Collection Of Ballads Research Articles

The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation,popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment

Steve Newman is assistant professor of English at Temple University. This essay is part of a book in progress on the role of ballad collection in the formation and institution of the English literary canon during the long eighteenth century.

Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy.

Walter Scott and Anti-Gallican Minstrelsy Richard Cronin In Scott’s continuation of the ballad Thomas the Rhymer, the Rhymer tells the story of Tristram, and his audience is moved: Then woe broke forth in murmurs weak: Nor ladies heaved alone the sigh; But, half ashamed, the rugged cheek Did many a gauntlet dry. 1 The gauntlet distinguishes the audience within the poem from Scott’s contemporary readership—medieval knights, it seems, wore gauntlets at their evening entertainments rather than the kid gloves favored by gentlemen at the beginning of the nineteenth century—but in their susceptibility to pathos the two audiences merge. Fashions may change, but feelings remain the same. Hence Scott’s confidence that his collection of ancient ballads, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802), will be appreciated by the modern reader, that the “fragments of the lofty strain” that he has worked so hard to recover might “Float down the tide of years” (T, 288) to awaken in his readers sympathetic emotions that would unite them with those who had listened to the ballads centuries ago. It is a precarious faith—though a faith, however sophisticated, on which all historical fiction ultimately depends—and its precariousness reveals itself clearly enough in Scott’s stanza. 2 His knights shed tears of which they are only “half ashamed,” as if they already dimly glimpse a culture in which a man might wear his tears with pride, as a badge of his cultural attainment. Scott’s knights inhabit at once a thirteenth-century castle and an Edinburgh drawing room of the later eighteenth century: the “tide of years” that separates them from their modern readers has shrunk to a stream so narrow that they can nonchalantly stand astride it. Scott, it is agreed, made sentimental additions even to the authentic ballads in his collection, and re-wrote lines to accommodate them to contemporary taste. A couplet from The Dowie Dens of Yarrow is adjusted to meet a modern demand for more finished pathos: A better rose will never spring Than him I’ve lost on Yarrow. A fairer rose did never bloom Than now lies cropp’d on Yarrow. 3 [End Page 863] But it is the presentation of the ballads rather than their emendation that works most powerfully to integrate the traditional material with the society that Scott was addressing. The ballads are prefaced by an introduction of more than a hundred pages and buttressed by five appendices, in which Scott applies to his traditional materials the methods of historical scholarship that had been developed only during the previous fifty years. He fixes in print poems many of which, until his publication of them, had survived only by oral transmission, and, in addition, he applies to them a scholarly method distinguished above all by its respect for the written document. So he adds to his introduction a letter from Surrey to Henry VIII, passages from the memoirs of Sir Robert Carey, and an indenture terminating a feud between the Scotts and the Kers. Individual ballads are furnished with an editorial apparatus that refers whenever possible to written documents. A typical example is Johnnie Armstrong, a ballad which is preceded in Scott’s edition by a preface of eight pages offering an account of the career of the historical Armstrong, and followed by an appendix of two pages in which Scott transcribes a “Bond of Manrent” given by Armstrong to the Warden of the Western Marches. The most extreme example is The Souters of Selkirk, a song of only twelve lines occupying a single page, but preceded by an introduction of thirteen pages and followed by two pages of explanatory notes. One effect of Scott’s editorial labors is to bestow on the ballads a value quite independent of their literary merit. He presents the ballads in a manner designed to appeal not solely, nor even primarily, to a literary taste but to a taste for the antiquarian. The affectionately mocking and self-mocking representations of antiquarians so common in Scott’s novels has secured our awareness of the fashion for antiquarianism in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but the harmless eccentrics depicted by Scott, obsessive in their...

Songs in a strange land—ambiguities of identity amongst Irish migrants in mid-Victorian Manchester

The concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ are resilient and flexible social constructs which for the most part were formulated during the nineteenth century. One of their most characteristic features is the creation of an ‘Other’ against which a diverse population can rally and define their own identity. In the case of the English and British nation one historic Other was Roman Catholicism, especially as represented by the succession of European powers against which Great Britain waged a long series of wars from the sixteenth century onwards. Another was the Irish, who were constructed with a variety of vices to emphasise English and British superiority. Whilst Catholics were redefined into Britishness during the nineteenth century and some efforts were made to do the same for the Irish after 1800, the grudging way in which concessions were granted and the ambivalent and contradictory attitudes towards the place of the Irish within the British state stimulated them to begin the construction of a distinct alternative identity. Irishness in the nineteenth century was therefore a contested identity, and nowhere more so than amongst the Irish who had settled in British industrial cities during the early decades of the century. Material from a collection of broadside ballads published in Manchester in the 1860s and 1870s is used to show that during this formative period Irishness took a variety of forms, some of them highly ambiguous.

