uut Aen sint Jans cappelle. Dat sach so menich fijn edel man, So menich jonc gheselle, ja gheselle.

Against the current she washed up At the chapel of St John. So many a nobleman witnessed that, So many a good fellow, yes fellow.

The complicated perambulations of Margaret’s real corpse — first fished up from the river, then buried in a shallow grave, and finally led in solemn procession to a makeshift wooden chapel at St Peter’s — have been telescoped into a single visualisable tableau, curiously 53

Middelnederlandsch woordenboek, s.v. sullen (3). Olrik, ‘Epic Laws’, p. 132. 55 Gielemans too, could not let Margaret’s murder go unpunished, adding the capture and killing of the villains to Caesarius’s account. 54

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The Singer and the Scribe reminiscent of the wall painting that was once in her chapel. 56 Perhaps the formula ‘dat sach so menich edel man’ was originally meant to bring to mind the role of the Duke of Brabant and his household, but the ‘menich jonc gheselle’ are the ‘good companions’ who sing and listen to ballads.57 As psychological experiment has shown, stories have a better chance of being remembered if they impinge upon the present. In the typical ballad closure, the story, rounded off, enters the horizon of the present. The ballad thus etches itself into our memories not only by virtue of its vivid story but also by making its entry into our world an object of representation. 2. The Law of Two to a Scene Only two individuals can interact in folk narrative, and these two individuals are further subject to the Law of Contrast. These laws need no further elaboration, for they correspond, after all, with our basic categories of understanding (Self and Other, Good and Evil). In Fier Margrietken, the Law of Two to a Scene accounts for the reduction of a band of criminals (who are not always of one mind) to one single-mindedly evil villain. An important stylistic corollary of the Law of Two to a Scene is the ballad’s preference for dialogue and questions and answers between two speakers. Thus Margaret, who says not a word in Caesarius and Gielemans, has become talkative in the ballad. Even if there are not two humans on the scene in a ballad a speaking partner can be found for the protagonist, often in the shape of a bird or a tree. 58 The narrative, too, is in dialogue with itself, asking questions and receiving replies: ‘Wat vantse in haren weghe staen? / Eenen ruyter stille’. 59 These rhetorical questions are not simply ballad formula but the hallmarks of oral communication, which, as Eric Havelock writes, ‘is “other-oriented” […] in the sense that the other is an audience, a “public” external to the speaker, often symbolized in the vocative as a single person, but always palpably felt as a listener who is a partner in the poetry’. 60 3. The Law of the Number Three In the ballad, as in the popular proverb, ‘two is company, three is a crowd’, i.e. there are two main characters per scene; any group of three is meant to represent a multitude. Thus Margaret has three brothers: ‘Ic hebbe noch drie ghebroeders stout, / Si sullen u dat hooft af

56

See above page 72 and n.12. Cf. the inscribed audience of Als al de eyckelen rijpen (Van Duyse 212): ‘Ghesellen, wilt dit onthouwen’ (‘Fellows, remember this’). 58 For examples of talking birds and trees in Dutch ballads see van Duyse 12 and 44 and Kalff, Lied, pp. 350-2. For examples in the British ballad see Wimberly, Lowry Charles, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads, 2 nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1965). There is no need to attribute all such phenomena to superstitious beliefs in the transmigration of souls to birds and plants, as Wimberly does. 59 Compare with this the German ballad Der verlorne Schuh (Meier 76), ‘Was fand es an dem Wege stan? Ein Kneblein das was wolgetan’ (‘What did she find along the way? A boy who was most handsome’), and the later Dutch ballad De Zavelboom, ‘Er zou een maagd om bloemetjes gaen / Om een wandeling te doene; /Wat vond zy onder haer wege staen? / ’t Was een zavelboompje groene’ (‘A maiden was out to pick flowers / To take a little walk; / What did she find on the way? / A little green juniper’). 60 Havelock, Eric, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Cultural Consequences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 20. 57

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Ad Putter houwen.’ In the ballad Des hadde een Swave een dochterlijn (AL 29) a maiden similarly attempts to protect herself from her assailant by invoking her three brothers: ‘Noch hebbe ic stoute broeders drie / Eenen rijcken vader tsoheyme’ (‘And I have three brothers bold and strong / A rich father at home’). 61 The introduction of three brothers bring us to another law. 4. The Law of the Family As Max Lüthi has observed, in ballads protagonists tend to be located in the context of their families; the law is perhaps most strikingly observed in the Judas ballad, which places the betrayal of Christ by Judas in the background of Judas’s prior betrayal by his devious sister.62 The history of Margaret has also been reshaped in accordance with this law. Margaret, who lived away from home with her relatives, and whose parents are not even mentioned in the early sources, has in the ballad acquired not only three brothers but also a mother. And as mothers do in ballads,63 Margaret’s mother anxiously guards her daughter’s sexual purity: ‘Uwen wille en doen ic niet / Mijn moerken soude mi schelden’. 5. The Law of Chronological Incompatibility Events in folk narrative happen successively but never simultaneously; there exists only one ‘theatre of action’, as Vladimir Propp put it.64 Of course this law is not a peculiarity of the Sagenwelt but of a fact of human experience. For although in life there are simultaneous theatres of action, we are more aware of them than the ballad is. The recurrent ballad motif of the protagonist looking behind him, or over his shoulder, to see, for example, his relatives coming to the rescue is the ballad’s ingenious answer to the problem of how to represent simultaneous events while safeguarding unity of action: we remain in one theatre of action but from there see into a second.65 The law of chronological incompatibility means that the ballad cannot tell the story as it really happened: Margaret had been sent to buy wine, and, in the meantime, her foster family was murdered. Caesarius and Gielemans can conjoin these two plot lines quite simply with the adverb interim, but in the ballad the narration of simultaneous events is just not acceptable. 6. The Law of Action ‘Each attribute of a person must be expressed in actions — otherwise it is nothing.’ Again this law is not restricted to the Sagenwelt but belongs to oral literature in general. To be memorable things must be visualisable and ‘so the preferred form of statement for memorisation will be one which describes “from action”’. 66 The abstract propositions in Margaret’s offical record — that ‘simplicity and an innocent life made her a martyr’, that ‘she served humbly and diligently’ — have no place in the ballad, which must make

61

van Duyse 288. The Dutch ballad was adapted from a German original, Der Schabentöchterlein (Meyer 75). ‘Der Familarismus der Volksballade’, in Lühti, Max, Volksliteratur und Hochliteratur (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1970), pp. 79-89. 63 See e.g. van Duyse, pp. 213 and 216. 64 Propp, V.I., Theory and History of Folklore (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), trans. by Ariadne Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin, ed. by Anatoly Liberman, Theory and History of Literature, 5), pp. 24-25. 65 For examples of this motif in the Dutch ballad see van Duyse, 17B-F. 66 Havelock, Literate Revolution, p. 137. 62

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The Singer and the Scribe concrete any abstract nouns (‘simplicity’, ‘innocence’) and unvisualisable abstractions (‘virginity’). Few ballads do this better than Fier Margrietken, which turns Margaret’s jealously guarded pitcher into an objective correlative of both her innocence and her virginity. Like a child who has been sent out on an errand, and is overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility of looking after her mother’s money, Margaret has blotted out all thoughts apart from that of keeping her wine safe. So it falls to the sinister squire to tell her that she has other things to worry about: ‘“En sorghet niet voor den coelen wijn, / Mer sorghet voor u selven”’ Even after the rape she knows only that she must return with her pitcher of wine: Smorgens ontrent der middernacht Si ghinc haer kanneken soecken, Daer lach die moeyaart ede hi loech: ‘Het state daer teynden mijn voeten.’

Of course, the wine has been drunk; and the cruel breach of a child’s trust becomes a metonym for her physical violation. The resources of tradition come to the poet’s aid. ‘Pouring wine’ or ‘tapping wine’ is a familiar euphemism in the ballad for sexual intercourse,67 and by implication Margaret’s worry that her wine may be spilt signals in advance (to the initiated, but not alas to Margaret) the threat to her virginity. Fier Margrietken involves us in the ironic conflict between all that we know about sex and sexual innuendo, and the little that Margaret knows — between a cynical world in which ‘spilling wine’ is slang for coitus and Margaret’s innocent world in which wine is only wine, and yet the fear of spilling it more overwhelming than in the world that knows what this loss really represents. The few attributes that Fier Magrietken does contain actually support Olrik’s general thesis. Thus when the ballad describes Margaret as ‘fier’, the adjective serves not primarily as an insight into her character but as a cue to the actions that are to come. ‘Fier’ is the traditional epithet for the girl who does not want a lover,68 but who inevitably acquires one all the same. The official hagiographers vexed themselves needlessly about Margaret’s epithet — how could this humble girl be called ‘proud’? 69 — for its function is not to describe her character but her role in the story. In the case of the ‘ruyter stille’ who blocks Margaret’s way, ‘stille’ is likewise not an attribute of the man but of his future actions: ‘Hi namse in sinen witten armen / Heymelijc al stille’. Olrik’s dictum might thus be revised as follows: attributes express actions, and actions express attributes. From this brief overview of the ‘laws’ of the ballad and oral tradition, it will be evident that the original history of Margaret has been reshaped in accordance with the ballad schema. The most important schema behind Fier Margrietken, however, is a particular type of ballad, well represented in the German and Dutch corpus, concerning a girl who, in defiance of social convention, leaves home to fetch wine but fetches up with a man instead.

67 68

69

See AL 37 and 57. Compare the ballad of Fiere Marienette (Kalff, Lied, p. 449) or ‘La Fiere’ in the romance Ipomedon by Hue de Rotelande. The ingenious answer worked out by the Bollandists is that Margaret was ‘proud’ only in the defence of her chastity.

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Ad Putter I should like to give two examples of this ballad type of the wilful daughter. I hope that the similarities with Fier Margrietken will be obvious enough to require no further comment. The first example, Het soude een meysken gaen om wijn, has an internal refrain (italicised below), repeated in every stanza: Tsou een meisken gaen om wijn, Hout u canneken vaste Savons in den maneschijn. Bij nachte, by nachte Hout u canneken proper Dianeken, Hout u canneken vaste

A girl was going out for wine Hold your pitcher firmly In the evening in the moonshine At night-time, at night-time Hold your pitcher properly, Diana, Hold your pitcher firmly

Wat vants in haeren weghen staen?

What did she find on her way?

Een fijn gesel en dat was waer.

A fine fellow, and that was true.

Den ruyter sprac dat meysken toe,

To the girl the squire said,

Oft sij sijnen wille wou doen.

Would she do his will.

Hoe weygerich dat dat meysken was,

Reluctant though the girl might be,

Hy swanckse neder int groene gras.

He laid her down on the meadow green

Doen hy syn willeken hadde gedaen,

When his will had been fulfilled,

‘Schoon lief, ghij moecht wel thuyswarts gaen.’

‘Fair love, you should be going home.’

Die ons dit liedeken eerstmael sanck

He who first sang us this song, 70

Syn bellekens en gauen geen geklanck.

His little bells made not a sound.

Johannes Koepp, who discovered this analogue to Fier Margrietken in the songbook Pratum musicum (Antwerp, 1584), pointed out that a very similar refrain occurs in a German ballad from the Ambraser Liedbuch (1586), also on the theme of the wilful daughter: Es hett ein Schwab ein Töchterlein, Halt die Kanne feste,

A Swabian man had a daughter, Hold your pitcher firmly

Es wolt nit lenger ein Megdlein sein Bei Nachte, fein sachte, Halt die Kanna, schöne bas Anna 71 Halt die Kanna feste.

She wished to be a maid no more At night-time, sweet and soft, Hold you pitcher, fairest Anna Hold your pitcher firmly.

My second example, apparently unknown to Koepp, is the widespread German ballad Wein holen. A fragmentary first stanza of a ballad of this type is extant in a songbook ca 1535, 72 and further evidence of its early popularity is afforded by a number of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ad notam references to ballads beginning Es sout ein meiskin holen win or 70

The implication of the last stanza (conventional in the German and Dutch ballad) is that the singer of the song is the ‘ruyter’ in the story, who absconds quietly on his horse. I cite the text from Leven en Werk van de Antwerpse Luitcomponist Emmanuel Adriaenssen, ed. by Godelieve Spiessens, Verhandelingen van de Koningklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgïe, Klasse der Schone Kunsten, Jaargang 36 (Brussels: Paleis der Academïen, 1974), 2 vols, II, no. 57. 71 Cited by Koepp, Untersuchungen, p. 113. 72 The first full version is from a songbook of 1696. See Deutsche Voklslieder mit ihren Melodien, ed. by Rolf W. Brednich, vol. VI (Freiburg: Verlag des Deutschen Volksliedarchivs, 1974), pp. 120-137.

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The Singer and the Scribe Het soude een meysken gaen om wyn.73 Although the earliest complete versions of this ballad type are much later, we cannot therefore afford to ignore them, particularly since, despite their lateness, they show marked similarities with Fier Margrietken. I cite below the full text of an eighteenth-century version: Es wollt’ ein schwarzbrauns Mägdelein Zum roten kühlen Wein, Zu Strasburg wohl über die Strassen, ja Strassen.

A dark-brown maiden wished to go To get some cool red wine, On the road to Strassbourg, yes on the road.

Was begegnet ihr allda? Ein wunderschöner Knab’:

Whom did she there meet? A beautiful young man:

‘Feins Mägdlein, wollt ihr euch lassen, ja lassen?’

‘Fine maid, do you want to play, yes play?’

‘Lasset ab, lasset ab,

‘Leave go, leave go,

Mein wunderschöner Knab! My beautiful young man! Mein Mütterlein das tät mich schelten, ja schelten.’ My mother would scold me, yes scold me.’

73 74

‘Ei, warum verschütt’st du mir Den roten, kühlen Wein

‘Oh, why do you make me spill The wine that is red and cool

Und bringst mich wohl um das Gelde, ja Gelde?’

And waste my money, yes money?’

‘Ja nicht um das Geld Und den roten kühlen Wein,

‘It’s not for your money And the wine that is red and cool

Dafür darffst du nicht sorgen, ja sorgen:

That you need to care, yes care:

‘Ist uns der Herr Wirt Der allerbeste Freund,

‘The taverner he is to us The best of friends,

Der tut uns ein Kännlein borgen, ja borgen.’

He will credit us a pitcher, yes pitcher.’

‘Und wenn er uns nicht borgen will,

‘And if he will Not lend to us,

So wollen wir ihn bezahlen, ja bezahlen,’

Then we will offer to pay him, yes pay him’

‘Mit lauter Silber, Mit lauter Gold,

‘With finest silver, With finest gold,

Mit lauter dicken Talern, ja Talern.’

With fine thick coins, yes coins.’

Es hat das schwarzbraun Mägdelein Ihr Pantöffelein verloren,

The dark-brown little maid Has lost her little slipper

Sie kann es nicht mehr finden, ja finden.

No longer can she find it, yes find it

Sie suchts wohl hin, sie suchts wohl her, Und da sie es gefunden hat,

She looks for it here, she looks for it there, And when at last she has found it,

Vor Freuden tät sie springen, ja springen

For joy she starts to leap, yes leap.

Über zwei Berg und auch tiefe Tal

Beyond two hills and valleys deep,

Da laüft ein schnelles Wasser, Und wer sein Liebelein nicht länger haben will 74 Der kans ja lassen, ja lassen.

There runs a rapid stream, And he who no longer wants his love Can leave her there, yes there.

Leven en Werk, ed. by Spiessens I, 231. Meier 78B.

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Ad Putter The family resemblance between these two ballads and Fier Margrietken suggests to me that the history of Margaret was digested and remembered on the basis of the ready-made schema provided by the ballad type of the accosted wine-fetching daughter. On the face of it, the correspondences between this ballad type and the true history of Margaret’s murder are slender and accidental — it so happened that Margaret had been sent out to fetch wine from the winepress before being raped and murdered — but popular tradition had developed for such experiences a morphology in the form of ballads about adventurous girls who stray from their homes, and the ballad of Fier Margrietken naturally made good use of it, as witness the revised story line: Margrietken meets with a ‘ruyter’, who takes her to a tavern; he tells her she has no need to worry about her wine since they know the taverner, who will supply more wine on credit, and so on. Of course the resemblance is imperfect. Margrietken is out fetching wine because she has been misled (‘Si was daer toe verraden’), not because she wants to; she does not end up looking for her lost ‘slipper’ or ‘shoe’, as women who have lost (or are about to lose) their virginity commonly do in the ballad,75 but for the pitcher of wine that had been entrusted to her. But despite these differences, Fier Margrietken provides excellent support for the theory that remembered stories are subject to ‘genre convergence’.76 In the course of memorial transmission the narrative gradually changes to conform to the norms of the re levant genre (in this instance the ballad) or a salient subgenre (the ballad type of the wine-fetching daughter). This explains why in the nineteenth-century version of Fier Margrietken Margaret leaves home of her own accord, and why the squire she meets has become ‘haar lief’ (‘her lover’). The ballad has lost its individual characteristics and has converged so completely with the genre that Margaret of Louvain is no longer recognisable in the ballad heroine. The official hagiographers of Magaret must have been alarmed at the transformation of the saint into the adventurous maiden of the ballad. The first reader response to Fier Margrietken that I know of is that of a scandalised cleric, Johannes Molanus, who in his Natales Sanctorum Belgii (Louvain, 1616-26), wrote that ‘there is extant a ditty about the blessed Margaret […] in a book of profane songs, but the song is lascivious and deserves to be burned’. In this intolerant criticism lies a kernel of truth: lasciviousness belongs firmly to the type of ballad with which Fier Margrietken had been converging. But we are fortunate that Fier Margrietken was spared the flames, for it is an exquisite ballad, much superior to the nineteenth-century version and to the kinds of ballad that helped to shape it. Somehow AL captured the song at just the right moment of its convergence. The ballad tradition of wine-fetching maidens has influenced Fier Margrietken enough to energise its world with libido and sexual innuendo, but Fier Margrietken has not advanced upon that tradition far enough for the heroine to lose her childlike naivety. She wanders innocently with her pitcher into a lewd scenario recognisable to anyone apart from herself. If the ballad schema

75

The loss of the shoe hints at the loss of virginity. See also the German ballad Der verlorne Schuh (Meier 76) and the discussion in Deutsche Volkslieder, ed. by Brednich, p. 116. 76 Rubin, Memory, p. 280.

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The Singer and the Scribe had not modified the original story of Margaret’s murder this tension between an unknowing heroine and a knowing world could not have reached its pitch of intensity, and the tension would be lost if the influence of the schema had been any more extensive. Our best ballads have been arrested at just the right stage of their development towards the schema; I think Fier Margrietken is one of them.

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Looking up at ‘Holger Dansk og Burmand’ (DgF 30)

William Layher One of the longstanding preoccupations in the Scandinavian ballad field concerns the question of origins: how old are the oldest Scandinavian ballads, and where did they come from? Although an oral ballad tradition survived well into the twentieth century in isolated pockets of Norway, Sweden and the Faeroe Islands,1 the early days of this tradition are only dimly understood. It is commonly agreed that the Nordic ballad was already well-defined long before the first ballad manuscripts were assembled in Denmark in the mid to late sixteenth century. How much earlier is uncertain; apart from a few suggestive references in Swedish chronicles and other historical sources to public performances of narrative ‘songs’ that seem to resemble ballads,2 other attempts to date the origins of the first Scandinavian ballads through comparative evidence gleaned from the fields of anthropology, history, folklore or other literary sources have produced mixed results, with conclusions that range from as early as the eleventh to as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. This dispute may never be resolved, for the shortcomings of the manuscript sources for the period before approximately 1550 are as legendary as they are insurmountable.3 Occasionally, however, evidence about the early days of the Nordic ballads comes to light where it is least expected. A map of Greenland made by the Danish cartographer Claudius Clavus in 1425 is perhaps the best known case of what we might call accidental ballad transmission in the Scandinavian field, for this map uses words and snatches of verse from a Nordic ballad as markers for the unnamed rivers, bays and inlets on the Greenland coastline. Some have argued that Clavus composed the verses himself, while others read them as a copy (or parody) of an older ballad, but regardless of provenence this map represents the oldest verifiable textual record of a Nordic medieval ballad that we have today.4 Another similar case — one that has not received the attention it deserves —

1

See most recently, for the Swedish tradition, Jansson, Sven-Bertil, Den levande balladen: medeltida ballad i svensk tradition (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999). 2 Jonsson, Bengt, Svensk balladtradition (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1967), p.19f. Jonsson defines the medieval Scandinavian ballad as ‘a genre of orally transmitted song that is defined by its form (two-lined stanza with one or two burdens, four-lined stanzas with one burden), its narrative content and its objective style, the latter characterised not least by the frequent use of formulaic expressions and so -called commonplaces’ (p. 855). 3 For a critical discussion of the ‘medieval’ roots of the Nordic ballads see Layher, William, Queen Eufemia’s Legacy: Middle Low German Literary Culture, Royal Patronage, and the First Old Swedish Epic (1301) (Harvard University dissertation 1999), pp. 46-73, and idem, ‘Killing Erik Glipping, 1286: on the early years of a Danish historical ballad,’ Lied und populäre Kultur/Song and Popular Culture: Jahrbuch des Deutschen Volksliedarchivs, 45 (2000), pp. 13-34. 4 On the Clavus map see Hildeman, Karl-Ivar, Medeltid på vers. Litteraturhistoriska studier, Skrifter utgivna av svenskt visarkiv, 1 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1958), pp. 155-61 and Colbert, David W., The Birth of

The Singer and the Scribe concerns a series of murals painted on the ceiling of a Swedish church in the fifteenth century. High overhead in the eight triangular fields in the crown of vault IV of Floda church, which lies some 80 km west of Stockholm in Södermanland province, is a magnificent setting of eight warriors battling each other in single combat. Interestingly, only one of these four pairs of combatants (David and Goliath) is drawn from Biblical sources; the remaining six figures are not prophets, patriarchs, Biblical characters or figures of sacred iconography but rather characters drawn from the vernacular literature of medieval Scandinavia. Vault IV shows David killing Goliath, Sven Fötling beheading a troll, Dietrich von Bern attacking Videke Velandsson, and Holger Dansk decapitating Burmand with one stroke of his sword. Each of these figures is identified in a small text scroll. Their names are given as dauit rex and golliat, swen fötling and trullet, diderik van beran and wideke welandesson, but for the fourth pair, some extra information of note to ballad scholars is given: the villain is named burmand while the hero is identified not by name but by the words hollager dansk han van seger af burmand (‘Holger Dansk, he won the victory over Burmand’) — a passage which is identical to the refrain of a popular Danish and Swedish ballad about this famous battle. The oldest extant copy of this ballad is found in a Danish manuscript from around 1580, but the text and image on the ceiling of Floda church, which was decorated with murals around 1480 -1485 (see Figure 1), indicate that a ballad on this topic was in circulation in eastern Sweden in the last quarter of the fifteenth century, some hundred years before the oldest surviving copy of the ballad appears in manuscript form. The ballad pressed into service on the Claudius Clavus map derives, ultimately, from an episode in Hervarar saga, an Icelandic ‘legendary saga’ of the thirteenth century, but it was only after a twisted and elliptical route of oral transmission, redaction, truncation (and perhaps parody?) that the ballad phrases were copied onto Clavus’s map. The ballad of ‘Holger Dansk og Burmand’ also goes back to a saga source — in this instance, a portion of Karlamagnús saga — but the steps in its journey from saga prose to rhymed narrative song have never been retraced in detail. 5 And yet, the surviving texts take us only so far. A complete reconstruction of the early days of ‘Holger Danske og Burmand’ must take the visual evidence on the ceiling of Floda church into account as well — and it is here, in the murals, where the present investigation takes an interesting turn. Although the banderole text hollanger dansk han van seger af burmand confirms that a ballad on this topic was sung in Sweden in the 1480’s, the pictures of Holger Danske and, especially, of Burmund, contain details that suggest that the artist may well have used another source besides the fifteenth-century ballad when painting Holger Danske and Burmand on the ceiling of vault IV.

Floda Church The oldest walls of Floda church date to the twelfth century, but the nave and choir were expanded in 1412-13 to roughly the dimensions they have today. Restoration efforts begun after a disastrous fire in 1414 likely led to the first set of murals being painted in Floda

the Ballad: the Scandinavian medieval genre, Skrifter utgivna av Svenskt visarkiv, vol. 10 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1989), pp. 56-61. 5 See, for example, the brief overview in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 26-27.

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William Layher church around 1420. Traces of a Crucifixion scene are still visible in the church’s original choir, i.e. in the easternmost vault in the northern aisle.6 A new vaulted roof was completed around 1450, and the vaults over the northern aisle of the nave were decorated with murals approximately thirty years later. Three escutcheons in the northern aisle indicate that the murals were painted in the 1480s. Two of the family crests pay tribute to powerful local families with connections to Floda church, while the third is a tribute to the local bishop’s family. The first escutcheon shows a lily with the inscription Germunt Larenson wapn and the second depicts a boar’s head with the text Hince jonsons oppå kopperberget. Germund Laurensson (d. 1459), a member of the Lillie family, was one of the largest landowners in Floda parish. His daughter Birgitta married a wealthy and influential local farmer named Mats Kagg shortly after 1450. It is believed that Germund Laurensson donated much of the money towards the construction of the vaulted roof in Floda church in the 1450s. The other family crest, that of the boar’s head, refers to Hinse Jönsson of the Svinhuvud family. Jönsson, a wealthy Stockholm businessman who was still alive as late as 1485, did not own a local estate, but his daughter married Anders Laurensson (a brother or perhaps a son of Germund Laurensson?), in the 1480s. The murals may well have been commissioned to commemorate their wedding. A terminus post quem for the murals is indicated by the third escutcheon, the family crest of Bishop Kort Rogge of Strängnäs (d. 1501), who was elevated to that office in 1479. Despite the presence of his crest in Floda church it is unlikely that Bishop Rogge commissioned the murals himself upon his installation; the Rogge insignia — positioned underneath the enthroned Virgin Mary in the place of honour in the first vault — is understood as a tribute to the seated bishop at the time of the painting, not as an indication of artistic patronage.7 The murals in Floda church are attributed to Albertus Pictor, the most distinguished and gifted church muralist in late-medieval Sweden, whose work graces some three dozen churches in southeastern Sweden.8 His name was first attested in 1473, in a document recording his marriage to the widow of master painter Johan Målare in Stockholm. Albertus may have been a painter by trade — through his marriage to Anna, the widow of Johan Målare, Albertus in all likelihood gained access into the city’s guild of painters — but he earned a significant portion of his income as a textile craftsman in Stockholm, where he

6

7

8

The Birgittine iconography in this Crucifixion scene suggests a dating to the early fifteenth century. On these murals see Bennett, Robert, Floda kyrka, Sveriges kyrkor, 205 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1988), pp. 60-61. Bennett, Floda kyrka, pp. 43-45. On the political and intellectual impact Bishop Rogge had on fifteenth-century Swedish society, see Öberg, Jan, ‘Von Humanismus zum Traditionalismus. Die Einwirkung der politischen, gesellschaftlichen und kirchlichen Verhältnisse auf das Kulturleben in Schweden am Beispiel von Kort Rogge (um 1420-1501)’, in Ut granum sinapis: essays on neo-Latin literature in honour of Jozef Ijsewijn , ed. by Gilbert Tournoy and Dirk Sacré, Supplementa Humanistica Lovaniensia (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1997) 12, pp. 24-34. Among the standard works on Albertus Pictor in Swedish are Lundberg, Erik, Albertus Pictor (Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt, 1961); Cornell, Henrik, and Sigurd Wallin, Albertus Pictor. Sten Stures och Jacob Ulvssons målare (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1972); see also, in English, the entry in Grove Dictionary of Art, ed. by Jane Turner, 34 vols (London, New York: Macmillan, 1994) I, 576.

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The Singer and the Scribe sewed and decorated religious vestments for use by the Church. Several city documents in Stockholm refer to him as ‘Albert Pärlstickare’ (the pearl embroiderer) and attest that he was still alive in 1509. His artistic talents were diverse: an elaborately carved and painted altarpiece for the Nådendal convent in Finland has been recognised as one of his last works, and he also earned a small sum as an organist and musician at the funeral of a fellow guildsman in 1509. Albertus Pictor’s strong connections to élite society in Stockholm strengthen the hypothesis that Hinse Jönsson was indeed the patron of the murals in Floda Church. Of the three dozen churches with murals attributed to Albertus Pictor, Floda church is one of the most distant from the city of Stockholm. Although he painted in churches at a considerable distance from Stockholm in Uppland province and Västmanland province, both to the north of Lake Mälaren, Albertus received very few commissions to the south and west of the Mälaren region and none more distant than Floda parish. Given Albertus Pictor’s attested wealth and success in Stockholm, 9 it is very likely that Hinse Jönsson and Albertus Pictor had become acquainted there, perhaps through business dealings or other artistic commissions, and that these personal connections encouraged Albertus to accept the Floda commission in the countryside west of the city. But before we turn our eyes to the visual evidence linking the mural to the medieval ballad, let us discuss the ballad, its sources and its monstrous figures.

‘Holger Dansk og Burmand’ The ballad survives in four Danish variants recorded in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and in two Swedish versions that date from around 1630. 10 No records of this ballad exist in the Norwegian, Icelandic or Faeroese tradition. The ballad is summarised as follows: TSB E 133 Holger Danske og Burmand — Princess releases prisoner Ogier le Danois to fight giant for her. The giant Burmand asks the king for his daughter Gloriant’s hand. Gloriant will not have Burmand. She goes to her father’s pris on and asks one of the prisoners, Holger Danske, to fight Burmand for her. She gives him a horse and a sword. Holger fights Burmand and kills him. 11

9

Albertus owned two stone houses at Norreport in Stockholm, and paid taxes at a higher rate than any of his colleagues; see Lundberg, Albertus Pictor, p. 11. 10 Danmarks gamle folkeviser, ed. by Svend Grundtvig, 12 vols (Copenhagen: div. publ., 1853 -1976) I, 384-97; where the ballad is catalogued as DgF30. Svenska fornsanger; en samling af kampavisor, folk-visor, lekar och dansar, samt barn-och vall-sanger, ed. by Ivar Arvidsson, 3 vols (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1834-42) I, 75-86. The Swedish multiforms of this ballad are also taken up in the recent edition of Sveriges medeltida ballader; see Sveriges medeltida ballader, ed. by Bengt R. Jonsson, Sven-Bertil Jansson and Margareta Jersild, 7 vols (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1983), 5.1, 104-112, where the ballad is catalogued as SMB 216. All ballad translations are my own. Further references to these editions will be made parenthetically in the text. 11 Bengt Jonsson, Svale Solheim and Eva Danielson, The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: a descriptive catalogue, Skrifter utgivna av Svenskt visarkiv, 5 (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1978), p. 255.

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William Layher The earliest traces of the Holger Dansk figure are found in Old French literature: a character named Oger de Denemarche [or: Danemarche] plays a minor role as one of Charlemagne’s paladins in the early twelfth century epic La Chanson de Roland.12 But already by the early thirteenth century, his heroic vita became the subject of independent chansons de geste in the French tradition (e.g. Les Enfances Ogier [1195], La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche [1200-1215]), and this new, expanded story left important traces in other Old French works like the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle. 13 These younger texts form the basis for Holger’s earliest reception in Scandinavia, which was accomplished through Karlamagnús saga, a cycle of chansons de geste — all of them related to Charlemagne and his deeds — that was translated into Old Norse in the middle of the thirteenth century. Scholars recognise ten distinct narrative branches in Karlamagnús saga, whereby branch III contains the story of Holger’s famous battle with Burmand.14 Although the ‘Holger Dansk og Burmand’ ballad ultimately goes back to scenes narrated in Karlamagnús saga, it is highly unlikely that the Icelandic or West Norse saga manuscripts served as the exclusive source for the ballad because new redactions of Karlamagnús saga in Old Swedish and Old Danish began to appear in mainland Scandinavia during the fifteenth century. One of them, the ODan Karl Magnus’ Krønike, exists in a manuscript copy from around 1480,15 and in two printed versions, the first edition in 1509 and a revised edition that appeared in 1534. 16 Another redaction of Karlamagnús saga possibly translated from a lost Norwegian manuscript, the Old Swedish 12

On the historical development of the Holger Dansk figure see most recently Holzapfel, Otto ‘Holger Danske,’ in Enzyklopädie des Märchens, ed. by Kurt Ranke and Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1977-) 6, cols 1175-78; Togeby, Knud, Ogier le Danois dans les littératures européennes (Copenhagen: Det danske Sprog -og Litteraturselskab, 1969) is indispensible reading. 13 See Togeby, Ogier le Danois dans les littératures européennes, pp. 38-109. 14 On the Old French sources of Branch III, entitled Oddgeirs tháttr danska in some manuscripts, see Skårup, Povl, in ‘Contenu, sources, rédactions’, Karlamagnús saga. Branches I, III, VII et IX, ed. by Knud Togeby et al., Ogier le Danois, 3 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzell, 1980), pp. 352-53, and Knud Togeby, ‘Filologiske Studier over Karl Magnus’ Krønike (rev.)’ Studia Neophilologica, 37 (1965) 91-96. The manuscripts of Karlamagnús saga are reviewed in Halvorsen, E.F., The Norse Version of the Chanson de Roland, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, 19 (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1959), pp. 32-37.and more recently in Loth, Agnete, ‘Les manuscrits norrois,’ in Karlamagnús saga, ed. by Togeby et al., pp 358-78. Unger’s 1860 edition of Karlamagnús saga in normalised Old Icelandic is still the only complete edition of the saga; see Karlamagnús saga ok kappa hans, ed. by C.R. Unger (Christiania: H.J. Jensen, 1860); a diplomatic edition of branches 1, 3, 7, and 9 manuscripts A and B of Karlamagnús saga with a French translation in Karlamagnús saga, ed. by Togeby et al. 15 Karl Magnus’ Krønike, ed. by Poul Lindegård Hjorth (Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz, 1960) and Hjorth, Poul Lindegård, Filologiske studier over Karl Magnus’ Krønike (Copenhagen: J.H. Schultz, 1965). The oldest manuscript version (ca 1480) is found in the ‘Børglum-Håndskrift’, Cod. Holm Vu 82, gl. nr. 12 b (Royal Library, Stockholm). This Low Germany miscellany is described more fully in Borchling, Conrad, ‘Mittelniederdeutsche Handschriften in Skandinavien, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg und Vorpommern’, in Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Philologisch-historische Klasse, Beiheft (1900), pp. 109-13. 16 The different versions are evaluated in Karl Magnus’ Krønike, ed. by Hjorth, pp. xvi- xlviii. See also Hjorth, Filologiske studier over Karl Magnus’ Krønike, pp. 97-157.

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The Singer and the Scribe Karl Magnus, dates to the first decades of the fifteenth century, in any case no later than 1420. 17 In contrast to Karl Magnus’ Krønike, however, the OSw text is an incomplete treatment of its Icelandic source, as it contains only two of the later branches of the saga neither of which concerns Holger Dansk. There is some evidence that a lengthier version of the OSw Karl Magnus did exist at one time, however, because the language of the oldest Karl Magnus’ Krønike manuscript of 1480 shows some significant Swedish influence which can only have come from a lost Swedish codex of Karl Magnus that was more complete than any of the surviving copies.18 Although the evidence for a lost version of the OSw Karl is controversial, it leaves open the possibility that the battle between Holger Dansk and Burmand was indeed in circulation — not merely in ballad form, but also in Swedish prose — around the Lake Mälaren region in the latter part of the fifteenth century, in the precise region of Sweden where Albertus Pictor did the majority of his church painting. That the ballad of Holger Dansk and Burmand was a popular subject in late-medieval Denmark is confirmed by an editorial comment in another Holger Dansk book entitled Kong Olger Danskes Krønike, which was published by Christiern Pedersen in 1534 (the same year in which he printed the Karl Magnus Krønike).19 In his introduction to Kong Olger Danskes Krønike, Pedersen makes reference to an old kempe vise or heroic ballad about Holger Dansk, and he quotes the same ballad refrain that is found on the ceiling of Floda church: Den menige mand her i Riget viste icke før andet en at han hagde all eniste verit en dansk kempe / som want seyer aff Burmand / som den gamle kempe vise lyder / Olger dansk han want seyer aff Burmand. [The common man here in this country knows nothing [about Holger Dansk] other than that he was a Danish hero who won the victory over Burmand, as the old kempe vise says: Olger Dansk he won the victory over Burmand.]

17

20

Kornhall, David, Den fornsvenska sagan om Karl Magnus. Handskrifter och texthistoria , Lundastudier i nordisk språkvetenskap, vol. 15 (Lund: GWK Gleerup, 1959), pp. 98-103. According to his reconstruction, the OSw Karl Magnus was translated from a lost Norwegian manuscript of Karlamagnús saga (pp. 108-113). 18 On the disputed lost Swedish version of Karl Magnus, see Karl Magnus enligt Codex Verelianus och Fru Elins Bok, ed. by David Kornhall, Samlingar utgivna av Svenskafornskriftsällskapet, 219, 63 (Lund: Carl Blom, 1957), pp. vii-xxviii; Kornhall, Den fornsvenska sagan om Karl Magnus, p. 298f; Hjorth, Filogiske Studier over Karl Magnus Krønike, p. 161f and 309f, argues that there is no textual evidence proving beyond a doubt the existence of a Swedish ‘missing link’ between the Icelandic saga and the Danish Karl Magnus’ Krønike , but admits that the Swedish inflections in the language of the oldest manuscript of the Danish text are best explained if one assumes that a complete Swedish codex of Karl Magnus existed in the fifteenth century and that this lost manuscript served as a source for the 1480 Danish text (p. 314); Kornhall, Den fornsvenska sagan om Karl Magnus, p. 298f, disputes any direct link between the extant OSw and ODan texts, but agrees that another version of Karl Magnus — one which was substantially different from the preserved mansucripts — might have served as a source for the Danish translation of 1480. 19 Pedersen, Christiern, ‘Kong Olger Danskes Krønike’, in Christiern Pedersens Danske Skrifter, ed. by Carl Joakim Brandt, vol. 5 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1856), pp. 129-314. On the Old French source for Kong Olger Danskes Krønike see Togeby, Ogier le Danois, pp. 227-229. 20 Pedersen, ‘Kong Olger Danskes Krønike’, p. 136 (my translation). Further citations to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text.

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William Layher Mindful of the ballad’s popularity in the Danish tradition, Pedersen is careful to point out in his preface that while the foreign sources identify Holger’s opponent as ‘Brunamundus’ (p.164), he will call him ‘Burmand’ for good reason: Denne samme kong Burnamand aff Egipten wor en mectig starcker kempe / oc han kallis almindelige paa danske Burmand / thi vil oc ieg saa kalle hannem her effter I denne Krønike / ath alle som høre eller lese hanss naffn / ath de skulle vide hvad mand han wor. (p. 164) [This king Burnamand of Egypt was a powerful champion and he is commonly known in Danish as Burmand, and I will also call him that in this chronicle so that all who hear or read his name will know which man this was.]

If the name Burmand was as popular in 1534 as Pedersen suggests, then we must consider the source of its popularity. The Icelandic manuscripts of Karlamagnús saga calls him ‘Burnamend’ or ‘Burnament’, while Karl Magnus Krønike calls him ‘Bwrnemanth’ (1480) or ‘Burnemand’ (1534). Only the Danish and Swedish ballad sources and Kong Olger Danskes Krønike, whose debt to the ballad is made explicit in the preface, know him as ‘Burmand’ or ‘Burman’ (var. ‘Burrmand’, ‘Burmandt’, etc.). Pedersen makes it clear that he is using the common form ‘Burmand’ in Kong Olger Danskes Krønike in order to avoid confusing his audience in Denmark, for the latter name is the one which carries the weight of tradition. The most likely source of this Danish familiarity with the disyllabic name ‘Burmand’ is the Nordic ballad which obviously enjoyed a commonality and universal appeal that Pedersen’s new translation of unfamiliar French stories could not hope to equal. This dispute over correct versus incorrect names also brings evidence of a stratified reception at the turn of the sixteenth century to the surface: Pedersen suggests that non-elite audiences who know the story of Holger Dansk solely through oral transmission (i.e. ballads) will be receptive only to the name ‘Burmand’ while, on the other hand, elite audiences of sufficient wealth and education to read the written sources — even though they almost certainly knew the ballad as well — will recognise that ‘Burnement’ and ‘Burmand’ are the same figure, even if the orthography of the name is levelled in the 1534 edition so as to conform with its most popular (and populist) form. 21 Another point of disagreement among the sources concerns the manner of Burmand’s death. All of the ballad variants agree that Burmand was killed at the end of his duel with Holger Dansk, but his death is treated differently in the Icelandic, Danish and Swedish sources. In Karlamagnús saga, Burmand is killed with a blow to the head and then — as is common with giants, so as to prevent their reanimation after death — his head is amputated from his torso. Burmand is killed with a blow to the chest, and then his head amputated in Karl Magnus’ Krønike (p. 75) while Kong Olger Danske’s Krønike tells that Holger Danske dealt Burmand a death blow from above that split his helmet down to the neck, causing the victim to fall down dead (p. 170). In the Danish ballad variants, Burmand is simply

21

The fact that the name of Holger Dansk is likewise treated differently in the Icelandic, Old Danish and ballad sources (Icl ‘Oddgeir’; ODan ‘Wdger, Olger’ [1480], ‘Olger’ [1534]; DgF 30 ‘Ollger Danske / Udgierd Dansk / Holgerd Dansk / Olger Dansk / Olger Danske’; Floda ‘Hollager Dansk’) should not detract from the main point: that the form ‘Burmand’ attested in Floda church matches most closely with the surviving ballad texts, and not with the surviving prose texts in any language.

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The Singer and the Scribe ‘vanquished’ in general terms: thett var hynnd unge kong Burmand, faldt død for Holggers fuod [ms A: the young king Burmand is struck, he falls down at Holger’s feet]; slagen bleff goden Burmand Kamp, hand fall død til iord [mss BD: the valiant warrior Burmand was slain, he fell dead to the ground]; kong Olger hand slaa then throll ihiell [ms C: king Holger beat the troll to death] (I, 392-97). The Swedish variants, however, correspond in close detail to Albertus’s artistic representation of the event on the ceiling of Floda church — Burmand is killed with a single, decapitating blow to the neck: Så hugher han Burmans hufve af, så blodet ran honom til dödha [ms A: thus he strikes Burmand’s head off, and he bled to death], så högg han Burmans hufvud i tu, at blodet rann honom till döda [ms B: thus he clove Burmand’s head in two pieces, that he bled to death]. I believe it is not a coincidence that the Swedish ballads are most consistent with Albertus’s representation of the scene — not because later ballad singers adapted their story so as to conform to the visual evidence presented in Floda church, but because Albertus and the Swedish ballad singers were following a lost common source that was unique to Sweden, one in which Burmand, a monstrous figure with eyes like a cat, was killed with a single blow.

Burmand as monster? By the time the murals were painted in vault IV, the figure of Burmand had undergone a striking transformation in the written sources, from a haughty Egyptian king in the twelfthcentury Old French epics to something akin to a troll in the ODan translations of Karlamagnús saga. Evidence of this progression can already be seen in two of the lead manuscripts of Karlamagnús saga, known as A (AM 180c fol, ca 1350-1400) and B (AM 180d fol, seventeenth century). The older redaction A introduces Burmand as a king who leads a company of twenty thousand brave warriors. No particular mention is made of his appearance. But in the younger B manuscript, Burmand appears as a monstrous figure: En Burnement hefir um allan aldr verit í bardögum, hann var mikill vexti ok illr kosti, svartr á hár ok hörund; hann má engan mat eta nema hrán ok eigi vín drekka nema blóði væri blandat: hann hafði gul augu sem kettir, ok Þó enn skygnri um nætr en daga. Þessi maðr var fullr galdra ok gerninga ok flærdar, ok mundi han tröll kallar vera, ef hann kœmi norr hingat í heim. [Burnament had been in many battles; he was large in size, and ill-shaped, black-haired and dark-skinned. He ate no food except raw meat, and drank no wine unless it was mixed with blood. He had yellow eyes like a cat, and could see better at night than during the day. This man was full of treacherous spells and tricks, and 22 he would be called a troll if he came northward into our land.]

