English Folk Dance and Song Society

Abstract

THE recent amalgamation of the Folk Song Society with the English Folk Dance Society has been marked by the appearance of a new journal with the title Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, under the editorship of Mr. Frank Howes. The contents of the first number are indicative of the policy which it is now considered desirable for the reorganised societies to pursue in common. The primary object which the original societies had in view was the collection and preservation of the remains of traditional songs and dances. This work now being regarded as completed, so far as can be seen, the main work of the joint society on its scientific side will be intensive comparative study of the material which has been collected. In the first issue both activities, it is true, are represented. Ten more of the forty Gaelic songs collected by Miss Lucy Broadwood twenty-five years ago are published, as well as some English folk songs and dances recently recorded. On the comparative side, Mr. A. G. Gil-christ makes an exhaustive study of the Scottish and Northumbrian ballad Lambkin, discussing its growth and origin in the light of some forty versions. Similar studies of no little interest to students of culture and of ‘survivals’ and their distribution are Miss Violet Alford's record of the form and distribution of the Farandole in the south of France and in Spain and the study of the sword-dance by Dr. R. Wolfram of Vienna, who connects it with the initiation ceremony, seeing in the decapitation of the ‘fool’ the ritual death of initiation rather than the memory of a fertility sacrifice.