Verdenssyn og menneskesyn i Grundtvigs salmedigtning

The World Picture and the View of Man in Grundtvig’s Hymns.By Peter Balslev-ClausenThis lecture for the Degree in Divinity at the Faculty of Theology in Copenhagen is a summary of the writer’s studies in the hymns, written by Grundtvig over the years from 1810 to 1872, with a view to determining the overall view of human life and Christianity that constitutes their background. The lecture discusses central concepts in these hymns, taking the point of departure in the word, i.e., speech as expressing the fact that man was created in God’s image. Hymn-singing is seen as man’s reply to God’s address, partly in the church service, partly in the daily prayers, as it is evidenced by the hymn "Congregation of God, Sing Secret Songs of Praise to Our Creator" (Guds menighed, syng for vor skaber i l.n (1847)). This hymn was composed during Grundtvig’s work on a collection of popular ballads, and is modelled on the ballad about hr. Villemand, who, by playing his harp, forces the merman of the river to give his bride back to him.The lecture concentrates on the Mosaic-Christian view of the world and of man, considered, consciously, by Grundtvig to be the contrast to the scientific picture of the world and idea of man of his own age. It is claimed that the new world-picture as Grundtvig saw it, made impossible any notion of a connection between God and man, heaven and earth, creation and consummation, and that without this connection man would lose his identity and his companionship with others. Grundtvig, accordingly, retained the Biblical calendar.Especially after meeting his second wife, Marie Toft, in 1845, and the breakthrough for congregational singing of his hymns in Vartov Church on Christmas Day the same year, Grundtvig came to think of the woman and the human heart as the essence of human nature, in contrast to the rationalistic concept of man, which Grundtvig regarded as a product of Antichrist.Grundtvig was aware that his picture of the world and his view of man was not acceptable to the majority, at least not in the academic world. But he considered it necessary to maintain it, both for the sake of the Mosaic-Christian way of thinking and the Christian faith.The first five years after the meeting with Marie Toft were a turbulent time of regeneration in Grundtvig’s personal life, as it is reflected for example in the hymn "The Clouds Are Turning Grey, and the Leaves Are Falling" (Skyerne gråner og løvet falder). The crisis resolved itself in a new sense of wholeness in life, which is expressed in the series of adaptations of older hymns which did not acquire their final form until the 1850s, such as "O, Christian Faith" (O Kristelighed), "The Sun Now Shines in All its Splendour" (I al sin glans nu stråler solen) and "The Lord Has Visited His People" (Herren, han har besøgt sit folk).Since even today Grundtvig’s hymns are used as existential expressions of the lives of the congregation, the question arises whether they can still be used when his presuppositions no longer apply. Precisely by his strangeness, Grundtvig insists that his reader and participant in the hymn-singing is entirely responsible for acquiring an existential experience of a hymn, on the basis of the assumptions that belong to each individual and are determined by the time he or she lives in.

Songs from Denmark. A Collection of Danish Hymns, Songs and Ballads in English Translation

Songs from Denmark. A Collection of Danish Hymns, Songs and Ballads in English Translation