22

Karlamagnus saga ok kappa hans, ed. by Unger, p. 108 (my translation). Ms B is a seventeenth-century paper copy of a lost vellum manuscript that probably dates from the fourteenth century; see Halvorsen, The Norse Version of the Chanson de Roland, pp. 32-35. We do not know if the details about Burmand’s monstrous appearance in B were also present in its lost vellum source; perhaps they were added ex tempore by the seventeenth--century copyist. Although clearly a redaction of Karlamagnús saga, the 1480 Børglum Karl Magnus’ Krønike uses none of the extant saga manuscripts as its direct source. According to Hjorth, Filologiske studier over Karl Magnus’ Krønike, p. 315, the ODan text was translated from a lost Karlamagnús saga manuscript of the older A family — a significant claim, in that the A manuscripts do not know Burmand as a troll — but the fact that the 1480 redaction does characterise Burmand as a monstrous figure strongly suggests that its affiliation to the Aa manuscript family is suspect, and that another Charlemagne/Holger Dansk/Burmand text in circulation in the fifteenth century influenced the

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William Layher The ODan Karl Magnus’ Krønike follows the saga account in the younger Icelandic manuscript very closely, omitting the references to Burmand’s powers of sorcery but maintaining the description of his appetites, his strange eyes, and his troll-like appearance. The 1480 redaction describes him thus: Tha kam en k[onge] som bwrnamanth hether (…) hannum foldhae xxxM men han otthae engen land tog bar han konngis naffn hans men skulle altid sloss fenge the engen andre thaa sloues the inburdes alle hans dage hadde han waretth I krygh ok orloff all hans madh skulle blandhes met blodh han haffude øghen som en katth ok sogh baether om natthen en vm daghen wore han her I landhet tha wore han lyger en troll. [Then a king named Bwrnamanth arrived. He led a company of three thousand men. He did not own any land [of his own] but he was known as a king. His men were always fighting. If they had no opponents they fought amongst themselves. He spent all his days at war. All of his food must be mixed with blood. He had eyes like 23 a cat and saw better at night than during the day. If he were here in our land he would be called a troll. ]

The Danish ballads also know Burmand as a monstrous figure, their descriptions largely following characterisations of him in Karlamagnús saga and the Krønike. Consider these stanzas from variant B (Dg F, I, 393): 10.

11.

Manden er gram, oc hesten er grum, det siger ieg eder for sant: ieg haffuer hørt, at dett er vist: hand bider met ulffuens tand.

The man is gruesome, and his horse is fierce I tell you this for true I have heard, and swear it’s true he bites with wolfish teeth.

end blod med eeder blend.

He will eat nothing else

end kiød aff christen mandt: icke vill hand andet dricke, Hand vill icke anet æde,

than the meat of a Christian man and wants to drink no other drink than blood that is mixed with venom. (DgF, I, 393)

Variant A contains similar language describing Burmand’s Variant D also contains the references to drinking blood and eating the meat of Christian men, although in this variant Gloriant refers to Burmand explicitly as a ‘troll’: 13.

Est du leffuende? Olger Danske, ieg siger dig paa min Sand: Her er en Trold, begerer mig, oc det er sorten Burmand.

‘Are you alive, Holger Danske I tell you this for true a troll [en Trold] is here, and wants to wed me and he is called black Burmand.’

At the end of the D variant, Burmand’s fiendish nature is confirmed once again: 33.

23

Olger reed til den skøne Iomfru: “i tage nu eders Festemand: Ieg haffuer dræbt met mit gode Suerd den fule, forgifftige Aand.”

Olger rode to the lovely maiden. ‘Now you may join your betrothed. I have killed with my good sword here the ugly, poisonous Thing (DgF, I, 395-97)

characterizations found in the Børglum manuscript; this discrepancy could be another shadow cast by the ‘missing link’ OSw Karl Magnus codex. Karl Magnus’ Krønike, ed. by Hjorth, p. 60 (my translation).

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The Singer and the Scribe The Swedish ballads show Burmand as a grotesque figure whose appearance and appetites have more than a shade of the comical. As Burmand sits on his horse and calls for the maiden Gloria to come out to him, she replies, 17.

Tu är inthe möcket vacker at se, tin kortel han är huiter, tin näsa är tre alnar långh, tu est en skråpucke licker.

‘You are hardly pleasant to look at Your tunic it is white Your nose is three spans long And you look like a buffoon.’

In the next stanza, Burmand’s alleged ruthlessness is seriously undermined when he lets forth an enormous fart as Holger approaches — a physical sign of weakness that betrays his anxiety about facing Holger Danske in combat: 18.

Burman holler för staden ut, han lather sin rompa kröcka, iagh fruchtar för holger danske, han skal och alla försöcka.

Burmand waits outside the city And then his rump trumpets forth: ‘I am afraid of Holger Dansk, He shall come and try his luck with me.’

In the light of the Swedish multiforms, it is notable that Albertus Pictor painted Burmand not as a comical figure but as a monstrous one: note the shaggy fur, the cloven feet, the beaked nose and the pointed chin, and the fact that Burmand wields a crudelyfashioned club instead of a sword or another chivalric weapon: in contrast, the giant Goliath wears plate armor and fashionable shoes, and brandishes a mace. Burmand’s eyes are also exceptional in this mural. They are unusually well- defined, with arching eyebrows and bright, glowing whites. By comparison, the eyes of the other figures in vault IV are unremarkable. I would argue that the way Burmand’s eyes are depicted tells us a great deal about the status of the Holger Dansk story in Sweden around 1485. We recall that Karl Magnus Krønike says that Burmand ‘had yellow eyes like a cat, and could see better at night than during the day’. Although none of the surviving ballads make any mention of Burmand’s unusual eyes, Albertus obviously rendered the eyes with special care in his mural. Since the entire study of medieval iconography is predicated on the assumption that artists followed traditional themes (as they understood them) in their work, we must assume for Burmand’s case in vault IV that Albertus Pictor knew some other version of the story than that which is transmitted in the Danish and Swedish ballads — a version in which Burmand’s cat-like eyes are one of his defining characteristics. What, then, was Albertus Pictor’s source? It is highly unlikely that he ever came in contact with the Icelandic manuscripts of Karlamagnús saga in the younger B redaction, and even if he had, his comprehension of the Old Norse text would have been minimal. The ODan texts are likewise ineligible as sources, because the younger incunabula prints of Karl Magnus Krønike postdate the murals in Floda church while the oldest manuscript, which was copied in Børglum in 1480, remained there, either in the private library of Bishop Jakob Friis (d. 1486), whose escutcheon is found in the codex, or in the monastery library in the city.24 There is no evidence that this manuscript or its contents had any reception in Sweden. In fact, Albertus’ unique depiction of Burmand cannot be linked with any of the surviving sources in the Nordic tradition. And yet the bright-eyed Burmand remains. If we must identify a source for this, we might do well to consider some other

24

On the escutcheons in the Børglum miscellany, see Karl Magnus’ Krønike, ed. by Hjorth, pp. xx-xxiii.

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William Layher factors which may have shaped Burmand’s reception in Sweden in the late fifteenth century. Again our suspicions are drawn to the fabled “lost codex” of the OSw Karl Magnus. It is assumed that this manuscript travelled from Sweden to Denmark at some point before 1480, as it seems to have influenced the translation of the ODan Karl Magnus Krønike. If this Karl Magnus was indeed a longer and more complete redaction of Karlemagnús saga than the surviving copies, then it could be held responsible for more than just the “extra details” about the monstrous Burmand that appear in the 1480 Børglum manuscript of the Danish text; this OSw text — or some oral/traditional offshoot from it that reached Albertus Pictor’s ears (another ballad? recitation from manuscript? local legend?) — may also have influenced his artistic representation of the Burmand figure in Floda Church.25

Gazing at the ceiling Albertus drew much of the visual inspiration for his murals from scenes in the Biblia Pauperum, a Dutch book of woodcuts printed in the 1460s, and from other blockbooks and broadsides circulating in northern Germany and Sweden in the fifteenth century.26 This is not to say that Albertus’s sources have been identified in every case; indeed, the battle between Holger Dansk and Burmand appears to have no clear iconographic model, since the portrayal in vault IV fails to match up cleanly with any of the known sources. Some might argue that Albertus was working without a direct narrative source in this instance; it is conceivable that Albertus modelled his shaggy Burmand upon the ubiquitous latemedieval Wild Man figure, attested in southern Sweden in the Glimmigehus statue from the late fifteenth century. This is highly unlikely, however, because the Wild Man was commonly held to be a benevolent forest dweller, while Burmand’s malevolence is clearly apparent in the mural and is also fundamental to the story itself. If we want to analyse the Floda church murals in light of the Nordic ballads or other written sources, we would do well to tread carefully. According to recent scholarship on the dynamics of text and image in medieval vernacular culture, it is incorrect to regard images as subordinate to the written word — as ‘illustrations’ of a particular text version, as it were — since both image and text function as independent manifestations of ‘story’ in all of its variety.27 For far too long, the Holger Dansk murals have been misunderstood and mischaracterised as illustrations of the Nordic ballad texts we catalogue as Dg F 30 and SMB 216. Albertus did not paint a ballad scene; what he did was represent a climactic scene from the Holger Dansk story (as he knew it) in two adjacent frames in the ceiling of vault IV. 28

25

The “lost codex” is not entirely theoretical. In the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, the antiquarian Johannes Bureus (d. 1652) noted the existence of what appears to be a Karl Magnus manuscript in Söderala that is unknown to modern scholars and presumed lost; see Kornhall, Karl Magnus, p. ix. 26 Cornell and Wallin, Albertus Pictor, pp. 10-29. 27 See, for example, Rushing, James A., Images of Adventure. Yvain in the Visual Arts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) and the bibliography listed there. 28 Rushing’s distinction between ‘representative scenes’ and ‘narrative scenes’ is helpful for the present discussion of the visual evidence. Albertus’ murals are representative of the story of Holger Dansk because they do not

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The Singer and the Scribe One wonders, then, why these figures are painted there in the church. The eight warriors in the crown vault take pride of place, but other Biblical and religious figures are depicted in vault IV as well: Cain and Abel, St Olaf, St Antonius, the archangel Michael weighing the soul of a dead man, Moses and the Israelites, John the Baptist, and even a rendering of the Lord God.29 Occasional juxtapositions of secular and sacred iconography are not unknown in medieval Scandinavian churches,30 but an intermixing on this scale and with this degree of unity of theme is unusual. What possible message do the battles in vault IV articulate? Anna Nílsen suggests that the images of the Nordic heroes serve a didactic function, arguing that Albertus meant to accentuate the close relationship between the sacred and the secular worlds by drawing on literary and folkloric motifs common in the Nordic vernacular tradition. Thus in the same way that the Virgin Mary’s purity is represented metaphorically by images of a unicorn hunt in some fifteen churches in medieval Sweden, the three Nordic heroes in vault IV serve as correspondances (‘motsvarigheter’) to the avenging Christ who defeats the Devil. 31 Old Testament prefigurations of New Testament events were indeed commonplace in medieval representation, and it is not surprising to see David and Goliath appear within that context. But a similar type of ‘motsvarighet’ linking Christ with the other three Nordic heroes is difficult to articulate, especially in light of the character Didrik av Bern, who in the Nordic tradition was regarded as something of a dark figure and whose violent demise — being dragged off to Hell on a black horse at the conclusion of Thiðreks saga — complicates any direct correspondances between the brave heroes of vault IV and the miles Christi. It is more likely that the unifying theme of the four battles in the crown of vault IV derives less from Christological imagery than from the common topos of good triumphing over evil in single combat, with the paradigmatic battle between David and Goliath serving as the model followed by the other Nordic heroes and their battles. Moreover, each of the human heroes is shown defeating a non-human antagonist, for David kills the giant Goliath,32 Sven

tell the entire story, nor is there a succession if images which could convey a sense of ongoing narrative. See Rushing, Images of Adventure, p. 21. 29 These other murals in Floda church are discussed in detail in Bennett, Floda kyrka, pp. 60-79 (esp. pp. 75-6). 30 Consider, for example, twelfth-century baptismal fonts in Bohuslän and Jämtland that are carved with images of king Gunnar trapped in the snakepit (a story told in the Old Norse poem Atlakviða and elsewhere), or the thirteenth-century carvings in Norwegian stave churches that show Sigurd meeting Regin the Smith and killing the dragon Fafnir. I do not mean to claim an equivalence between those cases and the heroic murals in Floda church. In the former, the usual ornamentation that was common for baptismal fonts or church portals was altered in a subtle and unobtrusive way so as to include a small image from the vernacular tradition, while in the latter, the painted figures in vault IV stand at the crowning moment of a grand theological narrative, and their inclusion adds a disruptive, heteroglossic element to the divine message. 31 Nílsen, Anna, Program och funktion i senmedeltida kalkmåleri (Stockholm: Kungl. vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, 1986), pp. 444-45. 32 To the medieval mind, giants — even Biblical ones like Goliath — were not seen as equivalent to humans, as ‘men writ large’ so to speak; they were considered a different race of beings. Much has been written on the origins and anthropology of giants in the Middle Ages; see, for example, Friedman, John Block, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Williams, David, Deformed Discourse: the functions of the monster in mediaeval thought and literature (Montreal; Kingston:McGill - Queen’s UP, 1996).

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William Layher Fötling slays a troll and Holger Dansk dispatches the monstrous Burmand. Dietrich von Bern fights against another human warrior, Vitege Velandsson, but I feel this encounter is a special case.33 The explicit defeat of monstrosity, in my opinion, is a critical factor for this grouping in vault IV, for if the artist wanted merely to show the triumph of good over evil in a general sense, he could easily have found other famous confrontations from Biblical or other religious sources to illustrate that point. Thus I would justify my special focus on Burmand thus far by arguing that it is Goliath — not David — who serves as the leading figures in vault IV, and that Albertus selected three other recognisable and familiar scenes from Nordic folklore that articulated a similar message, viz. that brave but physically weaker human heroes can indeed triumph over monstrous villains. If today’s ballad scholars are at all familiar with the images in Floda church, this is because the text in the banderole underneath the figure of Holger Dansk has, ever since its ‘discovery’ by Sven Grundtvig almost 150 years ago,34 consistently been interpreted as a quotation from the ballad multiforms we know as DgF 30 and SMB 216 — and considering the scarcity of hard evidence supporting the existence of medieval Scandinavian ballads in the pre-manuscript era, this unique combination of text and image in vault IV of Floda church is considered an unimpeachable source of the first order. I do not wish to dispute the validity of the evidence in Floda church, but merely to suggest that the story Albertus knew — as we reconstruct it from the images he painted —differed in significant ways from the ballads which survive in the Danish and Swedish corpus. The hermeneutic circle that has uncritically linked Floda church with DgF 30 and SMB 216 has heretofore never been broken, let alone challenged; but this is a necessary step if we wish to inspire confidence amongst our colleagues that our reconstructions of the early days of the Scandinavian ballads are laid on solid foundations. Consider the following scenario: if the banderole underneath Holger Dansk had indicated only the name ‘hollager dansk’ and not the phrase hollager dansk han van seger af burmand, this entire discussion would have taken a different track. In this hypothetical case, the pictures of Holger Dansk and Burmand in Floda church, stripped of any overt connection to the extant ballad texts in the Danish and Swedish tradition, would not be taken as proof of the existance of a medieval Scandinavian ballad some hundred years before its oldest manuscript attestations, but rather as credible evidence for the reception of Karlamagnús saga in Sweden in the late fifteenth century. It is the text passage in the banderole — not the images themselves — that has steered the reception of the Floda church murals as illustrations of the surviving ballad texts rather than 33

Their battle is different from the others, for no injury is inflicted. While the Floda murals show that Burmand’s head is sliced off, Trullat’s head is knocked off and Goliath is struck in the head by a stone, Vitege only retreats from Dietrich — his shield at his back as if he were fleeing — as the furious Dietrich spouts fire from his mouth. Vitege is not explicitly referred to as a monstrous figure in Thiðreks saga or in its OSw analogue Didrikskrönikan (transl. ca 1450 in Stockholm), but he is the grandson of a giant and was possessed of an incredible strength and naive ruthlessness, and his actions show him to be a disreputable figure full of treachery. There are no extant Nordic ballads about this encounter. I intend to discuss the fire-breathing diderik van beran in another setting. 34 While Grundtvig was surely not the first antiquarian to take note of the curious murals in vault IV of Floda church — Peringskiöld’s Kyrkor i Södermanland (published in 1686) had an engraving of them — Grundtvig was the first to link them thematically to the ballad he classified as DgF 30. See, Danmarks gamle folkeviser, ed. by Grundtvig, II, 654. and the discussion in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 26 n. 58.

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The Singer and the Scribe as illustrations of the epic story as a whole. But regardless of how Holger Dansk and Burmand are viewed in vault IV, the visual evidence in Floda church ultimately points in the same direction: that Albertus Pictor knew a variant of the Holger Dansk story that is otherwise unattested in Sweden in the 1480s. The vehicle which brought that story to Albertus’ ears — perhaps a ballad, an episode from a prose epic, an oral recitation from manuscript sources —is, however, unknown. In closing let us recall Christiern Pedersen’s remark from 1534 about the popularity of the old kempe vise. This likely held true some fifty years earlier as well, even in the Swedish provinces where Albertus did his painting: that the common man knows little about Holger Dansk ‘other than that he was a Danish hero who won the victory over Burmand, as the old kempe vise says: Olger Dansk he won the victory over Burmand’. It is indisputable that the Floda murals have a connection to the Nordic ballad tradition, for a ballad with that same refrain was obviously in circulation in Sweden by the end of the fifteenth century. But based on the above analysis of the iconography and history of the Burmand figure, we should no longer assume that the surviving ballad multiforms — which were copied some hundred years after Floda church was painted — are the same multiforms that were ringing in Albertus Pictor’s ears in 1485. It was our preconceptions that led us to believe that Albertus Pictor painted a scene from the ballad here — for looking up at the ceiling of vault IV, that is all that we were prepared to see.

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William Layher

Fig.1

(Published by permission of the ATA, Office of National Antiquities, Stockholm)

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The Suppression of a Ballad Culture: the enigma of medieval France

Philip E. Bennett Peter Haidu begins his book The Question of Violence, which deals with the relationship of epic poetry (and by further implication epic-heroic activity) to medieval France as an evolving state, with a consideration of the ways in which certain forms of modern, and modernist, critical discourse do violence to and seek to suppress the medieval literary artefact.1 What Haidu has postulated as a fate for medieval epic can equally be applied to the ballad in medieval French culture. I wish to consider the problem from two angles: initially looking at the treatment of ballads, as a manifestation of ‘folksong’, in recent books published in France on the subject of ‘popular’ literature, then considering the ways in which ‘literate culture’ in medieval France (which I will take to cover the twelfth to fifteenth centuries), adapts, subverts and suppresses ballad culture. I will close by analysing briefly one or two poems, which, in any cultural context other than that of France, would, I contend, be considered ballads. Part of the enigma of the position of France, which sat more or less at the centre of a large number of cultural developments in the Middle Ages, consists in the paradox that, while not apparently developing a ballad culture of its own, it furnished ample material from epic and romance to neighbouring cultures, which they absorbed to nourish their own ballad traditions. Two very obvious cases involve Iberia (which developed topics and incidents from both Charlemagne and Arthurian stories into ballads) and Scandinavia (where ballads are produced alongside prose saga adaptations of the same material). 2 Colin Smith, in the very detailed introduction to his edition of a selection of Spanish ballads, makes a couple of points about this transfer, and about the evolution of ballads in general, which will be germane to the rest of my argument.3 Firstly (p. 5), he invokes the conservatism of Spanish society and its culture, which permits the preservation of ‘popular’ medieval cultural and artistic forms long after they had been superseded in the rest of Europe by ‘learned’ cultural artefacts, drawn from the Greco-Roman classical tradition. Secondly (pp. 13-16), he points out that there is no manuscript evidence for the existence of ballads, including the Charlemagne-based or the Arthurian-based ballads, before the fourteenth century, from which he argues that the preservation of this material in ballad form is a mark of changing tastes in educated court and bourgeois society, leading to the emergence of these scattered shards of medieval culture in ‘popular’ traditions.4 Now there

1

Haidu, Peter, The Subject of Violence: the Song of Roland and the Birth of the State (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 1-16. 2 See, in this volume, contributions by Manuel da Costa Fontes and William Layher. 3 Spanish Ballads, ed. by Colin Smith (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1964), pp. 5-25. 4 Smith’s point raises as ever the question of defining the ‘Middle Ages’ and the temporal borders by which they merge into the ‘Renaissance’ or the ‘Early Modern’ period. For the purposes of this paper the Middle Ages in

The Singer and the Scribe is a certain paradoxical incompatibility between these two positions, but taken together they do highlight the principal problem in addressing the existence of ballads in medieval France: tensions between popular and high culture, between the ‘people’ and the ‘aristocracy’. The fact that much the same material passes from France, through Plantagenet England and possibly Scotland to Scandinavia, where it survives in ballads in Faroese to the present day,5 emphasises this paradox even more, since, at the period of transmission of the bulk of the material, southern European distinctions between the aristocracy and a wider community of ‘warrior-farmers’, traders and sailors were either blurred or inoperative in the North.6 One cannot therefore say, for Scandinavian examples, that the ballads which survive alongside versions recorded in the Karlamagnús saga or the riddere sögur represent a class-based dichotomy, even if a clerical-literate — oral-lay opposition is implied. In assessments by French scholars of their own native traditions the two concepts (of class and literacy) have become rather overlaid, and the whole question of the production of a ballad literature so embroiled in the traditionalist — individualist debate on the origins and composition of the epic that by a strict application of Cartesian logic they have been driven to all but deny the existence of ballads in early French traditions.7 Indeed most critics go so far as to deny the existence of popular tradition in France at almost any period. I shall return to this point more fully in a moment, for now suffice it to say that the adjective most regularly used to qualify ‘non-courtly’ medieval texts is popularisant, a word which is difficult to translate with simple precision, but which may best be seen to imply ‘works with a popular colouring’.

France will be held to include the fifteenth century, with the Renaissance / Early Modern beginning arbitrarily in 1500. 5 Skårup, Povl, ‘La matière de France dans les pays du Nord’, in Charlemagne in the North , Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference of the Société Rencesvals, Edinburgh 4th -11th August 1991, ed. by Philip E. Bennett, Anne Elizabeth Cobby and Graham A. Runnalls (Edinburgh: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 1993), pp. 5-20 (esp. pp. 5-6). The role of manuscripts prepared in England in the transmission of this material to Scandinavia has been explored by André de Mandach, Naissance et développement de la chanson de geste en Europe, IV Chanson d’Aspremont B-C la guerre contre Agolant, Publications Romanes et Françaises, 156 (Geneva: Droz, 1980), pp. 45 -52. For a more nuanced discussion of the routes of transmission of ‘French’ culture, suggesting variable routes including Germany, the Low Countries and England according to period and material transmitted to Scandinavia see Lönnroth, Lars, ‘Charlemagne, Hrolf Kraki, Olaf Tryggvason: parallels in the heroic tradition’, in Les Relations littéraires franco-scandinaves au moyen âge (Actes du Colloque de Liège, avril 1972), Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Université de Liège, 208 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1975), pp. 29-52, and Foote, Peter, ‘Aachen, Lund, Hólar’, in Idem , pp. 53 -76. 6 Foote, Peter and David Wilson, The Viking Achievement (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970), pp. 4; 79-80. 7 Spanish Ballads, ed. by Smith, pp. 9 and 12; for a concise but perspicuous account of the (neo-) traditionalist – individualist debate see La Chanson de Roland, Frederick Whitehead’s Text with Notes and Introduction by T.D. Hemming (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), pp. xviii -xxv. A notable exception is Davenson, Henri (Henri-Irénée Marrou), Le Livre des chansons, introduction à la chanson populaire française, Les Cahiers du Rhône (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1944; repr n.p. [Paris]: Club des Libraires de France, 1958), pp. 62-67, who indicates that themes, poetics, onomastics and musical structures of French folksongs, including ballads, can all be traced back to the Middle Ages, although he agrees with most other scholars in seeing the essential period of production of existing songs as being between 1500 and 1800 (pp. 60- 62).

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Philip E. Bennett One other problem confronting those who would study French ballad traditions must be mentioned before I proceed to the real heart of this paper. This is a problem of vocabulary, because French has no word which unequivocally covers the concept represented by English ‘ballad’ or Spanish ‘romance’. Since the native French word ‘ballade’ (which has been borrowed into English) was specialised in the sense of a courtly lyric with refrain, the French borrowed the Spanish word, pronouncing it in their own way as [romãs]. Even in the earliest period of its use (it entered the language in 1719) it did not have the same clear focus on a narrative poetic text showing Albert B. Friedman’s three essential characteristics of ballads (focus on an incident, dramatic presentation of event and impersonality)8 as either the English or Spanish equivalents. Although Marmontel, writing in the Encyclopédie at the end of the eighteenth century, offers analyses of many medieval lyrico-narrative poems, particularly chansons de toile, and stresses the importance of the heroic in the subject matter of the early romance, for him the essence of the French romance is already that of the slight and sentimental love lyric. 9 This attitude becomes so entrenched by the late nineteenth century, despite the use of the word Romancero by Paulin Paris and Prosper Tarbé or of Romances and its Germanised equivalent Romanzen by Karl Bartsch in the titles of their anthologies of medieval French poetry,10 that any reference to narrative poetry of what we would term a ‘ballad type’ is missing from discussions of the word. It has become no mo re than a sentimentally moving song of a popular disposition. This absence or dissolution of a clearly specialised lemma to cover the concept /ballad/ has re-inforced, and given comfort to, the individualist tendency to deny the existence of the literary form itself. 11 Thus in his recent book, Le Moyen Age et ses chansons (with its telling subtitle ‘ou un passé en trompe-l’œil’), Michel Zink equates the romance with the whole broad range of ‘folksong’, which he is at pains to discredit as a notion, largely on the grounds of the ambiguous use of Volk (‘people’) by writers of the Romantic-Traditionalist School to mean

8

Friedman, Albert B., ‘Ballad’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Alex Preminger (Princeton: Princeton University Press, enlarged ed. 1974), pp. 62- 64. 9 His attitude is best summed up in the article ‘Chanson’, republished in the Eléments de littérature: Nous avons aussi des chansons plaintives sur des sujets attendrissants; celles-ci s’appellent romances; c’est communément le récit de quelque aventure amoureuse; leur caractère est la naïveté; tout y doit être en sentiment. [We have melancoly songs on themes which move to tears; they are called romances, which habitually tell the tale of some amorous adventure; they are characterised by their simplicity and their sentimentality.] Œuvres complètes de Marmontel, 18 vols (Paris: Verdière, 1818-19), Vol 12 (Eléments de littérature, 1), p. 444. 10 Le Romancero françois: histoire de quelques anciens trouvères et choix de leurs chansons, ed. by Paulin Paris (Paris: Techener, 1833); Romancero de Champagne, ed. by Prosper Tarbé (Reims: P. Dubois, 1863-1864; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1980); Romances et pastourelles françaises des XII e et XIIIe siècles [Altfranzösische Romanzen und Pastourellen der 12. und 13. Jahrhundert], ed. by Karl Bartsch (Leipzig: Vogel, 1870). 11 Davenson, Le Livre des chansons, uses the term complainte to refer to the sub-type of chanson populaire otherwise known to French folklorists as ‘chansons épico-narratives’. His reason for this choice of label is that he considers the French approach to ‘ballads’ as reducing the narrative element in favour of an introspective meditation on the tragic dimensions of the narrative.

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The Singer and the Scribe both ethnic group and social class.12 His strictly individualist position leads him to argue that the fragmentary evocations of ‘folk tradition’ which he finds in a number of literary texts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries are precisely exercises in false nostalgia, whose purpose within the works in which he finds them is to define a lost Golden Age of ‘popular’ culture, before the Fall, characterised by the author’s present within the sophisticated culture of court or town. Zink is able to make a case for the inevitably fragmentary nature of these evocations of what he paints as an illusory past on two counts. In the first place he cites the use within a number of thirteenth-century romances of quoted extracts from songs, which provide a thematic ‘paratext’ for the romance in question. Among these are the much discussed fragments included in Guillaume de Dole by Jean Renart of chansons de toile (narrative songs, usually on a love theme, with a female protagonist and sometimes narrator-persona, both or either of whom may be portrayed as weaving or spinning while executing, or participating in the action of the song in question).13 Now this type of song does seem to offer one sort of camouflage for the ballad in the French tradition, and is indeed held most regularly to be the original of the French romance.14 It is under that designation that Léon Clédat includes in his Chrestomathie du Moyen Age the song Bele Doette (the story of a young woman who takes the veil when the knight variously described as her lover — ami — and her husband — sire — is killed in a tournament). 15 Pierre Bec actually goes even further in his study of the early medieval lyric in France and restricts the genres popularisants to women’s songs of this sort, which he equates with the Spanish cantigas d’amigo.16

12

Zink, Michel, Le Moyen Age et ses chansons ou un passé en trompe-l’œil (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1996), pp. 25-30, where both Herder in Germany and Gaston Paris in France are criticised for ‘confusing’ the genius of a people with the spontaneous outpourings of the people, and pp. 113-17, where medievalists and folklorists are accused of shifting between the ethnological and sociological usages of the word depending on whether they are producing a diachronic or a synchronic study. 13 Zink, Le Moyen Age et ses chansons, pp. 148-60; the notion that the folklorist, like the anthropologist or ethnologist, always arrives ‘just too late’ so that all that is available is the fragmentary wreckage of a myth, a song or a ritual rescued fortuitously from oblivion, is dealt with on pp. 37- 44. He also embraces Davenson in what he sees as a generally Romanticist view of the creative powers of the folk, pointing out that Davenson too refers to the fragmentary and disjointed nature of surviving texts (p. 180). In fairness it should be pointed out that at the place cited by Zink (Le Livre des chansons, p. 16) Davenson is evoking the psychology of the reception of folksong in mid twentieth-century France. He makes his own critique of the RomanticTraditionalist school, in terms not dissimilar to those of Zink, on pp. 22-32 and gives a much more subtle account of the interactions of popular and ‘élite’ poets in the production of folksong in France from the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century on pp. 42-47. 14 The chanson de toile or d’histoire has also been considered as the ‘source’ of the English and Scots ballad. See Howard S. Jordan, ‘The Old French Chanson d’histoire as a Possible Origin of the English Popular Ballad’, Revue de Littérature Comparée, 16 (1936), 367-78. See also below, n. 22. 15 Clédat, L., Chrestomathie du Moyen Age, ou morceaux choisis des auteurs français du moyen âge (Paris: Garnier, 12th ed. 1932), pp. 328-30. 16 Bec, Pierre, Nouvelle anthologie de la lyrique occitane du moyen âge (n. p. [Avignon]: Aubanel, 1970), p. 70 with examples pp. 149-67; idem, La Lyrique française au moyen âge (XIIe – XIIIe siècles), contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques médiévaux, 2 vols (Paris: Picard, 1977), I, 29-30 and 33-35. In the second work

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Philip E. Bennett It is thus by a quirk of literary self-referentiality within a specific mode of thirteenthcentury narrative that Zink is able to make his case for popular culture (including ballad culture) belonging to a time and place that are no more.17 Fragments of several chansons de toile are in fact inserted many times in Guillaume de Dole, including the occasion on which the mother of the heroine, in her rural castle far from the corruptions of the Imperial court, introduces three quoted fragments with a reference to how women used to sing such songs in days gone by.18 By a sleight of hand what starts as an aesthetic effect within a work of fiction becomes for Zink, in this work, a statement of sociological reality in the extratextual world, although he avoids such unwarranted extrapolations in an earlier study.19 Moreover, in keeping with the violence I see as being visited on this type of text, Zink portrays the singing of Bele Aiglentine en roial chamberine20 by a group of young knights heading for a tournament as a salacious parody of the chanson de toile and the ‘lost’ conservative way of life it is held to represent. A contrast is established between the use of fragments of song to evoke the ‘Never-Never Land’ of the women and their ‘folksongs’, which operate reciprocally by mise en abyme to generate a world existing only in nostalgic memory, and the singing in extenso of Bele Aiglentine to produce a comic deconstruction of that world. There is, however, nothing in the narrative line of Bele Aiglentine (the story of a young noblewoman whose pregnancy is discovered by her mother and who then gets to marry the handsome knight with whom she is in love) to suggest more than a degree of fantasising and wish-fulfilment on the part of the ‘bacheler de Normendie’ who sings it.21 Moreover, the contrast Zink establishes between the fragmentary singing of songs by Lïenor and her mother and the singing of a whole song by the ‘bacheler de Normendie’ is,

Bec introduces the extra idea of ‘genres folklorisants’, which are a sub-set of the ‘genres popularisants’; the ‘sujet lyrique’ — we might say persona — of these poems is still a woman according to Bec. In no case does this imply that the author (where one is known) will be female, indeed most of the examples given in the Nouvelle anthologie are by identified male poets, who also compose courtly lyrics. 17 Zink, Le Moyen Age et ses chansons, pp. 158-60. 18 Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. by Rita Lejeune (Paris: Droz, 1936) ll. 1145-92. All quotations are from this edition. 19 Zink, Michel, Belle, essai sur les chansons de toile suivi d’une édition et d’une traduction (Paris: Champion, 1978), pp. 3 -11. In this work Zink is clear that the effect of mise en abyme established by Jean Renart operates in such a way that the only extra- textual world for the chansons de toile being performed is that of the romance of Guillaume de Dole itself. 20 Guillaume de Dole, ll. 2235 -94. 21 Whether or not the fact that the bacheler is from Normandy in this romance written by an Easterner for a patron from Eastern France is of any significance, the fact that he is a landless young knight presumably in quest of an heiress undoubtedly is. The model of this type of knight in the late twelfth century is Guillaume le Maréchal, who, after a career of some twenty years serving Henry II and his sons Henry Court Mantel and Richard the Lionheart, was rewarded aged forty with the hand of the sixteen year-old heiress to t he county of Pembroke. On his career see Duby, Georges, Guillaume le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris: Fayard, 1984). For an interpretation of the singing of Bele Aiglentine similar to mine, and which also notes the similarity of structuree between this French chanson de toile and English ballads see Page, Christopher, Voices and Instruments in the Middle Ages: instrumental practice and songs in France 1100-1300 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 35-37, where Page draws attention to the folkloric and proverbial discourse of the Aiglentine text and its incremental narrative structure.

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The Singer and the Scribe unfortunately, misleading, since at the end of the romance another male character, the nephew of the bishop of Liège, who is clearly part of the same ‘modern’ world as the young knights attending the tournament at Saint-Trond, also sings a fragment of a chanson de toile, ‘Or vienent Pasques, les beles, en avril’, whose heroine is la bele Aigline.22 In this perspective we must also consider the interesting problem of the singing in the romance of multiple versions of Main se leva bele Aaliz, including three which are sung on a picnic where young men get to fondle the thighs of young women who offer them their chemises as towels to dry their hands after washing before the meal. 23 Now this might be held simply to re-inforce the contrast between the immoral modernity of the court and the respectable conservatism of the provincial castle if the judgement of most recent critics is accepted, that the Bele Aaliz texts presented here are not fragments of something longer but complete rondets de carole (dance-songs with close generic links to what will, by the end of the thirteenth century, become one of the main types of ‘fixed form’ courtly lyric: the rondeau).24 However, Maurice Delbouille considered the rondet de carole at least as oldfashioned as the chanson de toile in Jean Renart’s day,25 which nullifies the argument from nostalgia. Nor has anyone actually responded to, let alone refuted Pierre Le Gentil’s observation that to reduce the texts presented in Guillaume de Dole to regular rondets requires considerable surgery.26 To take just the first example from Jean Renart’s romance: Main se leva bele Aeliz — Mignotement la voi venir —

22

Guillaume de Dole, ll. 5188-207. There is some dispute among specialists about the generic affinities of this fragment, although the latest editor of the poem, Félix Lecoy, does identify it as a chanson de toile, Jean Renart, Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole, ed. by Félix Lecoy, Classiques Français du Moyen Age, 91 (Paris: Champion, 1962), p. xxv. Lecoy, loc. cit., also explicitly identifies the chanson de toile and the romance. 23 Guillaume de Dole, ll. 259-556. 24 Bec, La Lyrique française au moyen âge, I, 223-24; II, 150-55.; Guillaume de Dole, ed. by Lecoy, pp. xxvi-xxix. The identification of the Bele Aaliz poems as dance-songs may not be totally irrelevant, however: Jordan, ‘The Old French Chansons d’histoire’, p. 372, follows W.P. Ker in deriving ballads from dance-songs. This connection is certainly alive in Faroese ballads, which, even when derived from Old French epic material, are performed in the manner of the Old French caroles with a lead singer singing the stanza, the company singing the refrain and dancing in line or in a round. In this manner, on the basis of a singing by Bárður Jákupsson specially recorded for the event, the Faroese ballad ‘Runsivalstriðið’ was performed at the twelfth international congress of the Société Rencesvals held in Edinburgh in 1991. 25 Delbouille, Maurice, ‘Sur les traces de “Bele Aëlis”’, in Mélanges de philologie romane dédiés à la mémoire de Jean Boutière (1899-1967) ed. by Irénée Cluzel and François Pirot, 2 vols (Liège: Soledi, 1971), I, 199-218 (esp. p. 216). 26 Le Gentil, Pierre, ‘A propos de Guillaume de Dole’, in Mélanges de linguistique romane et de philologie médiévale offerts à M. Maurice Delbouille, tome 2, Philologie médiévale, ed. by Jean Renson (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1964), pp. 381-97 (esp. pp. 390-92). See also van der Werf, Hendrik, ‘Jean Renart and Medieval Song’, in Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: essays on Guillaume de Dole, ed. by Nancy Vine Durling (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 168-69, where he too comments on the mis-match between what we find in Jean Renart’s manuscript and the versions of the poems published by Friedrich Gennrich, although with no reference to the earlier work by Le Gentil. None the less, van der Werf still discusses all these songs from Guillaume de Dole as ‘rondeaux’.

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Philip E. Bennett Biau se para, miex se vesti Desoz le raim. — Mignotement la voi venir, Cele que j’aim! — [Fair Aeliz rose early — I see her coming daintily towards me — she made herself beautiful, dressed herself 27 more finely under the branch. — I see her coming daintily towards me, the one I love!]

We can see that the poem, if complete, does not offer the habitual rhyme scheme of the rondet or rondeau of ABabAaAB (where capital letters indicate the refrain) but a monoassonanced sequence of three lines with a self-rhyme in –ir provided by the repeated refrain and a rhyme in –ain provided by a stanza line and a refrain line. While, on the one hand, Maurice Delbouille noted this feature of the Bele Aaliz poems but offered no comment on it,28 Pierre Le Gentil for his part observed that the underlying structure of these stanzas is that of the strophe de romance (the French equivalent of a ballad stanza) and concluded that the fragments quoted in Guillaume de Dole represent the disiecta membra of one or more romances with Aaliz as heroine.29 Equally interesting is the fact that the variants offered of Bele Aaliz suggest a lively and creative oral tradition capable of generating what amounts to a singing competition among the picnickers: the reason each of these singings is fragmentary is that, as the narrator indicates, people keep interrupting each other with their own versions of the song.30 This feeling that Jean Renart is not consigning such traditions to an improbable and unfashionable past arises also from the evident relationship between one of the songs sung by the hero’s sister, La bele Doe siet au vent; Souz l’aubespin Doon atent. Plaint et regrete tant forment Por son ami qui si vient lent: — «Diex! quel vassal a en Doon!, Diex! quel vassal!, Diex! quel baron!

27

Guillaume de Dole, ll. 310-15; all translations appended to quotations in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated. The lines in italics indicate the supposed refrain of the rondet, although they might be just a quoted refrain from another song, unless it is the Bele Aaliz text that is quoted and the refrain original. 28 Delbouille, ‘Sur les traces de “Bele Aëlis”‘, pp. 211-12. 29 Le Gentil, ‘A propos de Guillaume de Dole’, pp. 393-95. A similar mono-assonanced stanza, though this time with no indication of a refrain, is offered by the fragment ‘De Renaut de Mousson’ (Guillaume de Dole, ll. 2397- 403); Lecoy, Guillaume de Dole, p. xxvi, considers this to be a ‘chanson historique, une chanson d’éloge en tout cas’, opining that this is an otherwise unknown genre in French poetry. 30 This also happens with the bishop of Liège’s nephew, whose song is cut short by another character coming in with a version in French translation of two stanzas of ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’ by Bernart de Ventadorn (Guillaume de Dole, ll. 5208-27). For another interpretation of the scene in which multiple versions of ‘Bele Aaliz’ are sung see van der Werf, ‘Jean Renart and Medieval Song’, p. 172 where the suggestion is made that what we are witnessing is a form of ‘parlor game’ in which participants have to improvise a complete short song on a refrain cité. This could bring us back to the idea of the pre-existing complete song, whose narrative scheme would provide a basis for the improvisation of the participants in the game.

111

The Singer and the Scribe Ja n’amerai se Doon non.» [Beautiful Doe sits in the wind; under the hawthorn she waits for Doon. She complains and laments intensely on account of her lover who is so slow to come to her: ‘God, what a fine fighter is Doon! God, what a fighter! 31 God, what a brave man! I’ll never love anyone but Doon.’]

and that published by Clédat: Bele Doette as fenestres se siet, Lit en un livre, mais au cuer ne l’en tient: De son ami Doon li ressovient, Qu’en autres terres est alez tornoier. E or en ai dol. [Beautiful Doette sits in a high chamber, she reads a book but can’t concentrate on it: sh e remembers her lover 32 Doon because he has gone to fight in tournaments in other lands. Oh, what grief is mine.]

In some ways the Guillaume de Dole version could indeed be held more archaising (the evocation of Doon owes more to epic than to romance traditions; the allusion to the hawthorn appears as a folklore reference) while Clédat’s text seems more modern (the heroine is not doing needlework but reading a book seated in the airy solar of her castle). However, the dramatic intensity of Lïenor’s singing has nothing to do with a vapid evocation of the ‘good old days’: it is a reflection of the single-minded purposefulness of a heroine who will take her reputation in her own hands when she goes to court to clear her name of a scurrilous slander and win the man she loves. That Jean Renart has Lïenor sing only a fragment is important, because the intertextual references set up by the suppressed ending (which we must assume to follow the established theme as recorded in the Clédat edition and have the bereft heroine retreat to a convent) call precisely on the audience’s knowledge of a tradition to measure the conventional passivity of the heroine of the romance against the very unconventional activity of the heroine of the romance. The second type of poem which Zink is able to cite as a model of inherited folk tradition as a shattered mirror is the kind of lyric poem, current again in the thirteenth century, known in French as a chanson avec des refrains. This sort of poem may be of a purely courtly nature (as in ‘Chançon ferai, que talenz m’en est pris’ by Thibaut de Champagne), 33 offer a mixed register, with a courtly theme wedded to a narrative structure borrowed from the pastourelle (as in ‘Avant ier me chevauchoie’ possibly by Thibaut de Blaison)34 or purely in the pastourelle or bergerie tradition (as in ‘El mois de mai par un matin’ by Jehan Erart). 35 The defining characteristic of the type is the insertion of a different refrain at the end of each stanza of the poem. The generally held view is that these refrains are borrowed

31 32 33

34

35

Guillaume de Dole, ll. 1203-16. Clédat, Chrestomathie, p. 328. Les Chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, roi de Navarre, ed. by A. Wallensköld, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 69 (Paris: anc. Edouard Champion, 1925), pp. 76-82. Les Poésies de Thibaut de Blaison, ed. by Terence H. Newcombe, Textes Littéraires Français, 253 (Geneva: Droz, 1978), pp. 122-24. Les Poésies du trouvère Jehan Erart, ed. by Terence Newcombe, Textes Littéraires Français, 192 (Geneva: Droz; Paris: Minard, 1972), pp. 72-78.

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Philip E. Bennett from pre-existing songs in a popular mode, although it is not inconceivable that on occasions the poets invented refrains to adorn their poems. This example from Jehan Erart gives an indication of how ‘ballad-like’ the type can be, fulfilling all of Friedman’s criteria except that of the anonymity of its author. It also differs from most ballads by the complexity of its verse form: El mois de mai par un matin S’est Marïon levee; En un boschet lez un jardin S’en est la bele entree. Dui vallet, Guiot et Robin, Qui lonc tens l’ont amee, Pour li voër delez le bois Alerent a celee.

4

8

Et Marïon qui s’esjoï A Robin perceü, Si dist ceste chançonete: «Nus ne doit lez le bois aler Sanz sa conpaignete.»

12

Robin et Guiot ont oï Le son de la brunete. Cil qui plus a le cuer joli Fet melz la paëlete. Guiot mult tres grant joie ot Quant ot la chançonete; Pour Marïon sailli en piez, S’atempre sa musete.

16

20

Robin mult tres bien oï l’ot, Au plus tost que il onques pot A dit en sa frestele: «Deus! quel amer, Harou! quel jouer Fet a la pastorele!»

24

Guiot a mult bien entendu

28

Ce que Robins frestele, Si tres grant duel en a eü A pou qu’il ne chancele. Mes li cuers li est revenu Pour l’amor de la bele; Sa musele il a reposté S’escorce sa cotele.

