Gwerzio� for all! A look at the field

Abstract

North American journal of Celtic studies Vol. 2, No. 2 (November 2018) Copyright © 2018 by The Ohio State University REVIEW ESSAY Gwerzioù for all! A look at the field MATTHIEU BOYD Constantine, Mary-Ann, & Éva Guillorel. 2017. Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978–0–19–726619–9. 250 pp. $80.00 (hardback). The occasion of this essay is the publication of Miracles & murders. An introductory anthology of Breton ballads by Mary-Ann Constantine & Éva Guillorel (2017). Every Celtic language has its particular treasures; among the treasures of Breton are the hundreds of ballads called gwerzioù (sg. gwerz, from Lat. versus). One can further distinguish the gwerz of oral tradition from the more literary broadsheet gwerz, although there was some degree of cross-pollination. Miracles & murders is concerned with the former. As explained in the preface (xv–xvi), the book is an opportune collaboration between Constantine, who identifies as a literary scholar, and Guillorel, who identifies as a historian; their combined expertise exceeds these two areas and embraces almost every aspect of the gwerzioù. Miracles & murders has the text and translation of 35 songs, and an audio CD with performances of 22 of them. This is much more than what was previously available in English: nine songs in the appendix of Constantine’s Breton ballads (1996: 209–250), and a few in Jacqueline Gibson & Gwyn Griffiths’ anthology of Breton literature in translation (2006). For many years, Constantine’s fine book Breton ballads (1996) was just about the only secondary literature in English on the subject; to this has been added a book and some Matthieu Boyd [mwboyd@​ fdu​ .edu] is Associate Professor of literature at Fairleigh Dickinson University; an associate of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University; a contributing editor to the Broadview anthology of British literature; and a past member of the executive or advisory boards of the Celtic Studies Association of North America, the International Arthurian Society (North American Branch), the International Marie de France Society, and the MLA Discussion Group on Celtic Languages and Literatures. 180 North American journal of Celtic studies articles by Natalie Franz (2011), a little of my own work, and now Miracles & murders. I will not be able to do justice in this space to Guillorel’s monumental study La complainte et la plainte (2010), so I will not try. Suffice it to say that it is a milestone in the study of Breton oral literature, with important theoretical implications; if you work in this area, you need to read it. Its main contribution is to assess the value of the gwerzioù as historical evidence by comparing the songs to pre-Revolutionary court records and other archival sources. Overall, the songs are impressively accurate: only when the singers considered that there had been a miscarriage of justice do they vary significantly from the documentary record established centuries earlier. Miracles & murders is almost the perfect book within the scope it sets itself, being an ‘introductory anthology’. If you read only one book about gwerzioù (and if you are in any branch of Celtic studies whatsoever, you should), this is it. The introduction is in three main parts: ‘Song collecting in Brittany. From the early 19th century to the present day’, ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’, and ‘Ways of “reading ” gwerziou’. ‘Song collecting in Brittany’ covers Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué’s romantic and somewhat embellished Barzaz-Breiz (1839), the more scientifically-minded Gwerziou Breiz-Izel of François-Marie Luzel (1868–74), and various collectors since. No single collection has stature equivalent to Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish popular ballads (1882–1898) for the Anglo-Scottish tradition, though Luzel is probably the best approximation of such. There is a catalogue of Breton-language folksongs by Patrick Malrieu that covers nearly 2000 items, not all of them gwerzioù; this was an unpublished dissertation (Malrieu 1998), familiar and accessible to specialists, but not to the general public. However , it has been further developed on-line: the sites https://​ to​ .kan​ .bzh/​and https://​ fv​ .kan​ .bzh/​cover orally-transmitted and broadsheet songs, respectively. ‘The nature of the gwerz tradition’ is comparable to the...