The Problem of Classification in Folksong Research: a Short History

THE problem of folksong classification has been extensively dealt with in the ethnomusicological literature since the beginnings of the discipline in the late nineteenth century.' That no ideal solution has been found so far is shown by the constant appearance of new endeavours throughout our century. Today, even though no major breakthrough is foreseen for the immediate future, the use of the computer promises at least the possibility of more efficient methods of handling large amounts of information. Obviously, one of the requirements that a classificatory system should meet is that of making it easy to locate a given song within a large collection. A second, and equally important requirement, is that of underscoring similarities and relationships among tunes, thereby helping in bringing together groups of variants or, to put it otherwise, of what folksong scholars define as tune families.2 For the purpose of comparative analysis, the investigator should have at his disposal, in easily accessible form, the entire complex of a given melody-group, including every known variant and derived melodic form. These variants should be arranged so as to permit study that will explain how each one of them is related to all the others. The question, therefore, is to discover a system whereby a large number of melodies are indexed in such a fashion that they can be readily compared and, at the same time, distinguished from each other on the basis of what individual features they may show. Such goals are not easy to achieve. It is for this reason that over the years many different methodologies have been devised, adopted, modified and improved. No single one is satisfying in all respects, since both advantages and disadvantages are inevitably intrinsic to them all. The first attempt to create a melodic index was made, at the best of our present knowledge, by the Benedictine monk Johannes Werlin in 1646. He catalogued several hundred tunes on the basis of their initial three tones, according to the principles of solmization. His was, however, an isolated enterprise which had no follow-up for roughly two hundred years. In more recent times, another attempt to index melodies was made by Johannes Zahn in his Die Melodien des Evangelischen Kirchenliedes (1889-1893). Here the metric features of the tunes are the basis for classification (duple metre, triple metre, either simple or compound). However, in the study of musical folklore, that is, in the study of music living in oral tradition, Zahn's approach is of limited utility. Tunes that are similar in their melodic contour may appear unrelated to each other if classified only according to their metrical and rhythmical pattern. Looking back at the history of folksong scholarship one can see that the criteria used for classification throughout the whole nineteenth century were solely based on the literary content of the text.3 This is the case with Child's famous collection4 in which the same principles are used (form of the text and its narrative content) that had been used by the Danish folklorist Svend Grundtvig, who preceded Child in publishing a collection of folk ballads. It was customary for folklorists of the time to study folksong

The Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College

The Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College

Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs. Volume I

Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs. Volume I

The "Twofold Balls And Treble Scepters" in Macbeth

Journal Article The "Twofold Balls And Treble Scepters" in Macbeth Get access E. B. Lyle E. B. Lyle E. B. LYLE, Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh, has edited Andrew Crawfurd's Collection of Ballads and Songs and a volume of Ballad Studies and has published several notes on Macbeth. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 4, Autumn 1977, Pages 516–519, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869443 Published: 01 October 1977

A New Portuguese Ballad Collection from California

A New Portuguese Ballad Collection from California

Blood and Knavery: A Collection of English Renaissance Pamphlets and Ballads of Crime and Sin

Blood and Knavery: A Collection of English Renaissance Pamphlets and Ballads of Crime and Sin

Ancient Ballads Traditonally Sung in New England. From the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection. Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Compiled and edited by Helen Hartness Flanders, with critical analyses by Tristram P. Coffin, and musical annotations by Bruno Nettl. Correlated with the numbered F. J. Child Collection. Ballads 95-243. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 4, and Oxford University Press, London, E.C.4,

Ancient Ballads Traditonally Sung in New England. From the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection. Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Compiled and edited by Helen Hartness Flanders, with critical analyses by Tristram P. Coffin, and musical annotations by Bruno Nettl. Correlated with the numbered F. J. Child Collection. Ballads 95-243. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 4, and Oxford University Press, London, E.C.4,

Richard Johnson's ‘Musarum Plangores’

Although Richard Johnson (ca. 1573–1659) has received little critical or scholarly attention, his own output was quite large and various, and probably popular. He authored two chivalric romances; several volumes of poetry, including a collection of fast-moving ballads; some descriptive topographical verse; a satiric tract or two; a jest book; and several elegies.To this list can now be added one more piece. That is the recently recovered elegy of 234 lines entitled Musarum Plangores, a memorial on the death of Sir Christopher Hatton. What is probably the unique copy of this work now lies in the Folger Shakespeare Library. It lacks a title page and bears no colophon. The date of publication, however, was probably 1591, the year in which Hatton died, although there is no record of its being printed. The author is ‘R. Johnson’, for that name, followed by the letters Sa., occurs at the end of the poem.