32

Un petitet ala avant

36

Delez Marïon maintenant, Si li a dit tout en esmai:

113

The Singer and the Scribe «Hé, Marionnete! Tant amee t’ai!»

40

Marïon vit Guiot venir — S’est autre part tornee, Et quant Guiot la vit guenchir, Si li dist sa pensee: «Marïon mains fez a prisier Que fame qui soit nee, Quant pour Robinet ce bergier Es si asseüree.»

44

48

Quant Marïon s’oï blasmer, Li cuers li conmence a trenbler, Si li a dit sanz nul deport: «Sire vallet, vos avez tort Qui esveilliez le chien qui dort.» Quant Guiot vit que Marïon Fesoit si male chiere, Avant sacha son chaperon, Si s’est tornez arriere. Robin qui s’estoit enbuschiez Souz une chasteigniere, Pour Marïon sailli en piez Si a fet chapiau d’ierre.

52

56

60

Marïon contre lui ala, Et Robin deus foiz la besa, Puis li a dit: «Suer Marïon, Vous avez mon cuer Et j’ai vostre amor en ma prison.»

64

[One morning in May Marion arose; the beauty went into a grove beside a garden. Two lads, Guiot and Robin, who have loved her for a long time went secretly to the edge of the wood to see her. And with joy Marion spotted Robin and sang this little song: ‘No one should go to the edge of the wood without his girl friend.’ Robin and Guiot heard the tune the brown-haired girl was singing. The one with the merriest heart had the best time. Guiot was overjoyed when he heard the song; on account of Marion he jumped to his feet and tuned his bagpipe. Robin heard it well enough and as quickly as he could played on his pipe ‘God! what love, Halloo! what sport the shepherdess has set up!’ Guiot clearly understood what Robin was piping, he was so struck with grief he nearly fell down, but heart came back to him for love of the beauty; he put his bagpipe aside and hitched up his tunic. He advanced at once a bit towards Marion and said to her with great emotion: ‘Hey, Marionnete, how much have I loved you!’ Marion saw Guiot coming and turned to one side, and when Guiot saw her swerve he said what was on his mind: ‘Marion, you are the least worthy of any woman alive, when on account of Robinet, that shepherd, you show such resolve.’ When Marion heard herself criticised her heart began to beat fast and she said without any jesting: ‘Sir boy, you are wrong to wake a sleeping dog.’

114

Philip E. Bennett When Guiot saw how Marion was scowling he pulled his hood over his face and turned tail. Robin, who was lying in wait under a clump of chestnut trees, leapt to his feet on account of Marion and made a chaplet of ivy. Marion went up to him and Robin kissed her twice, then said: ‘Dear Marion, You have m y heart, and I have your love as my prisoner.’]

Now Zink is right that this poem from the literate tradition is giving us glimpses only of what purports to be popular, oral tradition, although nothing here indicates that a lost culture is being evoked. What is perhaps most perplexing with the whole set of chansons avec des refrains is that none of the refrains used, although they are re-used by more than one poet, can actually be attached to a song outside the set. They are, in fact, refrains that are known to be refrains, and nothing more.36 It is impossible to trace a verifiable tradition of oral poetry, whether in ballad form or not, behind them. Even worse, the last pair of lines used by Erart, and identified as a quoted refrain by the editor, do not have the air of being a refrain at all: they could be the incipit, or any other pair of lines, taken not from a ‘folk’ song but from a courtly song. However, if we look more closely at what Erart is doing in this poem, we see that the whole tenor of it is one of parody of neo-epic activity, and neo-epic composition. The use of formulaic language, including textual repetitions within the poem, the insistent use of the simple temporal link quant [‘when’] to articulate an otherwise disjointed, paratactic narrative line, the use of dialogue and quoted song to advance the plot all move us back into the universe of the ballad in its heroic neo-epic manifestation, but in a burlesque register. While this poem is not a ballad in the habitual sense of the term, we are fa r from the evocation of the fragmented and lost tradition referred to by Zink. It actually presupposes a current and active tradition against which the audience can measure Erart’s performance, without which much of the humour would be lost. The other bone of contention among French scholars, which has considerable ramifications for the perception of the place of the ballad in medieval culture, concerns the existence — or as most individualist critics would put it — the non-existence of those short songs — cantilenæ — which traditionalist and neo-traditionalist critics see at the root of epic poetry. The impression given in statements of theoretical position by individualists is that Gaston Paris, who was the main advocate at the end of the nineteenth century of the role of cantilenæ in generating the versions of epics surviving in manuscripts, was simply inventing concepts ex nihilo.37 The argument broadly runs that, since no examples of such songs exist in manuscript form today, they can never have existed. The witness of writers such as William of Malmesbury, who refers to the cantilena Rollandi sung at the Battle of Hastings, and Ordericus Vitalis who refers to cantilenæ sung vulgo (‘by the people’) on the subject of Guillaume d’Orange, is either dismissed, or interpreted in a tendentious way, which takes cantilena in its strictly Classical sense to mean ‘trivial song’ rather than ‘short 36

37

On the question of whether early refrains used in the Old French chanson avec des refrains genuinely derive from otherwise lost traditional songs and on the propensity of poets to invent refrains to fit their own poems see Zumthor, Paul, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans by Philip E. Bennett (Minneapolis; Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 195- 96. A typical example is the dismissive statement by Timothy Hemming that ‘Gaston Paris […] lent a certain intellectual reinforcement to this charming fantasy [that epic poems found their ultimate origins in laments and eulogies sung immediately after the events celebrated]’, La Chanson de Roland, ed. cit., pp. xviii-xix.

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The Singer and the Scribe song’ and vulgo to mean ‘in the vernacular’, the two words being treated as forming a pleonastic doublet implying that the songs referred to were of the same approximate length and shape as those surviving in literary form, but were denigrated by clerical writers as not belonging to Latin culture. Two points need to be made here: firstly, that there is no doubt that for Gaston Paris and the (neo-) traditionalist school the songs referred to by medieval writers as cantilenæ are short poems; secondly (and as a form of corroboration of that) longer poems related to epic material are designated not cantilena but carmen in twelfthcentury sources, as we see from the Carmen de prodicione Guenonis, a Latin treatment of the core material of La Chanson de Roland,38 and the Carmen de Hastingæ Prœlio, an account of the Norman conquest of England drawing on both Classical and contemporary vernacular epic modes of composition.39 Also, in terms of medieval witness, we should not assume that when Wace portrays the jongleur-knight Taillefer singing about ‘Charlemagne, Roland, Oliver and the vassals who died at Roncevaux’ before Duke William at Hastings40 he is singing anything approaching the Chanson de Roland as we have it, even in the Oxford manuscript. It has, as a point of comparison, been calculated for Greek epic texts and romances that at a standard rate of recitation it takes about three hours to ‘chant’ 1500 lines of text.41 This is clearly incompatible with the scenario implied by Wace, and stated explicitly by William of Malmesbury that Tunc cantilena Rollandi inchoata, ut martium uiri exemplum pugnaturos accenderet, inclamatoque Dei auxilio, prelium consertum, bellatumque acriter, neutris in multam diei horam cedentibus. [Then they struck up the song of Roland (cantilena Rollandi), to fire them as they went into battle with the example of a heroic warrior, and calling on God’s help (shouting the warcry of the Normans), came to grips 42 and fought furiously, neither side giving way till a late hour.]

The brevity (or incomplete nature) of the song implied in cantilena, coupled with the shouting of the Norman war cry (“Dieus aïe!”) at the mo ment when battle is to be joined led Du Cange to identify the cantilena itself as a ‘clamor militaris’, 43 and definitely orients us towards the sort of ‘epic fragment’ which, if self-contained, becomes virtually indistinguishable from a ballad. However, that such ‘proto-epics’ should be considered also to be ‘proto-ballads’ is itself a matter of controversy. Gordon Hall Gerould and Albert B. Friedman (who also quotes the opinions of both Gerould and W.P. Ker) refuse to make the

38

39

40

41 42

43

Carmen de prodicione Guenonis in Les textes de la Chanson de Roland ed. by Raoul Mortier, 10 vols (Paris: La Geste Francor, vol. 3, 1941), pp. 105-17. The Carmen de Hastingae proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens ed. by Catherine Morton and Hope Muntz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. by Anthony J. Holden, Société des Anciens Textes Français, 93, 3 vols (Paris:Picard, 1970-73), ll. 8013-18. Personal communication by Prof. Elizabeth Jeffreys based on her work on Byzantine practice. William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English kings, ed. and trans. by R.A.B. Mynors; completed by R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 Vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998-99), p. 455, with my glosses in parentheses. Carolus Du Fresne, Dominus Du Cange, Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis, 3 Vols (Paris: L. Billaine, 1678), I, col 765.

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Philip E. Bennett connection,44 but they were both concerned with the English tradition, which implies a certain poetics of the ballad, not necessarily found in other parts of Europe. Certainly two of the earliest Old French epics, Gormont et Isembart and La Chanson de Guillaume have undeniable refrains and the oldest of all, La Chanson de Roland in the Oxford manuscript has an enigmatic notation ‘AOI’ at several points which can be interpreted as a refrain.45 We do in fact have two witnesses to such products in France in the thirteenth century. One is the parodic, and frankly scatological Audigier,46 which recounts in the form of a short epic a burlesque battle between grotesque peasants, not unlike the battle in Torelore, in Aucassin et Nicolette,47 where the opposing forces fight with soft cheese and rotten apples. The other is the presumably satirical and topical Bataille d’Annezin. This poem, which consists of fifty lines on a single assonance relates the story of a battle between Christians and Saracens ‘in the marshes at Annezin’ (near Lille).48 The battle is aborted, however, when the two sides are reconciled by the appearance of a cup of wine. The extent to which either of these poems is in the ‘popular’ or ‘aristocratic’ tradition is open to debate, a debate which may in any case be irrelevant, since from one point of view all vernacular traditions may be regarded as ‘popular’ in contrast to the ‘learned’ traditions of clerical Latin. Audigier is linked to the popular tradition because a line of it is sung by a coarse peasant (who is immediately silenced by his more refined fellow-shepherds and shepherdesses) in Adam de la Halle’s play Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, a dramatised pastourelle-cum-bergerie, presented at the court of Louis d’Anjou in Naples, probably at 44

Gerould, Gordon Hall, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), pp. 102-03; 194-96; Friedman, Albert B., The Ballad Revival, studies in the influence of popular on sophisticated poetry (Chicago: London: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 19-21. 45 Gormont et Isembart, fragment de chanson de geste du XII e siècle, ed. by Alphonse Bayot, Classiques Français du Moyen Age, 14 (Paris: Champion, 3rd ed. 1931), which has a variable intercalated quatrain as a refrain at certain moments of the narrative; e.g. ‘Quant il ot mort le bon vassal / ariere enchalce le cheval; / puis mist avant sun estendart: l’em la li baille un tuenart’. [When he had killed the good vassal / he drove his horse back behind his lines; then he raised his standard: he was handed a large shield.], ll. 5-9, 37-40 (with minor variation), 61-64, 83-86, 134-37 which punctuates a series victories by the pagan leader Gormont over French warriors; La Chanson de Guillaume, ed. and trans. by Philip E. Bennett, Critical Guides to French Texts, 121.ii (London: Grant & Cutler, 2000), which has a series of refrains referring to days of the week throughout the text; e.g. ‘…Crie “Munjoie!” – l’enseigne Ferebrace. / Lunsdi al vespre: / Cil le choisirent en la dolente presse’. [He shouts “Munjoie!” – the warcry of Ferebrace. / Monday at vespertide: / They caught sight of him in the grievous throng.], ll. 447- 49; La Chanson de Roland, ed. cit. The notation ‘AOI’ ocurs for the first time at the end of l. 9 and then frequently though irregularly throughout the rest of the poem. Since nothing like this occurs in any other Old French epic in a corpus of some 120 poems, it is reasonable to assume that this feature is a survival of an early stage of epic production, implying an approach which favoured the lyric, perhaps with ritual dance elements, over the narrative which dominates later epic production in France. 46 Conlon, D.C., ‘La Chanson d’Audigier, a scatalogical parody of the chanson de geste edited from ms BN f. fr. 19152’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 33 (1989), 21-55. 47 Aucassin et Nicolette, chantefable du XIIIe siècle, ed. by Mario Roques, Classiques Français du Moyen Age, 41 (Paris: Champion, 2nd ed. 1962); the Torelore episode occupies sections XXVIII-XXXIII (pp. 29-33). 48 Badel, Pierre-Yves, ‘La Bataille d’Annezin: une parodie de chanson de geste’, in ‘Plaist vos oïr bone cançon vallant?’ mélanges offerts à François Suard , ed. by Dominique Boutet et al., Collection Travaux et Recherches (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Université Charles - de - Gaulle – Lille 3, 1999), pp. 35 - 44.

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The Singer and the Scribe 49

Christmas 1283. The joke is multi-layered, and the habitual critical dichotomy of popular and courtly traditions negated, because of the rejection of coarseness by polite shepherds and the self-evident fact that Adam’s princely and aristocratic court audience must have recognised and reacted to the quoted fragment. The Bataille d’Annezin is harder to place, and any deductions must be made from its appearance in a sole manuscript. This too operates at a variety of levels, since character-types from the chansons de geste are placed in ‘homely’ local surroundings, and reduced in status to being bourgeois militia. So far we have found in both these texts elements already identified in the analysis of the pastourelle by Erart: a degree of humour that can only have worked by reference to a serious litera ry model, and a systematic debasement of content which is both necessary to an appreciation of another level of humour and designates the model as unworthy of consideration by a cultivated audience. The last level of meaning in La Bataille d’Annezin, though, is a more serious one than we have found in any poem so far, since it involves an allegorical reading, making of the whole a political satire on the military mismanagement of King John. It is this which leads me to the last category of poem I would like to consider as candidates for the lost, or suppressed, ballad culture of the medieval French-speaking world: certain types of Anglo-Norman political song. The varied collection of poems published by Isabel Aspin in the Anglo-Norman Text Society series in 1953 has never attracted the attention of scholars which it deserves.50 While it would be wrong to claim that all the poems in the short anthology are ‘ballads’ in the sense we would want to give to the term (it includes a set of macaronic proverbs, satires on the state of the church and the realm, attacks on excessive taxation — again in Latin and French — reflections on morality and the Three Estates) some of the poems Aspin published fit clearly within a tradition that we see to be that of the ballad across Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I would like to single out just two for brief consideration. The first is a short narrative (96 lines) in rhyming octosyllabic couplets presenting the colourful career of a self-styled double agent (Thomas Turberville) who, in 1295, offered first to guarantee the conquest of England to Philip IV of France, then to arrange the reconquest of Edward I’s lost territories in France. Its overt form is that of the romance or lai.51 However, the opening, Seignurs e dames escutez, De un fort tretur orrez Ke aveit purveu une tresun; Thomas Turbelvile ot a non. (ll. 1-4)

49

50

51

Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de Robin et Marion, ed. by Kenneth Varty (London: Harrap, 1960); Audigier is quoted at l. 729. Anglo-Norman Political Songs, ed. by I.S.T. Aspin, Anglo -Norman Texts, 11 (Oxford: Anglo -Norman Text Society; Blackwell, 1953). While the use of octosyllabic rhyming couplets associates the poem with narrative literature in French rather than with sung forms it should be noted that the Castilian romance uses a very similar form of octosyllabic lines assonating abcbdb etc., see Spanish Ballads, ed. by Smith, pp. 25-30. Aspin’s identification of this poem as a ‘song’ rather than as a ‘tract’ is thus not necessarily incongruous.

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Philip E. Bennett [Lords and ladies, listen, you shall hear about a bold traitor who had planned to commit treason; his name was Thomas Turberville],

is borrowed from epic-oral style. So, most probably, is the persistent calling of the King of France ‘Charles’, since the first mention of the name ‘Charlys’ (unadorned by a title) evokes a formulaic reference to Saint Denis, which again suggests an oral-epic origin for the substituted name. At the end of the poem the evocation of Eustace le Moine (an early thirteenth-century pirate who commanded the French invasion fleet of 1216 and became the subject of a roman d’aventure) alongside ‘Duc Lowys’ (identified as Louis VIII, although he never bore such a title, being known simply as ‘le Prince Louis’) maintains the blend of popular-historical and literary reminiscence. Objective history is in fact the victim of this tendentious retelling of heroic English resistance to the invasion of forces despatched by a bloodthirsty and unreasoning tyrant: Ore purra Charles pur ver Aprés li longement garder, Einz k’il venge pur la treison Demander de li garison. Sire Edeward pur la grant navye De France ne dona une aylle; De vaillante gent fist la mer De tut part mut ben garder. De Engleter sunt failliz Ly Franceys e sunt honiz […] Ore sunt tuz, jeo quide, neëz Ou en lur teris retornez E penduz pur lur servise, Ke Engleter n’aveyent prise; E ceo Charles lour premist Si nul de eus revenist. (ll. 63-84) [Now Charles can truly watch for him a long time before he comes to ask the reward of his treason. Lord Edward didn’t give a clove of garlic for the great French fleet; he had the sea watched on all sides by valiant men. The French have failed to take England and are put to shame […] They are, I think, now all drowned or returned home and hanged for their service, since they hadn’t taken England; that’s what Charles promised 52 them if any returned home.]

This is the type of the cantilena that Gaston Paris proposed as the source of the epic tradition. Whether they were sung, chanted in the manner of liturgical responses or simply recited53 is not as important as the evident fact that this text, although conserved in a

52 53

Aspin, pp. 51-53. Stevens, John, Words and Music in the Middle Ages, song, narrative, dance and drama, 1050-1350, Cambridge Studies in Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); pp. 199-267 deal with ‘narrative melody’, which, for French, Stevens limits to early saints lives, chansons de geste and related laisse and stanza-based forms. However, he does note (pp. 213-14) that German translations of French romances using continuous sequences of couplets offer the possibility of chant as an alterntive to recitation, which also raises the question of how the French originals were ‘produced’.

119

The Singer and the Scribe manuscript, is not meant to be pored over: it is for immediate oral communication. Nonetheless, it might be objected that the explicit authorial comment of l. 79, and the implied comment of ll. 83-84 prevent this poem from being a ballad, since it fails the test of impersonality.54 The same sense of oral immediacy is found in the quite different Trailbaston, a firstperson narrative of a man forced to flee and live as an outlaw to escape what are presented as the extortions practised by commissioners of Trailbaston, whose own original function was to prosecute acts of extortion or criminal violence, a remit rapidly extended to cover conspiracies to pervert the course of justice and similar abuses of power in local officials.55 Composed in mono-rhymed quatrains with lines of varying lengths, the poem opens with a mixed appeal to courtly lyric and epic modes, proceeds with a brief allusion to pastoral mode, and finishes with a reference to the composition and first diffusion of the poem: Talent me prent de rymer e de geste fere D’une purveaunce qe purveu est en la terre. Mieux valsit uncore que la chose fust a fere; Si Dieu ne prenge garde, je quy qe sourdra guere. ********** Pur ce me tendroi antre bois, suz le jolyf umbray; La n’y a fauceté ne nulle male lay, En le bois de Belregard, ou vole le jay E chaunte russinole touz jours santz delay. ********** Cest rym fust fet al bois, desouz un lorer, La chaunte merle, russinole e eyre l’esprever; Escrit estoit en parchemin pur mout remenbrer E gitté en haut chemin qe um le dust trover. [I have a desire to compose a poem and a noble story about provisions made in the land. It would be better if the thing were still to be done; unless God takes care, there will be war [...] So I shall take to the woods, under the merry shade; there exist no falseness or evil law, in the forest of Belregard, where the jay flies and the nightingale sings all day without a break [...] This poem was composed in the forest, under a laurel, where the blackbird and nightingale sing and the sparrowhawk flies; it was written on parchment so that it would be well 56 remembered, and thrown on the highway where people would find it.]

54

Despite the regularly asserted impersonality of the ballad, many of the most celebrated in the English tradition do present authorial points of view and reflections. A typical example, similar to the closing lines of the extract from ‘Turbeville’ quoted above, is Alison Gross: ‘O Allison Gross, that lives in yon towr, / The ugliest witch i the north country’ (Child 35, 1-2); these lines apparently inspired Sir Arthur Quiller Couch to add the refrain: ‘Alison Gros, she must be/ The ugliest witch in the north country!’ The Oxford Book of Ballads, ed. by A. Quiller Couch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910 [repr. 1963]), pp. 52-52. 55 For the legal and historical background to the Commissions of Trailbaston in the years 1297-1305 see ‘Early Trailbaston Proceedings from the Lincoln Roll of 1305’, ed. by Alan Harding, in Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C.A.F. Meekings, ed. by R.F. Hunisett and J.B. Post (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1978), pp. 142-68. 56 Aspin, pp. 69-73.

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Philip E. Bennett While the bulk of the subject matter (generalised protest against the application of the Trailbaston commissions represented as personal experience) does not fall within the normal scope of balladry, the appeal in the frame narrative to the Robin Hood tradition of outlaw ballads is unmistakable, 57 and bears witness to the popularity of the type even at this early date. Equally interesting is the mixed appeal to lyric and epic in in the first line quoted above, which, like the last two lines, implies a fusion of written and oral media. If this poem is not exactly a ballad in the form in which we have it, the launching of it into the oral tradition, so vividly represented by the throwing of the parchment on which it is inscribed onto the highway, indicates that its author envisaged its transformation into something akin to a ballad in the mouths of the wandering singers tacitly charged with disseminating it. From these varied observations a few tentative conclusions may be drawn. The first of these is that songs in the oral tradition, similar to ballads, most probably did exist in the French-speaking world in the Middle Ages. On the Continent, however, they are constantly subverted by courtly poets who offer parodic versions, which none the less through their own deforming mirror attest to the existence of the models on which they depend for their effect. Even so, the best one can say of their existence is that it is precarious and ‘underground’, with no formal recognition in the manuscripts which ‘canonise’ the literature of the day. In addition it has to be said that the range of material offered by such poems in Continental France is very narrow. Occasionally an epic or chivalric model may be glimpsed as the necessary hypertext or intertext allowing interpretation of a parody, and we have but one tantalising glimpse of a song on the theme of aristocratic largesse, but in general love and the pastoral are already the staple fare of romances in the thirteenth century as they will be in the eighteenth. On the other hand in Anglo-Norman England poems are produced and recorded in manuscripts, which give some glimpses of what a medieval French ballad tradition might have been, including elements of the heroic. It is perhaps no coincidence that the nearest approach to a ballad literature we have in the French-speaking world in the Middle Ages comes from England, which was on the point of producing a ballad culture in the increasingly dominant English language. Yet one cannot easily invoke either a supposed conservatism or a popular (non-aristocratic) bias to explain the phenomenon. The enigma of France is not that it failed of all the countries of Western Europe to produce a ballad culture in the Middle Ages, but that it went to such lengths to suppress that culture. It is even more of an enigma that in the highest seats of learning in France there was still, at the end of the twentieth century, a desire to deny the reality of that tradition in the name of promoting a purely literate ‘aristocratic’ culture.

57

Although the surviving ‘Robin Hood’ poems are all much later than this, it seems most probable that the legends developped at the very end of the thirteenth or in the early fourteenth century. At all events not only were the legends fully formed but ‘rymes of Robyn hood’ were circulating by the 1370s. On the rather tangled early chronology of Robin Hood see Dobson, R.B. and J. Taylor, Rymes of Robyn Hood, an introduction to the English outlaw (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 1-36. The ‘Trailbaston’ poem would, therefore, be contemporary with the development of the legends, if not with the earliest poems.

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F.J. Child and Mikail Bakhtin

Richard Firth Green One of the most striking features of the Child Ballads is their generally sombre tone.1 Though this view has been questioned,2 it remains true that except for a handful of ballads printed, seemingly almost as an afterthought, in Volume Five, 3 what humour there is, is largely incidental. This does not, of course, mean that it is inconsequential. The brio with which the heroine of Tam Lin dismisses a busybody who has remarked upon her thickening waist could hardly be bettered: ‘Haud* your tongue, ye auld* fac’d knight, Some ill death may ye die! Father my bairn* on whom I will, I’ll father nane * on thee.’ (Child 39A:12)

hold / old child none

Neither could the indignation with which Thomas Rymer learns that he has been granted ‘a tongue that can never lie’: ‘My tongue is mine ain* ,’ True Thomas said, ‘A gudely* gift ye wad gie* to me! I neither dought* to buy nor sell, At fair or tryst * where I may be.’

own goodly / would give I’d have no skill meeting

‘I dought neither speak to prince or peer, Nor ask of grace from fair ladye:’ ‘Now hold thy peace,’ the lady said, ‘For as I say, so must it be.’ (Child 37C:18-19).

If such wry moments provide one of the great pleasures of reading the Child Ballads, another comes from the ironic situations we encounter in ballads like Robin Hood and the Potter (Child 121), or Queen Eleanor’s Confession (Child 156). But even as we concede the importance of such features, we must recognise that there is an almost complete lack of the broader, more racy kind of humour we might expect from these products of folk culture.

1

The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by F.J. Child, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882-1889). Ballads from this collection will be cited by number. 2 See Roberts, Warren E., ‘Comic Elements in the English Traditional Ballads’, Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 3 (1951), p. 76-81. 3 They include Our Goodman (274), Get up and Bar the Door (275), The Friar in the Well (276), The Farmer’s Curst Wife (278) and The Keach in the Creel (281). Others in this group, such as The Wife Wrapt in Wether’s S kin (277), are evidently intended as comic, though their humour has not worn well. It is worth noting that, though more than a third of Child’s Ballads have not survived down to modern times, all of these (with the partial exception of The Wife Wrapt in Wether’s Skin) are still widely sung today; see Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, ed. by B.H. Bronson, 4 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959-1972), 4: 95-277.

The Singer and the Scribe That we should have any such exp ectation is due in part to the enormous influence of Mikhail Bakhtin’s study, Rabelais and his World.4 For Bakhtin, as is well known, the Middle Ages were marked by a dramatic division between the official culture of the ecclesiastical and feudal authorities and the popular-festive culture of the marketplace. In his pages, the cursing, brawling, guzzling, copulating folk flaunt the disorderly imagery of the grotesque body in the face of their political masters, asserting the positive, dynamic, regenerative triumph of festive laughter over the ascetic seriousness of official ideology. It is this carnival spirit, he claims, that is reflected in the work of François Rabelais. If Rabelais himself was the great conduit through which the carnivalesque flowed down to later ages, however, Bakhtin leaves us in no doubt that its ultimate source is to be sought in the ageless rituals of the folk themselves. In light of Bakhtin’s rich and compelling model, we might naturally ask why the ballad folk, at least as Child represents them, should have been almost totally excluded from this realm of festive laughter. True, women sometimes turn the tables on men,5 but elsewhere in the ballads challenges to official ideology — as, for example, in Lamkin (Child 93) — produce an effect that is anything but carnivalesque.6 What Bakhtin calls ‘the popularfestive system of images’ (p. 176) has left little impression on the ballads. Feasts, even marriage feasts, are rarely festive: And aye* she served the lang* tables, With white bread and with brown; And aye she turned her round about Sae* fast the tears fell down. (Fair Annie, Child 62A:18)

ever / long

so

Bloody brawls are fought in deadly earnest, with little sense of regenerative vitality: It’s five he’s wounded, an* five he slew, I * the bonny braes* o’ Yarrow; There came a squire out o’ the bush; An pierced his body thorough. (The Braes o’ Yarrow, Child 214B:9)

and on / banks

Unless recuperated by an advantageous marriage, 7 sexual irregularity is almost always punished: ‘O wae* be to you, my fause* brethren, And an ill death mat * ye die! Ye mith* slain Clerk Saunders in open field, And no* in bed with me.’ (Clerk Saunders, Child 69F:23)

woe / false may might (should) have not

Furthermore, Child’s most conspicuous example of a grotesque body — ‘Her teeth was a’ like teather stakes [stake posts], / Her nose like club or mell [hammer]’ (King Henry,

4

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). E.g. Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight (Child 4D), The Broomfield Hill (Child 43), or The Baffled Knight (Child 112). 6 One important exception is The Twa Magicians (Child 44). 7 E.g. The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter (Child 110), Lizzie Lindsay (Child 226), or The Beggar-Laddie (Child 280). 5

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Richard Firth Green Child 32:6) — serves merely to reinforce the prestige of the king who is challenged by this monstrous creature. It is this paradox of Child’s uncarnivalesque folk ballad, then, that I propose to explore in this essay. Apart from matters of national temperament, which seem to me comparatively unimportant in this context,8 there are, I suggest, three principal ways in which we might try to account for such a paradox: 1) we might maintain that broadly comic ballads exist, or existed, but that Child deliberately excluded them from his collection; 2) we might argue that the folk humour characterised by Bakhtin was peculiar to the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance and that by the time that most of the Child Ballads were being collected it was no longer in vogue; 3) we might claim that there is something in the ballad form itself that is inimical to the carnivalesque. I shall consider each of these propositions in turn. In 1972 the singer and musicologist A.L. Lloyd (1908 -1982) introduced a performance of The Widow of Westmorland’s Daughter with a story, quite possibly apocryphal, of the song’s scornful rejection by F.J. Child from the canon of traditional balladry.9 The Widow of Westmorland’s Daughter is a charming tale of a girl who, to stop her mother’s nagging, returns to her seducer to get her virginity back: So he kissed her and undressed her, And he laid her on the bed, And he set her head where her feet was before, And so give back her maidenhead.

The folk motif of the restored maidenhead is a very old one,10 and though, like so many ballads of seduction, this one, too, ends in a recuperative marriage, its air of carnivalesque inversion is unmistakable; Lloyd’s intuition that it must have been this that put it beyond the pale for Child is at least plausible. Unlike Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor of an Edwardian anthology of ballads, who believed that it was better ‘to omit a stanza from Glasgerion […] or to modify a stanza in Young Hunting, than to withhold these beautiful

8

Though the great scholar of European balladry, William J. Entwistle, ‘Ballads and Tunes which Travel’, Folklore, 50 (1939), 333, would assign France and the British Isles to different ‘ballad areas’, his criteria hardly apply at the level of abstraction with which Bakhtin is concerned. Entwistle himself does not discuss humorous ballads, but it is worth pointing out that the tragic Spanish ballad Blanca niña, which he traces to a thirteenthcentury French fabliau (pp. 335-37), lives on in the English-speaking world in its original comic guise as Our Goodman (Child 274). 9 Classic A.L. Lloyd, CD (Workington: Fellside Recordings, 1994) track 24. 10 A recipe from 1485 includes such ingredients as seven miles of moonlight, the song of seven Welshmen, the left foot of an eel, and the creaking of a cartwheel; Reliquiae Antiquae, ed. by Thomas Wright and J.O. Halliwell, 2 vols (London: Pickering, 1841-1843), 1: 250-51. The story-type appears in Poggio's Facetiae, no. 157.

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The Singer and the Scribe things altogether from boy or maid’,11 Child was too good a scholar to bowderlise his texts. Nevertheless, even if his notorious characterization of popular broadsides as ‘veritable dunghills’ (in a private letter) had not survived, his genuine ‘revulsion from bawdy material,’ 12 could reasonably have been deduced, not only from his actual selections, but also his presumed rejections: there are several songs that must certainly have been known to him whose exclusion from The English and Scottish Popular Ballads seems to confirm Lloyd’s belief in his prudery. Perhaps the most striking of such omissions is John Barleycorn.13 This ballad, which can be traced back to the early seventeenth century, was adapted by Robert Burns, and versions of it were printed by at least three nineteenth-century collectors known to Child: Robert Jamieson (1806), James Henry Dixon (1846), and Robert Bell (1857). It is old, it is in ballad metre, and it tells a story, so that Child’s reasons for excluding it must primarily have been based on its subject matter. A drinking song about the cultivation of barley (buried in the winter, springing up with the new year, cut down and threshed in harvest time, and finally reborn again through the brewer’s art), John Barleycorn conforms closely to Bakhtin’s characterisation of a ‘traditional system of images: uncrowning, travesty, thrashing’ (p. 198), all elements, as he says, ‘steeped in “merry time”, time which kills and gives birth, which allows nothing old to be perpetuated and never ceases to generate the new and the youthful’ (p. 211). 14 Almost as striking an omission from The English and Scottish Popular Ballads is the song of The Derby Ram (Kennedy 304), which was also printed by nineteenth-century collectors known to Child: George R. Kinloch (1827) and Llewellyn Jewitt (1867). No doubt Child’s prejudice against it derived in part from his suspicion of animal ballads, a suspicion which led to a similar exclusion of such ancient ballads as The Frog and the Mouse (Kennedy 294) and Old Daddy Fox (Kennedy 301). No doubt he also felt, rightly, that its narrative line was slight (a feature, however, insufficient to disqualify other ballads like Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship [Child 46] in his eyes), but the traces of a death-andrebirth motif are nonetheless quite easily detected (particularly in some of the more bawdy versions),15 and its link with the kind of ‘grotesque realism’ that Bakhtin finds at the heart of the carnivalesque is still more obvious:

11

The Oxford Book of Ballads (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. xi. The stanza omitted from Glasgerion (Child 67) is “He did not take that lady gay / To boulster nor to bedd, / But downe vpon her chamber-flore / Full soone he hath her layd” (A.11). His modification of Young Hunting (Child 68) is indicated by the bracketed text: “[She has kiss’d him by] the candle light / And the charcoal burning red”; Quiller-Couch’s version is by and large a conflation of Child A and J, but no original of these two lines appears in any of Child’s versions. 12 Palmer, Roy, ‘“Veritable Dunghills”: Professor Child and the Broadside’, Folk Music Journal, 17 (1996), p.157. 13 Kennedy, Peter, Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (London: Oak Publications, 1984), no.276. Ballads and songs from this collection will be cited by number; for ease of reading, I have punctuated quotations from Kennedy’s text, without further comment. 14 Cf. My Father Had an Acre of Land (Kennedy 300), a ballad first printed in James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England (1842), another collection known to Child. 15 I.e., ‘It took all the women in Yorkshire for to wheel away his stones / And all the women in Dorset to cover up his bones’; James Reeves, The Everlasting Circle (London: Heinemann, 1960), p.92.

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Richard Firth Green And when this ram was kill-ed sir, there was a terrible flood, Took four and twenty butcher boys to wash away the blood. (Kennedy 304:9)

Though songs of such grotesque hyperbole are not common in the surviving English ballad tradition,16 their roots go back a long way,17 and it is difficult to see why Child should have decided that riddling ballads were worthy of inclusion, whereas liars’ songs were not.18 One of the most fruitful sources for Child’s collection was Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript (ca 1650); 19 indeed, he dedicated his English and Scottish Popular Ballads to Frederick J. Furnivall on the grounds that ‘without the Percy MS no one would pretend to make a collection of the English Ballads, and but for you that manuscript would still, I think, be beyond reach of man’. 20 Fourteen years earlier Furnivall (and his co-editor, John W. Hales) had published an edition of the manuscript that had omitted a number of its ‘loose and humorous songs’, but Furnivall, who was certainly no prude, had taken care to have these published privately in a separate edition.21 In a letter to James Russell Lowell, Child warns his friend that if this latter volume should ever come his way, ‘I advise you to put it up the chimney (where it will be in its element) or into the fire — where the authors no doubt are!’ (quoted by Rieuwerts, p.13); hardly surprisingly, then, it makes no appearance in Child’s voluminous bibliography. At least one of the poems in Furnivall’s second collection, however, is an obvious contender for inclusion in an anthology of popular ballads (see Palmer, p. 157). The Sea Crabb (pp. 99-100) is in ballad metre and tells a fabliauesque tale of a pregnant wife who feels a sudden craving for crabmeat. Her long-suffering husband returns home late at night with a live crab he has bought for her; faute de mieux he deposits it in the chamber pot, with farcical consequences which hardly need elaborating. This ancient ballad was still being sung in the 1950’s (Kennedy 196). While Child might be prepared to accept the mildly salacious ballad of The Boy and the Mantle (Child 29) from the Percy Folio Manuscript (no doubt because of its Arthurian setting and its magical machinery), such a ‘loose and humorous’ piece as The Sea Crabb clearly formed no part of his notion of the traditional ballad. A second ballad in the Percy Folio Manuscript is yet more interesting in that Child and Furnivall both print it, but under completely different guises. Furnivall includes the ballad he calls Lillumwham among his ‘loose and humorous songs’ (pp. 96-98), because he sees it as being based (like The Widow of Westmorland’s Daughter) on the motif of the restored maidenhead. In Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads, on the other hand, it is titled The Maid and the Palmer (Child 21), and is introduced as a version of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan Woman ‘blended with medieval traditions concerning Mary Magdalen’. 16

The Herring Song (Kennedy 296) came to light only after Child’s collection was complete. Cf. ‘The Felon Sew: a mock-heroic poem from the fifteenth-century’, ed. by G.H. Cowling, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, OS 8 (1922), pp. 79-89. 18 Cf. Kittredge, G.L., ‘Notes on a Lying Song’, Journal of American Folklore, 39 (1926), 195-99. 19 See Fowler, David C., A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1968), pp. 132-82. 20 On Child’s involvement with the Percy Folio Manuscript see Rieuwerts, Sigrid, ‘“The Genuine Ballads of the People”: F.J. Child and the Ballad Cause’, Journal of Folklore Research, 31 (1994), pp. 11-12. 21 Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: loose and humorous songs, ed. by Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Printed by and for the Editor, 1868). 17

127

The Singer and the Scribe In Furnivall’s defence, we might notice that Lillumwham has a refrain that seems conspicuously ill-suited to so solemn a subject; indeed, its verbal exuberance (derived in this case perhaps from the ploughboy or carter’s calls) reminds one of Bakhtin’s stress on the role of licentious language in popular-festive laughter: The maid shee went to the well to washe, Lillumwham, Lillumwham! The mayd shee went to the well to washe, Whatt then? what then? The maid shee went to the well to washe, Dew ffell of her lilly white fleshe; Grandam boy, Grandam boy, heye! Leg a derry, Leg a merry, mett, mer, whoope, whir! driuaunce, larumben, Grandam boy, heye! (1-9)

It is no part of my brief here to try to adjudicate between Furnivall and Child on this matter; merely to point out how deaf Child shows himself to be to such carnivalesque echoes in one of the balldas he prints. Two other poems in Furnivall’s collection, Fryar and Boye (pp. 9-28) and Panche (pp. 61-67) must have been quite easy for Child to reject for they are not written in any recognised ballad metre, but they do raise the tantalising question of whether there may once have existed carnivalesque ballads now lost to us. Fryar and Boye (better known as Jack and his Stepdame) is a particularly fascinating example. 22 Popular from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, it tells of a boy who forces his stepmother’s lover, a friar, to caper among thorny briar bushes by playing a pipe that compels all who hear it to dance. This pipe had come to him as one of three wishes granted for an act of kindness, and another of these wishes enables him to afflict his stepmother with flatulence whenever she reproves him. Stepmother and friar haul him off to the ecclesiastical court where he sets not only his accusers but all the court officials cavorting uncontrollably until he is finally pardoned. Where this tale exhibits the carnivalesque mockery of official culture, another aspect of Bakhtin’s popular-festive comedy, the grotesque body, is conspicuous in Panche. Panche is a man of Gargantuan appetite: soe great a stomacke had hee, his wiffe did him provide ten meales a day, his hungar to lay, yet he was not satisfyed. (5-8)

Invited to his sister-in-law’s wedding, he creates havoc, partly by the enormous quantities of food he consumes at the banquet, and partly by his wandering about in the middle of the night in search of further snacks. Though Fryar and Boye and Panche look nothing like traditional ballads as they stand, they do serve to show that early modern England was hardly less receptive to carnivalesque humour than Rabelais’s France. Moreover, since

22

For a recent edition see Ten Fifteenth -Century Comic Poems, ed. by Melissa Furrow (New York: Garland, 1985), pp. 67-153.

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Richard Firth Green similar non-ballad narratives in the Percy Folio turn up in ballad guise later on,23 there seems no reason in principle for denying that such tales might have furnished the materials for popular balladry. An obvious way of accounting for their apparent failure to do so, is to see this as primarily a matter of changing tastes. This point will serve to introduce the second of my three possible explanations for the paucity of carnivalesque humour in the Child Ballads: that such humour was restricted to a specific time period and was no longer thriving during the era of the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ballad collectors. Though in some ways counter-intuitive (we like to think of folk culture as immensely conservative, not subject to whims of fashion like the culture of the elite), such a position receives a measure of support from Bakhtin himself. Much of his chapter on the history of laughter (pp. 59-144) is concerned with the way changing critical fashions have obscured for later readers the true sources of Rabelais’s comedy, but there are times when he seems to imply that these fashions themselves reflect deeper-seated changes in cultural values. One of Bakhtin’s central tenets, after all, is that the peculiar social conditions of the Renaissance allowed a cross-fertilisation between official and non-official culture of a kind that was to become impossible at a later period: “Later, in times of absolute monarchy and the formation of a new official order, folk humour descended to the lower level of the genre hierarchy. There it settled and broke away from its popular roots, becoming, petty, narrow, and degenerate” (p. 72). Were it not for such breaking away from its popular roots, we could imagine that the traditional ballad might have represented one of the lower levels of ‘the genre hierarchy’ for Bakhtin, but whatever he means precisely by this claim, it seems quite clear that he felt that folk culture itself became degenerate after the Renaissance. Of the ‘romantic grotesque’ of the late eighteenth century, for example, he writes that ‘the direct influence of folk spectacles and carnival forms, which were still alive though degenerate, […] was apparently not considerable’ (p. 37). David C. Fowler has argued strongly against the older view that many traditional ballads represent oral survivals from the Middle Ages, claiming rather that most are no older than the period in which they were first collected. The classic era of ballad collecting, the age of Thomas Percy (b. 1729), David Herd, Joseph Ritson, Walter Scott, William Motherwell, and Robert Jamieson (d. 1844), coincides with the period that Bakhtin claims witnessed a degeneration of folk culture, so if both Fowler and Bakhtin are correct we have no problem accounting for the absence of true popular-festive forms in Child’s collection. The difficulty is, of course, that Bakhtin’s claims for the degeneracy of folk culture are somewhat difficult to substantiate. While it is true that recent historical studies of popular-festive forms in England, most notably those of David Underdown, David Cressy, and Ronald Hutton,24 have tended to focus on the period before the Civil War, it could hardly be said that this work has borne 23

Cf. John the Reeve (ed. by Furrow, pp. 177-234) and King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth (Child 273). 24 Underdown, David, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: popular politics and culture in England, 1603-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Cressy, David, Bonfires and Bells: national memory and the Protestant calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989); Hutton, Ronald, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: the ritual year 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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The Singer and the Scribe out Bakhtin’s conclusions. In particular, the relationship between official and unofficial cultures now appears far more complex than Bakhtin was prepared to recognise; and, lest we should suppose that this situation was peculiar to England, Peter Burke is there to remind us that it obtained on the Continent as well. 25 While most historians would recognise that something changed in the relationship between popular and elite after ca 1650, not all would characterise that change in terms of popular degeneration; Burke himself is quite happy to use the ballad as evidence for the nature of traditional forms (pp. 118-30). Perhaps the historian whose work poses the greatest threat to Bakhtin’s model, however, is E.P. Thompson, for his Customs in Common, in particular, demonstrates the continuing vitality of popular-festive forms well into the nineteenth century.26 For the literary scholar, the most obvious place to turn for evidence of such survival is to the Mummers’ Play. Mummers’ Plays are archetypically festive comedy: their language, imagery, and action are frequently grotesque, they are deeply concerned with themes of death and rebirth, and they belong indisputably to the folk. Textually, the Mummers’ Plays have never had their F.J. Child, in part because none of the three great collectors, Thomas Fairman Ordish, Reginald Tiddy, or Alex Helm, lived to complete his projected edition, and in part because the texts themselves are far less manageable: they show both a wider range of local variation and a far greater uniformity of subject matter than the popular ballad — all Mummers’ Plays, indeed, can be reduced to three basic types: the Sword Dance, the Plough or Wooing Play, and the Hero-Combat Play. Nonetheless, when E.K. Chambers wrote his classic study, The English Folk Play, in 1934, he knew of the existence of some 157 texts,27 some still in performance in his own day. The Oxford scholar Reginald Tiddy alone had been able to collect twenty-eight texts from live performance in the years immediately before the First World War in which he lost his life, 28 and in 1981, at the time Alex Helm’s The English Mummers’ Play was posthumously published, new texts were still being discovered.29 Even the frankly bawdy Wooing Plays, which clearly offended Victorian sensibilities,30 have survived down to recent times. Why, then, does the carnivalesque live on in this one form of folk performance, and not apparently in the other? Is it perhaps, as I hypothesised at the beginning of this paper, that there is something in the very form of the ballad that makes it inhospitable to festive comedy? In many ways, Peter Kennedy’s Folksongs of Britain and Ireland is the diametrical opposite of Child’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Inclusive, where Child had been selective, it makes no attempt to segregate narrative ballads from other kinds of folksong, nor does it show any signs of the narrow prescriptivism that led Child to reject, say, broadside material or nursery rhymes. Above all, where Child’s work had been largely dependant on manuscript and printed materials collected in libraries, Kennedy assembled

25

Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Scholar Press, rev. ed. 1994). Thompson, E.P., Customs in Common: studies in traditional popular culture (New York: The New Press, 1993). 27 Chambers, E.K., The English Folk Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), pp. 236-44. 28 Tiddy, R.J.E., The Mummers’ Play (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923); the book actually contains thirty-three texts, but four are from the nineteenth-century and one was contributed by Tiddy’s editor, Rupert Thompson. 29 Helm, Alex, The English Mummer’s Play, ed. by N. Peacock and E.C. Cawte (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer for the Folklore Society, 1981), p. 66. 30 Helm, Alex, The English Mummer’s Play p. 19. 26

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Richard Firth Green his collection entirely from the living tradition, from field recordings, made mostly by himself in the 1950s. A glance at Kennedy’s chapter headings (for example, ‘Songs of Seduction’, ‘Songs of Country Life’, ‘Songs of Good Company’, ‘Songs of Diversion’) suggests that here, if anywhere, we should expect to find evidence of the survival of Bakhtin’s popular-festive forms, yet this expectation is only partially met. What we find, by and large, is that the festive songs are non-narrative, and that the narrative songs, even where they deal with earthy subject matter, convey only a limited sense of the carnivalesque. Though the old theory, associated with Francis B. Gummere, of the communalist origins of the ballad is generally discredited today, it is quite clear that certain folksongs do owe their origin and development to collective merry -making. The Welsh Was You Ever See? (Kennedy 309) is an obvious example of a song that can be carried by a roomful of people, individuals chipping in with improvised verses as inspiration takes them. 31 It is equally clear that such songs will totally lack the kind of narrative focus that might qualify them as ballads; when they are not entirely random, what structure they possess tends to be that of the simple list. This is, for example, quite evident in drinking songs: The Barley Mow (Kennedy 265) lists measurements, implements, and tradespeople associated with the brewing of beer, Billy Johnson’s Ball (Kennedy 266) lists guests, Here’s to the Grog (Kennedy 274) lists garments, Tam Broon (Kennedy 283) lists playing cards, and Twankydillo (Kennedy 286) merely gives a random list of people (the blacksmith, the gentleman, the pretty girl, the Queen) whose healths the company is invited to drink to. One variant of this pattern, When Jones his Ale was New (Kennedy 287), is reminiscent of presentation formulae in the Mummers’ Plays, ‘Here comes I, Old Father Christmas’ (Chambers, p. 20), but even this is still a long way from providing it with a narrative structure. While it remains possible to reshape a song like Was You Ever See? (309) to make it tell a story, or at least comment on a local event (Kennedy, p. 682), at that point the individual performer enters on the scene and something of its original communal anarchy is lost. There is no denying a strong carnivalesque element in songs like these, but as soon as we turn to the narrative pieces in Kennedy’s collection this element becomes noticeably more attenuated. Songs of seduction and copulation are a staple of the folk repertoire, of course, but two common elements tend to weaken the effect of full-bloodied popular-festive comedy in them. One is the use of a first-person narrator (the antithesis of the celebrated impersonal narration of the traditional ballad), and the other is the use of comic euphemisms. The following incident from The Overgate (Kennedy 187), for example, would undoubtedly feel more carnivalesque if told in the third person: She’d four hot pies and porter She swallid* them baith* galore. She ate and drank as much hersel’ As an elephant or a score.

