Three Versions of the Ballad from Bosnia's North about Pledging a Son for a Brother

Abstract

Approximately sixty lyrical songs were inscribed into the Folklore Archive of the National Museum during the field research in Brcko conducted by Bosnian writer and folklorist Alija Nametak as an employee of the Institute for Folklore Research in 1956, including a ballad about a mother who sacrificed her son to save her brother's life. This moving ballad has been inscribed at least twice more in Bosnia's north, and two variants of this song were recorded in Derventa - they are included in a large collection made by Smajl Bradaric and kept in the National Museum of BiH's Folklore Archive. The National Museum and the BiH Slavic Committee collaborated to publish this collection (Bradari 2018). The mentioned ballad was also discussed in Munib Maglajlic's 1985 study "Muslim Oral Ballads," in the section entitled Conflict in the Family, indicating its importance, but also a solid number of variants throughout Bosnia (Maglajlić 2018). The variants presented here, however, were not the subjects of Maglajlić's analyses, even though he found as many as nine versions of this ballad from various sources for his study. This paper will use the method of three-variant ballad promotion to see the oral poet from Bosnia's north in action. It will try to show and highlight the poetic achievements of the "northern" variants. The poetic shaping of key motifs will be considered in each recorded variant, and the difference between them will be established. Methods of interpretation and analysis will be used.