A Judeo-Spanish Derivative of the Ballad of The Bridge of Arta

PERHAPS THE MOST famous of all ballad narratives in the complex, multilingual and yet strikingly homogeneous folklore of the Balkan Peninsula concerns the ancient practice of walling a human being into the base of a building or a bridge as a foundation sacrifice.' Under various titles, and obviously with numerous local variations and attributions, the topic enjoys almost universal diffusion in the balladry of Balkan peoples.2 Ballads with a similar narrative structure concerning a human foundation sacrifice have been recorded in Greek (the bridge of Arta, of Hellada, of Antimachia, among others), in Macedo-Rumanian (The bridge of Narta), in Albanian (The bridge of Artos or of Dibra3 and the fortress of Shkodra), in Serbian (The building of Skadra [Scutari] and the bridge on the Drina), in Macedonian (a variety of bridges), in Bulgarian (the stronghold of Salonika, among others), in Daco-Rumanian (the monastery of Argef or the castle of Barcan) and in Hungarian (the citadel of Deva). The same topic concerning the building of a bridge or a church forms part of the folkloric traditions of far-wandering Balkan Gypsies.4 The ballad was also known, and indeed possibly originated, as The Bridge of Adana, in the archaic Greek speech communities of Trebizond and central Anatolia.5 In I956, the Israeli scholar Moshe Attias published a collection of ballads and folksongs from the oral tradition of the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews of Salonika and Larissa (Greece).6 Ballad no. 62 of Attias' Romancero begins with the following verses:

Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England. From the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Compiled and edited by Helen Hartness Flanders, with critical analyses by Tristram P. Coffin, and musical annotations by Bruno Nettl. Correlated with the numbered F. J. Child Collection. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 3436 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, 4 and Oxford University Press, Amen

Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England. From the Helen Hartness Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont. Compiled and edited by Helen Hartness Flanders, with critical analyses by Tristram P. Coffin, and musical annotations by Bruno Nettl. Correlated with the numbered F. J. Child Collection. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 3436 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, 4 <i>and</i> Oxford University Press, Amen

William Shenstone's Share in the Preparation of Percy's Reliques

That William Shenstone has some share in the preparation of Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry has been recognized ever since Percy made an acknowledgment of his indebtedness in the preface to the first edition. But Percy's account of their collaboration as given in the preface is inadequate and misleading; and a misinterpretation of two of Shenstone's letters to his friends has resulted in an entirely false impression on one significant point, as to who was instrumental in getting Percy started on a collection of ballads for publication. The purpose of this article is to correct the misconception and to develop in some detail the story of their collaboration. It is based in part on unpublished Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:LE FRANÇAIS ORAL, by M. S. Pargment. D. C. Heath and Co. 1924.NAVARRO Y LAMARCA, CARLOS, COMPENDIO DE HISTORIA HISPANO‐AMERICANA. Abbreviated and edited by Roy Temple House and Carlos Castillo. Scott, Foresman and Co. Chicago. 1925.TREASURY OF GERMAN SONG. A Collection of Lyrics and Ballads. By B. J. Vos. New York, Henry Holt and Co., 1924.HISTORICAL FRENCH READER, Medieval Period, Edited by Paul Studer and E. G. R. Waters, Oxford University Press, 1924.ANTHOLOGY OF FRENCH LYRIC POETRY. Edited by Charles Edmund Young. XIV. 160 pp. Benj. H. Sanborn &amp; Co. 1925.FRENCH COMPOSITION AND PRONUNCIATION EXERCISES, by Noëlia Dubrule, formerly Teacher of French, High School, Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Herbert E. Manser, State Normal School, Mansfield, Pennsylvania. Published by Ginn and Co., 1925.ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS, LA DAME AUX CAMÉLIAS. Edited with an introduction and notes by Hugh Allison Smith and Robert Bell Mitchell. Oxford University Press American Branch, 1924.FRANÇOIS DE CUREL, LA NOUVELLE IDOLE. Edited with an introduction, notes and vocabulary by Hugh Allison Smith and Leslie Ross Méras. The Century Company, 1924.PINLOCIIE'S PICTORIAL FRENCH DICTIONARY. D. C. Heath and Co. 1925.

A Collection of French Romances, Italian Ariettes, and English Ballads

A Collection of French Romances, Italian Ariettes, and English Ballads

XVIII.—Some account of an Unpublished Collection of Songs and Ballads by King Henry VIII. and his Contemporaries

A Manuscript volume of songs, ballads, and instrumental music, which once belonged to Henry VIII, has recently been brought to light, and it is of interest, not merely for restoring a large number of songs of which no other copies are now known, but also because some among them were written by the King himself, within the first three or four years of his reign. Henry was then so much subject of his own songs, that these are of material assistance in forming a judgment of his early character.

Popular Music of the Olden Time: A Collection of Ancient Songs, Ballads, and Dance Tunes, Illustrative of the National Music of England

Popular Music of the Olden Time: A Collection of Ancient Songs, Ballads, and Dance Tunes, Illustrative of the National Music of England