31

swallowed / both

Cf. Hench, Atcheson L., ‘Communal Composition of Ballads in the A.E.F.’, Journal of American Folklore, 34 (1921), 386-89; Hatch remarks of verses improvised to the refrain ‘Hinkie Dinkie Parlez-vous’ by soldiers in the First World War, ‘unfortunately obscenity and filth prevent the printing of any but the harmless ones’ (387).

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The Singer and the Scribe O, then we baith gat up the stair To hae * a contented night, When an a’ful* knock cam to the door At the breakin’ o the light.

have dreadful

O, it was a big fat bobby, He got me by the top o’ the hair, And he gave me the whirligig Right doon* to the foot o’ the stair. (Stanzas 4-6)

down

One has only to compare this with one of Child’s few genuinely comic ballads, The Keach in the Creel (281), to appreciate the difference in tone. By contrast, The Jolly Tinker (Kennedy 177) is told in the third person, but its potential for broad comedy is greatly weakened by its air of knowing jocularity: The tinker he came down the lane And on the door did knock: ‘O have you got some pots and pans, With rusty holes to block?’ And I’ll be bound she had. She brought him through the kitchen, She brought him through the hall. The cook cried: ‘It’s the devil, He is going to block us all!’ And I’ll be bound he could . (Stanzas 4-5)

Interestingly, Vivian de Sola Pinto records an example of this ballad, ‘current in the Forces’ in 1957 (when Britain still had conscription), which is considerably less euphemistic and puts a correspondingly greater emphasis on grotesque realism. 32 Despite the limitations of both first-person narration and euphemism, some of Kennedy’s songs (The Greasy Cook [129], for example) display carnivalesque humour of a fairly high order, but few would qualify for inclusion in an anthology of traditional ballads, narrowly defined. As a matter of fact, Bakhtin himself provides us with a way of accounting for this phenomenon. One of the most fundamental aspects of the carnivalesque for Bakhtin is its roots in communal consciousness: ‘medieval laughter is not a subjective, individual, and biological consciousness of the uninterrupted flow of time. It is the social consciousness of all the people’ (p. 92). Thus, even death can be the target for festive laughter since in the experience of the community it represents the promise of regeneration and new life; only at the level of individual self-reflexivity is the prospect of annihilation a source of terror. Subjectivity, then, is the enemy of festive laughter; whatever it cannot translate into ‘cold humor, irony, sarcasm’ (p. 38), it is likely to banish as mere vulgarism. For these reasons the medieval comic theatre (a theatre without footlights, as he is at pains to stress [p. 257]) was for Bakhtin the literary medium closest in spirit to the world of the carnival. From this perspective it is entirely understandable that the Mumming Play should best represent the 32

The Common Muse: an anthology of popular British ballad poetry, 15th -20th Century, ed. by Vivian de Sola Pinto and A.E. Rodway (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 596-97.

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Richard Firth Green carnivalesque in our own times, and that the ballad with its performer, its individualised narrator, should preserve only echoes of an older communal ethos. As we have seen, these echoes are made all the fainter where the narrator draws attention to himself, representing his story as a personal history and relating it with a knowing wink. Indeed, we might go still further and suggest that a strong narrative line (and spare, taut narration is after all a quality much admired in the traditional ballad) is by its very nature unlikely to prosper in the sprawling, cyclical, perpetually inchoate domain which festive laughter naturally inhabits. Perhaps, then, it is no accident that, except for a few anomalous survivals like John Barleycorn or The Derby Ram, the traditional ballad should have proved so relatively inhospitable to the carnivalesque. F.J. Child was not temperamentally attracted to the kind of humour I have been discussing in this paper, yet even had the job of editing The English and Scottish Popular Ballads fallen to someone like F.J. Furnivall it seems doubtful that the overall shape of the collection would have been very different. No doubt this is partially due to changing social conditions which made later ballad performers, confronted with popular-festive forms, more likely to mimic the self-conscious drollery of men like Tom D’Urfey (a drollery reflected in the arch first-person narratives still common today), but its ultimate causes may lie deeper yet. They are to be sought perhaps in a clash between two distinct modes of folk culture: between individual performance and communal participation, between ironic restraint and grotesque overindulgence, between, finally, an awareness of the painful brevity of linear time and a celebration of the ageless rhythms of death and rebirth.

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Echoes of Authority: audience and formula in the Scots ballad text.

Charles Duffin When it comes to drawing literary interpretations from orally rooted, popular ballads it seems to be as a matter of course that we concentrate our attention on the singers and scribes who, on the face of things, share joint responsibility for producing the actual texts that we work from. These texts, viewed as editorially mediated products of oral creativity, provide a fertile source of material, amenable to the various kinds of analyses that mark the literary process in its quest for critical authority. A common barrier to all of those approaches arises when we are forced to confront the presence of an audience, the ghost in the ballad text. Critical response to this audience tends to vary in proportion to the degree of literariness demanded by the particular strategy employed, so, at one extreme, that presence might be completely exorcised from the text in the interest of the reading, while at the other it is invoked contextually as the creative genie of the text, reducing in the process the individual singer’s role to that of automatic mouthpiece of the tradition. The common ground between these extremes is the lip service that most of us pay by acknowledging that audience while skirting the implications of its presence in the text. Of course, it is the implied nature of that presence which makes it difficult to assign the audience a role in the critical equation that is in some useful way measurable against that of singers and scribes. This difficulty is compounded by the need to model that audience according to a set of cultural circumstances which for a number of reasons, not least of which is literacy itself, cannot be reconstructed other than theoretically. We can seek general assistance in the vast amount of field work carried out among currently vital oral traditions, but cultural anomalies notwithstanding, varying degrees of literary interdependence and the sublime interference of a new wave of technology-based orality can all introduce potentially distorting elements when re-applied to a specific, historically bound tradition like the Scots ballads. We can go some way to tracing the shape of our notional audience by this means but it seems to me that its essence resides ultimately in or around the text. So, what are we looking for? Initially, we are looking for textual evidence which suggests how the creative and critical dynamic between singer and audience might express itself, but how do we discriminate between those aspects of the text that we assign to individual creativity and those which express a more engaged commonality? Choral components aside, there is very little on the surface of the text that would allow us to make that kind of neat distinction. Unless we can find a way of tracking those elements of performance which are dedicated to that relationship, it is difficult to propose a role for the audience in the critical process. It is here, I believe, that singers and scribes come to our assistance. We may not be able to reconstruct an authentic oral context for the ballad text,

The Singer and the Scribe but because of the enthusiasm of early ballad collectors and the continuing vitality of the ballad in a post-literate culture we can apply ourselves to determining what happens to what we might describe as the negative space that the audience occupies in the oral text as it collapses in on itself under pressure from the literary process. Once we have taken account of the effects of literary intrusion on that space we are able to concentrate our attention on what remains and how that relates to the audience’s role in the critical process. An approach like this depends to a great extent on the Homeric scholar, Milman Parry’s theory of oral-formulaic composition, developed by his pupil Albert Lord and applied to the Yugoslavian epic tradition from where it has been drafted in and, with varying degrees of success, applied as a critical apparatus to the Scots ballad tradition, most notably by David Buchan.1 This has not been without controversy. Parry, himself warned of the dangers of the partial application of his work to other oral cultures, but despite that warning the attitude to audience in the oral-formulaic approach to ballad tradition has been one of general conformity to Cecil Sharp’s liberal extrapolation of Parry’s thinking, ‘the individual invents; the community selects’ — this, without providing any real explanation, or evidence, of how that dynamic can be witnessed operating within the text. One notable exception to that conformity is Flemming Andersen, whose sceptical view of oral-formulaic method has, despite an occasional tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater, given up a great deal of useful material relating to the singer’s utilisation of formulaic material to arouse narrative expectation in the audience. One of the main reasons, in my view, for glossing over the audience’s role is a general tendency to import only those parts of Parry’s thinking which apply to singers, so avoiding a confrontation with the intangibilities of audience. Parry himself, may, to some extent, share in the blame for this. His decision quietly to sideline a significant element of his own theory, following the publication of his original thesis, may have gone some way to promote an imbalance in the broader application of his original definition of what constitutes a formula in oral poetry — ‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’.2 For Parry, however, the oral style to which the poet and the audience are committed jointly by tradition is not simply dependent on the same fixed repeated groups of words. In such a case there would be no way in which change could be accommodated and this would result in a sense of cultural stasis leading, ultimately, to a moribund tradition.3 Creativity in

1

Buchan, David, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). Parry, Milman, The Making of Homeric Verse, ed. by Adam Parry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 272. 3 Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p. 334. Change in an essentially conservative oral culture is, Parry claims, slow but sure and comes through change in spoken language and the association between peoples with the same language but a different dialect. Different dialects effect change but words and forms are not thought of as words of a certain locality, they serve simply to carry the style above the commonplace everyday speech. As the spoken language changes so does traditional poetic diction, but there is no requirement to give up existing formulae which provide an archaic element. The poet may also introduce artificial elements by analogy with the real created by the need for a formulaic unit of a certain length which can only be got by this means. Adaptation also gives rise to the artificial whereby part of a word may be changed, part may be archaic. Constraint on the technique of versemaking ensures longevity of formula even though the language 2

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Charles Duffin oral poetry is, for Parry, brought about through analogy which creates new formulary expressions on existing particular word-models and on the sound-pattern of existing formulaic expressions. This view of formula allows for flexibility in the ideas of oral poetry, which cannot always be inferred from the central premise of his theory, but it is a view which he considered as important enough to share italicisation in the same paragraph as his original definition. He continued: ‘the formulas in any poetry are due, so far as their ideas go, to the theme, their rhythm is fixed by the verse-form, but their art is that of the poets who made them and the poets who kept them’. 4 The controlling medium of this flexibility is the tradition itself geared to an aesthetic imperative. The oral poet expresses only ideas for which he has a fixed means of expression. He is by no means the servant of his diction: he can put his phrases together in an endless number of ways; but they still set bounds and forbid him the search of a style which would be altogether his own. For the style that he uses is not his at 5 all: it is the creation of a long line of poets or even of an entire people.

This notion aroused a great deal of antagonism from his contemporaries and led ultimately to Parry being accused of being the Darwin of Homeric scholarship.6 The innate Darwinian implications of Parry’s theory were deliberately downplayed by himself to deflect that kind of criticism and this may have led to a critical oversight by those who went on to apply his ideas to the ballad tradition. Given the underlying dependence of the recent critical history of Scots ballad texts on Parry’s oral-formulaic theory it is appropriate to review the application of Parry’s ideas to the Scots ballad tradition not only in the light of his own Darwinian construct but also in that of contemporary neo-Darwinist scrutiny of cultural development as complementary to scientific evolutionary process. Neo-Darwinism applied to the cultural aspects of human behaviour invites controversy, particularly when its proponents are moved to suggest that language mutates in the manner of genes. Whether this kind of explanation is viewed as analogy masquerading as science or science working through analogy is not yet clear, but the underlying notion of language as a generational artifact of a biological process invites us to look again at Parry’s notion of a formulaic discourse where formulae are replicated, mutate into variables and those which are selected by the tradition accrete layers of associative meaning which ensures cultural vitality. Viewed from a neo-Darwinist perspective, Parry’s formulaic discourse illustrates potentially a working memetic complex, where a meme is defined in simple terms as a ‘unit of cultural inheritance’ — the psychical parallel of a gene.7

4 5 6 7

has become archaic. Events may be new but they are told in the traditional way, so that the new becomes possible by fullest use of the old. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p. 272. Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse, p. 270. Wade-Gerry, Henry Theodore, The Poet of the Illiad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 38. Dawkins, Richard, Unweaving the Rainbow (London: Penguin Press, 1998), p. 301. Dawkins, drawing on the work of memetic theorists, Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, extends the definition of the ‘unit of cultural inheritance’ thus: ‘A meme is, by analogy, anything that replicates itself from brain to brain, via any available means of copying’. Recognising the dangers inherent in the breadth of that definition, he raises his own

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The Singer and the Scribe When Parry talks about a poet adopting a style which belongs to an entire people he makes it clear that it is this formulaic discourse, which allows the poem to be made in a particular way, that is being appropriated by the performer. That formulaic discourse has its roots, as Walter Ong notes, in the day-to-day thought processes of a pre-literate culture where the entire noetic economy, or mental storehouse, is dominated by formulae and poets simply maximise those processes in order to produce artistic products.8 That creativity is governed by the formulaic diction itself. Parry is not denying the poet’s individuality, he is simply proposing that individuality is to be expressed within the context of a formulaic diction that is somehow fixed by common agreement. In order to sustain a dynamic and vital culture there must be within the formulaic discourse some mechanism to allow new or noteworthy information to enter the tradition. It follows from his remarks that if a formulaic diction belongs to an entire people and the poet is governed by that diction then it is that people, as a whole, who must stand guarantor for the way it is utilised and it is the audience, in conjunction with singers, who authorise those new elements of style which can be accommodated within the formulaic discourse and become a useful fixture in the poetic economy. Parry’s notion of a formulaic discourse suggests a process of negotiation between generations of poets and audiences by which means those innovations come to be absorbed within the complex generational matrix which establishes and sustains a tradition through time. For many of those critics who have applied oral-formulaic theory to the ballad tradition, the mechanism of that process of negotiation resides in the narrative itself. David Buchan relies heavily on Lord’s recurrent dictum: ‘the tale’s the thing’. This is worth noting because Lord, working with a living Yugoslavian tradition, took particular pains to avoid any Darwinist implication in developing his tutor’s theory.9 When pressed to explain how the oral narrative coalesces in performance, Lord substitutes for Parry’s Darwinism, the notion of a tension of essences, something analogous to Adam Smith’s invisible hand of

8 9

questions about the limited usefulness of the ‘scientific poetry’ that draws parallels between genes and memes. His unease seems justified given the scientific priority attached to generating and testing against evidence. Within such a broad definition as ‘the unit of cultural inheritance’ the scientific premise is rendered meaningless. If, however, it is possible to generate and test within a culture-bound system of recognisable units of cultural inheritance, in this case Parry’s conception of an oral-formulaic diction geared to narrative production, then the outcomes should be measurable to a degree that is at least coherent in terms that Dawkins, as a scientist and a Darwinian, would recognise. Walter Ong, Rhetoric, Romance and Technology (Ithaca; London: 1971), p. 286. Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, p. 53. Extrapolating from Lord’s notion Buchan attempts to subsume its vagueness within the recognisable architectonic features of the Scots ballad form: ‘A conceptual pattern called by Lord “the tension of essences”, whereby certain narrative elements automatically cohere, would suggest that there are other hidden patterning forces, as yet undissected working within oral tradition. Just as the aural patterns reflect the non-literate person’s highly developed sense of sound, so these architechtonic patterns reflect how his mode of apprehension is spatial as well as simply linear and sequential’.

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Charles Duffin God in economics, and, it has to be said in neo-Darwinian terms, an unquestionable skyhook: that is to say, it is an argument suspended from a mystery. 10 Filtered through Lord and Buchan, Parry’s ideas limit the critical role of the traditional audience to their demand for a consistent narrative without drawing on Parry’s Darwinian construction of how that is sustained. Perhaps paradoxically, it is left to an oral-formulaic sceptic like Flemming Andersen to broaden the implications of how the modes of narration function as a possible critical apparatus in ballad texts. Commenting on the associative, or what he describes as ‘supra-narrative’ function of ballad formulae, he remarks: ‘Appearing in the same kinds of contexts in a large number of ballads the formulas have become imbued with specific overtones, which have bearing on the immediate narrative contexts in which they are employed’.11 Here, it appears to me that Andersen consciously, or otherwise, takes up Parry’s notion of the formula as a kind of poetic meta-language which generates the narrative orientation of the ballad. The formula is deployed in such a way as to ensure audience and singer occupy, simultaneously, the same psychological space in the course of the narrative. This assumes that individual singers are sufficiently skilled in their art so as to manipulate that space in the performance, but he further claims: ‘Formulas may also serve as signals of what is to come. Different formula families point to different ways of resolving the conflicts, and consequently produce narrative variation by presaging different kinds of story endings’.12 Here he is advancing a more powerful case for the critical role of the audience in which they interpret through the formulaic disposition of the ballad what the likely narrative outcome might be. If the singer is not sufficiently skilled, then, by implication, this metalanguage becomes dysfunctional, with audience and performer both occupying a different psychological space as they engage with the immediate narrative. The singer who generates narrative expectations by utilising a particular type of formula has, quite literally, lost the audience if those expectations are not subsequently met. This is as far, I think, as Andersen can go in asserting the critical role of audience. He rejects Parry’s original definit ion of what constitutes a formula (‘a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea’) on the grounds of what he describes as the multiform nature of ballad formulae, moulding his own adaption of Chomsky’s ‘deep structure’ linguistic theories into a generative model of formulaic construction, in preference to Parry’s substitutionary model of formulaic creation by analogy. Nevertheless,

10

11 12

Darwinians, such as Dawkins, Dennett and Blackmore have a tendency to apply the ‘skyhook’ argument to any non-scientific approach to explaining cultural history and activity. It appears to me that Parry’s theory of an oral-formulaic discourse applied to a tradition provides an ideal opportunity to test their theory against the evidence generated by the tradition that resides in the orally based text. If that process confirms their ideas about how language and culture ‘evolve’, we are some way to a coherent evolutionary theory of culture. If, however, that fails to sustain the memetic theory, they could find themselves swinging from the biggest skyhook of all, the meme itself. Andersen, Flemming G., Commonplace and Creativity (Odense: Odense University Press, 1985), p. 25. Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, p. 25

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The Singer and the Scribe I believe that Andersen highlights here the Darwinist imp lications of Parry’s extended definition of the formulaic discourse. It is worth noting W.J. McCarthy’s claim that there is no obvious obstacle which disbars Parry’s ‘substitutionary’ models of formula (creation by analogy) from operating as, or in tandem with, Andersen’s linguistically derived ‘generative’ deep-structure models.13 Daniel Dennett, a contemporary neo-Darwinist, is another who sees no real obstacle in accommodating Chomsky’s transformational grammar within an evolutionary model aside from the not insignificant fact of Chomsky’s personal reluctance to condone it.14 Andersen’s insistence on exactly the same kind of metrical sound and sense precision for a mature epic tradition and for a ballad tradition which operates under a completely different set of cultural conditions, including an imminent confrontation with mass literacy, is asking too much of Parry. The point surely is to examine how formulae emerge from the fusion of those metrical conditions themes and ideas which support the particular tradition and broadly speaking, it seems to me, the single-line ballad-formulae work in a way that is coherent in respect to Parry’s notion of what constitutes a formulaic discourses where they are not disrupted by literary encroachment. Andersen, however, prefers to group formulae together in families, varying in length from one line to several stanzas which, he claims, excite the same narrative expectations under different metrical circumstances. He recognises those formulae that appear in linear form but argues that it is their verbal aspect and not their metrical shape that expresses the significant narrative idea. To illustrate his contention he examines several examples of the ‘sewing’ formula which is common to the ballad tradition, of which is typical: Fair Margaret sat in her bonny bower, Sewing her silken seam.

St.2 15

Tam Lin (Child: 39D)

The narrative function (essential idea) here is, according to Andersen, the conventional depiction of a woman of some standing which overlays a supra-narrative expression of 13

McCarthy, W.B., The Ballad Matrix - Personality, Milieu and the Oral Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 11. McCarthy also notes that Andersen’s ‘rejection of the term oral-formulaic seems more political than conceptual, since he admits a recreative role for the singer, and describes balladry as an oral art built around the formula, albeit a more restricted kind of formula than Lord posits’. The recognition of Lord’s influence on Andersen, over Parry, once again suggests that Parry has only really been considered as a secondary source for oral-formulaic theory which may account for Andersen’s consistently taking for granted the mechanical basis of Parry’s work as emphasised by Lord rather than in its full aesthetic compass as outlined by Adam Parry. 14 Dennett, Daniel C., Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 398. Dennett’s contention that Chomsky is simply avoiding the implications of his own theory is given some licence by Chomsky’s own notion that if, as he maintains, language is an innate function, cognitive structures should be studied in the same way as organic structures. See also, Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct (London: Penguin Press, 1995), pp. 8-10. 15 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, ed. by F.J. Child, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882-1889). As this is generally accepted to be a standard reference work, all quoted ballad texts are identified where appropriate according to Child’s classification. Each stanza quoted is identified by ‘St. number’.

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Charles Duffin longing for a lover. This latter aspect emerges from the tension between the act of sewing which occupies the hands and the freedom of thought which is the corollary of that mechanical activity. This subconscious longing is borne out by narrative events which occur in its wake such as a sexual encounter. Andersen also argues that the ‘same overtones are evoked in other ballads’ by formulaic phrases which denote other similar preoccupations as with: Fair Margaret sat in her bower window, A combing of her hair.

St .3 Fair Margaret and Sweet William (74A)

These two distinct formulae, he argues, are members of the same formula family, are interchangeable and carry the same narrative function and associative potential. His evidence for this comes from a comparison of the opening stanzas of two other Child versions (41A & 41B: Hind Etin) in which, he claims, this interchangeability is exemplified. While it might be possible to regard this ‘family’ relationship in terms of Parry’s notion of creation of new formulae by analogy, it is not possible to accept Andersen’s idea, based on his own explanation of formulaic construction, that they are invested with exactly the same associative function as each other. The act of hair-combing, particularly when that hair is a significant colour (yellow in 41B), in the ballad tradition generates a more profoundly sexual connotation than the sewing formula, particularly where it appears with the ‘kirtle’ or ‘skirt’ formula in close attendance, as it does in both of Andersen’s examples where the combing formula is utilised. Andersen himself notes the propriety of the action of sewing in a surface-narrative sense and it is also significant that in comparing the two versions of Hind Etin, the narrative outcome is significantly different, where those different formulae have been used with the more overtly sexual narrative (41B) producing a negative outcome and the more sensual than sexual ‘sewing’ formula (41A) producing a positive transformation of narrative circumstances. The point here is to illustrate that formulaic diction can be seen to operate not casually, or by accident, during performance. Andersen assumes that these so called ‘interchangeable’ formulae are deployed by artists of equal skill and that they have access to a common but variable formulaic vocabulary. He does not consider that one or the other may have simply been less skilled in the deployment of formulaic diction and as a consequence produce a significantly altered rendition. In order to assess those qualities, these single-line formulaic phrases would have to be examined in the context of their relationship with attendant formulae and the subsequent narrative action. If, for example, a traditional audience was led to expect an overtly sexual encounter because of the presence of a ‘combing’ formula in conjunction with a ‘skirt’ formula and what arose was a more subtle variation such as the advent of a lover’s ghost (which Andersen elsewhere relates to the ‘sewing’ formula) then it might be fair to assume that the performer had, in a traditional sense, launched the wrong associative signal and as a consequence could be regarded as less skilled than the one who properly evoked the supernatural resonance of the ghost through the ‘sewing’ formula. When he comes to regard the longer narrative units, which he describes as stanzaic formulae, Andersen cites the narrative condition of separation between principal characters

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The Singer and the Scribe that necessitates the call for a ‘bonny boy’ to act as go-between. The ‘Bonny Boy’ formula, according to Andersen can take the form of a single line, the ubiquitous ‘Where will I get a bonny boy?’ or a whole stanza: Gin I had but een o my father’s merry men St.3 As aft times I’ve had mony, That wad run on to the gates o Aboyne Wi a letter to my rantin laddie The Rantin Laddie (240)

This is an unusual choice because it is a linguistic variant, chosen perhaps to illustrate Andersen’s point about multiformity. In other versions of this same ballad printed by Child, however, there are alternative versions of the ‘bonny boy’ formula which conform more readily to the most common utilisation of this formula, of request and echoed response, which Andersen also quotes from a variety of ballad sources to illustrate the linguistic variation in the formula including ‘Where will I get a bonny boy, Will win gold to his fee, And will run into Chiel Wyet’s, With this letter from me?’

St.10

‘O here I am, the boy, says one,

St.11

Will win gold to my fee And carry away any letter To Chiel Wyet for thee’ Lord Ingram and Chiel Wyet (66A)

He then quotes a trinary stanzaic pattern which may involve a non-formulaic interpolation by the singer which according to Andersen forestalls the ‘acceptance’ response ‘O where will I get a bonny boy, To rin my errand soon, That will run into fair England, And haste him back again?’

St.7

O up it starts a bonny boy,

St.8

Gold yallow was his hair, I wish his mither meickle joy, His bonny love meikle mair. ‘O here I am a bonny boy,

St.9

Will rin your errand soon I will gang into fair England, And come right soon again.’ Johnny Scot (99A)

At this level of construction, Andersen claims that the formula has almost become an entire ballad scene, but it appears to me that all of the examples above can be read as a single-line ‘bonny boy’ formula, sometimes contextualised by a request, or an answer and response

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Charles Duffin orientation, and qualified in narrative terms by attendant formulae such as ‘will win gold to his/my fee’, as well as by subsequent narrative information that relates the single-line formula to the overall narrative and conceptual architectonic of the ballad. Andersen recognises that these formulae are, ‘traditional expressions, moulded over many generations, and that their linguistic flexibility is not completely unrestricted’. I would suggest that it is perhaps more restricted than he would have us believe.16 Even if we were to consider the trinary stanzaic form above a complete formulaic unit (even though, as Andersen notes, the middle stanza is not in itself formulaic in his own terms) we must also find reasons to explain its variation in economy. Interpolations of a subjective and self-conscious kind by the narrator, typified by the central stanza, are strongly indicative, not of an oral mindset but of a nascent literary sensibility. That same interpolation also includes another formulaic phrase —‘Gold yallow was his hair’ — which, as noted above, may have sexual connotations for a traditional audience whereas here it could rather be a sign of literary sentimentality, alien to the ballad narrative. Taken in conjunction with the ‘messenger’ formula this may be considered as both narratively and conceptually inappropriate. It may or may not appear to be formulaic, it may be wrapped in tradition, but it may also be the result of a flawed performance, or a literary interpolation in a transitional work addressed to the emerging priorities of a literary audience. Evolution, in an oral culture, although it allows for variability, does not, from Parry’s perspective, allow for the kind of expansiveness apparent in Andersen’s notion of multiformity. In a culture that is obliged to conserve its noetic stock in memory alone, economy is the key to retaining information. Where Parry’s studies produced strong evidence to support the notion that Homeric works are tightly metrically bound, this in itself might only be an indication that the particular tradition upon which those works were based had reached a degree of associative conciseness that made such close metrical economy possible. That is to say that the formulaic diction, operating on the principal of utility, exercised on the listener and artist together the maximum connotative potential in the tightest possible narrative conditions — the metrical circumstances prescribed by Parry. The relative stability of some linear formulae in the ballad tradition suggests that there are formulae which have been refined to a degree of sound and sense which approaches those circumstances and it is this that points us to the essential critical role of the audience. What is it that stops variations from developing into highly individualised original songs? The singer’s individuality is the key to variation in the oral economy but any attempt to express that individuality outwith the confines of formulaic discourse results in material which is incomprehensible to the culture as a whole. Innovation is vital but the meaning which attaches to that innovation cannot be left to the singer alone. In order for an innovation to become part of the tradition it must accrete narrative and associative meaning that is universally comprehensible to the tradition. When that innovation attains a level of common currency that allows it to release that accreted meaning into the narrative under optimum metrical conditions and it functions, in co-operation with other established formulae, in order to produce a satisfactory narrative outcome it has, in Parry’s terms,

16

Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, p. 59

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The Singer and the Scribe evolved to the point where it is an essential element in formulaic discourse. That can only be achieved where the singer’s drive to individuality is attenuated over time into commonality by meeting the narrative expectation of the audience. Through that process the conceptual basis of the original message is preserved and its resonance enhanced to accommodate change through time. The establishment of a working formula is in itself the hallmark of critical authority. Every time a coherent formula appears in a ballad narrative it echoes that critical authority; consequently when it is rendered incoherent by narrative intrusion and the effects of literacy, the non-literate audience suffers a loss of critical significance. If we had the luxury of being able to trace the development of a single ballad through several generations of a particular oral process we might indeed be able to identify that evolutionary process at work in the ballad tradition. The history of ballads as texts, however, is such that it would be difficult to trace given that, by the time they were thought worthy of collecting, they had for some time been interacting with literary forces through broadsheets and manuscripts and were also being subjected to editorial pressures by early collectors. Thanks to those same collectors we do, however, have access to an enormous selection of ballad-texts and versions of ballad-texts from a variety of sources which, when we take account of the equally varied editorial practices applied to them, might help us identify any breakdown in the formulaic diction. Walter Scott’s protracted thesis of decay in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border illustrates a paradox that lies behind the explosion of ballad-collecting: that literary elites were fascinated by the ballads as cultural products while their literary sensibility, driven by the quest for originality of expression, was repulsed by the formulaic burden which attached to them. The collections of rhymes, accumulated by the earliest of the craft, appear to have been considered as forming a joint stock for the common use of the profession; and not mere rhymes only, but verses and stanzas, have been used as common property, so as to give the appearance of sameness and crudity to the whole series of 17 popular poetry..

Scott has a recurring knack of recognising the essence of oral poetry and simultaneously missing the point of his own observations. What he is condemning here is the very stuff of oral tradition, the formulae and architectonic repetitions which may ensure not only the delivery of the narrative message but also, in the manner of their disposition, the gloss of currency that attaches to that message at a particular point in the tradition, which seeks an evaluatory response from the traditional audience. Scott, however, is simply reflecting literary intolerance to formulae which are regarded in terms of redundancy. With the complicity of his educated readers, Scott quite literally edited the critical authority of the non-literate audience out of cultural contention. In editing and glossing out the commonplaces and so-called clichés of formulaic discourse that offended the romantic literary mind, he stifled the means by which the traditional audience could understand and evaluate the current state of the tradition. These frozen and often adulterated texts were collectively transformed into a literary dream of national identity mouthed by virtual bards

17

Walter Scott, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, rev. and ed. by T.F. Henderson, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1932), 1, 8.

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Charles Duffin for the benefit of their own cultural aspirations. The complicity of Scott and his ‘educated reader’ meant that ballad-texts were effectively re-configured into the software of a literary, romantic discourse that assumed critical authority over the products of tradition. This is not to say that we have no ballad-texts that are genuinely oral in their conception or that all texts are by definition over-mediated in the process of transformation. Collectors like William Motherwell show a remarkable prescience in regard to formulaic diction when discussing the language and mechanisms of ballad-discourse and even that bloodthirsty vegetarian Joseph Ritson demanded a respect for the oral process. It has to be said, though, that his powers of discrimination when applied to that purpose often fell short of his ambitions. These and other exceptions aside, many texts are profoundly marked by the effects of literacy at the point of performance and transcription and to recognise this provides a counter-weight when it comes to gauging what may, or may not, constitute elements of a working oral-formulaic discourse in any given ballad-text. One such opportunity exists in a comparative study of those texts delivered to us at different times by Mrs Brown, who stands, according to Child among others, as the doyenne of Scots ballad singers. Although there is no evidence to support the notion that Mrs Brown ever had a public audience for her work until the demand from literary collectors created it, she had learned traditional songs and techniques from people who may have had such a public role and it seems fair to assume that her learning process was to some extent attuned to the critical priorities of oral performance. Yet the only critical audience she ever had was a literary audience and it is to the priorities of that literary audience, as she understood them, that her work is ultimately addressed. She was familiar with the social and sexual politics of the literary world as distinct from the ballad world and on both occasions when her texts were being transcribed in 1773 and in 1800 she delivered censored versions of ballads with a sexual content about which David Buchan admits it is fairly safe to assume deliberate acts of omission on Mrs Brown’s part.18 If that is a safe assumption, then we must also assume a critical role for the literary audience of which Mrs Brown was not only aware but which she was willing to accommodate in her compositional strategy. Critical regard was not paid, directly or indirectly, to a traditional non-literate audience, but to her literate transcribers, a fourteenyear-old boy in 1773, and a Church of Scotland minister in 1800. More importantly, it was the aesthetic priorities of the audience beyond the transcription that were exciting Mrs Brown’s interventions — a wider, literary audience of ballad-collectors and a public increasingly directed by their rules of aesthetic propriety which was essentially literary. It was not simply that audience’s sense of sexual impropriety which was protected by Mrs Brown but also their literary sensibility. Buchan recognises this up to a point:

18

Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, p. 138. This self-censorship must hold some implications for the notion of spontaneous re-creation. If it was so in Mrs Brown’s case, at what level of consciousness does censorship take place? Buchan does not address that question. Considering that these ‘performances’ were to be transcribed for a literate audience the level of intervention must have been attuned to the expectations which Mrs Brown shared in common with that audience.

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The Singer and the Scribe We are faced with a paradox: the woman who preserved the finest representatives of the old oral tradition, the tradition of the non-literate rural folk was herself an educated woman, daughter of a professor and wife of a minister. This paradox is, however, apparent rather than real, because it is possible, at a certain point in the tradition, for a person to be both literate and an oral composer. It is only when a person ceases to be re-creative along traditional lines and accepts the literate concept of fixed text that he or she can no longer be classed as oral.19 However, a comparison of the texts delivered by Mrs Brown in 1773 and reconfigured in 1800 illustrates that dynamic precisely. I would argue that that the evidence strongly suggests that Mrs Brown’s two renditions of The Lass of Roch Royal (76D-76E) are profoundly altered by the more modern version’s relationship to the text printed in Herd’s Scottish Songs in 1776, reprinted by Child as (76B) The Bonny Lass of Lochroyan. Comparing Mrs Brown’s two versions of The Lass of Roch Royal (Child: 76D, 76E) will, Buchan says, support Bertrand Bronson’s claim that, what Mrs Brown was trying for in the version of 1800 was not to recover her own text of 1783, but to recover, or re-create, the ballad itself: the essential, ideal “Lass of Roch Royal”.20 This ‘ideal’ is, for Buchan, underpinned by Parry’s notion of an oral-formulaic creation but if we do examine these texts we find evidence of an intrusive literary ambience which undermines the proposition that the work is being re-created in an exclusively oral mode: ‘O wha will shoe my fu fair foot? An wha will glove my han? An wha will lace my middle gimp Wi the new made London ban?

St.1

‘Or wha will kemb my yallow hair,

St.2

Wi the new made silver kemb? Or wha’ll be father to my young bairn, Till Love Gregor come hame? Her father shoed her fu fair foot

St.1

‘And wha will kaim my yellow hair,

St.2

Wi the new made silver kaim? And wha will father my young son, Till Love Gregor come hame? St.3

Her mother glovd her han Her sister lac’d her middle gimp Wi the new made London ban. Her brother kembd her yallow hair

‘O wha will shoe my fu fair foot? And wha will glove my hand? And wha will lace my middle jimp, Wi the new made London band?

‘Your father will shoe your fu fairfoot

St.3

Your mother will glove your hand; Your sister will lace your middle jimp Wi the new made London band. St.4

‘Your brother will kaim your yellow hair St.4

Wi the new made silver kemb But the king o heaven maun father her bairn Till Love Gregor come haim. (76D) (1783)

Wi the new made silver kaim; And the king of heaven will father your bairn Til, Love Gregor come hame.’ (76E) (1800)

When we examine the opening stanzas of Mrs Brown’s two versions, the conscious anglicisation of the 1800 (76E) version obliges us to consider whether we are dealing with a process of traditional idealisation or of literary improvement. Orthography alone might lead us to speculate that the translation itself might have been an ‘improved’ version of a 19 20

Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk, p. 64 Bronson, Bertrand H., ‘Mrs Brown and the Ballad’, California Folklore Quarterly, 4 (1945), 129-40.

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Charles Duffin traditional performance and this view would be supported not only by the substitution of the vernacular, as in ‘son’ for ‘bairn’ in the later text, but also by the shift to a future tense. The tonal ramifications of this, however, suggest a more trenchant strategic shift by the performer. Comparison of the third lines of stanza four in each these versions reveals the narrative consequences of those substitutions. In the original version (76D) the essential narrative idea is conveyed in an impersonal and non-subjective manner which is consistent with Child’s own idea of a traditional oral style. In the more modern version (76E) the narrative idea is expressed by a narrator whose voice is critically affected by the substitution of the standard English ‘will’ for the vernacular ‘maun’ (must) which ‘improves’ the poetic language and maintains the consistency in tense but fundamentally alters and personalises the tone. This is no longer fatalistic, but positive. The strategic aim appears to be an attempt to enhance the ‘traditional’ gra mmar in order to infuse the ballad with a literary polish, but the narrative consequences are to distort fatally the traditional sense. This undermines Buchan’s notion that this second version is being re-created according to a traditional poetic grammar as described by Parry and suggests either the intrusion of an active literary imagination, or that the second text is being recreated from a different model. In 1776 Herd’s Scottish Songs contained a version of the ballad, ‘The Bonny Lass of Lochroyan’, reprinted by Child as 76B: ‘O wha will shoe thy bonny feet? Or wha will glove thy hand? Or wha will lace thy middle jimp, With lang, lang London whang?

St.1

‘And wha will kame thy bonny head,

St.2

With a tabean brirben kame? And wha will be my bairn’s father Till Love Gregory come hame?’ Thy father’ll shoe his bonny feet,

St.3

Thy mither’ll glove his hand; Thy brither will lace his middle jimp, With a lang, lang London whang. ‘Mysel will kame his bonny head,

St.4

With tabean brirben kame; And the Lord will be the the bairn’s father, Till Love Gregory come hame.’

The tonal confluence between (76B) and (76E) is marked from the outset, suggesting a closer narrative relationship at this point between these two works than between either of these and Mrs Brown’s earlier version. The orthographic similarities are noteworthy, as is the shared use of the future tense. The essential link between these two texts, however, is the personalised narrator who in this (76B) version intrudes upon the action. Here, as in Mrs Brown’s (76E) version, the narrative voice explicitly addresses the ballad-actor in contrast to the impersonal narration of the early text (76D) where the action is described in a traditional way. This is not evidence of a passive traditional voice but of an active, literary 147

The Singer and the Scribe strategy. If Mrs Brown is looking to re-create an ‘ideal’ version, it is not the ‘ideals’ of tradition that are uppermost in her mind. This is reinforced by Mrs Brown’s alternative treatment of the traditional triangular relationship between Annie, her lover and his mother who represents the threat to that relationship. The entire nature of the threat and consequently of the relationship alters between the two texts. Long stood she at her true-love’s door And lang tirld at the pin At length up gat his f’ase mither Say’s wha that would be in?

St.9

‘O open the door Love Gregor’, she says St.9 ‘O open and let me in’ ‘For the wind blaws through my yellow hair And the rain draps o’er my chin.’

(76D) ‘Awa, awa’ ye ill woman You’r na come here for good. You’r but some witch, or vile warlock, Or mer-maid of the flood.’

St.10

(76E)

In the earlier text the audience is made aware from the outset of the mother’s deception of Annie. The ‘fa’se mither’ is a heavily charged formula which alerts the traditional audience to the imminent deception. The relationship between Mrs Brown’s (76E) version and the Herd version (76B) is reinforced here by the use of a stanza which appears in almost identical form at the same stage of narrative development in both of these but not in the original (76D) text. Now open, open , Love Gregory, St.17 Open and let me in! For the rain rains on my gude cleading, And the dew stands on my chin. (76B)

In the modern (76E) text the deception is not revealed until the exchange between Annie and the mother is over and her lover wakes and recounts his dream, to which the mother responds: ‘O there was a woman stood at the door, St.24 Wi a bairn until her arms But I would na lat her within the bowr For fear she’d done you harm. (76D)

‘Gin it be for Annie of Rough Royal That ye make a’ this din, She stood a’ last night at this door, But I trow she wan no in. ‘O wae betide ye, ill woman, An ill dead may ye die! That ye wouldno open the door to her, Nor yet woud waken me.’

St.19

St.20

(76E)

In the original (76D) version the deception is still intact but understood by the traditional audience through the use of the ‘fa’se mither’ formula which signifies to that audience that the mother has deliberately misled both Annie and her lover despite her certain knowledge of Annie’s identity, established by a test of tokens. This realisation is not shared by the son in the original version where he remains ignorant of the deliberate nature of the deception. 148

Charles Duffin In the later version the deception, which is narratively unambiguous, is sprung by the mother, increasing the emotional impact. This is consistent with the Herd text, which also fails to utilise the ‘fa’se mother’ formula. Once again, a common stanza appears at a critical stage of the narrative development of those two versions which does not appear in Mrs Brown’s early text. Awa, awa, ye wicket woman, And an ill dead may ye die! Ye might have ither letten her in, Or else have wakened me.

