The Dobrudjan Traditional Ballad

Abstract

Among the countless categories of works entitled “ballad”, we have structured this paper - for both objective and subjective reasons - around the one which distinctly represents the epic creation to which we are referring, from a certain area of the Romanian territory, i.e., Dobrudja. On the one hand, the subject is too generous in terms of the number and value of the information it entails so as to approach it by referencing a larger area than the one between the Danube and the Black Sea, and on the other hand, as a Dobrudjan, we have naturally considered the references to field recordings, which allowed the creation of collections of texts and the production of melody transcriptions of these pearls of Romanian millenary traditional genre.