Toponymy of the Child Ballads: Problems of Representation in Written and Oral Texts

Abstract

Place names in ballads range from the real and historical—London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen—through to the patently fictional—Ambertown, Archerdale, Scarlet Town, Roch Royal. In between these two poles lies a range of names that might refer to real places but equally might shade off into the imaginative. In terms of ballad narrative this rarely poses a problem; however, for the ballad collector/editor, such names may pose a real challenge of representation. The functions of ballad texts in writing are not the same as those of ballads in performance. The phonetics of a place name when sung or recited may not always usefully translate into its written representation. Is there any merit in writing “Edinborough,” even if the word is pronounced as a tetrasyllable? An editor is often required to make decisions about the orthography of a name—decisions that might seem much less compelling to a listener than to a reader. This paper traces some of the questions raised in particular by place names in the ballad collection made by James Madison Carpenter, and considers their implications for editorial strategies and for the referentiality of place names in ballads at large.