St.22

(76B)

The connotative power of a single traditional formula in (76D) is sacrificed to the literary shock tactic of dramatic revelation. The mystery is not understood, but revealed. The fact that Mrs Brown needed to explain suggests that by 1800 she was unsure of the ability of her audience to appreciate to the connotative reverberations of the ‘fa’se mither’ formula. The surprise element of the alternative strategy also suggests a literary sensibility at work in the composition. According to the Parry view of oral composition, an aesthetic contract between traditional singer and audience is founded on a common understanding of the tale to be told. There is no room for narrative surprises and novel elements are only introduced and accepted by mutual agreement that the tradition is ready to absorb them. 21 The narrative is fundamentally altered by the demands of the new approach and this culminates in distortion in the final stanzas. The message compressed within the ‘fa’se mother’ formula is made literal in (76E) where the protagonist launches a curse on his mother for deceiving him. He is explicitly aware of the deception. In the (76D) version, however, he is left to mourn the loss of his lover while it is the traditional audience alone who are aware of the root of that tragedy. This awareness arises from an educated understanding of the connotative force and strategic disposition of the formulaic phrase within the narrative. O he has mourned o’er Fair Anny Til the sun was gaing down, Then wi a sigh his heart it brast, An his soul to heaven has flown.

St.32

(76D)

‘O wae betide my cruel mother, And ill dead may she die! For she turnd my true love frae my door When she came sae far to me.’

St.26

(76E)

The religious and sentimental expressions in the final stanza of the original are themselves evidence of an intrusive literary sensibility in the early text, but it is the narrative alteration that concerns us here. Even in the Herd text the son dies. The consequences of that 21

Vansina, Jan, Oral Traditions as History (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 35. Vansina’s experience of contemporary oral performance suggests that whatever the quality of the performance, ‘the tale must be well known to the oral audience: they must already know the tale so that they can enjoy the rendering of various episodes, appreciate the innovations and anticipate the thrills to come’. This supports the idea that variations, such as the one perpetrated here by Mrs Brown, could in no sense have been intended for an exclusively oral audience. The ‘innovation’, at narrative level, effectively confounds the sense of anticipation which the connotative ambience of the ‘fa’se mither’ formula evokes.

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The Singer and the Scribe relationship when comparing the modern version with the earlier text suggest a significant disruption of the relationship between the formulaic disposition and the traditional narrative to the point where the more modern text carries a romantic literary ambience which sets it apart from the simple formulaic and narrative efficiency of the earlier text. The literary infestation of the text results in a fundamental alteration in relationships between the ballad-actors to the point where it is difficult to imagine how that version might make sense to a pre-literate audience attuned to the narrative expectations raised by any formulaic discourse. This is borne out ultimately in the alteration of the narrative outcome where, instead of dying as he did in the earlier version (and, it is worth noting, in Herd’s version), the lover, who has been deceived by his false mother, is instead condemned to life as a tragic figure straight from the pages of a literary romance. Mrs Brown’s re-configuration of this ballad demonstrates something fundamental to our understanding of Parry’s formulaic discourse which is that something significant happens to a ballad when a singer fails to recognise the critical authority of the traditional non-literate audience. The narrative itself is transformed and the key to that transformation lies in the aesthetic priorities of her perceived audience. Buchan’s failure to recognise the full connotative power of the individual formulaic unit and his attempt to incorporate Parry’s definition in an unmodified form has provided fuel for those critics, like Flemming Andersen, who claim that oral-formulaic studies are inappropriate to the ballad tradition. The need to establish the usefulness and limitations of oral-formulaic theory is driven by the recognition that it provides, perhaps uniquely, a critical framework which allows a literary scholar the opportunity to appreciate and address the Scots ballad tradition in terms of a distinctive, non-literary, oral aesthetic. Any other literary approach entertains distortion rooted in the procedures and prejudices of the time when literary culture assumed ownership of traditional products, for psychological, political and commercial purposes — a literary process. Ballad formulae where they appear, echo the critical authority of the oral audience. The more frequently they appear to be working coherently within the narrative the more I think we can assume that the text has been measured by that critical authority. Where they are displaced or rendered incoherent by the literary interpolations of editors and the compromised aesthetics of singers they may provide us with comparative evidence of the kind of space that critical authority occupies in variant text s of the same ballad that are relatively free from that kind of aesthetic disruption. In terms of understanding what is left, it seems to me that Parry’s theory, in its broadest application, provides the most comprehensive means of doing so which both respects fully the critical role of audience and does not rely on skyhooks. This does not mean that I am making a case for cultural Darwinism, at this stage I am more concerned with reviewing critical history in order to make a case for the critical authority of the oral audience, but I do think that the undeniably snug conformity to the Darwinian paradigm of Parry’s theory raises interesting possibilities. If Parry’s ideas allow us a sense of the creative and critical dynamic that operates in a text that is judged to be relatively free from literary encroachment, we have in those texts an ideal opportunity to attempt what scientists are always demanding of the humanities — to generate and test 150

Charles Duffin against available evidence. In the formulae we have, in neo-Darwinian terms, a measurable memetic unit and in the formulaic discourse we have, potentially, a dynamic assembly of memetic units engaged with each other in an associative drive toward narrative production. If an examination of this process supported the idea of science working through analogy then, deprived of our skyhooks, we may have to address the implications of a scientific basis for oral aesthetics; if, however, it reveals analogy masquerading as science then we may find in our critique of Parry a valuable source of evidence to set against the claims of cultural Darwinists. It may be singers and scribes who generate the evidence that we find in the Scots ballad text, but, if Parry’s ideas are to be usefully applied to that tradition, it is ultimately against the critical role of the audience that such evidence must be tested.

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Estrea Aelion, Salonica Sephardic Tradition and the Ballad of Imprisoned Virgil

Margaret Sleeman In this paper I give a succinct portrait of Estrea Aelion, a remarkable singer originally from Salica. I describe briefly my work with her in London, and indicate the interest of her ballad repertoire. After this, I pick out for detailed discussion one of the ballads she sang, Virgilios. The ballads of the Sephardic Jews have long been valued for their conservatism, and rightly so. The tradition includes ballads which are now little known in the Iberian Peninsula, or are no longer sung there at all, and Sephardic texts, together with those of other isolated groups, can provide invaluable information about earlier stages of a ballad. There is, though, another aspect, that of the accommodation of what was originally Hispanic material to Sephardic culture, for the singers have made the ballads their own. I aim to emphasise this aspect in my commentary. Before approaching my main subject, however, it will be useful to fill in the background. The Jews formed a small but significant group within the population of the Iberian peninsula during the Middle Ages. Towards the end of that period, however, their situation changed dramatically. In 1391, a series of pogroms in the towns of Castile and Aragon caused panic, and many Jews embraced Christianity (though it has to be said that individual conversions of these ‘New Christians’ or conversos varied in sincerity — the necessary outward observance of Christianity often being a cloak for the continued and secret practice of Judaism). Conversion did, however, open up new career possibilities in the Church and in civil administration, and many conversos rose to positions of power in these areas. Their new power was envied, and a combination of envy and suspicion about their religious orthodoxy seem to have been key factors in the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478. And fears that the continued presence of considerable numbers of unbaptised Jews might tempt the conversos to revert to Judaism led, eventually, to the expulsion of the Jews. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella effectively decreed that all remaining Jews in Castile and Aragon choose between baptism and expulsion. There was a further wave of conversions, but many held out, and had to leave. The great majority fled to Portugal where they had a brief respite, but in 1497, all Jews in Portugal were forced to leave or be baptised. For those who left the Peninsula, favoured destinations were neighbouring Provence, Italy, and North Africa. Expelled Jews also made their way to the Ottoman territories of the eastern Mediterranean. It was in the towns of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire that they were able to find greatest long-term security; they formed communities, were able to practise their faith, and kept their language and important elements of popular culture. Of the secret or crypto-Jews who had remained in the Peninsula, many managed to leave over the following years and centuries, and either joined the Jewish communities established earlier, or founded new communities in Northern Europe — in France,

The Singer and the Scribe Germany, Holland, and England — where they were able to practice Judaism openly as conditions allowed. The settled communities of the Sephardim (descendants of Jews who lived in Spain and Portugal before the Expulsion) have now largely disappeared. The Eastern communities were affected by the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, the First World War, and in addition, in the case of the Sephardic community in Salonica, the great fire of 1917, which destroyed large parts of the city. Many Jews left, the United States and South America being popular destinations. A group of almost 700 Eastern Sephardim from Salonica and Turkey came to London to join an old established Sephardic community dating from the seventeenth century (and by now thoroughly anglicised). Events over the following decades continued to erode, and in some cases extinguish the Eastern Jewish communities. In the new Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s modernisation projects made the country less attractive for Jews. Nazi atrocities virtually wiped out the huge Jewish community in Salonica, others in Greece, and those in Yugoslavia. The North African communities have now also dispersed. From the middle of the twentieth century many Moroccan Jews have chosen to move to Israel, the United States, Canada, France and elsewhere, continuing a desire to emigrate which had begun earlier. 1 Much important ballad fieldwork was carried out in the old communities. The work of the Spaniard Manuel Manrique de Lara was outstanding, conducted in all the major Eastern centres in 1911, and in the Moroccan ones between 1915 and 1916. His meticulous handwritten texts are housed in the Archivo Menéndez Pidal in Madrid, as are his transcriptions of the tunes of some of these ballads. Inevitably, from the middle of the twentieth century the focus has been on the new centres. Here the towering figures are the American scholars Samuel G. Armistead, Joseph H. Silverman, and Israel J. Katz, who have collected in the U.S.A., Morocco and Israel. I.J. Katz works on the music of this collection. Among the Sephardic communities which had not been investigated was the British one, and during the 1980s I carried out fieldwork there. By far the most knowledgeable informant I found was Estrea Aelion (born Matalón), originally from Salonica, who had settled in London with her family many years before. Details of Mrs Aelion’s life are from my recorded conversations with her, correspondence with her daughter and granddaughters, and from a lengthy tape-recording which she made for her family at the time of her hundredth birthday, a copy of which was very kindly given to me by her daughter. Estrea Aelion was born in 1884 in Salonica (then part of the Ottoman Empire), to a family which was apparently quite comfortably off. Her father Jacob Samuel Matalón was a jeweller who specialised in dealing in pearls, and her mother Rahel Errera was the daughter of the owner of a substantial shop which sold clothing and household goods.2 Estrea was the third of five 1

The break-up of the old communities and migration to new, usually non Spanish -speaking countries has dealt a death blow to Judeo-Spanish. For a detailed account of the current situation, see Harris, Tracy K., Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994). The speech of Moroccan Jews, however, was by the time of their resettlement in other parts of the world heavily influenced by Andalusian Spanish, the result of the Spanish presence in Morocco. 2 The Jews lived together in certain districts. In 1883, the year before Estrea’s birth, the very substantial Jewish population of Salonica was estimated at 50,000, while Turks numbered 25,000 and Greeks 20,000. See

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Margaret Sleeman children, and the only girl. When she was fourteen, her mother decreed that she should leave school and prepare for eventual married life. She went to classes in dressmaking. She later said she had enjoyed sewing all her life, but also insisted that she had never stopped reading: newspapers, and devotional books given to her by her father. In 1905, Estrea married Saltiel Jehuda Aelion, the head of one of the departments in grandfather Errera’s shop. In 1907 and 1910 their son León and daughter Irma were born. After the First World War, it was decided that there was little future in Salonica, and the family moved first to Istanbul, then to Paris in 1923 after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk came to power in Turkey. Finally they moved to London where they had business interests. The children, now grown up, moved first, Irma with her husband Maurice Frances. Mr and Mrs Aelion arrived in 1936. Their business was an import and export business, a family concern. The Aelion family were members of the Holland Park synagogue, opened in 1928 by the newly-arrived Sephardim from Salonica and Turkey. After her husband’s death, Mrs Aelion lived with her daughter Mrs Irma Frances in St John’s Wood, in a very attractive and elegantly furnished flat overlooking Regent’s Park. It was there that I first met Estrea in January of 1982. She was then 97. I visited her intermittently until 1988, the year when she died, aged 104. Despite her age, Mrs Aelion had a remarkable memory. She was a strong character, with a lively sense of humour, and she very much enjoyed discussing earlier times in Salonica and singing her ballads and other songs, which were clearly very important to her. Estrea Aelion told me that she had learned her ballads from her mother, but she also heard them from others in her family. When I asked her how she learned them, she simply said (and I translate) ‘Everybody sang in my family, everybody sang, and I was small, and I listened, and learned them. Then Irma heard them from me.’ The family’s living arrangements (which were in line with local custom) must have reinforced what were already close ties: Estrea’s family lived in the same building as her father’s brother, and her maternal grandparents Errera had two apartments in their large house on the outskirts for two sons and their families. As a girl, Estrea often stayed with one of these younger families for a month at a time, since she was a great favourite of her aunt. Ballads were almost entirely women’s songs, and were bound up with a way of life. Judeo-Spanish was the vehicle, and that was the language of the home. Women in Salonica were occupied with children and the house, while men concerned themselves with the synagogue and their jobs or business interests. Ballads were used to lighten household tasks, and were sung to the children as lullabies, or at bedtime if they were older. They would be sung at parties and gatherings, such as the day, some time before a girl was married, when her friends came to her house to help wash the wool for the mattresses outside in the courtyard. Estrea described how the girl’s father would purchase a quantity of sheep’s wool. A sunny day would be chosen, and the girls would sing all day long — ballads and songs suited to the occasion. (She cited a song which contained the lines: Me dišeron qu’eras novia, / y te vine a ayudar — They say you’ll be married, /and I’ve come to

Nehama, Joseph, Histoire des Israélites de Salonique, 7 vols (Salonica: Librairie Molho, 1935 [vol. I]; Paris and Salonica: Librairie Durlacher and Librairie Molho, 1935–36 [vols II–IV]; Salonica: Fédération Séphardite Mondiale, 1959 [vol. V]; Salonica: Communauté Israélite de Thessalonique, 1978 [vols VI–VII]), VII, 772.

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The Singer and the Scribe help you) Weddings and deaths were times when ballads reserved for the occasion were sung. At weddings and other festive occasions semi -professional singers and tambourine players (cantaderas and tañederas) would come to the house to sing ballads and other songs. Until quite recent times, professional mourners (women) came to the house of the deceased. Mrs Aelion’s repertoire as collected by me comprised thirty-five ballads, plus songs associated with dates in the Jewish calendar, numerous lyrics, nursery songs and sayings, also topical songs which recorded some recent notable event. I worked with a checklist (based on Attias’s Salonica collection), 3 but some ballads were sung unsolicited. All were recorded on tape, with their tunes where Mrs Aelion remembered them, and with her comments. The ballad repertoire is typical of others collected from that centre; there are Carolingian ballads, two biblical ballads, and a large group of the so-called ‘novelesque’ ballads. Mrs Aelion also knew some which were ultimately of Greek origin, for a number of Greek ballads had been adapted as Judeo-Spanish ballads, the product of bilingualism among some singers. A few of Mrs Aelion’s ballads, El sueño de Doña Alda (Lady Alda’s Dream), El paso del Mar Rojo (The Crossing of the Red Sea), El veneno de Moriana (Moriana’s Poison), are considered very rare, in that few texts have been collected.4 Estrea Aelion’s texts are notable for their completeness, very unusual today when most people are able to remember only a few of the commonest ballads, and these only in fragmentary form. Mrs Aelion’s ballads are comparable in quality with those collected in Salonica by Manuel Manrique de Lara in 1911 from people who were after, all her, contemporaries. None of the repertoires collected by him is, however, as extensive. Her ballads, with their tunes, are an invaluable document of Salonican tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is little doubt that the fact that Estrea was able to use Judeo-Spanish on a daily basis was a factor in her retention of her repertoire; that was the language she spoke with her daughter Irma. What was surprising, however, was that Irma did not know her mother’s ballads (despite her mother’s declaration, noted above, that she had sung them for her as a 3

Attias, Moshe, Romancero sefardí: romanzas y cantares populares en judeo-español, 2nd edn (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Ben-Zewi Institute, 1961); in future cited as: Attias. 4 A full account of Estrea Aelion’s repertoire is included in my monograph (in final stages of preparation), Stories in Song: Judeo-Spanish Ballads Collected in Britain ; musical transcriptions by Judith R. Cohen. A selection of Mrs Aelion’s ballads were played at the Colloquium: El robo de Elena (The Abduction of Helen of Troy), La vuelta del marido (The Husband’s Return ), and Virgilios (Virgil). The ballads sung by Estrea Aelion which are adaptations of Greek ballads are El pozo airón (from the ballad known as The Haunted Well), La moza y el Huerco (from Charon and the Girl); La vuelta del marido is also remarkably similar to a Greek ballad. For texts, see Argenti, Philip P. and Rose, H.J., The Folk-Lore of Chios, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), II, 718–19; 722–23; 778–81. The Greek contribution to the eastern Sephardic repertoire is investigated in Armistead, Samuel G., and Silverman, Joseph H., En torno al romancero sefardí (Hispanismo y balcanismo de la tradición judeo-española) (Madrid: SMP, 1982), pp. 151-93. Mrs Aelion knew only some words and phrases in Greek, but one of Rina Benmayor’s informants knew the language quite well, and sang for her The Ballad of Susan, in Greek: see Benmayor, Rina, ‘A Greek “Tragoúdi” in the Repertoire of a Judeo-Spanish Ballad Singer’, Hispanic Review, 46 (1978), 475–79.

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Margaret Sleeman child). 5 Irma expressed amazement on hearing them. She did remark, however, that she had sometimes heard her mother quietly humming to herself. Several months after I started to work with her, Mrs Aelion sent some material to the Proyekto Folklor started by Moshe Shaul of the Sephardic branch of the Israeli Broadcasting Service, Kol Israel. She sent him two tapes, containing fourteen ballads and some other songs. I have copies of the tapes, and it is interesting to compare them with versions I collected myself. Some of the later versions are fuller, as Mrs Aelion recalled additional lines, but my recordings are, I believe, ‘warmer’ than those recorded ‘for the record’, since they were sung for an audience. In a short essay such as this it is impossible to describe adequately the many ways in which the ballads have been adapted by Sephardic singers from Eastern communities, for the process pervades every level. Some instances drawn from Estrea Aelion’s repertoire can, however, give an idea of the processes involved. On the verbal level, her texts (like those of other singers of course) include words borrowed from Turkish and the Balkan languages, words current in the Judeo-Spanish they spoke. Hebrew words also appear. There are also local touches. In La mala suegra (The Evil Mother-in-Law), the false older woman promises to look after her son carefully during her daughter-in-law’s absence by cooking fine meals. In Peninsular versions, fine wine and fine bread are on offer, but Eastern Sephardic versions promise, naturally enough, the favourite dishes of that group: Mrs Aelion’s version has pešcado con agra *e, fish with a sharp sauce, others have pigeons or savoury meatballs. There is also the question of the treatment of the frequent Christian references in Hispanic ballads, studied most recently by Samuel Armistead and Joseph Silverman in an article ‘El substrato cristiano del romancero sefardí’.6 They note differences in the way these are dealt with which include retention (rare in the East), term retained, but with a different sense, term replaced by one acceptable to the Jews: bautizar (baptise), for example, is replaced by nombrar (name) in Eastern versions of Las hermanas reina y cautiva (The Two Sisters: Queen and Captive). The treatment of the key term ‘misa’ (Mass) in Eastern texts is interesting. In Hispanic ballads, things happen when the protagonist is going to church to hear Mass, or is attending Mass. The word indeed is used in Eastern Sephardic ballads — in the forms misa, milsa, mesa — but in the examples I have encountered, with different senses. As discussed below with reference to Virgilios, there is a Sarajevo text in which the following suggestion is made: ‘digamos presto la misa’, suggesting that singers thought that the ‘misa’ was some sort of prayer or service which could be rattled off. In some ballads, the context makes it clear that the sense of misa is not that of ‘Mass’, nor even ‘prayer’, but of the building where it is said, ‘church’. Eastern versions of La bella en misa (The Beauty in Church) confirm this. Mrs Aelion’s version, which is typical, opens: ż la orasión. Tres damas van a la mesa para hazer Three ladies go to the mesa to pray.

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Irma Frances did, however, know nursery rhymes and topical songs, learned from her mother. It is probably relevant that the family left Salonica when she was quite young. In Armistead and Silverman, En torno al romancero sefardí, pp. 127–48.

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The Singer and the Scribe Here, three ladies go to la mesa to say their prayers, and a few lines further on, la mesa is lit up by the exceptional beauty of the protagonist; the sense of mesa is clearly ‘church’. While the priest who is dazzled by the girl’s beauty becomes, in these Salonica texts, the papazico, * the Orthodox priest familiar to the singers. Mesa has the same sense in Landarico. Mrs Aelion’s text of Landarico opens: E rey que mucho madruga para la mesa se iva. Topó la mesa serrada, par’ ande la reina andava. [And the King who rises very early sets off for the mesa He found the mesa closed, he went to meet the Queen.]

Here, la mesa, which is found to be closed, is clearly a building, a church or chapel. Other Eastern versions of Landarico have similar formulations. The word is used in this same sense in La choza del desesperado (The Hopeless Lover’s Hermitage) where the wretchedly unhappy man says he will build himself a misa, torre, or (Mrs Aelion) una ermita. I suggest that in Mrs Aelion’s version of Virgilios given below, misa has the sense ‘church’. Most interesting of all are cases where the inherited Hispanic material has been completely recast in line with Sephardic sentiment and values. Such a case is the ballad known as La tormenta calmada (The Quieted Storm), which derives, as Armistead and Silverman have discovered, from a sixteenth-century Spanish erudite ballad which survives in oral tradition only among the Eastern Sephardim. 7 Central to the Spanish ballad is a shepherd’s prayer to ‘the Heavens’ that the storm cease, and his delight when it does. As Armistead and Silverman observe, the Sephardic ballad transforms the original, which has ‘a minimum of re ligious overtones’ into a ballad which ‘has come to celebrate in the most fervent terms God’s miraculous response to the prayers of a true believer’ (p. 140). The relevant verses, in the version sung by Estrea Aelion, are as follows: Bendicho el Siñor del mundo, que tantas maravías mos haz e ?. Mo las haga agora y siempre y de prisa y que non de tadre. El quita naves del golfo, a la parida cuando pare. [Blessed the Lord of the world, who performs so many miracles for us He perpetually performs them, urgently not tardily He saves ships from the abyss in all hazards.]

There is an element of such a transformation in Salonican versions of Virgilios.

The Ballad of Imprisoned Virgil: ‘Virgilios’ A courtier (named Virgilios or Vergilios in early texts) makes love to a maiden at court, generally the king’s niece, an action injurious to the king himself. The king imprisons him and forgets all about him. One day he remembers him (or is reminded). He goes to see him in prison and questions him about his situation. The prisoner’s exemplary answers so impress the king that he frees him. In many versions, marriage to the lady follows.

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Armistead, Samuel G., and Joseph H. Silverman, The Judeo-Spanish Ballad Chapbooks of Yacob Abraham Yoná (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 134–44.

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Margaret Sleeman The above summary gives the story told in the majority of versions. It is a story which may be linked to the medieval legends of Virgil (the Roman poet) as a lover who gets himself into scrapes. Versions of Virgilios were printed in pliegos sueltos in the early sixteenth century. One version of the ballad was included in the Cancionero de romances ‘sin año’ of ca. 1548, and also in later collections. Another, rather different version, was printed in a pliego suelto, formerly in the collection of the Duque de T’Serclaes, now lost, of which a handwritten copy is housed in the Archivo Menéndez Pidal; this version is titled Romance nuevamente trobado del grande poeta Vergilius por muy gentil estilo [Newly found ballad about the great poet Virgil in very noble style]. The ballad has also been collected from the modern oral tradition. Judging from the numbers of texts collected, Virgilios seems to have been well known among the Moroccan Sephardim and, in the Eastern Mediterranean, among Jews from Sarajevo and Salonica. It appears to have been somewhat less well known in the other Eastern centres.8 In the Iberian Peninsula, by contrast, the ballad is little known today. A mere handful of versions have been collected from the Spanish provinces of Palencia, Zamora, Orense, and over the border in Portugal, almost all of them at the beginning of the twentieth century. A recent, intensive collecting campaign by Maximiano Trapero in the small island of El Hierro, part of the Canary Islands archipelago, has, however, revealed that the ballad survives there with some vigour. 9 Trapero has followed up his important discovery with a short monograph dedicated to the ballad.10 A particularly valuable feature of this book is an appendix which contains a selection of published texts as well as a number of previously unedited texts from the Archivo Menéndez Pidal, the latter from the Peninsular and the Sephardic traditions.11 The 8

Armistead and Silverman, The Judeo-Spanish Ballad, pp. 134- 44. His texts, recorded in 1982, and the very first of Virgilios to be collected in the Canaries, are published in his Romancero de la Isla del Hierro (Madrid: SMP and Cabildo insular del Hierro, 1985). 10 El romance de ‘Virgilios’ en la tradición canaria e hispánica (Las Palmas: El Museo Canario, 1992). 11 For examples from Morocco see: Alvar, Manuel, ‘Los romances de La bella [en] misa y de Virgilios en Marruecos’, Archivum (Oviedo), 4 (1954), 264–76, at pp. 266–70; Armistead, Samuel G. and Joseph H. Silverman, Romances judeo-españoles de Tánger recogidos por Zarita Nahón (Madrid: CSMP, 1977), nos 14A–C; Bénichou, Paul, Romancero judeo-español de Marruecos (Madrid: Castalia, 1968), p. 99; Larrea Palacín, Arcadio de, Romances de Tetuán, 2 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1952), nos 51–53; Martínez Ruiz, J., ‘Poesía sefardí de carácter tradicional (Alcazarquivir)’, Archivum (Oviedo), 13 (1963), 79–215, no. 49; WeichShahak, Susana, with the collaboration of Paloma Díaz -Mas, Romancero sefardí de Marruecos: Antología de tradición oral (Madrid: Alpuerto, 1997), no. 18 a–d. For texts from the Eastern tradition, see Armistead, Samuel G., and Joseph H. Silverman, with the collaboration of Biljana Šljivi- Šimši, Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Bosnia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), A1, B1, C3. This collection is referred to in future as Bosnia ; Armistead, Samuel G., and Joseph H. Silverman, Judeo-Spanish Ballads from New York Collected by Maír José Benardete (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1981), no. 18. Cited in future as Benardete; Attias, 7; Danon, Abraham, ‘Recueil de romances judéo-espagnoles chantées en Turquie’, Revue des Études Juives, 32 (1896), 102–23, 263–75, at p. 268; González-Llubera, Ignacio, ‘Three Jewish Spanish Ballads in MS. British Museum Add. 26967’, Medium Aevum, 7:1 (1938), 15–28, at pp. 21–23; Hemsi, Alberto, Cancionero sefardí, edited by Edwin Seroussi in collaboration with Paloma Díaz9

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The Singer and the Scribe selection of Eastern Sephardic texts is, however, restricted to those from Sarajevo, Belgrade and Jerusalem, and Trapero’s analysis of the Eastern tradition follows suit. The quite substantial number from Salonica is ignored. In this paper I shall attempt to rectify the omission, all the more important since Mrs Aelion’s version and two unedited texts in the Archive exemplify what amounts to a different story, and one which reflects specifically Jewish preoccupations. These Salonican versions have to be considered in the context of the tradition of the ballad as a whole, and I start with the version printed in the Cancionero de romances ‘sin año’. It opens with the imprisonment. Virgil is imprisoned for ‘violating’ (‘forzar’) a young lady, Isabel, in the king’s palace. The king forgets all about him, until one day at Mass, he suddenly remembers him. He checks with his men, and is reminded that Virgil is in jail. He says he will go to see Virgil immediately after lunch, but the queen (for a reason which is not explained), says that she will not sit down to eat without him. They go to the prison, and the king asks Virgil what he is doing. He replies that he is combing his hair and his beard, which started to grow in prison and will go white there. The king tells him that he has three years still to serve, to which Virgil replies that he would gladly stay for the rest of his life, should the king command it. As a result of his patience, Virgil is released and pardoned, and later rewarded with marriage to Isabel. An important feature of this version is Virgil’s great popularity among those at court (see verses 7, 11, 22– 23 below), most particularly with Isabel herself, who is described as thrilled at his release. Thus, Virgil’s action, rather than being one characterised only by violence, as suggested by the use of forzar (v. 3), must have been one in which love was present, i.e. ‘sleep with’, ‘make love to and deflower’ (Isabel was, after all, a virgin, a doncella). The king’s concern for his prisoner also supports this milder view. As it happens, another ballad (again contained in the Cancionero de romances ‘sin año’), which opens ‘Medianoche era por filo …’, has interesting similarities with Virgilios. Count Claros makes love to the Princess Claraniña (whom he had long adored) after an encounter in which compliments and highly suggestive comments are exchanged. Count Claros is arrested and condemned to death, the girl’s father referring to his crime as ‘forzar’. Count Claros is eventually saved by the devoted Claraniña, who makes a persuasive case to her father the king. There is no way in which this passionate and loving relationship could be described as a violation12 and the king’s use of forzar is all the more odd since the huntsman who informed him described the couple as kissing and embracing as they made love. Should forzar be construed as ‘deflower’? In both Conde Claros and Virgilios, the use of forzar is problematic, and it is not surprising that in Virgilios, singers eventually substituted another verb.

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Mas, José Manuel Pedrosa and Elena Romero (Jerusalem: The Jewish Music Research Centre, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1995), no. 17. Referred to as Hemsi; Molho, Michael, Literatura sefardita de Oriente (Madrid and Barcelona: CSIC, 1960), p. 73. Bosnia A1 and González-Llubera’s text are of eighteenth-century date. Unedited texts from the Archivo Menéndez Pidal are listed in the following work: Armistead, Samuel G., with the collaboration of Selma Margaretten, Paloma Montero, Ana Valenciano, and with musical transcriptions edited by Israel J. Katz, El romancero judeo-español en el Archivo Menéndez Pidal (Catálogoíndice de romances y canciones), 3 vols (Madrid: CSMP, 1978). Cited in future as CMP. I am very grateful to Professor Diego Catalán for allowing me to consult these texts, and the copy of the T’Serclaes text. This ballad is edited and provided with extensive notes in Roger Wright, Spanish Ballads, second revised impression (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1988), pp. 12–21.

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Margaret Sleeman I quote the text of Virgilios,13 followed by a literal English translation (this and all subsequent translations are my own).

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Mandó el rey prender Virgilios y a buen recaudo poner por una traición que hizo en los palacios del rey, porque forzó una doncella llamada doña Isabel. Siete años lo tuvo preso sin que se acordase d’él y un domingo estando en misa mientes se le vino d’él. — Mis caballeros, Virgilios, ¿qué se había hecho d’él?— Allí habló un caballero que a Virgilios quiere bien: — Preso lo tiene tu alteza y en tus cárceles lo tien. — ¡ Vía comer, mis caballeros; caballeros, vía comer! Después que hayamos comido a Virgilios vamos ver. — Allí hablara la reina: — Yo no comeré sin él.— A las cárceles se van adonde Virgilios es. — ¿Qué hacéis aquí, Virgilios? Virgilios, ¿aquí qué hacéis? — Señor, peino mis cabellos y las mis barbas también; aquí me fueron nacidas, aquí me han de encanecer que hoy se cumplen siete años que me mandaste prender. — Calles, calles, tú, Virgilios, que tres faltan para diez. — Señor, si manda tu alteza, toda mi vida estaré. — Virgilios, por tu paciencia conmigo irás a comer. — Rotos tengo mis vestidos, no estoy para parecer. — Que te los daré, Virgilios,

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The king ordered his men to seize Virgil and to imprison him securely for a crime he had committed in the king’s palace, ‘violating’ a maiden called doña Isabel. He held him prisoner for seven years, forgetting him entirely. One Sunday, while at Mass, Virgil came to mind. — my Knights, what has become of Virgil? Then a knight spoke up, one who loved Virgil well. — Your Majesty holds him prisoner, he is in your jail. — Hurry, let us eat, knights; knights, let us hurry and eat. After we have eaten, we will go and see Virgil. Then the queen spoke up: — I won’t eat without him. They went to the prison where Virgil was being kept. — What are you doing, Virgil? Virgil, what are you doing? — My lord, I am combing my hair and my beard as well. My beard began to grow here and here it will turn white, for it is seven years today since you imprisoned me. — Be quiet, be quiet, Virgil, you have three years to go before ten are up. — My lord, if Your Majesty orders it, I will stay here for the rest of my life. — Virgil, because of your patience you will come and dine with me. — My clothes are in shreds, I’m not fit to appear. — I shall give you clothes, I shall give orders

From Cancionero de romances ‘sin año’, edited by Paloma Díaz-Mas, in Romancero (Barcelona: Crítica, 1994), pp. 346-48.

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yo dártelos mandaré. – Plugo a los caballeros y a las doncellas también; mucho más plugo a una dueña llamada doña Isabel. Ya llaman al arzobispo, ya la desposan con él; tomárala por la mano y llévasela a un vergel.

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that you are provided with clothes. The knights were glad, the maidens as well, but the lady who was best pleased was doña Isabel. The archbishop was summoned, and she was married to Virgil. He took her by the hand, and led her into a garden.

It is very interesting to compare the other sixteenth-century text (T’Serclaes) with this one. Essentially the story told is the same as in the Cancionero de romances text. Virgil’s crime is again described as forzar, and his punishment is again severe—a ten-year period of imprisonment. Again, the king suddenly remembers about his prisoner, rushes to see him in prison, is impressed by (in this version) Virgil’s humility in stating his unconditional willingness to serve the remainder of his sentence, and again, the king lets him go early, and also permits him to marry the woman he knows he loves. There are, however, some significant differences. After v. 3 of the Cancionero de romances text, T’Serclaes has an additional verse which gives detail of the lady’s parentage; she is the daughter of an archbishop and the niece of the king: “hija es de un Arçobispo / sobrina era del buen rey.” Second, the verse in which the queen speaks up is lacking in T’Serclaes. Finally, the T’Serclaes text describes the prisoner’s suffering in much more harrowing terms than the other text. In T’Serclaes, the king asks his prisoner what his life in the dungeon (mazmorra ) is like, and Virgil replies that there is no need to ask, for the results of the imprisonment can be seen in his face: when he entered prison, his beard was beginning to show (i.e. he was a youth), but now, for his sins, it was already going white—a formulation found too in textts in the modern oral tradition and one which, as Paloma Díaz -Mas noted, Romancero, p. 347, is a little different from the formulation in the text she edited, in which Virgil declares that his beard will go white in prison (v. 15) due to the length of his incarceration. The concluding verses of the two versions also vary. In T’Serclaes, Virgil is brought forth from prison weighed down with handcuffs, leg irons, and chains, a pitiful sight, we are told (vv. 47– 52): Ya lo sacan a Vergilios / de la cárcel segun veis con esposas en las manos / y unos grillos a los pies una cadena en su cuello / que dolor es si lo veis.

The final verses of T’Serclaes (vv. 55–56) explicitly praise the magnanimity of kings. Like the early texts, those in the modern oral tradition have assonance in –é. Sephardic texts from Morocco and Sarajevo and Salonica contain a verse which describes the lady’s relationship to the king, as is found in the T’Serclaes version, and texts from Sarajevo and Salonica have the verse in which the queen speaks up for the prisoner, a verse found in the Cancionero de romances text and not in the other early one. There is one feature, however, which is found only in the modern tradition: the woman dressed in mourning whose presence serves to remind the king about his prisoner. This feature, shared by Sephardic,

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Margaret Sleeman Peninsular, and Canarian versions, suggests that there was, at an early stage, a slightly different version of the ballad which contained this detail. 14 The Moroccan version given below, from Tetuán tradition, is typical of Moroccan texts, though the usual forzar becomes in this text, euphemistically, faltar (see v. 3). In Moroccan tradition it is the sight of Isabel, dressed in mourning, which prompts the king to ask about Vergico, as he is known here. Again, the king rushes to see the prisoner. In Morocco, as the ensuing dialogue shows, it is Vergico’s devotion to the lady which is to the fore, for when the king explicitly asks him how much he loves her, Vergico makes his feelings clear: he declares that he would stay in prison double the time to be with his lady. For his steadfast devotion to his lady, the prisoner is released and married to her. This particular Moroccan version of the story, in which the love and devotion of both parties is so evident, again suggests that the crime was that of impetuous passion rather than a violent assault on an unwilling victim.

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Preso llevan a Vergico, el rey le mandó prender, por una traición que ha hecho en los palacios del rey, de faltar a una donzella, la cual se llama Isabel; hija era del obispo, sobrina del señor rey. Un día indo el rey a missa, encontrara una mujer toda vestida de luto, ella y sus damas también. Preguntó el rey a su alcalde que quién era essa mujer: — Vuestra sobrina, mi señor, vuestra sobrina Isabel. — ¿Por quién va vestida en luto, ella y sus damas también? Por Vergico, mi señor rey, que en vuestras prisiones es. — Pronto, pronto, mis criados, poní mesas a comer; mientras las mesas se aprontan, a Vergico iré yo a ver. — En buena hora estés, Vergico. — Bien vengáis, mi señor rey. — ¿O qué años o qué tiempos que en las mis prisiones es?

Vergico has been taken prisoner, the king ordered that he be arrested, for a crime he committed in the king’s palace, for ‘wronging’ a maiden named Isabel, the bishop’s daughter, the king’s niece. One day, as the king was going to Mass, he met a woman completely dressed in mourning, she and her ladies too. The king asked an official who that woman was. — Your niece, my lord, your niece Isabel. — For whom is she wearing mourning. she and her ladies too? — For Vergico, my lord the king, he is in your prison. — Quickly, quickly, servants, prepare the tables for the meal; while the tables are being set I shall go and see Vergico. — Greetings, Vergico. — I greet you, my lord the king. — How many years, how much time have you been in my prison?

This feature was noted by Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, Romancero hispánico (hispano-portugués, americano y sefardi, 2 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1953), I, 348. He argues that this version of the ballad, circulating in oral tradition in the fifteenth century, but not printed in a pliego suelto, must have been the most widespread.

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— Siete años ha, mi señor rey, siete años y más un mes. Cuando yo entrí en ellas, no empeçaba a embarbecer, y ahora por mis pecados ya me empecí a encanecer. — ¿Qué darías tú, Vergico, por hablar con Isabel? — La vida de las prisiones yo la doblaré otra vez. — Pronto, pronto, mis criados, sacay Vergico a comer. Y a otro día a la mañana, Vergico con Isabel.

— Seven years now, my lord, seven years and a month. When I entered prison, I did not have a beard, and now, for my sins, I am going white. — What would you give, Vergico, to be able to speak to Isabel? — I would be prepared to double my time in prison. — Quickly, quickly, servants, free Vergico from prison and let him eat with us. Next morning, Vergico and Isabel were married. (Bénichou, Romancero , p. 99)

Of the available Eastern texts, I turn first to the Sarajevo group (studied by Trapero, El romance de ‘Virgilios’, pp. 37–43). In this group the verb used to describe the man’s crime is not forzar but amar (make love to). The woman, again the king’s niece, is called Zadé, while the man’s name (as is general in Eastern texts, as well as those from the Iberian Peninsula and El Hierro) is prefixed by the courtesy title Don (i.e. Don Virgile, Bosnia A1, an eighteenth-century text), the title sometimes being incorporated in Eastern texts giving rise to forms such as Doverdjeli (Bosnia C3), Doverchile (CMP F8.3), an indication that the sense of the title was not understood. The last-mentioned version, CMP F8.3, from a manuscript obtained by Manuel Manrique de Lara in Sarajevo in 1911, and edited in Trapero, El romance de ‘Virgilios’, p. 96, opens as follows: Traición a Doverchile por el palacio del rey, por amar una doncella que se llamaba Zadé, ni más alta ni más baja, sobrina era del rey. Tanto era el mal que hacía, fue en oídos del rey (vv. 1–4) [Doverchile has committed a crime in the palace of the king by making love to a maiden called Zadé neither higher nor lower born, she was the king’s niece. The king soon heard about the wrong he had done.]

The king duly imprisons the delinquent. A striking feature of this group of texts is the stress given both to the severity of the punishment and to the neglect of the prisoner.15 The eighteenth-century text, Bosnia A1, includes the verse: “Pasa tyenpo i vyene tyenpo i ninguno se akodra dél” (v. 6). Roughly translated as ‘days come and go, and nobody remembers him’, variants of this verse with its forlorn message are found quite widely in Eastern texts. In others of this same group, the terms of the sentence are made plain at the outset, and they are harsh. In the Sarajevo text cited above, CMP F8.3, the king’s orders are

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Trapero also points out (El romance de ‘Virgilios’, pp. 38–39), that here the king is more closely involved in the imprisonment, since he keeps the keys himself.

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Margaret Sleeman as follows: “–diez años esté en la cárcel, ninguno non lo vaya á ver” (v. 7). The order not to visit is, however, ignored by Doverchile’s sorrowing mother who goes to see him every day and brings him food: Su madre la desdichada cada día lo va á ver. Debajo del brazo izquierdo un pan le lleva á comer (vv. 8–9)

That Doverchile is also forgotten is clear from the fact that, again, the king is reminded of his existence by the woman in black, in these versions his mother. The king urges that ‘Mass’ be hurried,16 that the meal be eaten, in order to visit the prisoner quickly. After mutual greetings, Doverchile tells the king that he submits to the full sentence, seven years of which he has served, and he describes how his beard is already going white. The king is impressed by this show of loyalty, and orders that Doverchile be freed, bathed and united with Zadé. Marriage is the usual conclusion in this group, but there is one version, CMP F8.6 (see Trapero, El romance de ‘Virgilios’, pp. 93–94) in which, after his release, the prisoner drops dead; the victim of his ill-treatment, perhaps, in the estimate of some singers. Counting both published texts, the unedited versions in the Madrid Archive, and Mrs Aelion’s new text, I have seen thirteen texts from Salonica. Whereas the Sarajevo versions are fairly uniform, the same can not be said of the Salonican ones. The versions from this second centre can, I believe, be placed in three groups. The first, comprising Attias’s text, no. 7, CMP F8.21, and the one written down by the fourteen-year-old Elisa de Bottón in a MS collection acquired by Manuel Manrique de Lara (CMP F8.19), resemble the Sarajevo texts quite closely, albeit with features which distinguish them. The most important is that these, and the other Salonica versions I have seen do not end with marriage. The second grouping (which I call transitional) consists of a number of versions, including Benardete 18, CMP F8.16, 17, 18, which appear at first glance to be somewhat disordered, but which reveal the workings of a curious logic. Finally, I link together three very reduced versions, Mrs Aelion’s, and F8.20 and 22 from the Archivo Menéndez Pidal, in which I find the tensions of the transitional group resolved in a way which radically recasts the story. Further, over and above these divisions, the Salonican texts show a very interesting specific adaptation to the Sephardic milieu: the addition of verses which contain an invocation to God, and which also constitute a commentary on events. Of the first group, both Attias and the shorter Bottón text give a full version of the ballad story. They open similarly; I quote from Attias: Traición de Don Argilis / por el palacio del rey, por amar una doncella, / por amarla y bien quierer (vv. 1–4)

When he discovers the misdemeanour with his niece (here the milder amar y bien quierer) the king has the young man arrested and put in isolation in a deep dungeon: El buen rey cuando lo supo, / en cárcel lo fué a meter, en unas prisiones fondas, / que dinguno lo va a ver (vv. 9–12)

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Trapero, El romance de ‘Virgilios’, pp. 40–41, discusses the curious ‘Digamos presto la misa’, literally, ‘let’s say Mass fast’, which suggests that singers construed it as some sort of prayer which they could rush through.

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The Singer and the Scribe The Bottón text also suggests harsh treatment; the man is thrown into prison and chains. Attias’s text has verses lacking in the other, verses which explicitly mention and then comment on Don Argilis’s abandonment: Tiempos van y tiempos vienen / dinguno s’acodra d’él. (El Dió s’acodre de todo el mundo / y de mosotros también; la hora que lo llamamos, / que mos aresponda en bien) vv. 17–22

The first two verses have already been encountered in a Sarajevo version, the third and fourth, which are distinctive of a number of Salonica texts, represent a pious wish that God not forget his people, a significant addition which expresses Sephardic religious sentiment. The final verses elaborate on the previous two, and in my corpus are found only in Attias. As in the Sarajevo texts, in both Attias and Bottón the king is reminded about the prisoner by the presence of his mother, dressed in black. In Attias, the king questions Don Argilis, and is told that his hair is going white, that he has been there for fifteen years, but would stay until sixteen were up (dieciséis satisfies the assonance requirement) if the king wished. In Attias, the king orders Don Argilis to be released, dressed richly, wear the king’s crown, and that people should acknowledge his (the king’s) magnanimity. The shorter Bottón text has a very similar prison dialogue, but ends abruptly with the prisoner’s offer to stay up to sixteen years in prison. The texts which I have called transitional have some unusual features. In most of these texts, the woman loved in the palace is the king’s niece, in one she is just a señora. Again, as in Attias, the verbs used are often amar y bien quierer, which express true love and affection. In only one version in this group, F8.17, is the courtier explicitly sent to prison for loving the woman. In the remainder, we discover later that the man is indeed in prison, for the king is reminded of him by the presence of a woman in black — in all the versions in this subgroup she is his wife. A number of puzzles present themselves. Is the wife the same woman the courtier had initially dearly loved (and subsequently married)? Why then was the courtier put in prison? Was the imprisonment some unexplained whim of the king? Except for F8.17, where the prisoner is released, all end on a gloomy note with the prisoner lamenting his fate. The suggestion of the arbitrary nature of the imprisonment is strengthened by the final group, which includes Mrs Aelion’s version, to which I now turn. Estrea Aelion’s sung version of Virgilios, which she told me she learned from her mother, was recorded at her home in London on 7th February, 1982. It is as follows:

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Un día, el rey estando’n la mesa, vido venir una muzer entera vestida de preto de la cavesa fin a los pies. Demandó el rey a su gente y quién er’ aquea muzer. — Muzer era de Undergile qu’en la cársel lo tenéš. Estava metido en cársel, y en las priziones del rey. Pasan días y vienen noches y el rey no se acodra d’él.

One day, when the king was in church, he saw a woman approaching, completely dressed in black from her head right down to her feet. The king asked his people who that woman was. — It is the wife of Undergile whom you hold in your prison. He was in prison, in the king’s jail. Days and nights come and go, and the king never remembers him.

Margaret Sleeman Se acodre el Dio de mozż otros, y que mos quiera mucho bien.

May God remember us, and may things go well for us.

I also give the short handwritten text CMP F8.22, which is housed in the Archivo Menéndez Pidal. Written on a blank sheet of paper in a bold, sloping hand, it is initialled at the end; the initials, which are not clear, seem to be J.G.C. Armistead tentatively assigns this text to Salonica tradition, and suggests that it may have been obtained by Manuel Manrique de Lara when he collected in the town in 1911. CMP F8.22 is as follows: 2 4 6

Un día estando en la milsa / vide [sic] venir una mujer, vestida entera de preto / de la cavessa asta los pies. Demandó el rei a su gente / ken era akea mujer. – Mujer era de un gran vergiles / ke aki en preso lo tenech. Días van i días vienen / y el rei non se acodra de él. 17 S’acodre el Dio de todo el mundo / i de nosotros también.

The two versions are very similar but for the awkward first verse of F8.22. A third Archive text, F8.20, again a handwritten text (but with no indication of the transcriber), attributed to Salonica tradition by Armistead, is also very like them, but lacks the verse containing the expression of hope that God will remember his people. In view of their similarity to the Aelion text there seems little doubt that the two Archive texts are indeed from Salonica. None of these versions contains the usual reference to a crime, and the explicit punishment of imprisonment for it. All begin with the king’s sighting of the woman in black (again identified as the prisoner’s wife). Since I elicited Mrs Aelion’s version by quoting the opening of Attias’s version (which does contain the usual opening) and by giving a plot-summary, I am sure that what she sang was, for her, the complete ballad; she normally indicated if she had forgotten part of a ballad. This version of the ballad, exemplified by these three texts, tells, I believe, a radically different story. An individual, Undergile (Aelion), 18 un gran vergiles (F8.22) un vergile (F8.20) is in prison, we know not why, nor with what justification. His situation is lamented by his devoted wife, dressed entirely in black (Aelion and F8.22), completely covered in mourning clothes (F8.20): “Todo cuvierta de luito [sic] de la cavesa asta los pies” (v. 2). The king’s question about this woman in black elicits the reply that she is the wife of the man he holds in prison. Having been given this information, the king then consigns him to oblivion: days come and go, and the king does not remember him. Whereas in most versions of the ballad the king’s forgetfulness had, in narrative terms, brought about the testing of the prisoner’s stoicism, loyalty, or love, the display of which brought about his release, in this little group of Salonican versions, the king’s forgetfulness, which follows the reference to the man’s situation rather than preceding it, has an entirely different function, for it amounts to total abandonment.

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CMP gives acodra , but the subjunctive form acodre is clear in the original transcription. Establishing word boundaries can sometimes be a problem when transcribing a ballad. Since I wanted to know whether Mrs Aelion analysed ‘Undergile’ as one word, or as an indefinite article + noun, I asked her to write it down. The first syllable of the man’s name recalls the title Don, and assimilation accounts for the change in the following consonant. Clearly we are now far from the Virgil of the early versions.

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The Singer and the Scribe In this version of the story, I would argue, the roles are reversed; the prisoner and his faithful wife are victims of the king’s utter neglect, which now surely becomes the crime. The final verse expresses the singers’ fervent hope that God never abandon them: Se acodre el Dio de mozżotros, y que mos quiera mucho bien (Aelion, v. 7) S’acodre el dio de todo el mundo / i de nosotros también (F8.22, vv. 11–12)

The underlying concept is surely that of God’s remembrance of his covenant with his people, and the presence of the verse at the end of the ballad focuses on the Sephardic Jews’ trust in God. Further, I believe that the irresponsibility and cruelty of an earthly ruler, given such prominence here, reflected a real concern; Mrs Aelion did not make the point when she sang her version, but other diaspora Jews have commented to me that their group has acute political antennae.19 In this case, it could be argued that these versions illustrate the opposite of the common process of novelización, where a ballad on a historical theme develops, in oral tradition, the personal, often amorous aspect, and that here, an amorous ballad has become one with a sombre political message.

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There is in fact evidence that, at a time of weak central control in the Ottoman Empire, Salonica Jews did suffer at the hands of corrupt local officials. Nehama, Histoire des Israélites, VI, 37-38, describes the activities of a late seventeenth-century governor who made false accusations against Jews, and notes too that corrupt officials could imprison people who displeased them.

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Spanish Ballads in a Changing World

Roger Wright At the Edinburgh colloquium ‘The Singer and the Scribe’, the purpose of this paper was to demonstrate that the Spanish ballad is and has been a performance genre, better appreciated when heard than when being read off a page. It may seem somewhat curious, then, to find a version printed in this volume: readers need to bear in mind that several of the texts here printed were presented to the colloquium on tape in their performed state, with the text and English translations circulated to the audience on paper. For an initial example of the Spanish ballad genre as it exists today, we can consider a ballad recorded on 24th October 1977 in Moshav Mata, Israel. The singer is seventy-one year old Rahel Gabai, born in Tetuán in 1906, who immigrated into Israel from Morocco in 1956. Her family is descended from one of the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish communities that were expelled from Spain in and after 1492, and eventually settled all round the shores of the Mediterranean. The tale, Gerineldos, is a well-known one of ancient origin, and the most widely attested of all the Spanish ballad stories in the modern world; several hundred versions have been collected by field workers over the last century. The text of this version was printed by Alexander et al. (1994:125-26, with the addition of two extraneous lines) as their reference no. Y 2121(1); 1 the translation is mine, and intended to be merely literal: — Girineldo, Girineldo, mi caballero polido, ¿quién te me diera esta noche tres horas a mi servicio? — Como soy vuestro criado, Señora, burláis conmigo. — Yo no burlo, Girineldo Que de veras te lo digo. — Y ¿a qué hora podrá, Señora, y a qué hora lo prometido? — A eso de la media noche cuando el rey ya está dormido. Y a esa hora son las doce cuando canta el gallo prim o, medianoche ya es pasada, Girineldo no ha venido.

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‘Girineldo, Girineldo, My fine knight, Would you give yourself to me tonight, Three hours at my service?’ ‘Since I’m your servant, My Lady, you are joking with me. ‘I’m not joking, Girineldo, I’m saying this to you seriously.’ ‘And at what time will you be able, My Lady, to fulfil this promise?’ ‘At about midnight, When the King is already asleep.’ It is that time, twelve midnight, when the first cock crows; And now it is after midnight, and Girineldo has not come.

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Alexander, Tamar, Isaac Benabu, Yaacov Ghelman, Ora Schwarzwald, and Susana Weich -Shahak, ‘Towards a typology of the Judeo-Spanish folksong: Gerineldo and the romance model’, Yuval, Studies of the Jewish Music Research Centre, 6 (1994), 68-163

The Singer and the Scribe — Malhaya tú, Girineldo, ¿quién amor puso contigo Medianoche ya es pasada y tú no has venido. Ellos en estas palabras y a la puerta dio un suspiro. — ¿Quién es ése o cual es ése que a mi puerta fue atrevido? — Girineldo soy, Señora, que vengo a lo prometido. Pusole escalera de oro, por ella se había subido; se agarraron de la mano y hacia la alcoba se han ido; se pusieron a jugar como esposa con marido. A eso de la medianoche el rey pidió su vestido: — Que lo traiga Gerineldo como mozo más antiguo. Unos dicen: - No está aquí otros dicen: - Ya se ha ido Y el rey que estaba en escuchas a su encuentro le ha salido Y encontró a los dos durmiendo como esposa con marido; — O si mato a la princesa, tengo mi reino perdido; o si mato a Girineldo, lo he criado entre chico. Más vale que mire y calle Y no diga nada a ninguno. Sacó alfaje de su cinto y entremedias lo ha ponido; con el frío del alfaje la reina se ha conmovido. — Girineldo, Girineldo, ya estamos los dos perdidos; que el alfaje de mi padre nos lo han puesto por testigo. — ¿Por dónde me iré yo ahora para no ser consentido? — Vete por esos jardines cortando (floras) rosas y lirios. Y el rey que estaba en escuchas a su encuentro le ha salido;

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‘Damn you, Girineldo, Who is loving you? Now it is after midnight, And you have not come.’ But at these words There came a sigh at the door. ‘Who is that? Who is that Who dared to come to my door?’ ‘I am Girineldo, My Lady, I’m coming for what was promised.’ She let down a stairway of gold, He has climbed up it; They took each other’s hand And went to the bedroom; They began to play Like husband and wife. At about midnight, The King asked for his clothes: ‘Girineldo should bring it to me, as my oldest page.’ Some say ‘He isn’t here’, Others say ‘He’s gone’; The King heard them, And went out to look for him. He found the two of them asleep Like husband and wife. ‘Should I kill the Princess? I’ll be ruining my kingdom; Should I kill Girineldo? I’ve raised him since a boy; Better to watch and keep quiet And to say nothing to anyone.’ He took his scimitar from his belt And put it between them. With the cold of the scimitar, The Princess has stirred; ‘Girineldo, Girineldo, We’re both of us doomed! For my father’s scimitar They’ve put here as a witness.’ ‘Where can I go now, So as not to be found out?’ ‘Go out through those gardens Picking roses and lilies.’ But the King was listening out And has come out to meet him.

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Roger Wright — ¿Dónde vas tú, Girineldo, tan triste y tan amarillo? — He venido de un jardín, de cortar rosas y lirios. — No lo niegues, Girineldo, que con mi hija has dormido. — No lo niego yo, buen rey, Que yo la culpa he tenido. — No has tenido tú la culpa, que mi hija la ha tenido. Y el sábado por la noche seréis esposa y marido …

‘Where are you going, Girineldo, So sad and so pale?’ ‘I have come from a garden, From picking roses and lilies.’ ‘Don’t deny it, Girineldo, You’ve slept with my daughter.’ ‘I cannot deny it, My Lord, And the blame is all mine.’ ‘No, the blame is not yours, The blame was my daughter’s; And on Saturday night, You’ll be husband and wife ’…

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At this point, in the middle of the musical phrase, the singer goes straight off into a different ballad (La boda estorbada). She has a hoarse voice, but the words are clear; the music is patterned into four-line octosyllabic verses, with a break after each pair of lines, but the whole ballad runs on continuously without any break between these four-line musical groups. She accentuates the rhythm of the music over the natural stresses of the words, in the usual Hispanic manner, and sings slowly enough for an appreciative audience to have time to react appropriately at various points. The English translation lacks the rhythm and assonance of the original, and is strictly utilitarian. The text was transcribed from the taperecording; she was herself singing, perhaps partly improvising, from memory, not from a written text. This may well be the genuine oral tradition. The tale and much of the wording is directly descended from late medieval Spain, and in this case it is possible that the music has too. This version of Gerineldos was chosen for the present purpose largely because the performance may approximate those of the medieval tradition, although of course many singers would have been rather more sprightly than this one. It is also possible, however, that none of the music that is heard with the Spanish ballads nowadays is similar to that of the Middle Ages. The tradition of singing ballads like this is old and deep-rooted in every part of the Hispanic world. Specialists in social anthropology and in Hispanic literatures keep finding them still, even now, in every Hispanic area and every Hispanic language and dialect; that is, in the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal, Galicia, León, Castile, Navarre, Aragón, Catalonia, Valencia, Andalucía, the Balearics), in the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Azores, and in every country of Latin America that has been investigated; as well as in the communities of the Sephardic Jews who spread throughout the Mediterranean, now mostly to be found in Israel or The United States. Almost all the stories that are heard in these songs nowadays are ancient, although new themes and plots are developed from time to time, particularly in Mexico, as we shall see later. And it is still in essence an oral genre rather than a written one. That comment is not intended to imply that the ballads are never written down, but that they are still usually sung from memory rather than following a written script. This means that a ballad can exist for centuries without anyone ever recording it in writing, and for that reason their presence in former times is almost invisible to us now. Conversely, the invention of magnetic tape means that they have recently been tape-recorded in vast numbers, and although the specialists often adopt a pessimistic tone and say that the genre

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The Singer and the Scribe is falling out of fashion and likely to disappear, especially as television pre-empts the anthropological niche that the genre used to fill, it is also true that the documentation of these oral performances is much greater now than ever before. Most years in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, teams of researchers went out from Madrid into the remote valleys of Northern Spain and elsewhere to record more versions on their tapes, so there is now a large archive of such recordings in Madrid, waiting for someone to come and listen to them. There is much less evidence for the living oral genre as it existed before the invention of the tape-recorder, of course, but even so it is generally assumed that this was more of a living genre in the past than it is now. So we might be justified in believing that performances such as this are our best evidence of the nature of the medieval performance genre. But we have got some old texts. At times in the past, it has fortunately been fashionable for editors to collect these songs from the mouths of singers in order to print the words. In Spain, the first time that this became a fashionable enterprise was in the mid-sixteenth century, and there are huge collections from that period, known as Romanceros.2 But all such editions involved some adjustment to suit normal written conventions, and for that reason it has been argued that since the oral genre has probably not changed greatly over the years a genuine oral ballad from the present day is a better witness to the nature of its fifteenth- or sixteenth-century oral precursor than are the versions found in the huge Romanceros of that time. The words can vary, though, and to some extent they have to change if the ballad is to survive at all, so this claim needs to be treated with care. Before going any further, I should explain what a Spanish ballad, known in Spanish as a romance, actually is. It is defined in a formal, metrical, way and no other. It can be short, it can be long. The shortest found in the old collections is of twelve lines, although, obviously, singers are often singing odd one- or two-line snatches while doing the washingup, without performing the whole song. The longest of the ballads in the old collections has over a thousand lines, but that is quite exceptional; the average length is of fifty to sixty lines. Nearly all the lines have eight syllables. This syllabic regularity is not consciously worked out arithmetically by the singers, of course; the point is just that in this way the words fit the simple music that accompanies them. At least, the music is usually simple in Spain, but, as we shall see, the Eastern Sephardim have sometimes taken over Eastern music of greater sophistication. These octosyllabic lines have alternate assonance; that is, the end of every alternate line shows vowel rhyme from the final stressed syllable onwards, regardless of the consonants; thus in this version of Gerineldos the assonance pattern is -í-o (polido, servicio, conmigo, etc., all the way through to marido). That is all that is involved in the definition of a Spanish ballad. If a verse has eight-syllabled lines with alternate assonance, it counts as a romance. The themes of the ballads that are most popular nowadays are those of the most basic human emotions, such as love, sex, grief, pride, honour, duty, fear and poetic justice. Emotional reactions tend to take priority over the narration of the events that cause them, as the listening audience are invited to feel the same emotions as the protagonists. Reactions to the death of a loved one, for example, are presented more often, and more graphically, than the actual death. Most of the stories concern, at least partly, the adventures of young 2

For relevant bibliography see Wright, Roger, Spanish Ballads with English Verse Translations (Warminster: Amis and Phillips, 1987), pp. xiii-xvi.

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Roger Wright women. The women in the ballads are almost all more warm, more human, more intelligent, more caring, more enterprising and generally more interesting than the men. Half the listeners may well assume that that is only to be expected, because after all women are indeed more warm, caring, intelligent, etc, than men; but this feature may also be both the cause and the effect of the fact that nowadays, at least, it tends to be women rather than men who sing them. Perhaps it has always been a predominantly female genre. It is tempting to agree with the feminist viewpoint that in this way many of the old ballads were implicitly subversive of traditional male authority in Spanish society (see the excellent article to this effect by Teresa Catarella). 3 But most of the emotions felt by protagonists within the ballads can be experienced by anyone in the audience, of whatever gender. In the old tradition this dependence on the powerful appeal of universal human emotions was probably just as great as it is now, even though many of the first printed ballads were ultimately based on striking historical events of the medieval Iberian Peninsula. As time goes by, naturally, people gradually forget historical details, and many of these stories lose their roots and turn into more general tales of love and adventure; in these cases a specialist in literary history can sometimes see where the plot has originated from, but the singers and their audience need know nothing at all about the original historical context for a performance to be a success within its own context, engaging the sympathetic attention of the listeners. Only a few ballads are to be found in the enormous manuscript song-collections of fifteenth-century Spain, or even in the gigantic printed Cancionero General of 1511, because at that time, in the early Renaissance period, the ballads were thought to be of unacceptably low quality, being rustic rather than literary. Describing these collections as enormous is not an exaggeration; there are over 700 fifteenth-century Spanish poets whose names we know, some of them prolific, plus a large number of anonymous poems. These writers ignored the ballad genre almost entirely. But once the invention of printing became more widely accessible, ballad texts were often printed on single sheets of paper, or in leaflets containing some four to six ballad texts, known as pliegos sueltos. We know now that there were many thousands of these sheets. Very few indeed of these survive, but sometimes the only early text that we have of a ballad that is now famous exists in just one surviving sheet: this happened to the famous ballad of Melisenda, for example. Then in Antwerp, the cultural capital of the Spanish Netherlands, the printer Martín Nucio gathered together many of these separate sheets and published them in two large volumes, one in (probably) 1548 and one in 1550. Over the next few years several other collectors followed his example in Spain. The texts included in these volumes are generally treated by modern investigators as if they were more or less authentic, that is, recorded as they were sung; but even so, it is often possible to suspect that the collector or the editor or the printer has smartened the texts up to some extent. Unfortunately, this period presents only a short-lived window of opportunity for the researcher; towards the end of the sixteenth-century, at the height of the Spanish Golden Age, the ballad form became a fashionable one for educated poets to comp ose their own works in and some were set to new music by court musicians such as Narváez and Milán. In this way it became a written and even a learned genre also. Thus there is a vast collection of poems in romance form, in nine volumes, printed at the 3

Catarella, Teresa, ‘Feminine historicising in the romancero novelesco’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 67 (1990), 331-43.

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The Singer and the Scribe start of the seventeenth-century, which is largely useless for the modern folklore specialist interested in the history of genuine oral ballads. From then on many of the best Spanish poets and playwrights, including Góngora, Lope de Vega, Meléndez Valdés, the Duque de Rivas, Antonio Machado, and Federico García Lorca in his Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads) and in some of his plays, have composed in the ballad form. Those are not the ballads being considered here today. Even so, it is worth pointing out that the genuine oral tradition is more important within mainstream literary culture in Spain than ballads are in most other countries, and are indeed usually included on University literature courses. In the nineteenth century, three centuries after Martín Nucio, specialists suddenly discovered once again, apparently to their surprise, that out there in the countryside there was still a very live tradition of singing the folk ballads, and the literary anthropologists who went out collecting then found that many of the same themes and stories were being sung as were present in the great sixteenth-century collections. They also came across several ballads which seemed to be ancient, but which had not been recorded on paper in the sixteenth century (so far as we know). This lack of sixteenth-century documentation can be explained; it looks as if those early collectors had a particular interest in the ballads based on stirring events in national history, tending to ignore the more romantic tales of the adventures of lovers, princesses, witches and so on, that were of greater interest to the collectors of the nineteenth century, being children of the Romantic age. The earlier history of the oral genre, however, is a more controversial topic. There has been considerable scholarly discussion of when ballads first began to be sung in Spain. All is informed guesswork and conjecture, but it seems likely to me, at least, that this is a very old genre indeed. Mine is not a new view, since many of the nineteenth-century Spanish scholars thought the same, but they also thought that the attested written ballad texts were older than the apparently oral thirteenth-century Spanish epic tradition; which cannot be true, since we know now that no attested ballad text comes from before the later fifteenth century. The commonly accepted dating of the supposedly earliest written text to 1421 has been plausibly reassigned to the 1470s,4 which probably leaves the earliest known text as one dating from about 1450. But on the other hand we also know now that the genre can exist in perfect health without being written down at all, because that is what happened in the eighteenth century, for example; so it is not at all irrational to propose that the genre existed in the early Middle Ages, perhaps even in Visigothic Spain before the Moslem invasion of the peninsula in 711, and conceivably even in Roman Spain, since we know that Latin popular verse included octosyllabic rhythmic verse forms. This is not to suggest that exactly the texts that we hear now, or read in the Golden Age collections, were being performed in precisely the same way in the year 1000. But the essence of a folk ballad on a universal human theme can remain more or less the same for centuries, even if details of the plot, the length, the wording and the grammar change from performance to performance in the ordinary way. And whatever the chronology of its first appearance, we can be sure that the genre and several of the tales that are still heard nowadays were also available in the later medieval tradition, as well as possibly some of the music, and it is easy to understand the excited way that the specialist researchers in Madrid feel they are performing a kind of national emotional archaeology, rediscovering essential and basic aspects of their human

4

Aubrun, Charles V., ‘Le romance gentil dona gentil dona, une énigme littéraire’, Iberoromania, 18 (1983), 1-8.

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Roger Wright heritage. I have written two articles arguing for the existence of ballads in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Spain, which have failed to provoke any disagreement at all, on the chronological point, at least.5 The taste for composing ballads on contemporary history flourished in the fifteenth century, particularly in the frontier area between the Moslem kingdom of Granada, on the south coast, and the Christian area of Andalucía to the north and west of it. Several ballads about the events of those conflicts were subsequently recorded in written form. Since the original version of this paper was given in Edinburgh, it is both appropriate and a pleasure to be able to declare that the most acute analysis of the social context of these frontier ballads is probably that of Angus Mackay.6 It seems likely that many of these ballads were composed by actual participants in the events recounted, and they are remarkable in many ways, not least because several are noticeably pro-Moslem. On the whole these areas were at peace rather more than they were at war, particularly between 1350 and 1460, and the people on each side of the nominal frontier tended to get on reasonably well together. War was promoted by rulers who lived further away, in Castile to the north, or in the Moslem capital city of Granada itself, and unwelcome to those on the frontier. Our next textual example is one of these: the ballad of AbnÁmar, as attested in the Zaragoza collection of 1550-51. This derives from events of the 28th June 1431, when King John II of Castile led an army south to Granada and camped overlooking the city from the north. From here there is a spectacular view of the city still, with the Sierra Nevada in the background, snowy even in late June. The last part of the ballad recounts the ensuing skirmish outside the city walls, which in real life ended with the King’s Moslem guide, the exiled dissident AbnÁmar, being installed briefly as a puppet ruler. But as time went by, the first part of the ballad was the only section to survive in the collective memory; in this the King and his guide discuss the view of Granada, and the King is so taken by its beauty that he proposes marriage to the city, whose answer comes back on the wind, replying in the negative. Most of the original historical circumstance thus vanished from view. Other Golden Age versions correspond to only the first thirty lines of the 1550-51 version; these run as follows, with my own translation7 intended in this case to approximate the effect of the rhythm and the assonance, sometimes to the detriment of literal semantic equivalence: — Abenámar, Abenámar, moro de la morería, ¿qué castillos son aquéllos? altos son, y reluzían. — El Alhambra era, Señor, y la otra la Mezquita, Los otros los Alixares labrados a maravilla; el moro que los labró

‘Abnámar, Abnámar, Moslem and friend what are those towers so shining and splendid?’ ‘That’s the Alhambra,[5] that’s the Mezquita, that’s Alixares, with beautiful features; the Moor who designed it

5

The articles have been reprinted in Wright, Roger, Early Ibero-Romance (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 1995) where they constitute chapters 19 and 20. 6 Mackay, Angus, ‘The Ballad and the Frontier in Late Medieval Spain’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 15 (1976), 15-33. 7 Wright, Spanish Ballads, p. 106.

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The Singer and the Scribe cien doblas ganava al día; la otra era Granada, Granada la noblescida, de los muchos cavalleros y de gran ballestería. Allí hablara el Rey Don Juan, bien oyréys lo que diría: — Granada, si tú quisiesses contigo me casaría; darte he en arras y dote a Córdoba y a Sevilla y a Xerez de la Frontera que cabe sí la tenía. Granada, si más quisiesses, mucho más yo te daría.’ Allí hablara Granada, al buen rey le respondía: — Casada so , el rey Don Juan, casada so, que no viuda, el moro que a mí me tiene bien defenderme quería.’

earned hundreds of doblas; the rest is Granada, Granada the noblest, with many fine horsemen and many fine bowmen.’ King John then cries out these words of good omen: ‘If you’re willing, Granada, please be my bride; I can offer you Córdoba, Sevilla besides, and also the town of Jerez can be yours if you want it, Granada, I’ll give you much more.’ But the breeze from Granada this answer has carried: ‘I’m married, King John, not widowed, but married; my husband the Moor will fiercely defend me.’

[10]

[15]

[20]

[25]

[30]

Lines 31-52 then recount the ensuing battle, and how the Castilians were paid off with great riches to go away. The following is a version of the ballad from modern Morocco, where nostalgia for the glory of Granada persisted more than the historical details of the 1430s. The first and last parts of this version correspond quite closely to the first ten lines of the 1551 version. This is taken from a commercial record (Cantos Judeo-Españoles de Marruecos, Saga, 1984) made at a time when there was a fashion for making such records, and the singer (Clarita Benaim) and guitarist (Jesús García) are professional musicians. The music is arranged in four-line verses with a guitar passage between each verse, whereas probably the early ballads were continuous, like the sefardí performance of Gerineldos above; but this is still recognizably the same genre, performed with the same slow deliberation that encourages audience identification with the characters and situation. The development of the words in this case, ignoring all but the start of the original ballad, is an instructive example of how the oral tradition changes in a changing world, managing thereby to survive where a version corresponding to the written text from the past would have little modern resonance at all. (my literal translation): — Abenámar, Abenámar, moro de la morería, el día que tú naciste grandes señales había. Estaba la mar en calma, la luna estaba crecida Moro que en tal signo nace no debe decir mentira.

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‘Abnámar, Abnámar, Moor of the Moors, The day you were born Great were the signs. The sea was calm, The moon was full. A Moor born under such a sign Should tell no lie.’

Roger Wright — Y no os la diré, Señor, aunque me cueste la vida, que de chico y muchacho mis padres me lo decían: que mentiras no dijese, que era grande villanía. Pregunta pues, el buen rey, que la verdad te diría. — ¿Qué palacios son aquéllos? Altos son y relucían; — La Alhambra era, Señor, palacio de gran valía. El moro que lo labraba cien duros ganaba al día, y el día que no los labra otros tantos se perdía.

‘And I will not tell you one, Sir, Even if it costs my life, For as a young child and boy My parents told me this: That I should tell no lies, For that was an evil thing. So ask me, Good King, For I would tell you true.’ ‘What are those palaces? They are tall, and they shine’ ‘That’s the Alhambra, My Lord, A palace of great price. The Moor that designed it earned a hundred duros a day; any day he did not work on it, he lost the same amount.’

The Alhambra is the only one of the original buildings to remain in the modern version, presumably because it was the only one still standing in the twentieth century; the coins earned by the architect are no longer the now obsolete doblas but the modern duros (fivepeseta pieces); the military guide seems to have become a soothsayer, and the original military context has disappeared; but some of the phrases are identical, and there is no doubt that this has descended directly from the tale as told almost five hundred years before, in 1550. Two rather startling examples from contrasting Hispanic environments can help further to illustrate this theme, of the way that the genre has been adapting to a changing world. The first, Mas ariva i mas ariva, is a recording made in Israel of a genuine old Spanish tale, concerning some poor fishermen who manage to fish out a rich duke, and the words are undoubtedly in ballad form. But the singer of this ballad is an immigrant from Turkey, Berta Aguado, performing unaccompanied; the words are Eastern Judeo-Spanish, and the music is essentially Turkish. Below is the text as printed in the booklet that accompanies the tape (Kantes Djudeo-Espanyoles, edited by Moshe Saul, no.5; published in Israel by Sefarad, the Society for the Conservation and Diffusion of Judeo-Spanish Culture). The spelling is the most distinctively Judeo-Spanish feature of the language, in fact, for the recommended spelling in Israel is quite deliberately different from that of the same words in Spain, such that in the event the oral version might be more intelligible to a Spaniard than is this written text: Mas ariva i mas ariva en la sivda de Silivria Ay avia peshkadores peshkando sus proverias Vieron vinir tres en kavayo asiendo gran polveria Vinieron serka del rio a la mar lo echarían Echo ganchos i gancheras

Further up and further up In the city of ‘Silivria’, There there were poor fishermen Trying their luck. They saw three men come on horseback Raising much dust; They came close to the river; They threw something in the sea. One fisherman lowered hooks and lines,

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The Singer and the Scribe por ver lo ke le salia Le salio un duke de oro ijo del rey paresia Si se lo trayian bivo ombres grandes los haria Si se lo trayian muerto sus presentes les daria Kamiza de Holanda yeva kaveson de sirma i perla Aniyo yeva en el dedo sien proves rikos se asia

To see what came out for him; A golden duke came out for him, He seemed like a son of the king. If they took him to the king alive he would make them great men; If they took him to the kin g dead He would give them presents. He is wearing a fine linen shirt, A collar of silver thread and pearl; He has a ring on his finger; He’d make a hundred poor men rich.

The combination of extremely slow Turkish music, including several extended melismas on individual syllables, with a recognisable Spanish tale, sounds quite amazing. What the singer and her listeners probably have no idea of is the original context of the events recounted, which in fact refers to the disposal and subsequent recovery of the body of Cesare Borgia’s murdered brother Giovanni, son of Pope Alexander VI, in the Tiber in Rome in the year 1497; 8 hearing that men had been seen dumping the body, the Pope ordered the river to be dragged and the richly dressed victim was then discovered. The ballad is always presented from the viewpoint of those who dragged the river, and usually printed elsewhere under the title of La muerte del duque de Gandía. The fact that historical accuracy was no concern of the singers once the original circumstances had faded from view is attested in striking form by the name of the place where the tale is set; in the modern Sephardic tradition, it never seems to be set in Rome (the ballad seems not to survive still in Spain itself, although it is found in Golden Age pliegos sueltos and collections). Silivria (line 2) seems to be a garbled form reminiscent of Sevilla; in four originally Turkish versions recorded in the United States in the 1970s, the placename is once ‘Vizirolú’ (Benmayor no. 2a), with a musical transcription by Judith Mauleón), once Marseilles (Benmayor no. 2c), and twice Messina.9 Singers, notoriously, can be equally cavalier about names of people. In many of the Sephardic communities, where not only were most of these songs never written down but there did not even exist the Roman alphabet to do that in if they wished, those tales that were able to survive four centuries and more did so by losing the context, acquiring a more generally intriguing feel and adapting to the local musical styles, and the result can send shivers down the spine. The last example here comes from the other end of the Hispanic world. In Mexico, the tradition of inventing new songs on rousing political and military events of the present, such as has hardly existed in Spain since the fall of Granada in 1492, is still alive, and has been particularly strong in the twentieth century. Although in form they are obviously the modern descendants of the old Spanish ballads, they are usually called something else, corridos; and the music tends to have a tinge of mariachi, since these too have accommodated to the local musical tastes. One type of newly-invented corridos at the

8

Benmayor, Rina, Romances judeo-español de oriente (Madrid: Gredos, 1979), pp. 31- 41: Further references are to Benmayor plus an item number. 9 Benardete, Maír José, Judeo-Spanish Ballads from New York (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 23.

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Roger Wright moment is that of the so-called narco-corridos, about the adventures of Mexican drugtraffickers, particularly those that operate over the border into the United States. What follows here is one of several which were originally composed during the Mexican Civil War of 1910-18. The inventors of corridos are just as likely to create rhythmic prose tales, but when they burst into song it tends to be in the old octosyllabic ballad form, a process fascinatingly described by Cardozo Freeman.10 The one here printed is called the Corrido de Juan Carrasco, based on events of 1913 which need a brief explanation. Francisco Madero (1873-1913) was a rich cotton farmer who challenged the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz for the presidency in 1910. He was elected in 1911 and assassinated in 1913. A wide movement to avenge this murder started, particularly in the north, under Carranza and Pancho Villa, against the federales of the next president, Huerta. The towns mentioned in this ballad, Quelite, Mazatlán and Acaponeta, are in Sinaloa province, just inland of the west coast, opposite the southern end of Baja California, some 450 miles north-west of Mexico City. The local leader of this movement and hero of this corrido, Juan Carrasco, was an uneducated cowboy, expert horseman and notorious drinker, and his colleague Ángel Flores was a docker, but their local rebellion, though disorganised, was successful11 and the two became popular heroes; Pancho Villa, in his memoirs, even referred to him as ‘General’ Juan Carrasco.12 In another corrido he is referred to as ‘Juan sin Miedo’ (‘Juan the Fearless’).13 These were local corridos of the time, remarkably similar in some respects to those inspired by minor but stirring military events on the fifteenth-century Granada-Andalucía frontier. All the historical references are assumed to be understood by the listener. The version of the ballad here presented is that performed three decades later on a 78 rpm record by a singer called Juan Meza, recorded in about 1942. In form this is the same as a medieval ballad, except for the fact that it is structured into four-line stanzas with mariachi music between each one, and the assonance pattern regularly changes with each verse, often in the event using full rhyme; also Juan Meza, like many Latin American singers, has the irritating habit of letting the rhythm of the music (././../.) override the word stresses, such that in the second line, for example, the clitic la and the second syllable of muerte receive linguistically undue prominence (‘por lá muerté de Madéro’), but otherwise the corrido and its performance are most attractive: Carrasco quedó sentido por la muerte de Madero; por eso se levantó con la gente del potrero. Su hijito le decía — Padre mío, no te metas; ¡ahí vienen los federales por el río de Acaponeta!

Carrasco was upset By the death of Madero, And so he rebelled With the people of the plains. His young son said to him ‘My father, don’t attack; Here come the government troops Up river from Acaponeta!’

10

Cardozo Freeman, Inez, ‘Creativity in the Folk Process: the birth of a Mexican corrido’, in El Romancero hoy: nuevas fronteras, ed. by Antonio Sánchez Romeralo et al. (Madrid: Cátedra Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1979), pp. 205-14. 11 Knight, Alan, The Mexican Revolution, Vol.II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 33. 12 Guzmán, Martín Luis, Memoirs of Pancho Villa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), p. 275. 13 Knight, The Mexican Revolution, II, 222.

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The Singer and the Scribe Juan Carrasco ambicionaba la libertad de su pueblo, Y le gritaba a su gente: — Si no lo cumplo, ¡me cuelgo! Decían que no traía parque, y que él traía malas armas; en el pueblo de El Quelite les avanzaron las cargas; morían los federales por toditas las labores, de miedo que les tenían a Carrasco y a Ángel Flores. Como que quiere hacer aire, como que quiere llover, el que no quiera a Carrasco algo le va a suceder. Vuela, vuela, palomita, descansa en aquel peñasco; aquí se acaba el corrido del valiente Juan Carrasco.

But Juan Carrasco wanted The freedom of his people, And shouted out to his followers: ‘If I don’t succeed, I’ll hang!’ They said he had no ammunition, And that he had bad guns; In the town of Quelite They attacked him; The government troops died Despite their efforts, For the fear that they felt Of Carrasco and Ángel Flores. As sure as the wind’s going to blow, As sure as it’s going to rain, Anyone who won’t follow Carrasco, Something bad will happen to him. Fly, fly, little dove, And rest upon that rock; This is the end of the corrido Of brave Juan Carrasco.

This ballad is at a very early stage of decontextualisation, for thirty years after the events not much can plausibly be inserted that contradicts known facts; but even here the process has begun, and if this song should still survive in the oral tradition of the twenty-first century, untouched by the record, Carrasco could become as separated from his roots in reality as AbnÁmar. Thus the four recently recorded versions included in this lecture demonstrate how the Spanish ballad has indeed been changing in the modern world; Juan Carrasco is a mere 30 years down the road from its subject matter, the Zaragoza AbnÁmar 120, the Turkish Mas ariva 500, the modern Moroccan AbnÁmar 550, and in the case of the last two literary research has been needed to explain the circumstances which the ballad itself cannot supply. Thus it may be the case that Gerineldos also has some kind of now irrecoverable historical origin origin (it has been suggested, for example, that the name, at least, might come from Charlemagne’s secretary Egginhard). But it may also be true that from listening and watching modern performances we can get a better idea of what the older oral genre was like than we could if we were strictly limited to the necessarily partial evidence of the sixteenthcentury written texts, for so much of the impact of a performance is in the hands of the performer rather than in the text14 that we can never be sure in any case that a singer might not have explained the historical circumstances of the tale in advance for example.15

14 15

Wright, Roger, ‘Point of View in the Ballad Performer’, Hispanic Research Journal, 1 (2000), 97-104. I would like to express my particular gratitude to Isaac Benabu for his help with Gerineldos, Christy MacHale for his help with AbnÁmar, Margaret Sleeman for her help with Mas ariva i mas ariva, and both Kenny Murray and José Saval for their help with the Corrido de Juan Carrasco.

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The Stewarts of Fetterangus and Literate Oral Tradition

Thomas A. McKean The Stewarts of Duke Street, Fetterangus, are one of Scotland’s outstanding singing families,1 celebrated for their remarkable fund of traditional lore: stories, riddles, music, songs of many kinds and particularly classic ballads.2 This essay examines how the skills of reading and writing work in the context of their largely oral culture. 3 As will become clear, I do not see oral tradition as existing in opposition to written tradition, but rather each is dependent on the other for propagation and perpetuation. In this light, we can see oral tradition as the process of passing on (social) culture through shared practices and lore, what David Atkinson calls, fundamentally, ‘a cognitive function of individuals and groups of people situated in time and space’.4 There have always been at least two types of oral tradition: the transcendent and the transient,5 embodying, respectively, the long-term sweep of cultural knowledge – passing on and preserving material over centuries – and the microcosmic tradition at the individual and family level – one person’s memory of a song, one person’s passing on of that song to a daughter, son, or contemporary. We might think of these as vertical and horizontal traditions, respectively. Vertical tradition has certainly altered in nature with the advent of literacy, for songs and stories have travelled with ease back and forth between oral and written culture for centuries now. 6 It is immediately clear, then, that to study oral tradition today, one must examine its longstanding relationships with writing and print. Although I

1

So called to differentiate the various related families of Stewarts from this area and the North-East of Scotland in general. They are second cousins to the “Stewarts of Blair”: Alec, Belle and their daughters Sheila and Kathie. 2 I use the term roughly as defined in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads ed. by Francis Child (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1882–98, reprint New York: Dover, 1965, reprint Northfield, MN: Loomis House, 2002–), but without adhering exclusively to Child’s closed list of 305 types. 3 See David Atkinson’s thorough study, The English Traditional Ballad: Theory, Method, and Practice. Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), p. 20–26 and 245–246, for discussions of the use of song books and broadsides by English singers and by song editors. 4 Atkinson, p. 27, but note a differentiation drawn between the material of tradition and the culture which uses it. These are not necessarily the same thing (p. 248). 5 The terms ‘transcendent’ and ‘transient’ are borrowed from Atkinson, p. 248, who sees the transcendent element as ‘located in an individual, conscious, volitional, affective engagement in a relationship with people, but also with cultural forms, across time’ (p. 28). 6 Atkinson, pp. 18–19, discusses the impact of broadside print on song tradition. David Buchan also addresses this question in The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge, 1972, reprinted, Phantassie, East Lothian: Tuckwell, 1997), chapter 18. For a discussion of the interrelationship between print and oral narrative traditions in Scotland and Ireland, see Bruford, Alan, Gaelic Folk-Tales and Mediaeval Romances (Dublin: The Folklore Society of Ireland, 1969), particularly part 3.

The Singer and the Scribe agree with William Motherwell that, ‘it is worthy of remark how excellently well tradition serves as a substitute for more efficient and less mutable channels of communicating the things of past ages’,7 I am not concerned with the antiquity of the traditions discussed here, but the horizontal ‘tradition as personal relationship’,8 which is fundamentally unchanged in form and in function. It has, of course, taken on the influence of print as an added reference point, but it remains an interpersonal, social and, above all, verbal art. The change which has taken place is one of specifics, rather than of essential nature. I do not subscribe to the school of thought that holds that ‘oral tradition’ becomes mere ‘verbal tradition’ over time and oral re-creation mere memorisation in a literate society,9 but instead see as key the ways an individual regards her source, oral or printed. A good oral performer and tradition-bearer can exist within literate and non-literate societies. The issue is not the singer’s environment, or the immediate source, print or oral, but whether aural or visual memory is being used. Such a distinction exists independently of the existence of writing. Indeed a single singer can employ either system, or a combination of the two: one song can be remembered by actual or mental reference to writing or print, or perhaps the place in which it was learned, another as an aural pattern, recalling the voice of the singer from whom the song was learned, or the sound of a current or previous performing environment.10 Traditional singers, in my experience, have always referred to an ‘original source’, or authority, whether that source be an oral or a written one. So, in the pre-literate past, when a singer wished to refer to the ‘correct’ version of a song, that is the original source, she would consult the singer from whom she learned it. Today, such an original source may be a person, a page, or a recording. What matters is that the singer feels there is an authority from whom the legitimacy of their version or performance extends. That feeling is the same as it was many hundred years ago, and is entirely independent of literacy. If tradition is process, as I believe it is, rather than content, the mechanics of tradition are essentially the same today as they were in pre-literate times. This brief study is really just one way to explore an intense emotional bond between Elizabeth Stewart and her aunt Lucy that is symbolised in their relationship of song, and its manifestation in the intersections of memory, orality and literacy. The Stewarts of Fetterangus occupy an interesting space in the transition between domestic, private tradition and the public, commercialised tradition we take for granted today. This is analogous to the earlier transition from an oral to a literate society explored by David Buchan in The Ballad and the Folk . The steps from non-literacy to literacy and from private to public tradition create new repertoires and new environments for traditional performance, along with new techniques of learning and propagation, without necessarily destroy pre-existing means, which undoubtedly continue to flourish where individual 7

Motherwell, William, Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern: with an historical introduction and notes (Glasgow: Wylie, 1827), p. 3. 8 Barry McDonald, quoted in Atkinson, p. 28. 9 Buchan, p. 2. 10 It is accepted that many storytellers and singers visualise the action of a tale or ballad as they perform; see Macdonald, Donald A., ‘A Visual Memory’, Scottish Studies, 22 (1979), 1–26 and Turriff, Jane, Singin is Ma Life (Kingskettle: Springthyme SPRCD 1038, 1996), p. 11. For more on the textuality of oral verse and the untextuality of printed verse, see English Traditional Ballad, p. 12.

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Thomas A. McKean abilities and suitable social environments exist. Both these transitions actually take place on a myriad of individual and family levels, in many places, and at many times, rather than to the whole of society at a single moment in history. The Stewarts, then, are just one strand in a complex, changing cultural fabric. Fieldworkers collecting from oral and manuscript sources in the North-East of Scotland have created an almost unbroken, centuries-old trail of written and recorded collections of songs, yielding a fresh snapshot of tradition with each generation. This extensive body of material has held the attention of many scholars, but often the human dimension is all too easily lost. Song is only a part of the Stewart family’s life and legacy; when Elizabeth Stewart remembers her aunt or her mother through song and music, she triggers an infinite variety of memories, memories of their humour, their tragedies, their wit, their humanity, just as anyone might recall a whole ethos from a single family photograph or an evocative scent. To pigeonhole anyone simply as a singer or ‘tradition-bearer’, then, is to miss the defining characteristic of traditional music itself: it is inseparably intertwined in the fabric of life. Examining the long-standing, multi-layered interactions between oral and literate traditions, and between the two main characters in this discussion, would be virtually impossible without reference to the culture from which the singers’ culture, songs, and their transmission and performance arise. The key figure in this discussion is Lucy Stewart of Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire (1901– 1982), an outstanding, though lesser-known, figure in the consciousness of the modern folk revival (fig. 1).11 A Traveller born in Skene Street, Aberdeen, Lucy made her living as a dealer of new and used goods, but she was also a wonderful performer of ballads, songs, Märchen, legends and riddles. Of the ballad, she is an acknowledged master, one of Scotland’s greatest artists, and yet, since the LP of Child ballads produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein in 1964, 12 and the odd track on Alan Lomax’s compilation albums of British traditional songs,13 she has hardly appeared on record. Unlike Jeannie Robertson, Lizzie Higgins, the Stewarts of Blair, Flora Macneill and other traditional singers who became part of the fabric of the professional and semi-professional folk revival, she never passed on her material to a paying public. Indeed, Lucy never performed in public at all, preferring to keep her domestic traditions where they belonged: ‘*No, niver, no’, according to her niece Elizabeth, ‘she wis too shy. [She sang] in e hoose an fan she wis oot in the cairtie wi me an Jane’.14 Stewart was, however, recorded on many occasions, firstly by the late Arthur Argo, then Hamish Henderson with Lomax and, most exhaustively, by Goldstein, the American folklorist who lived in the nearby village of Strichen in 1959–1960. ‘*He jist aboot bade wi us’, says Elizabeth, who witnessed many of Kenny’s persistent recording sessions. Several

11

She is, curiously, only given a passing mention in Munro, Ailie, The Folk Music Revival in Scotland (London: Kahn & Averill, 1984), p. 117, reissued as The Democratic Muse: Folk Music Revival in Scotland (Aberdeen: Scottish Cultural Press, 1996), p. 70. 12 Lucy Stewart, Traditional Singer from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Child ballads, vol. 1, produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein (East Lothian: Greentrax CTRAX 031, 1989, originally Folkways/Rounder, 1964). 13 These recordings made between 1949 and 1969 are now reissued as Folk Songs of England, Ireland, Scotland & Wales: Classic Ballads of Britain and Ireland, vols 1 and 2 (Cambridge: Rounder 1775 and 1776, 2000). 14 Interview, 2000. Quotes preceded by an asterisk are taken down as close to verbatim as possible.

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The Singer and the Scribe other families he recorded have said similar things, so he must have been constantly at work. This process of periodic collecting itself, extending from 1951 to 1982, surely had its effect on Lucy Stewart and the repertoire she chose to sing, and yet she still never performed outside the home. Indeed, she could scarcely be persuaded to sing for visitors and hers remained a very private tradition to the end of her days, for sharing with family and trusted friends. Ironically, it was this reticence that allowed the public performing careers of her sister Jean and niece Elizabeth to flourish through passing on songs and by looking after first Jean’s and later Elizabeth’s children. Lucy’s repertoire, like that of most traditional singers in Scotland, is quite broad and includes centuries-old traditional ballads and children’s songs handed down through the generations, to Country and Western and music-hall material. Older material was learned principally from her mother, Elizabeth Townsley, nicknamed Aul Betty (fig. 2) and various uncles who also sang; her father was more of a musician than a singer. Later influences with which she may have come in contact included 78 rpm recordings and the radio, along with print media, such as broadsides and song books. The privileging of non-literate sources by singers and collectors is, of course, a well known phenomenon15 and according to Elizabeth, Lucy did not learn any of her material from these latter sources: ‘*I dinna think so. She cuidna read affa well’, as she looked after the younger memb ers of the family and never got as much schooling as her siblings. Lucy’s was largely an oral world and her style, learned in the traditional manner, is that of the oral singer. That is not to say, however, that her entire tradition is an oral one, for while we can say with some confidence that her personal tradition and modus operandi are oral, her repertoire reveals the ‘the constant, dynamic, mutual reinforcement of ballad-singing and ballads in print’ that we have come to expect in British folk tradition.16 In the latter half of her life, Lucy had, and continues to have twenty years after her passing, an influence on the Scottish folk scene through performances by her niece Elizabeth, through the use of recordings by the staff and students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama degree programme in traditional music, and through revival singers such as Ray Fisher, Alison McMorland and Arthur Argo, all of whom spent time learning songs and singing-style from this shy, unmarried woman with a wicked sense of humour and great sense of the ridiculous, only to be seen if one had acquired her complete trust. Among the most frequently heard of her songs at just about any Scottish festival are The Plooman Laddies and I Am a Miller Tae Ma Trade, often sung with little or no awareness on the part of the singer or the audience as to the recent source of the song.17 Apart from the

15

See, for example, an anecdote about singer Harry Cox, in Atkinson, p. 21. Atkinson, p. 25. 17 The Plooman Laddies can be heard on Elizabeth Stewart, ’Atween You an Me (Woodhead, Aberdeenshire, Scotland: Hightop Imagery, 1993). Lucy’s singing of the Miller is not available commercially, but a version learned from her is on The Fisher Family (London: Topic TOP 12T137, 1966). It has also been recorded by Hamish Imlach and numerous other revival singers. 16

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Thomas A. McKean one album and the few tracks mentioned before, her material has remained almost entirely in archives and libraries. For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I will consider Lucy representative of a ‘pure’, unadulterated, non-commercial style and repertoire of North-East Scottish traditional singing. These adjectives are, of course, indefensible, but by their use I contend that her style and repertoire have been affected mainly by feedback from family and friends (including, of course, ballad-hungry fieldworkers in the 1950s and 60s), and the usual traditional influences of people, broadcast media, and print, rather than by folk festival and commercial audiences. This is not a value judgement, simply a statement of fact that allows us to look at Lucy’s repertoire and style in a slightly different shade of light than that which shines on a more exposed performer. And here I reiterate my contention that Lucy remains a traditional, oral singer even though living in a society driven by literacy. For her, these were simply other influences, not qualitatively different ones. They did not transform the nature of her tradition. In a nutshell, defining Lucy’s world in this way allows me to draw a contrast with that of her niece. But first a few words about Lucy’s sister, Jean. Jean Stewart, 1911–1962, enjoyed a remarkable career as a pianist, accordionist, broadcaster and band leader, for which she is still well-remembered today (fig. 3). When her own family was young, this was made possible by Lucy looking after her children while she was out playing for BBC Radio Aberdeen and at village-hall dances throughout the area. She held diplomas from the Royal Academy of Music in London and her father was a fiddler and piper who taught her to read music at an early age. She was a bit of a polymath who not only performed, but wrote, composed, sang and acted. Even today, anyone over the age of fifty recalls her music with great affection (see fig. 4). Jean’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth, born in 1939, is a mixture of the private and the public embodied in her aunt and in her mother (see fig. 5). Naturally, the whole family has private traditions outsiders never see, so my outsider observations are here combined with Elizabeth’s from within. All three of these women have strong public and private strands to their lives, but as far as the traditional arts are concerned, Lucy’s was a very private, domestic tradition, as opposed to Jean’s and Elizabeth’s more public, commercial one. The latter two took their traditions out of the domestic setting in a way that Lucy never did, considerably adapting it in the process, which is, after all, part of what perpetuates a living tradition. In the 1960s and 70s, Elizabeth played Scottish dance music for Foxtrots, Quick-steps, Tangos, Two-steps, Waltzes and the more indigenous Eightsome Reel and Gay Gordons. She also adapted some of Lucy’s ballads, ‘up-tempo’ for the dance floor, and played some of the Rock and Roll, Jazz, and Blues material of the time. These adaptations and excursions in style may be little different from a performance situation in anyone’s life, where different contexts demand differing material. What is clear, however, is that Elizabeth chose, or in a sense was compelled, to place herself in those circumstances and yet found a way, within the particular constraints of that context, to transpose material organically from one environment into another.18

18

For a fuller examination of these adaptations, see McKean, Thomas ‘“You Make Me Dizzy Miss Lizzie”: Elizabeth Stewart’s Up-tempo Traditional Ballads’, Northern Scotland, 18 (1999), 103–15.

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The Singer and the Scribe How is a good singer made? Well, the first question is whether the idea of a good or bad singer is relevant in the traditional context. Virtually anyone can acquire songs, sing or recite them and still be a valuable contributor, regardless of their (by definition, subjectively judged) artistic talents. To get a clear, almost statistical, picture of a song tradition, in relevant comparative scale to the rest of our culture, we really ought to record anyone and everyone and find out just exactly what percentage of people know one to five Child ballads, what percentage know six to twenty, and so on. Collectors often concentrate on the manuscript that survived, or the outstanding singer, not the rubbish that did not survive in oral tradition, or the truly ordinary singer, though there are honourable exceptions to this tendency. I leave this sort of statistical survey to others. So what criteria can we use to assess a singer’s quality? There are two basic avenues open to us: (1) skill at singing and (2) various assessments of repertoire. I do not propose to discuss skill and technique in any great detail here; that has been addressed elsewhere at greater length, though not yet definitively.19 That leaves us with repertoire. Kenneth S. Goldstein maintained that this was the criterion privileged by singers themselves, and their acquaintances, when judging a performer’s skill, particularly size: number of songs, number of verses. The more songs the better; the more verses the better.20 I must acknowledge that I have heard singers describe their versions as better simply because they are bigger, ‘I sang the full fifty-six verse version’, but again, this is not the criterion I wish to dwell upon here. Instead, I wish to concentrate on a few particular songs sung by Lucy and Elizabeth Stewart and look at how and why they are remembered and passed on. All singers are collectors. They share much with the professional fieldworker: an interest in songs, an interest in the ‘best’ versions (judged by various criteria), and an interest in the contextual links of the material, albeit in a more holistic, personal way than that of an outsider academic fieldworker. Much is said these days about how the young are not taking an interest in tradition and traditional music, but surely this might have been said in any era: not every young person a hundred years ago would have taken an interest in traditional song, or everyone approached by a fieldworker would have been a singer with a sizeable and interesting repertoire. No, exceptional tradition-bearers are a self-selecting subcategory of society. We all, to varying degrees, bear tradition — we carry information that defines and creates our culture — but in this case, I mean those people who carry on traditional song, or other structured lore, through a generation or two. So, they are self-selecting, but are also then selected by others to receive traditional material. This is an obvious pattern, usually overlooked, as traditionbearers are often considered the remains of a society in which, it is vaguely implied, 19

20

See, for example, McKean, Thomas, ‘Gordon Easton’s “The Aul Beggarman”’, in Ballads into Books, ed. by Tom Cheesman and Sigrid Rieuwerts (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), pp. 237–248 and Idem ‘Equating Traditional Singers’ Terms with Melodic Adaptation’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica, 47, 1-2 (2002), 91–97. I am also currently working on a book on the traditional ballad-singer’s art. See also, Munro, Democratic Muse, pp. 91, 95–96, 216, and Porter, James, ‘Jeannie Robertson’s “My Son David”: a conceptual performance model’, Journal of American Folklore, 89 (1976), 7–26. Goldstein, Kenneth. S., ‘Notes Toward a European-American Folk Aesthetic: lessons I have learned from singers and storytellers I have known’, Journal of American Folklore, 104, no. 412 (Spring 1991),164–178, particularly p. 168 ff.

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Thomas A. McKean everyone knew hundreds of songs.21 Undoubtedly, in former pre-literate times people did know more oral poetry as a general rule, but there would always have been those who knew more than others, those who made a particular study of it, from the highly trained Gaelic bards and court poets, to the village ‘character’ who knew songs, ditties, literary and broadside ballads (such as Peter Buchan’s James Rankin).22 Extraordinary singers like Lucy Stewart and Jeannie Robertson, then, do not simply occur. Rather they are the product of their environments, coupled with innate intellect, interest, and talent. In fact, exceptional singers I have known display an almost obsessive and professional interest in song above all things, even to the point, in the modern era, where sometimes family and social responsibilities are somewhat neglected in pursuit of their art. This is only a problem when venues for the performance of this material are outside the home, which, formerly, would have been the usual environment for such material. In the twentieth century, as traditional music became more commercial, the demand for village-hall and theatre performances has escalated, removing the material and its practitioners from the home environment. What was only recently a social and sociable art, which helped to build and stabilise family units, has largely become the opposite. Paradoxically, this shift helped to develop Elizabeth Stewart’s own passion for her aunt’s material, for while her mother Jean was out playing with her band, Lucy was looking after Elizabeth and her sisters. Consequently, she was exposed to the songs and stories in a natural domestic context far more than she might otherwise have been; a clear cut example of context — in this case family social function — affecting how tradition is passed on and develops. In this case it was the song tradition, but with her mother a professional musician, she was also drawn into that life. Even today, it is these two threads that define the cultural side of Elizabeth’s life. The third thread, drawn from her Traveller heritage, is dealing in antiques and used goods, her current means of making a living. Following the tragically early death of her mother, in Elizabeth’s own years of young motherhood, Lucy cared for Elizabeth’s children when she was out playing with her own dance band. Consequently, they have been exposed to tradition a generation older than their own mother’s. They are familiar with the songs, and sometimes discuss them, though they do not perform in public. This is partly due to their youth, but also because their mother is the senior singer. As Elizabeth deferred to Lucy, who the older children knew well, so Jeannette, Elizabeth, and Michael do to Elizabeth. Their time will come to inherit the

21

C[arl] W[ilhelm] v[on] Sydow noted that only a minority takes part in perpetuating tradition Selected Papers on Folklore, Published on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday. A selection of papers written from 1932–45 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948; reprinted Arno Press, 1977), pp. 12 and 48. 22 For more on Gaelic bards and court poets, see Thomson, Derick, Introduction to Gaelic Poetry (London: Gollancz, 1974), particularly chapters 1 and 2. For more background on Peter Buchan and his sources, see Buchan, pp. 205–222, and Rieuwerts, Sigrid, ‘The Case Against Peter Buchan’, in The Flowering Thorn, ed. by Thomas A. McKean (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003).

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The Singer and the Scribe mantle of actively carrying on the tradition.23 In the meantime, their spiritual bond with their aunt Lucy is just as intense and absolute. To return to the idea of singer-collectors, there are really two levels on which they are active. The first is the most natural, in which a singer gathers her repertoire together over time from of a range of sources: other singers, print/written media and, latterly, audio recordings and radio. They learn songs that fit their criteria: a good song (many verses, an interesting story, tune, or resonant family connection) or a useful song (for entertaining children or some such practical function). Prominent examples of this type of collector in the twentieth century include Belle Stewart (Blairgowrie, Perthshire), Jeannie Robertson (Aberdeen), and Calum and Annie Johnston (Barra). 24 Older examples might include Agnes Lyle of Kilbarchan, one of William Motherwell’s most prolific sources, and Anna Gordon, the ‘Mrs Brown of Falkland’ whose texts feature prominently in Child’s collection.25 All of these people were literate to one degree or another and there is a good chance that they wrote some of their own songs down, not necessarily in a rigorous way, but at least in the informal way that Elizabeth Stewart does, and that I shall address below. In the second group of collector-singers, more wholly on the collecting side of the coin, we find people like Margaret Gillespie, supplier of 466 songs (484 song versions) to the collector James B. Duncan, and the curious case of Bell Robertson, who sent 398 songs (425 song versions) to Gavin Greig, not one of them with a tune.26 Here we have an insider collector who is not a singer at all, and who brings us out the other end of the continuum between non-literate singer and non-singing literate and into the realms of non-participant observer-fieldwork.

23

As such, they are passive tradition-bearers in the sense proposed by Goldstein, Kenneth, ‘On the Application of the Concepts of Active and Inactive Traditions to the Study of Repertory’, Journal of American Folklore, 84 (1971), pp. 62–7. 24 For Belle Stewart, see Queen Among the Heather (Cockenzie: Greentrax CDTRAX 9055); The Stewarts of Blair (London: Topic TOP 12T138, 1965[?]);The Sang’s the Thing, ed. by Sheila Douglas (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), pp. 138–143; The King o the Black Art and Other Folk Tales, ed. by Sheila Douglas (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987); Scottish Traditional Tales, ed. by Alan Bruford and Donald A. Macdonald (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1994), pp. 333 - 336. For Robertson, see Porter, James, and Herschel Gower, Jeannie Robertson: emergent singer, transformative voice, Publications of the American Folklore Society, new series (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Jeannie Robertson, The Great Scots Ballad Singer (Kingskettle: Springthyme Records SPRC 1025, 1988, first issued 1959); Jeannie Robertson, Jeannie Robertson: the queen among the heather, The Alan Lomax Collection Portrait Series (Cambridge: Rounder 1720, 1998); and Scottish Traditional Tales, pp. 55-64, 240-244. For the Johnstons, see Scottish Tradition 13, Calum and Annie Johnston: songs, stories and piping from Barra (Cockenzie: Greentrax CTRAX 9013, 1995, originally issued in 1980) and Scottish Traditional Tales, pp. 41-43, 64-69, 301-303, 339-341. 25 Agnes Lyle is the subject of a detailed study, McCarthy, W.B. The Ballad Matrix (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), as is Anna Gordon, see Buchan, David, The Ballad and the Folk, esp. pp. 62-173. 26 My thanks to Emily Lyle of the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, for these figures. The two women’s immense contributions are published in Greig, Gavin, and Duncan, James B., The Greig - Duncan Folk-Song Collection, general editors Patrick Shuldham -Shaw and Emily B. Lyle (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press: Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1981–2002). Volume eight contains brief studies of Gillespie’s and Robertson’s material.

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Thomas A. McKean I am particularly interested in a middle type of singer-collector, one who actually writes down or records songs that interest them, or that they feel worthy of note. Such a man was Willie Mathieson (born ca. 1880), a farm servant in King Edward and Ellon, Aberdeenshire. Scotland, and the North-East in particular, has an extensive history of manuscript song collection,27 so Mathieson is no anomaly, but an assiduous example, collecting for himself and posterity, but with no thought of publication or commercial gain. Mathieson consciously collected songs, learned them and wrote them in three large notebooks, the ultimate in academic fieldwork terms. His interest lasted many decades and so devoted to songs was he that when he lost some notes in a fire, he immediately rewrote them from memory. Not only, then, did he collect the songs from others for his own repertoire, but he collected them from himself in order to replace his lost manuscripts. He had known Gavin Greig and was also one of the American collector James Madison Carpenter's contributors during his 1928–1935 tours of the British Isles.28 Two decades later, he performed the same service for Alan Lomax and Hamish Henderson on their 1951 Scottish collecting tour. A few years ago, the cycle began again as his grand-daughter contacted me having heard something about ‘a singer, Willie Mathieson, from Ellon’, on the radio. She frequently attended Traditional Music and Song Association festivals, and had a liking for North-East song, but before hearing about him on the radio, was not aware that her own grandfather had sung. I told her that photostats of the notebooks were preserved at the School of Scottish Studies, along with the tune of each song on tapes made by Hamish Henderson. She has now consulted these notebooks, and even learned a few of the songs – a good example of the value of fieldwork, and perhaps all the more so in that the collector was an insider with an acute awareness of the value of the material.29 Another way that some insiders have collected material is on tape. An astonishing number of people in the North-East had reel-to-reel tape recorders in the 1950s and 60s, and had the awareness to record their traditional songs. Naturally, a lot of the material they recorded was the current music of the day – Country and Western and pop – but a surprising amount of older material, from ballads to music hall, is also preserved. Jane Turriff, also of Fetterangus, is one such collector who recorded herself, her sisters and her mother in the 1950s and 60s, singing all kinds of material on tapes she still prizes today. The Stewarts of Fetterangus were and are literate: Lucy could certainly read, though her writing was not as fluent. Elizabeth and her late mother were both highly literate textually and musically, and could write in Scots as well. This latter skill is almost entirely selftaught, sometimes by the example of books of Burns’ poetry, local newspaper columns, or

27

28

29

Many well known eighteenth- and nineteenth-century song collectors drew, directly and indirectly, on NorthEast material. For a comprehensive résumé of this material, see Buchan, pp. 278–280. The Aberdeenshire collecting tradition is largely fieldwork based, making F. J. Child’s work something of an anomaly, though some of his texts were, admittedly, only a generation or two away from oral transmission, e.g. some broadsides. See Bishop, Julia, ‘“Dr Carpenter from the Harvard College in America”: an introduction to James Madison Carpenter and his collection’, Folk Music Journal, 7:4 (1998), 402–420 (the rest of the issue is devoted to aspects of the Carpenter collection). For more information on Mathieson, and several of his songs, see Tocher, 43 (Edinburgh: School of Scottish Studies), pp. 22–39; see also Henderson, Hamish, Alias MacAlias (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), pp. 25 and 32.

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The Singer and the Scribe song books featuring words like awa, wey, aa or a’, windin’, etc. Until the 1930s, and the coming of affordable and ‘portable’ recording machinery, the ability to write was essential for any singer-collector. Scotland has seen widespread literacy for many years and certainly since the 1872 Education Act nearly every Scot would have acquired some skill in reading and writing English to a greater or lesser degree, depending on necessity, ability, and actual school attendance. I specify English because the reading and writing of Scotland’s other languages and dialects — chiefly Gaelic and Scots — was a much more hit and miss affair, dependent on individual parochial or village provision. In the case of Scots, the teaching of writing and reading still lags far behind, where it exists at all. It is worth remembering that the two skills are quite different and often develop to different degrees.30 I would contend that, at least in Elizabeth Stewart’s case, the confidence to write texts in a language she was not formally taught to write comes from her unshakeable belief in the tradition itself. Since the songs are a central pillar of her individual, family and community identity, they have an authority to define what is correct. The hand-written text, therefore, reinforces the cultural veracity of the songs. This is in contrast to the assumption made by early collectors that an oral version is but a broken down version of a printed, read ‘correct’, original and that a print version is seen by singers as authoritative. The former is, of course, a general notion with which most Westerners live through our reliance on the perceived authority of newspapers and print in general. Where then, does an interested singer-collector in the North-East of Scotland look for material? Apart from oral sources, there are old collections, broadsides, song-books, musichall performances, radio and, latterly, audio recordings. All of these are seen by traditional singers as authorities to one degree or another. Some will privilege a source singer, others a book or a recording; sometimes a singer will privilege a singer as the source of one song, a text for another. What matters is that there is an external source to which to appeal for an authoritative version. The North-East of Scotland is well served with song publications, from those of the Christies of Monquhitter to that of John Ord 31 and, of course, the Greig -Duncan collection. Material was therefore readily available to those of sufficient means, or, in the early part of the twentieth century, to readers of the Buchan Observer, which carried Gavin Greig’s regular song column.32 Not unexpectedly, then, Elizabeth Stewart has a fine collection of ballad and song-books. In later years, Elizabeth has sometimes used her books to look at other versions of the family’s songs, to check historical references and to confirm the song’s importance by noting its appearance in a published work. On the surface, all three of 30

Atkinson discusses the question in a little more depth and offers annotated references, in English Traditional Ballad, p. 17–18 and notes. 31 Christie, William (1817–1885) and William Christie, Traditional Ballad Airs: Arranged and Harmonized for the Pianoforte and Harmonium, from Copies Procured in the Counties of Aberdeen, Banff, and Moray (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1876–81). See also, Alburger, Mary Anne, ‘The Christie Family of Monquhitter: preservation and “refinement” of traditional music and song’, Northern Scotland, 18 (1999), 117–33 and Ord, John, Bothy Songs & Ballads of Aberdeen, Banff & Moray, Angus and the Mearns (Paisley: Alexander Gardiner, 1930; reissued John Donald, 1990). 32 Collected in: Grieg, Gavin, Folk-Song of the North -East (Peterhead: Scrogie, 1914; reprinted Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1963).

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Thomas A. McKean these uses would seem to privilege the text in a familiar way, but when I ask Elizabeth about it, she is unequivocal: Lucy’s version of the song is superior in every way, as is the contextual narrative that accompanies it. The privileging of songs passed down within the family is a common enough theme,33 as the personal and contextual associations clearly derive from the unwritten social traditions surrounding the songs. If one accepts David Buchan’s proposal regarding Anna Gordon that ‘it is only when a person ceases to be recreative along traditional lines and accepts the literate concept of a fixed text that he or she can no longer be classed as oral’ (p. 64), we can say that Elizabeth’s tradition is ‘oral’. As we shall see, she has not accepted the ‘fixed text’. Whatever the case, I do not believe that a simple dichotomy — between re-creative/oral and fixed-text/verbal — can be applied to anyone, whether they be Anna Gordon in the eighteenth century, or Lucy and Elizabeth Stewart in the twentieth. The fact that a song that Lucy knew, and taught to Elizabeth, can be found in the books perhaps lends authority to Lucy, to the family, and to the oral tradition as a whole. Though this process confers status on the family repertoire, it is not the texts themselves that lend authority, but merely the fact that such a thing exists at all. Primacy is given to the oral and, in Elizabeth’s case, to Lucy’s version, of the song: ‘*I never look at them. I like tae hae them, bit they’re niver lookit at’. Because of the centrality of this process, we may therefore say that the workings of Elizabeth’s immediate family tradition are still oral in nature, and fundamental to family cultural identity, even though many songs show strong relationships with parallel print culture. Print material has probably not been an important source of the Stewart repertoire for the last century or so. The uses of literacy discussed here, therefore, relate to the family’s transient tradition of the last generation or two. Within Elizabeth’s and Lucy’s oral-song relationship, let us examine a few verses of two of their classic ballads, noting levels of correspondence. According to Child, The Jolly Beggar (Child 279) was first printed in 1751, in The Charmer, though he feels the Scottish version to be far superior, and later in Herd’s 1769 collection. There is also a similar narrative to be found in Pepys’ collection c. 1670-75. Only one of Child’s texts is similar to the Stewarts’ version as opposed to about a third of those in Bronson’s Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads.34 Most versions in the Greig -Duncan collection do not share the famous chorus, used by Byron in ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’, preferring instead, ‘Wi his fal an his dal an his dandy o/ Wi his teerin owre an eerin oure an andy o’, as couplet refrains.35 The two women’s singing styles are radically different, a measure of the role of individual creativity within tradition. Elizabeth is very aware of the stylistic differences, describing Lucy’s as ‘plain’ and her timing as leisurely and stately.36 This highlights that it 33

See Atkinson, p. 29, for a brief résumé of the tendency. For full references, see Child, and Bronson, Bertrand H., The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, with Their Texts, According to the Extant Records of Great Britain and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1972). 35 For North-East examples similar to the Stewarts’, see Mrs Gillespie’s contributions, noted January 1909 in Greig-Duncan, vol. 2, p. 299 (versions E and G). ‘The tune given in the books’, Greig writes, ‘is less objectionable than usual’, Gavin Greig, article 30. 36 Questions of style being virtually impossible to deal with on the printed page, I leave readers themselves to listen to the two singers on the two recordings cited above. 34

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The Singer and the Scribe is the process — the fact that she has learned the songs, values them, feels them, and understands them on a deep level — that perpetuates the tradition. Elizabeth does not need to copy the songs slavishly, nor Lucy’s singing of them, to carry on her aunt’s legacy. The Jolly Beggar (Child 279) Lucy Stewart (1959) There was a jolly beggar, And a-beggin he wis boun, An he’s taen up his quarters, In some landward town.

Elizabeth Stewart (1994) There was eence a jolly beggar, And a-beggin he wis boun, An he’s taen up his quarters, In some langward toon.

An we’ll gang nae mair a-rovin

An we’ll gang nae mair a-rovin

Sae late intae the nicht We’ll gang nae mair a-rovin, Lat the mune shine e’er sae bricht.

Sae late untae the nicht An we’ll gang nae mair a-rovin, Let the meen shine e’er sae bricht.

He widnae lie in barns,

He widna lie in barns,

Or he widnae lie in byres, In ahint the ha door, Or before the fire.

Nor he widna lie in byres, Bit in ahint the ha door, Or jist afore the fire.

The beggar’s bed wis made at een,

Oh the beggar’s bed wis made at een,

Wi guid clean strae an hey, An just ahint the ha door, An there the beggar lay.

Wi gweed clean strae an hey, An just ahin the ha door, There the beggar lay.

Elizabeth herself comments on her tendency to introduce verses with a more than occasional ‘fill-in’ word, such as ‘O’ or ‘An’. This perhaps derives from her more emotional, extrovert, dynamic style, which virtually demands attention. Lucy’s singing, in contrast, invites the listener into the song, the ballad-world, in their own time, so to speak. The singers’ words correspond almost exactly, the differences partly due, no doubt, to natural dissimilarities in any two renditions. There are a few variations in dialect, Lucy’s ‘mune’ versus Elizabeth’s ‘meen’ in line 8, for example, the latter a late nineteenth-century form. A curious feature, also found in other songs of Lucy’s is the frequent use of English words, e.g. ‘town’ (l. 4), where Elizabeth sings — and one would expect — ‘toun’ (pronounced ‘toon’). Similarly in verse 2 of Binnorie, Lucy sings the English ‘take’ where her niece sings the more natural ‘tak’. Hamish Henderson has written of ‘the flexible formulaic language of the older Scottish folk song — which grazes ballad-English along the whole of its length, and yet is clearly identifiable as a distinct folk-literary lingo’. 37 Much of the existence of such a dialect can surely be ascribed to the semi -migratory nature of traditional ballads from other areas within the ‘single great ballad zone’ of England, Scotsspeaking Scotland and English-speaking Ireland, as Henderson goes on to say,38 but I think one must also recognise the growing influence of spoken English as a lingua franca in the era of the great collections of Scottish song — the late eighteenth-century to the present

37

Henderson, Hamish, ‘The Ballad, the Folk and the Oral Tradition’, in The People’s Past, ed. by Edward J. Cowan (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1980, reissued 1990), p. 82. 38 Henderson, ‘The Ballad, the Folk’, p. 82.

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Thomas A. McKean day. Oral versions collected in the age of sound recordings are often more Anglicised than the broader Scots of older written sources. There is an undoubted tendency towards Anglicisation-in-performance for the benefit of outsider collectors, an effect operating in Lucy’s case and, I believe, in similar examples involving other singers. Elizabeth Stewart agrees, saying that Lucy modified her language considerably for visitors like Goldstein, and that she herself served as interpreter with other contributors on some occasions. To my mind, the is sue is largely one of cultural self-assurance. As English made inroads into the North-East consciousness, confidence in local dialect and culture wavered, yielding a more Anglicised register in song. In recent years, especially for someone as proud of her family’s culture as Elizabeth Stewart, renewed cultural pride allows singers to extend their natural speaking dialect into the more formal setting of a classic ballad. Jock Duncan’s singing is a classic example of this tendency; the dialect in his ballad versions is scarcely different from that of his bothy songs (cornkisters) which originated in the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth centuries. Composed by fee’d farm servants, hired on a six-monthly basis, bothy songs discuss farmwork and farm life, enumerating the characteristics, good and bad, of the farmers and the other workers. They are almost invariably sung, even for outsider collectors, in the broadest of dialect. The Two Sisters (Binnorie, Child 10) Most versions of The Two Sisters begin, ‘There were two sisters lived in a bower’, ‘There were two sisters lived in a ha’, or ‘There were three ladies playin at the ba’. Not one of Bronson’s, Child’s, or Greig’s and Duncan’s ninety-seven, twenty-seven, and twenty-two versions, 39 respectively, feature the Stewarts’ opening line ‘O there were twa sisters lived in this place’, or Lucy’s refrain for that matter. At verse three, their version begins to match with many collected in North America, and in Britain by Gavin Greig, among others. Lucy was three years old when Greig began collecting seriously, just seven miles down the road, but he was apparently too busy with all the immediately local material to move further afield. ‘The Swan Swims Sae Bonnie o’ Lucy Stewart Oh there were twa sist ers lived in this place, Hey o ma nannie o, Een was fair an the ither was deen, An the swan swims sae bonnie o.

Elizabeth Stewart There were twa sisters lived in this place Hey oh, binnorie, oh. Een o them wis fair an the ither wis deen [dark] An the swan swims sae bonnie o

Again the correspondences are close, though there are expected, natural variations, and the first refrain line is, surprisingly in a conservative tradition, completely different. The two versions are not quite as close as Elizabeth feels they are, but this highlights the fact that the essential factors of traditionality are cultural fidelity, and the tribute paid in the remembering and singing of the song, rather than slavish word-for-word reproduction. Textually, then, Lucy’s and Elizabeth’s versions of songs reveal a high degree of exactitude, with only minor variations. The differences, as might be expected within a single family and between two emotionally close people, are of the same general type as minor differences between oral and printed texts taken from oral sources, though, as in the case of

39

Greig-Duncan, vol. 2, song 213, pp. 76–92.

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The Singer and the Scribe broadsides, these may be more extreme if the song has been through several generations of print. Of course, a great many such texts are originally from oral sources, with various amounts of doctoring, as opposed to songs which have their ultimate origin in a literary tradition.40 Perhaps the most common printed source for songs and ballads in Scotland is the broadside; there were numerous publishers, primarily in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh and their material undoubtedly reached up into the North-East.41 One of several songs in Lucy’s repertoire undoubtedly from the broadside tradition is the story of murderous Dr Pritchard. There are two songs in Bodleian Library Broadside Collection, being, The lament of Mr Taylor for his wife and daughter, who were cruelly poisened [sic] by the daughters husband, Dr Pritchard, who is now lying under sentence of death, in the prison of Glasgow to be executed on the 28th 42 July, 1865.

The case was sensational and there was a spate of articles, broadsides, poems and sermons about the murders and the execution, Glasgow’s last public hanging.43 I have yet to trace a specific source for the Stewarts’ version, which is quite different from both Bodleian examples. The date of 1865 means, I think, that Lucy Stewart is unlikely to have learned it directly from a broadside. Perhaps a grandparent did, but that is really immaterial. By Lucy’s time, the song was probably in oral tradition, having become detached from its print source. In any case, the fact that it has such ultimate origins is not really germane to a primarily contextual study of its oral life, centred in a period a hundred years later. The song is particularly important to Elizabeth; its content moves her and she learned it from her beloved aunt. This song neatly demonstrates the interaction between print sources and the oral tradition: a song can exist in parallel worlds simultaneously, in this case crossing only at its point and time of origin, or shortly thereafter. Indeed there is some case to be made for there now being two totally separate, individual songs, one which lives in an oral world, the other in the two dimensional, unchanging world of print. Or to put it another way, without privileging either one, a living, evolving one and a fixed, static version. These two worlds

40

For a look at the instability of broadside printed texts, which show many of the same supposedly oral unique types of variation and localisation as oral versions, see Atkinson, p. 25. 41 For look at an Aberdeen broadside seller, see Brown, Mary Ellen, ‘An Excursus into Historical Documents: the life and songs of Charles Leslie’, in The Ballad Today: history, performance, revival, ed. by Georgina Boyes. th Proceedings of the 13 International Folk Ballad Conference, Société Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore, Kommission für Volksdichtung (Doncaster and Addiscombe, England: January Books, 1985), pp. 72–79. Sellers and printers are the focus of Hindley, Charles, The Life and Times of James Catnach, Late of Seven Dials, Ballad Monger (London: Reeves & Turner, 1878; reprint Welwyn Garden City: Seven Dials Press, 1970) and Shephard, Leslie, John Pitts: ballad printer of Seven Dials, London, 1765-1844 (London: Private Libraries Association, 1969). For a general introduction to broadsides, see Shephard, Leslie, The Broadside Ballad: a study in origins and meaning (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962). 42 Oxford, Bodleian Library, 2806 c.14 (52); the second song is Bodleian 2806 c.11 (60). 43 See Roughead, William, Trial of Dr Pritchard , Notable Scottish Trials (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1906), p. 304. The book contains full transcripts of the trial, along with pictures of Pritchard and the other players in the drama. Sermons on the doctor’s sins can be found on the Internet even today.

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Thomas A. McKean should be considered ‘not as mutually exclusive cultures’, but to derive from, ‘mutually supportive mental habits’. 44 More recent print sources of songs in the North-East of Scotland include the published work of Willie Kemp, George S. Morris and other music-hall practitioners of the bothy ballad tradition. By the end of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, the short-lived tradition was taken over by music-hall composers whose songs are self-conscious, often humorous, parlour parodies of the rough farm songs. As the lifestyle itself passed away, so the nostalgic, golden sunset appeared in its song tradition. Kemp, Morris and others were well-known throughout the North-East and their work appeared on 78s and in book form quite early on.45 Indeed some of Jean Stewart’s professional work was accompanying Willie Kemp, John Mearns, George Elrick, Ludovic Kennedy and other artists in their BBC radio work in Aberdeen. Many Aberdeenshire performers sing some of their songs, which are now generally accepted as traditional; many have entered the oral tradition, either by this means or by radio and recordings, to the point where it is now virtually impossible for anyone to maintain convincingly that they are, or are not, traditional songs. It is clear, then, that the Stewarts would have had exposure to a wide range of material, also in the past because of a Travellers’ itinerant lifestyle. In practice, however, they tended to stick to their own tradition for the big ballads and lyric songs that had been in the family for some time. One curious song Lucy’s and Jean’s immediate forebears may have learned directly from the music-hall tradition is The Russian Jew. This is an unusual title for rural Aberdeenshire, to say the least, and a very misleading one. It derives from the macaronic 1890s ‘Says I, “Ciamar a tha sibh an diugh?”’, which pokes fun at the Highlander by parodying his English, as do a number of songs in the Greig -Duncan collection (one verse of this song appears in volume 8). The original song ends each verse with the title line, meaning ‘Says I, “How are you today?”’ in Gaelic. In The Russian Jew, this line has been transformed into ‘Says I, come a Russian Jew’, or ‘Says, Here comes a Russian Jew’, which sounds very similar. The first field recording of this was made in the late 1950s by Kenneth Goldstein, who told me in 1995 about hearing it for the first time from Elizabeth, her sister Jane and their aunt Lucy: ‘*They had probably never even seen a Jew before, and here am I a Russian Jew from New York recording this song from Aberdeenshire Travellers!’ 46 The most recent type of source material is audio recordings (such as 78s), radio and television. While not literate in the strict sense, they are often given a similar sort of authority by those in an oral tradition, much as we might give The Beatles’ original rendition of a song authority over a cover version of the same song. I call these a kind of literate source as they are reproducible and can serve as a permanent template, which is the salient element of a printed text. Again, I draw the reader’s attention to the main function of such sources, whether they be singers, books, or recordings: they serve as an external

44

Atkinson, p. 18, drawing on the work of Engler, Balz, ‘Textualization’, in Literary Pragmatics, ed. by Roger D. Sell (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 185. 45 See, for example, Kerr’s ‘Cornkisters’ (Bothy ballads) as Sung and Recorded by Willie Kemp (Glasgow: James S. Kerr, [1950]), or Kerr’s Cornkisters: Bothy Ballads (Glasgow: James S. Kerr, 1951). 46 Personal communication.

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The Singer and the Scribe authority for the singer. It is worth remembering, too, that once someone has learned a song it is affected by the same rules that govern ordinary oral transmission and variation.47 Literacy also makes its presence felt in the song making tradition of the North-East. Elizabeth Stewart has made a number of songs, including a traditional-style ballad, based on historical events of the fourteenth century.48 Her mother was famous for her satirical songs about fellow villagers in Fetterangus, including one that lead to a threatened arrest, and her aunt has composed several verses, written on the backs of Christmas and birthday cards and kept in a canister atop her piano. Writing plays a prominent role here, with the song often being written down as soon as it is complete in the mind of the composer. One singer, Bill McKinnon of Peterhead, also recorded by Kenneth Goldstein in 1959, started making songs only in 1993. Unusually for a composer within the tradition, he always writes them down as he makes them, rather than waiting until they are complete and, in fact, he is often unable to sing them without the paper in front of him. He has told me that he makes the verses while walking, motion being a common feature of the process of traditional song composition, so at some stage they do exist only orally. I think the paper copy is therefore largely necessary for the performance of the song, especially in front of others.49 I have already mentioned Willie Mathieson, who wrote all his songs in three manuscript notebooks, but in the course of my years in the North-East of Scotland, I have come across numerous singers who write their traditional songs down, some of them the most capable singers I know: Bill McKinnon, Jane Turriff, and Bill’s sister Jean Mathew, to name a few. Elizabeth Stewart is one of these, though her mode of operating is rather different. While McKinnon, Turriff and Mathew all write and wrote notebooks (or in Jane’s case Christmas cards) full of songs, Elizabeth is constantly renewing her notebooks, starting a fresh one, usually coincidentally with a public concert or competition, and occasionally to pass the time. She does have one main book containing transcriptions of Lucy’s songs, with occasional melodic outlines in sol-fa notation, but it would be misleading to say that she keeps a single notebook. She also has two versions of some songs. Unusually, Lucy sometimes had two very different versions, text and melody, of the same song. Like most traditional singers, however, Elizabeth only ever sings one version. 47

See McKean, ‘Gordon Easton’s “The Aul Beggarman”’ about a singer drawing on a recorded source before making a song his own. For the classic discussion of adaptation, variation and localisation in traditional song, see Coffin, Tristram P., The British Traditional Ballad in North America, revised edition with a supplement by Roger de V. Renwick, Bibiliographical and Special Series published through the cooperation of the American Folklore Society (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977), introduction, pp. 1-19. 48 For an examination of this song and its traditional themes, structure and creation, see McKean, Thomas A., ‘The Making of Child 306’, in Bridging the Cultural Divide: Our Common Ballad Heritage/ Kulturelle Brücken: Gemeinsame Balladtradition, ed. by Sigrid Rieuwerts and Helga Stein, 28. Internationale Balladenkonferenz der SIEF – Kommission für Volksdichtung (Hildesheim; Zürich; New York: Olms, 2000), pp. 273–290. 49 For an interview with Bill McKinnon, see The Broken Fiddle 4 (Macduff: Aberdeenshire Council, 1995), pp. 56–61; for recordings of two of his songs, see North-East Tradition 1: New Recordings from the North -East Folklore Archive (Kingskettle: Sprin gthyme SPRC 1040, 1994). For a description of the role of movement in traditional song composition, see McKean, Thomas A., Hebridean Songmaker (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1997), pp. 114-123.

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Thomas A. McKean The simplest function of writing songs down is as an aide memoire, not that Elizabeth ever refers to the words in the book. Rather, it is the process of writing that revitalises the words in her mind, and restores the flow, reminiscent, perhaps, of listening to Lucy singing, somehow externalising the source of the song again. I saw an example being made recently when, just prior to the Strichen Festival singing competitions, Elizabeth sat in the hall writing out the song she was planning to sing, reinforcing it in her mind. Two Pretty Boys (The Twa Brothers Child 50), Elizabeth Stewart. (Figure 6) When Elizabeth sings the song, the last line is repeated, line 4 ends with ‘boy’, line 7 ends with ‘wood’, and verse three runs, So they went down to the merry green wood, Tae try a wrestling for, Big brother John took oot his little penknife, And stabbed William to the ground.

She does not write out every word, but used her own abbreviations and shortened lines, fully aware of their meanings. Sometimes, she says, she just writes down the first two words, e.g. ‘An they’, and that is enough to trigger her memory and assure her that she remembers the line. This shows that the process of writing is the most important function of such a written text. The most important of Elizabeth’s notebooks is one made in the late 70s when Lucy was in her declining years. Elizabeth realised that it was an important time and took down dozens of songs from Lucy’s dictation. The volume holds particular significance for her: ‘*It’s had Lucy’s hands on it’. (Figure 7) Writing down the songs that meant so much to both of them brought them closer and would have reassured Lucy that her legacy would be preserved, not that she necessarily considered the matter consciously. Elizabeth honours her aunt’s memory with the sort of monument that print texts are usually thought to be. As proof of this, I offer the fact that Elizabeth is keen to have a book in print about her Lucy, Jean and herself.50 Though she comes from a peerless oral culture, few of her immediate fa mily have taken up the reins; a printed legacy is therefore the only monument that matters to the wider literate-minded public. Such a document serves to confirm the legitimacy of the song, blunting the twoedged sword of orality, by giving it parity with versions found in the Greig-Duncan collection’s eight weighty volumes and others already mentioned, although with the proviso that it is the text’s mere existence that is important, not the version itself. For Elizabeth, writing songs down also gives them a context for performance when the domestic setting in which they were passed on to her no longer exists. In the silent performance, hearing the song in her head as she writes, she is a conduit in the dialogue between the written song and the oral version. The page offers feedback in a way that an audience or, in the past, a community might have. It is an inaudible performance, but given that she does not refer to the written text again, we may consider the act of writing a performance — like singing — in itself.

50

Elizabeth is currently working with Alison McMorland on such a book, which will contain family history, songs, music and photographs relating to the Stewarts of Fetterangus.

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The Singer and the Scribe But what of the apparent differences between a text and a performance? Folk song is said to be a very conservative tradition, for example in the retention of certain words, or at least homonymic phrases, even if the singer does not understand them (e.g. ‘he tirled at the pin’ in American versions of Scottish ballads, or the macaronic phrase, ‘Ciamar a tha sibh an diugh?’), but despite this overall conservatism, there is a strong tendency for traditional singers to individualise, to internalise a song. Having, or learning the text of a song does not mean that it will sound the same each time, or that the text will remain the same after the process of internalisation has taken place. An example of this difference can be found in Jock Duncan’s singing of The Battle o Harlaw (Child 163), the text of which he says he learned from John Ord’s Bothy Songs of the North-East of Scotland,51 with the last verse remembered from his uncle Charlie’s singing: ‘Well, I got a version oot o a book, bit I got the style o singin’t fae ma uncle, Charlie Duncan. At’s e wey he likit tae, tae dee’t’.52 He learned the song, or at least stimulated the re-learning, by looking at the book, but he adapts the text to reconstruct his uncles’ version and in the process also makes it his own. In re building his uncle’s version from memory, around forty percent of Ord’s text gets recomposed as he adapts the song, sometimes radically, consciously or subconsciously, to fit his own idiom. I suspect that his version differs from his uncle’s as much as it does from Ord’s, which he has obviously used as a structural key. Elizabeth Stewart clings to Lucy’s individuality, as Jock Duncan clings to Charlie’s. As we have seen, however, they both recast songs, using their own experience, making them their own. This is as good a definition of traditional singing as one is likely to create. On balance, I think we may safely say that literacy can have much to do with the quality of a text, but very little to do with the quality of a song, where song is taken to mean the totality of performance, or that which creates a compelling version of a song. It is obvious that one need not be non-literate to possess an excellent oral version of a song. Nor is literacy connected with one’s ability to render said song in a moving way. They are separate, but related skills, much like reading and writing; the ability to do one well does not ensure fluency in the other. Literacy and orality are therefore not diametrically opposed, as is usually assumed, and often asserted in scholarly work on the oral tradition, but can operate in parallel, with little or no detrimental effect to each other. This is no surprise, for as the oft-quoted Alan Lomax wrote in 1951, The Scots have the liveliest folk tradition of the British Isles, and paradoxically, it is also the most bookish…. Everywhere in Scotland I collected songs of written or literary origin from country singers; at the same time, I 53 constantly encountered learned Scotsmen who knew traditional versions of the great folk-songs.

In fact, all the finest ‘traditional’ singers one can think of today — Jock Duncan, Elizabeth Stewart, Gordon Easton, Norman Kennedy, Sheila Stewart — and the finest ‘revival’ singers — Ray Fisher and Alison McMorland, for example — are all highly literate in both reading and writing terms. You would be hard pressed to say that they are not as good as 51

Ord, Bothy Songs, pp. 473–75. Tape c1994.63.B in the North-East Folklore Archive, Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire. Summaries and transcriptions of my 1993–1995 audio recordings of North-East tradition — ‘The Banff and Buchan Collection’ — can be found at http://www.nefa.net/. 53 World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, compiled and ed. by Alan Lomax, Vol. 3 Scotland, The Alan Lomax Collection, The Historic Series (Cambridge: Rounder 1743, 1998), booklet, p. 6. 52

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Thomas A. McKean non-literate singers of the past, except through privileging the latter for the sake of it, or for the sake of some hypothetical, purely oral mental process.54 The coming of literacy, then, is not a death knell to the oral tradition. It is the arrival of another tool, used by singers like Elizabeth Stewart to reinforce deeply held convictions about their oral material. What role did literacy play in Lucy Stewart’s life of song? A small one, as far as I can tell. Her ability to read was useful in daily life, as was a talent for figures in her work as a dealer and shopkeeper, writing probably less so. She was undoubtedly fiercely intelligent, retaining family genealogies, birth, marriage and death dates and detailed historical information, such that she was an acknowledged authority in the village. On one occasion, she told a Glasgow University history professor about one of Robert the Bruce’s illegitimate sons. He was sure she was wrong and told her so, but after returning to Glasgow, and researching the question, he telephoned Lucy to admit his mistake. 55 Naturally, such a story has the useful function of reinforcing faith in the oral tradition through future generations. I think we can safely say that Lucy’s knowledge of tradition existed almost entirely independently of her literacy. What then of Jean’s and Elizabeth’s literacy? Jean was very well educated and would have needed rather different skills from Lucy’s to pursue her broadcasting and teaching work. For her professional life, textual and musical literacy were essential, though she certainly never put on airs about this, nor turned her back on her tradition. Jean’s abilities are reflected in Elizabeth, who was also a prize-winning pupil at school. In addition to using these skills as her mother did, Elizabeth harnesses them in the service of her tradition, whether performing or teaching: she uses them to reinforce her confidence; she uses them to pay tribute to her aunt Lucy; she uses them to pay tribute to her wider family and their traditions; she uses them to find out more about the songs she sings, heavily privileging the oral knowledge passed down to her. An individual’s literacy, then, does not have a great effect on the traditions of the Duke Street Stewarts of Fetterangus. That is not to say that general community literacy does not; there is the obvious effect on repertoire of broadside ballads for example. The fact that a song entered the repertoire from print, however, has little or no bearing on how it is handled by oral tradition. Even those songs which emerged from print culture have often undergone a thorough dose of the folk process and come out the other end as oral ballads. Initially, therefore, individual examples of literacy have an effect, but over time these individuals’ actions are polished by a functional oral tradition, one that gathers influences of every kind, including those of printed and written song-texts. The Stewarts of Fetterangus show us that this same process 54

Jock Duncan, Ye Shine Whar Ye Stan (Kingskettle: Springthyme SPRCD 1039, 1996) and Tae the Green Woods Gaen (Ellon: Sleepytown SLPYCD010); Gordon Easton, In Sicht o Mormond (Aberdeen: Grampian Society for the Blind, 1993) and several tracks on The Bothy Songs and Ballads of North-East Scotland, 3 vols (Ellon: Sleepytown SLPYCD001, 006 and 011); Norman Kennedy, Songs and Stories of the Old People and More Songs… (Sioux Falls, SD: Golden Fleece Publications, 1990); Sheila Stewart, From the Heart of the Tradition (London: Topic TSCD515, 2001); Ray Fisher, Traditional Songs Of Scotland (Wotton-Under-Edge: Saydisc SDL 391); Alison McMorland, The Belt wi Colours Three (London: Tangent TGS 125), Cloudberry Day: Scots Songs and Ballads (Kilmarnock: Living Tradition LTCD1003) and (with Geordie McIntyre), Rowan in the Rock (Kilmarnock: Living Tradition LTCD3002). 55 Elizabeth Stewart, personal communication.

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The Singer and the Scribe of synthesis, now with even more influences, is still happening. Reasons for using writing and reading, and other media skills, can vary widely, but they have all become tools in the repertoire of an educated singer-collector. The importance of writing to Elizabeth Stewart has more to do with the symbolic power of song than the power of the skill itself, or of texts. As we have seen, it reinforces family history and continuity; it symbolises links with the past. The written texts and the large number of tapes of Lucy and her mother serve as a legacy to the next generation. It is here that literacy may come into its own, for if the culture of performance, transferred directly from person to person, is lost, then all that will be left are the documents of tradition. Without the cultural performance contexts of the past, or some successor, such a the folk club, those documents are little more than fossilised bones. Elizabeth Stewart’s song texts are a literate link between her own and Lucy’s oral worlds. Now that Lucy herself is gone, these manuscripts help to make her traditions concrete once more. While they are certainly no substitute for Lucy herself, they do serve as a representation of her world that is external to Elizabeth and that, I think, in some way provides a crucial form of comfort for that which she has lost. Jean Stewart died in 1962, Lucy in 1982. Their gravestone in Fetterangus cemetery stands as a memorial to their life and legacy of traditional music and song. And curiously enough, there is an echo of literacy in the elegy on the stone. (Figure 8)

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Thomas A. McKean List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Louisa ‘Lucy’ Stewart, Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, ca. 1959 (photo Kenneth S. Goldstein, courtesy Rochelle Goldstein). Fig. 2. Elizabeth Townsley, ‘Aul Betty’, mother of Lucy and Jean Stewart, mid 1930s (postcard, copied by Kenneth S. Goldstein, courtesy Elizabeth Stewart). Fig. 3. Jean Stewart with her accordion class, New Deer Public Hall, early 1950s (courtesy Gordon Easton). Fig. 4. The People’s Journal, March 26, 1955. Fig. 5. Elizabeth Stewart performing in America, 1995 (photo Thomas McKean). Fig. 6. ‘Two Pretty Boys’ (courtesy Elizabeth Stewart). Fig. 7. The title page from Elizabeth Stewart’s notebook of her aunt’s songs (courtesy Elizabeth Stewart). Fig. 8. Detail from the headstone of Lucy, Jean and Robert Stewart (photo Thomas McKean).

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List of Contributors In the following list those marked with an asterisk (*) spoke at the colloquium of 27th May, 2000.

*Roderick Beaton, Professor of Byzantine Studies, King’s College, London *Philip E. Bennett, Reader in French, University of Edinburgh Manuel da Costa Fontes, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Kent State University, Ohio *Charles Duffin, professional musician, Edinburgh Richard Firth Green, Professor of English, Ohio State University *Thomas A. McKean, Research Fellow, Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen William Layher, Assistant Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Washington University in St Louis, Missouri Huw Lewis, Senior Lecturer in Spanish, University of Edinburgh Ad Putter, Reader in English, University of Bristol Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia, British Library, London *Margaret Sleeman, Honorary Research Fellow, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Aberdeen *Roger Wright, Professor of Spanish, University of Liverpool

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Index Aberdeen 183, 185, 188, 195 AbnÁmar 175, 180, 183n15 Acaponeta, Mexico 179 Acta Sanctorum 72, 73nn16&18 Adam de la Halle, Jeu de Robin et Marion 117 Aelion, Mrs Estrea 10, 153-7, 165168n18 Aelion, Saltiel Jehuda 155 Aesop, Fables 10 Aguado, Berta 177 Aguirre, J.M 37n3, 44 akritika 9, 14, 17-20 Albertus Pictor 91-2, 94, 98 -100, 102 Alburger, Mary Anne 190n31 Alesha Popovich 30 Alexander, Tamar 169 Alexander VI, pope 180 Alexiou, Margaret 16-17n13 Alexiou, Stylianos 19n17 Algarve, the 58,59n25, 61n29 Alhambra, the 177 Alonso, Martín 47n19 Alvar, Manuel 159n11 Ambraser Liedbuch 85 Amel’kin, A.O 28n29 Andersen, Flemming G 24, 70n6, 136, 139-43, 150 Andrea da Barberino 63n41 Andreev, N.P 24 Antwerp 80, 173 Antwerps Liedboek 74 -5, 78 -81, 8284, 87 Arant, P. M 25n18 Archivo Menéndez Pidal 154, 160n11, 165-7 Argenti, Philip P 156n4 Argo, Arthur 183 -4 Armistead, Samuel G 61n30, 63n38, 64n43, 67n47, 154, 156n4, 157-8, 159nn8&11 Arteta, Antonio Ubieto 53n9 Arvidsson, Ivar 92n10 Askins, Arthur L. -F 62n34

Aspin, Isabel S.T 118 -19n52, 120n56 Astakhova, A.M 29n36, 31n41, 32n48, 33n51, 34nn52 -3 Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 154 Atero, Virtudes 58n20 Atkinson, David 181-2, 184nn15 - 6, 190 n30, 19133, 194n40, 195n44 Atlakviða 100n30 Attias, Moshe 156, 159n11, 165-7 Aubert, R 79n44 Aubrun, Charles V 174n4 Aucassin et Nicolette 117 Audigier 117 Azbelev, F.N. 28n27 Azores, the 57-8, 62, 66, 171 Badel, Pierre-Yves 117n48 Bailey, J 26n18 Bakhtin, Mikail 11, 124 -33 Balashov, D.M 24, 30n41, 32n45, 35n54 Ballad and song titles Danish and Swedish Holger Dansk og Burmand 89 102 Knight Transformed into a Hart, the 77 Marsk Stig 77 Runsivalstriðið 110n24 Dutch Brandenborch 77 Daghet inden Oosten, het 75 Hadde een Swave een Dochterlijn, des 82 Fier Margrietken 77-87 Heer Danielken 75 Machreitje 78-9 Soude een meysken gaen om wijn 87 Te Gherbeken binnen 81 Vanden ouden Hillebrant 75 Zavelboom, de 82n59 Finnish Nådendal 92 French Avant ier me chevauchoie 112

The Singer and the Scribe Bataille d’Annezin 118 Bele Aaliz 110-11 Bele Aiglentine 109 Bele Doette 108, 111-2 Chançon ferai, qu talenz m’en est pris 112 De Renaut de Mousson 111n29 Floovent 52, 62-5 El mois de mai 112-5 Thomas Turberville 118 Trailbaston 120-1 German Edle Moriger, der 31n42, 76 Halewijn 46 Verlorne Schuh, der 82n59 Wein holen 85-6 Greek Ballad of Susan, the 156n4 Bridge of Arta, the 16 Charon and the Girl 156n4 Haunted Well, the 156n4 Maurianos 31n42 Song of Armoures, the 19 Song of the Dead Brother, the 16 Italian Fioravante 63-7 Latin Carmen de Hastingæ Prœlio 116 Carmen de prodicione Guenonis 116 Russian Alesha and Elena Petrovichna 30-4 Avdot’ia Riazanochka 28 Dobrynja and AljošAša 31n42 Molodets i korolevna 32n45 Slovo o polku Igoreve 25 Tatarskii polon 28 Scots and English Alison Gross 120n54 Aul Beggarman, the 186n19, 196n47 Baffled Knight, the 7, 124n5 Barley Mow 131

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Battle of Harlaw, the 198 Battle of Otterburn, the 10 Beggar-Laddie 124n7 Billy Johnson’s Ball 131 Bonny Lass of Lochroyan, the 147-9 Boy and the Mantle, the 127 Braes o’ Yarrow, the 124 Broomfield Hill 124n5 Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship 126 Childe Maurice 5 Clerk Saunders 124 Derby Ram, the 126, 133 Douglas Tragedy, the 5 Dr Pritchard 194 Earl Brand 79 Fair Margaret and Sweet William 140 Fair Flower of Northumberland [Child 9] 81 Farmer’s Curst Wife 123n3 Friar in the Well 123n3 Frog and the Mouse 126 Gest of Robin Hood, the 8n13 Get up and Bar the Door 123n3 Glasgerion 125 Greasy Cook, the 132 Gypsy Laddie, the 28n29 Here’s to the Grog 131 Herring Song 127n16 Hind Etin 141 Hinkie Dinkie Parlez-vous 131n31 Hunting of the Cheviot, the 10 I Am a Miller Tae Ma Trade 184 Jamie Douglas 7 John Barleycorn 126, 133 Johnny Scot 142 Jolly Beggar, the 191-2 Jolly Tinker, the 132 Judas 77, 83 Keach in the Creel 123n3, 132 King Edward the Fourth and a Tanner of Tamworth 129n23

Index King Henry 124 Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter 124n7 Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight 77n39, 124n5 Lamkin 124 Lillumwham 127-8 Lizzie Lindsay 124n7 Lord Ingram and Chiel Wyet 142 Lord Randal 5 Maid and the Palmer 127 Murder of Maria Marten, the 70n6 My Father Had an Acre of Land 126n14 My Son David 186n19 O Waly, Waly 7 Old Daddy Fox 126 Our Goodman 123n3, 125n8 Overgate, the 131 Plooman Laddies, the 184 Prince Heathen [Child 104] 81 Queen Eleanor’s Confession 123 Rantin Laddie, the 142 Riddles Wisely Expounded 77 Robin Hood and the Potter 123 Robyn and Gandeleyn 77 Russian Jew, the 195 Sea Crabb, the 127 Sir Patrick Spens 5-6 St Stephen and Herod 77 Tam Broon 131 Tam Lin 123, 140 Thomas Rymer 123 Twa Brothers, the 197 Twankydillo 131 Two Sisters, the (Binnorie) 5, 192-3 Was You Ever See 131 When Jones his Ale was New 131 Widow of Westmorland’s Daughter 125, 127

Wife Wrapt in Wether’s Skin 123n3 Young Hunting 125 Spanish and Portuguese A Morte do Rei D. Fernando 52- 4, 56-7, 63 AbnÁmar 175-6, 180 Afuera, afuera, Rodrigo 53, 61 Bela Infanta 52 Bella en misa, la 157 Benardete 165 Blanca niña 125n8 Boda estorbada, la 171 Cantar de la muerte del rey don Fernando y cerco de Zamora 52- 6, 58, 61-2, 67 Celinos 67n47 Choza del desesperado, la 158 Claralinda 66 -7 Conde Claros 160 Conde Olinos, el 48 Corrido de Juan Carrasco 180183n15 Doliente estaba, doliente 53, 56 -7, 59-60n28 Doverdjeli / Doverchile 164 Floresvento 62-67 Floriseo 42-5 Gerineldos 169, 171-2, 176, 180 Landarico 158 Mala suegra, la 157 Mas ariva i mas ariva 177-79, 180n15 Melisenda 173 Morir os queredes, padre 53, 60n28 Moza y el Huerco, la 156n4 Muerte del duque de Gandía, la 180 Paso del Mar Rojo, el 156 Pozo airón, el 156n4 Rico Franco, aragonés 46 Robo de Elena, el 156n4 Romance del Conde Arnaldos, el 7, 37-50, 63-4 Romanceiro do Algarve 58

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The Singer and the Scribe Silvana 57-60 Sueño de Doña Alda, el 156 Tormenta calmada, la 158 Veneno de Moriana, el 62, 156 Virgilios 153, 159-60, 165 Vuelta del marido, la 156n4 ballada (Russian) 8, 24 Baltanás Rodríguez, Enrique J 58n20 Bartlett, Frederic C 72 Bartsch, Karl 107n10 Basil Digenes Akrites 9, 18 Bateson, F.H 63n40 Baud-Bovy, Samuel 18 Bayot, Alphonse 117n45 Bárður, Jákupsson 110n24 Beatles, the 195 Beaton, Roderick 11, 13n2, 17nn1112, 18n13, 20n18, 21n20 Bec, Pierre 108, 110n24 Belgrade 160 Bell, Robert 126 Benabu, Isaac 169n1, 180n15 Benaim, Clarita 176 Benmayor, Rina 156n4, 180 Bennett, Philip E 106n5, 115n36, 117n45 Bennett, Robert 91nn6-7, 100n29 Beowulf 25 Bernart de Ventadorn 111n30 Bénichou, Paul 41, 43, 45- 6, 159n11 Biblia Pauperum 99 Bishop, Julia 189n28 Blackmore, Susan 137n7, 138n10 Bland, C. C. Swinton 70n7 Blyau, Albert 78 Bodleian Library 194 Bohuslän 100n30 Borchling, Conrad 93n15 Bottón, Elisa de 165-6 Boutet, Dominique 117n48 Boyes, Georgina 194n41 Børglum 96, 98n24 Braga, Teófilo, Cantos Populares 51, 58n 21, 64-6 Brandt, Carl Joakim 94n19 Braun M 28n29

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Brednich, Rolf Wilhelm 85n72, 87n75, 93n12 Brittany 10 Bronson, Bertrand H 123n3, 146, 191, 193 Brown, Mary Ellen 194n41 Brown, Anna Gordon, of Falkland 145 -50, 188, 191 Bruford, Alan 181n6, 188n24 Buchan, David 24n11, 69n4, 77n35, 79n42, 136, 138-9, 145 -7, 150, 174-5, 181n6, 182, 188n25, 189n27, 191, 194-5 Buchan, Peter 187 Bureus, Johannes (d. 1652) 99n25 Burke, Peter 130 Burlasová, S 29n33 Burns, Robert 126, 189 Burt, John R 63n39 bylina (Russian) 8, 29-35 Byron, lord George Gordon 191 Caesarius of Heisterbach 70 -1, 81n55, 82 Canary Islands 159, 171 Cancionero de Londres (1471-1500) 38, 40-1, 44, 48 Cancionero de romances (ca. 1548) 38, 159-60, 162 Cancionero de romances (1550) 38-41 Cancionero General (1511) 173 Cantigas d’amigo 108 cantilenae 115 -6 Cantilena Rollandi 116 Cape Verde Islands 52 Cardozo Freeman, Inez 179 Carpenter, James Madison 189 Carranza, Venustiano 179 Carrasco, Juan 179-80 Catalán, Diego 53n10, 160n11 Catarella, Teresa 173 Cawte, E.C 130n29 Caxton, William 125n10 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 47

Index Chambers, E.K 130-1 chansons avec des refrain 112-15 Chanson de Guillaume 117n45 Chanson de Roland 25, 93, 106n7, 116n37, 116-17 chansons populaire 8, 107 n8,11 chansons de toile 107-110 Charlemagne 180 Cheesman, Tom 186n19 Chernyshev, V.N 24 Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche 93 Child, Francis James 76n35, 127142n15, 145 -7, 181n2, 183, 186, 191, 193 Chomsky, Noam 140 Chronyk van Nederlant van Jaere 1027 tot 1525 72n14 Christie, William (1817–1885) 190 Cid, Cantar de Mio 6, 25, 63n39 Cid, the 55-6, 60-1 Cintra, Luis Filipe Lindley 53, 61 Civil War, English 129 Clanchy, Michael T 9n17 Clarke, Dorothy Clotelle 6n6 Clavero, Dolores 53n12 Clavus, Claudius 90 Clédat, Léon 108, 112 Clovis, king of France 63 Cluzel, Irénée 110n25 Cobby, Anne Elizabeth 106n5 Codex diplomaticus Neerlandicus 72n14 Coffin, Tristram P 7, 196n47 Cohen, H.L 23n1 Cohen, Judith R 156n4 Colbert, David W 77nn36 -7, 89n4 Collin, Ludo 79n44 Conlon, D.C 117n46 Constantinople 14 Cooper, Helen 77n35 Cornell, Henrik 91n8, 99n26 Corominas, J 47n17 corridos 179 Covarrubias, Sebastián de 47n21 Cowan, Edward J 192n37 Cowling, G.H 127n17

Cox, E.G 77n36 Cox, Harry 184n15 Cressy David 129 Crete 14, 17, 20 Crónica de Veinte Reyes 53n11, 56, 60 Crónica Geral de Espanha de 1344 53, 61 Crónica Najerense 53 Culík, J 29n32 Czajka, H 28n29 Czernik, S 26n21 Danielson, Eva 92n11 Danilov, Kirsha 23n2 Danon, Abraham 159n11 Darwin, Charles 137 Davenson, Henri 8, 106n7, 107n11, 108n13 Dawkins, Richard 137n7, 138n10 Débax, Michell 42-4 de Mandach, André 106n5 Delbouille, Maurice 110 Delft 75 demotiko tragoudi 9, 13-16 Dennett, Daniel 137n7, 138n10, 140 Devoto, Daniel 62n34 Deyermond, Alan 43n14 Débax, Michelle 43 Didrikskrönikan 101n33 Digenes Akrites 18 -20 Dijle, River 70, 72n14, 74 Dixon, James Henry 127 Díaz, Porfirio, Mexican president 179 Díaz-Mas, Paloma 159n11, 161 Dobson, R.B 121n57 Douglas, Sheila 188n24 Dovrynia Nikitich 30 Du Cange, Charles Du Fresne 116 du Fail, Noël, Propos rustiques 10 Dubois, Jacques 71n11 Duby, Georges 109n21 Duffin, Charles 11 dukhovnyi stikh 28 duma (Ukrainian) 27 Duncan, Charlie 198-99

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The Singer and the Scribe Duncan, James B 188n26 Duncan, Jock 193, 195n54, 198, 199n54 Dundee 194 Dundes, Alan 16n10, 80nn50 -1 Duque de Rivas, the 174 Duque de T’Serclaes, the 159, 162 D’Urfey, Tom 133 Durling, Nancy Vine 110n26 Easton, Gordon 186n19, 196n47, 198, 199n54 Edda 25 Edinburgh 169, 175, 194 Edson, Richmond W 23n1 Edward I, king of England 118 Edwards, Carol L 70n6 Egginhard 180 Eideneier, Hans 20n19 El Hierro (Canary Islands) 159 Ellon, Aberdeenshire 189 Elrick, George 195 Enfances Ogier 93 Entwistle, William J 5, 6, 8n15, 23n1, 26n20, 31, 48n23, 69n4, 125n8, Erotokritos 20 Escobar, Juan de 62n34 Euphrates 19 Eustace le Moine 118 Faeroe Islands 89 Fauriel, Claude 13n1 Felon Sew, the 127n17 Ferdinand I, king of Castile 52 Ferdinand V, king of Castile 153 Ferré, Pere, Romances Tradicionais 58n20 Fetterangus, Aberdeenshire 181-3, 189, 196-7, 195-200 Finnegan, Ruth 10n22 Firmino, A 63n42 Fisher, Ray 184, 198, 199n54 Floda Church 95-102 Floriseo 42-9 Fontes, Manuel da Costa 9, 52n7, 57n18, 58n20, 59n24, 105n2

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——— Portuguese and Brazilian Balladry 51, 52nn5-6, 59n22, 62n32, 67n47 Foote, Peter 106nn5-6 Fourth Crusade (1204) 21 Fowler, David C 7-9, 77n35, 127n19, 129 Fraker, Charles 53 Frances, Irma 155-7n5 Frances, Maurice 155 Franch, Juan Alcina 38n6 Friedman, Albert B 5, 6n8, 9n16, 107, 113, 116 Friedman, John B 101n32 Friis, bishop Jakob (d. 1486) 98 Fryar and Boye 128 Funk Gabriela 59n22 Furnivall, Frederick J 127-8, 133 Furrow, Melissa 128n22 Gabai, Rahel 169 Gala, Antonio 37, 50 Gambarin, Giovanni 63n41 Garbáty, Thomas J 9n18 García, Jesús 176 García Lorca, Federico Romancero Gitano 174 Garrett, Almeida 51 Gennrich, Friedrich 110n26 Gerould, Gordon Hall 6, 8, 9n16, 10n20, 24n7, 69, 116 Ghelman, Yaacov 169n1 Ghent 79 Gielemans, Johannes 71-3, 75n29, 82-3 Gilferding, A.F 23n3 Gillespie, Margaret 188, 191n35 Glasgow 194, 195 Goa 52 Goldstein, Kenneth S 183, 186, 188n23, 193, 195-200 González-Llubera, Ignacio 159n11 Gormont et Isembart 117n45 Gough, Richard 10 Gower, Herschel 188n24 Góngora 174

Index Granada 175-79 Green, Richard Firth 11, 77n35 Greig, Gavin 188 -90, 193, 195, 197 Greig-Duncan Folk -Song Collection 190 -1, 193, 195, 193 Grigir’ev, A.D 30n41 Grundtvig, Svend 92n10, 101 Guillaume le Maréchal 109n21 Gummere, Francis B 7, 23n1, 131 Guzmán, Martín Luis 179n12 Hagiologium Brabantinorum 71 Haidu, Peter 105 Hales, John W 127 Halliwell, James Orchard 125n10, 126n14 Halvorsen, E.F 93n14, 96n22 Harding, Alan 120n55 Harkins, W.E 27n26, 29n36 Harris, J 24n11, 26n29 Harris, Tracy K 154n1 Hart, Thomas R 37n2 Hart, W.M 23n1, 25n15 Hastings, Battle of 115-16 Hauf, A 37n3, 44 Havelock, Eric 82, 83n66 Heinrich von Morungen 76 Helm, Alex 130 Hemming, Timothy D 106n7, 115n37 Hemsi, Alberto 159n11 Hench, Atcheson L 131n31 Henderson, Hamish 183, 189, 192 Henderson, T.F 144n17 Henricus de Halen 71 Henriquez, J. C 73n19 Henry I, duke of Brabant 72 Henry II duke of Brabant 76 Henry II, king of England 109n21 Herd, David 129, 146-50, 191 Herder, Johann Gottfried 108n12 Herod 45 Herr Ivan 77n36 Hervarar saga 77, 90 Hesiod 9 Hesseling, D.C 20n19 Higgins, Lizzie 183

Hildeman, Karl-Ivar 89n4 Hindley, Charles 194n41 Hjorth, Poul Lindegård 93nn15– 6, 94n18, 97n23, 98n24 Hodgart, M.J.C 79n45 Hoffman, Conrado 56 Holden, Anthony J. 116n40 Holland Park Synagogue 155 Holton, David 17n13 Holzapfel, Otto 76n30, 93n12 Homer 9, 136-7, 143 Horak, I 30 Hritsa, S 26n18 Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon 84n68 Huerta, Victoriano, Mexican president 179 Hunisett, R.F 120n55 Hurtado de los Hitos, María 7n11 Hustvedt, S.B 23n1 Hutton, Ronald 129 Huybens, Gilbert 71n7, 78n40 Iakimenko, T.S 27n25 Il’ia Muromets 30 Imlach, Hamish 184n17 Ioannou, G 15n5 Ipomedon 84 Isabella I, queen of Castille 153 Iswolsky, Helene 124n4 Ivan the Terrible 28 Jack and his Stepdame 128 Jakobson, R 25n18 Jamieson, Robert 126, 129 Jansson, Sven-Bertil 89n1, 92n10 Jämtland 100n30 Jean Erart, El mois de mai 112-13, 115, 118 Jean Renart, Guillaume de Dole 109111n30 Jeannaraki, A 15n5 Jeffreys, Elizabeth 19n16, 116n41 Jersild, Margareta 92n10 Jerusalem 160 Jewitt, Llewellyn 126 John II, king of Castile 175

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The Singer and the Scribe John the Reeve 129n23 Johnston, Annie 188 Johnston, Calum 188 Joldersma, Hermina 74n22, 79n46 jongleurs / juglares 8 Jonsson, Bengt R 26n19, 89n2, 90n5, 92nn10-11, 101n34 Jordan, Howard S 108n14, 110n24 Jönsson, Hinse 91-2 Kagg, Mats 91 Kalff, G 69n4, 75n27, 82n58, 84n68 Kapsomenos, Eratosthenes 14n4 Karl Magnus (?OSw) 94, 99 Karl Magnus’ Krønike 93-9 Karlamagnús saga 95-8, 101, 106 Katz, Israel J 64n43, 159, 160n11 ——— El romancero judeo-español 168 Kayser, Wolfgang 69n4, 76nn32&34 Keats, John 14 Kemp, Willie 195 Kennedy, Ludovic 195 Kennedy, Norman 198, 199n54 Kennedy, Peter 126n13, 130-2 Ker, W.P 5, 110n24, 116 Kerr, James S 195n45 Kiev 31 King Arthur 45 King Edward, Aberdeenshire 189 Kinloch, George R 126 Kireevskii, P.V 23, 30n41 Kittredge, G.L 127n18 Knight, Alan 179nn11&13 Koepp, Johannes 74n22, 75nn24–5, 85 Kong Olger Danskes Krønike 94-5 Kornhall, David 94nn17-8, 99n25 Kravtsov, N.I 25n14, 28nn27&30–1 Kyriakidis, Stilpon 14n4 Kyriakidou-Nestoros, A 14n4 Labarthe-Postel, Judith 20n20 Larrea Palacín, Arcadio de 159n11 Laurensson, Anders 91 Laurensson, Germund (d. 1459) 91

218

Layher, William 9, 89n3, 105n2 Le Gentil, Pierre 110 -11n29 Lecoy, Félix 110n22, 111n29 Lemaitre, Jean-Loup 71n11 Leslie, Charles 194n41 Lewis, Huw 7 Lévi-Provençal, E 59n23 Liberman, Anatoly 83n64 Liège 110, 111n30 Life of the Blessed Margaret of Louvain 71 Livre d’Artus 74n23 Šljivi -Šimši, Biljana 159n11 Lloyd, A.L 125 Lomax, Alan 183, 188n24, 189 London 153 Longfellow, Henry W 37 Lope de Vega 6, 174 Lopes, António 62n36 Lord, Albert B 70n5, 136, 138-9n9, 140n13 Lorenzo de Sepúlveda 6 Loth, Agnete 93n14 Louis d’Anjou 117 Louis VIII, king of France 119 Loukatos, D 14n4 Louvain 70, 78 Lowell, James Russell 127 Lönnroth, Lars 106n5 Lundberg, Erik 91n8 Lüthi, Max 83 Lyle, Agnes 188 Lyle, Emily B 188n26 Macdonald, Donald A 182n10, 188n24 Machado, Antonio 174 MacHale, Christy 180n15 Mackay, Angus 175 Mackridge, Peter 15n6 Macneill, Flora 183 Madeira 57-8, 171 Madero, Francisco 179 Madrid 154, 165, 172, 174 Magalhães, Celso de 52 Magnus, L.A 26n20

Index Malacca 52 Manley, Kathleen E.B 70n6 Manrique de Lara, Manuel 154, 156, 164-5, 167 Manuel Pedrosa, José 160n11 Mapstone, Sally 77n35 Marathon, battle of 13 Marburg 76 Marchenko Iu.I 27n25 Margaretten, Selma 160n11 Marmontel, Jean François 107 Marques, José Joaquim Dias 51n2, 58-59, 61nn29&31 Marseilles 180 Martin, Ariadne Y 83n64 Martin, Richard P 83n64 Martins, Ana Maria 51 Martins, P 63n42 Martínez Mata, Emilio 42-4 Martínez Ruiz, J 159n11 Mary Magdalen 127 Matalón, Jacob Samuel 154 Matalón, Rahel Errera 154 Mathew, Jean 196 Mathieson, Willie 189, 196 Mauleón, Judith 180 Mazatlán, Mexico 179 Mälaren, Lake 92 Målare, Anna 91 Målare, Johan 91 McCarthy, W.B 188n25 McCarthy, W.J 140 McDonald, Barry 182n8 McIntyre, Geordie199n54 McKean, Thomas A 9n16, 10, 185n18, 186n19, 187n22, 196nn47&49 McKinnon, Bill 196 McMorland, Alison 197n50, 198, 199n54 Mearns John 195 Meekings, C.A.F 120n55 Megas, G. A 16n10 Meier, John 75n26, 82n59, 86n74, 87n75 Meletinskii, E.M 25n18

Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino 51 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón 37n1, 38, 40-3, 47, 51, 53, 56, 59n23, 60n28, 61n32, 62n37, 63nn38-9, 64nn43&45, 156, 161, 165n14, 167, 169, 181n10 Mesopotamia 19 Messina 180 Metzner, Ernst Erich 75n30 Meza, Juan 179 Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, Carolina 51n1 Mikhaila Potyk 30 Milán (musician) 173 Mintlaw, Aberdeenshire 198n52 Mitrofanova, V.V 29n36 Molanus, Johannes 87 Molho, Michael 155n11 Montero, Paloma 155n11 Morris, George S 195 Morocco 154, 159, 162-3, 169, 176, 180 Mortier, Raoul 116n38 Morton, Catherine 116n39 Moshav Mata, Israel 169 Motherwell, William 129, 145, 182, 188 Mozheiko, Z.Ia 29n34 Mukharinskaia, L.S 27n25 Mummers’ Plays 130 -1 Munro, Ailie 183n11, 186n19 Muntz, Hope 116n39 Murray, Kenny 180n15 Myddle, Shropshire 10 Mynors, R.A.B 116n42 Naples 117 Narváez (musician) 173 Nascimento, Bráulio do 52n4 Natales Sanctorum Belgii 87 Nehama, Joseph 154n2, 168n19 Nejedlá, J 27n24 New York 195 Newcombe, Terence H. 112n34 -5 Nieuw Amsterdams Liedboek 79 Nílsen, Anna 100

219

The Singer and the Scribe Nucio, Martín 56, 59-62, 67, 173-4 Nygard, Holger 9n18 Ochoa, Don Eugenio de 6n7 Oeghe, Johan 71 Olivos 49 Ollivier, Marie-Joseph 70n7 Olrik, Axel 11, 80-1, 84 Ong, Walter 138 Ord, John 190, 198 Ordericus Vitalis 115 Ordish, Thomas Fairman 130 Orense 159 Oring, Elliott 69n1 Öberg, Jan 91n7 Page, Christopher 109n21 Palencia 159 Palmer, Roy 126n12 Panche 128 Pancho Villa 179 Papago 69, 73n20 paraloyes 14-18, 20 Paris, Gaston 108n12, 115-6, 119 Paris, Paulin 107n10 Parry, Adam 136n2 Parry, Milman 136-41, 143, 146-7, 149-51 Pascual, J.A 47n17 Peacock, N 130n29 Pedersen, Christiern 94, 102 Pepys, Samuel 191 Percy Folio Manuscript 127-8 Percy, Thomas 127 Peringskiöld, Johan 101n34 Pernot, H 20n19 Perrie, M 30n28 Peterhead 196 Petrova, L.I 27n25 Pettitt, Thomas 24, 70n6 Pérez Vidal, J 66n46 Philip IV, king of France 118 Pinker, Steven 140n14 Piñero, Pedro M 58n20 Piot, Charles 72n14 Pirot, François 110n25 pliegos sueltos 10, 159, 173, 178

220

Politis, N.G 15n5, 16n8 Porter, James 186n19, 188n24 Post, J.B 120n55 Pratum musicum 85 Preminger, Alex 107n8 Primera crónica general de España 51, 53, 56, 61 Propp Vladimir Ia 24n11, 25n18, 29n35, 31, 83 Ptochoprodromika 20 Purcell, Joanne B 58n20, 59-60 Putilov, B.N 25n18, 30n41, 32n45 Putter, A.D 9, 11 Quelite, Mexico 179 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 5, 125 Rabelais, François 124, 128-9 Ramsey, Jarold W 69n1 Ranke, Kurt 93n12 Rankin, James 187 Raposo, Inácio 52 Reeves, James 126n15 Reig, Carola 53n8 Reilly, Bernard E 53n8 Renson, Jean 110n26 Renwick, Roger de V 195n47 Rethaan Macaré, M.C.A. 72n14 Ribeiro, Joaquim 52n3 Rico, Francisco 43n14 Rieuwerts, Sigrid 28n29, 127n20, 187n22, 196n48 Ritson, Joseph 129, 145 Robert the Bruce 199 Roberts, Warren E 123n2 Robertson, Bell 188 Robertson, Jeannie 183, 186n19, 1878 Robin Hood 8n13, 77, 116n38, 121, 123 Robinson, A. N 25n16 Rodrigues, Wilson W 52n3 Rodríguez del Padrón, Juan 38, 40, 48 Rodríguez-García, Isabel 58n20

Index Rodríguez-Moñino, Antonio 56n15, 62n34 Rodway, A.E 132n32 Rogatchevskaia, Ekaterina 8-9 Rogers, Edith Randam 44 Rogge, Kort, bishop of Strängnäs (d. 1501) 91 Romance de la Infantina 7 Romance of the Rose, the 10 Romanceros 172 Rome 41, 178 Romero, Elena 159n11 Roques, Mario 117n47 Rose, H.J 156n4 Rouge-Cloître, monastery of 71 Roughead, William 194n43 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 8 Rubin, David 79n42, 87n76 Ruiz, María Jesús 58n20 Runnalls, Graham A 106n5 Rushing, James A 99nn27-8 Rybakov, B.A 25n18 Rybnikov, P.N 23n3 Sacré, Dirk 91n7 St Antonius 100 St Baafs Cathedral (Ghent) 79 St Denis 118 St Elisabeth of Hungary 76 St George 14 St George’s Inn (Louvain) 70-1 St Gertrude 75n29 St John’s Chapel (Louvain) 77 St John’s Church (Ghent) 78 St John’s Day 44, 48 St John’s Wood 155 St Louis 76 St Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia 76 St Lucy 73 St Olaf 100 St Peter’s Church (Louvain) 70-2, 77, 81 St Sophia Cathedral 14 Saint-Trond 110 Salamis, battle of 13

Salonica 153-6, 158-60, 162-6, 168n19 Sarajevo 157, 159, 160, 162, 164 -6 Saramago, João A. das Pedras 58n20 Saul, Moshe 177 Saunders, Corinne 72n17 Saval, José 180n15 Sánchez Romeralo, Antonio 179n10 Scarborough, Dorothy 79n45 Schneider, Hermann 75n31 Schwarzwald, Ora 169n1 Scott, H. von E 70n7 Scott, Walter 129, 145 Sell, Roger D 195n44 Sephardim 10, 38-41, 52, 63-4, 15368, 169 -70, 178 Seroussi, Edwin 159n11 Sharp, Cecil 136 Shaul, Moshe 156 Shephard, Leslie 194n41 Shepherd’s Calendar 10 Shippey, Tom 72n12 Shuldham-Shaw, Patrick 188n26 Sifakis, Grigoris, 14n4 Silverman, Joseph H 64n43, 67n47, 156n4, 159nn8&11 Simmons, E.J 25n18 Sims -Williams, Patrick 49n25 Skårup, Povl 93n14, 106n5 Skopin-Shuiskii, M.V. 28n27 Skripil’, M.O 29n36 Sleeman, Margaret 9n16, 10, 180n15 Slonim, M 25n18 Smirnov, I.Iu 26-30n39, Smith, Adam 138 Smith, Colin 6n6, 105, 106n7, 118n51 Sobolevskii, A.I 23 Solheim, Svale 92n11 Sola Pinto, Vivian de 132 Sommer, H. Oskar 75n23 Söderala, Sweden 99n25 Spanish Inquisition 153 Spiessens, Godelieve 85n70, 86n73 Spitzer, Leo 37n4, 41, 45 Sri Lanka 52

221

The Singer and the Scribe stariny 23 Steenstrup, Johannes 77nn36&38 Stein, Helga 196n48 Stevens, John 119n53 Stewart, Alec 181n1 Stewart, Belle 181n1, 188 Stewart, Elizabeth (1939– ) 183 -200 Stewart, Elizabeth, jr 187 Stewart family, the (of Fetterangus) 181-188, 199-200 Stewart family, the (of Blair) 181n1, 183 Stewart, Jane 195 Stewart, Jean (1911–1962) 185, 195, 200 Stewart, Jeannette 187 Stewart, Kathie 181n1 Stewart, Lucy (1901– 1982) 183-200 Stewart, Michael 187 Stewart, Sheila 181n1, 198, 199n54 Stief, C. 28n27 Stock, Brian 9n17 Stockholm 90-92, 101n33 Sviatogor 30 Sydney, Sir Philip 8n13 Tale of Belisarius, the 20 Tarbé, Prosper 107n10 Tasseel, Marcellus 78 Taylor, J 121n57 Tesoro de los romanceros 6 Tetuán, Morocco 163 Thibaut de Blaison 112 Thibaut de Champagne 112 Thiðreks saga 101n33 Thompson, E.P 130 Thompson, Rupert 130n28 Thomson, Derick 187n22 Tiber, River 178 Tiddy, Reginald 130 Timoneda, Juan 62n34 Togeby, Knud 93nn12&14, 94n19 Toro 53 Tournoy, Gilbert 91n7 Townsley, Elizabeth (1939– ) 184 Trapero, Maximiano 159 -60, 164-5

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Turner, Jane 91n8 Turriff, Jane 182n10, 189, 196 Underdown, David 129 Underhill, Ruth 69 Unger, C.R 93n14, 96n22 Utembruele, Margaret 71 Valdés, Meléndez 174 Valenciano, Ana 62n37, 160n11 van de Graft, C. C 76n33 van der Werf, Hendrik 110n26, 111n30 van Duyse, F 75nn25&29, 80, 82nn57-8, 82n57&58, 83nn61,63&65 van Even, Edward 70n7, 72n14 Vanda, Anastácio 51 Vandelli, Giuseppe 63n41 Vansina, Jan 149n21 Vargyas, Lajos 75n25 Varty, Kenneth 118n49 Vasconcellos, José Leite de, Romanceiro Português 51, 63n42, 65-6 Veiga, Sebastião Philippes Martins Estácio da 58n22 Vellekoop, K 74n21, 75n28, 80n47 Venice 17 Verdam, J 73n20 Verhaghen, P.J 72n12 Verwijs, E 73n20 Villers, Cistercian Monastery of 70 -1, 73 Villers- la -Ville, Belgium 70 Virgil 10, 169 Volkslied 13 Von Fallersleben, Hoffman 79 von Sydow, Carl Wilhelm 187n21 Wace, Roman de Rou 116n40 Wade-Gerry, Henry Theodore 137n6 Wagenaar-Nolthenius, H 74n21, 75n28, 80n47 Wallensköld, A 112n33 Wallin, Sigurd 99n26, 91n8

Index Weich-Shahak, Susana 159n11, 169n1 West-Vlaanderen 78 Whitehead, Frederick 106n7 Wild Host 37, 43, 45-6, 49 Wild Man 99 William of Malmesbury 115-16 Williams, David 100n32 Wilson, David 106n6 Wimberly, Lowry Charles 82n58 Winterbottom, Michael 116n42 Woden 45 Wolf, Fernando, and Conrado Hofmann, Primavera 56-57 Wolfenbüttel 79 Wright, Roger 6-8, 9n16, 160n12, 172n2, 175nn5&7, 180n14 Wright, Thomas 125n10 Zamora, Spain 53-6, 59, 61, 159 Zaragoza, Spain 175, 180 Zhirmunskii, V.M 25n18 Zink, Michel 107-9, 112, 115 Zumthor, Paul 115n36

223