Popular Ballads Research Articles

The gaze of the oppressed people : Based on Three popular ballads by Lafcadio Hearn

The gaze of the oppressed people : Based on Three popular ballads by Lafcadio Hearn

The Popular Ballad, Rumours and Memories as a Special Narrative Format

In principle, the new folksongs or folk ballads of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century telling about dramatic events could also be called versified media news, as their aim was to mediate topical shocking events, in particular accidents or murders, thus serving as rumours, news and entertainment all in one. The popular ballad ‘Saatuse vangis’ (‘Bound by Fate’) tells a sensational story from southern Estonia. The song spread together with hearsay concerning the central event, the circumstances of the making of the song, and the characters involved. Over time, a specific type of story-telling developed, that mingled prose with parts of the song. The ballad together with the pertaining lore allows us to view the events descried from different aspects, creating a broader picture of the development and meaning of a popular text. The rumours, comments and personal memories accompanying the song helped both the contemporary and subsequent generations to understand and interpret the event. The stories spreading in the community by word of mouth addressed various circumstances “beyond the song”, and the narrator’s own emotions and opinions on the matter.

La Villemarque's Barzaz-Breiz (1839-1845-1867): A Romantic Fiction to Reinvent Oneself

In 1839, Viscount Théodore Hersart de La Villemarqué published the Barzaz-Breiz (The Popular Ballads of Brittany) at his own expense. He was only 24 years old at the time. This book would bring him fame, give him a name and was to influence all of his future work. The Barzaz-Breiz was then further developed and modified twice afterwards, in 1845 and 1867. To this day it remains one of the best known books in Breton language literature. There are several reasons why the Barzaz-Breiz should not be reduced to just a collection of popular ballads as its title and research on the subject suggest. First of all, the authenticity of the songs of the Barzaz-Breiz and their possible modification, manipulation — or even their total invention by de la Villemarqué — have been the object of so much scholarly debate since the beginning of what came to be called the Barzaz-Breiz dispute, that attention has almost exclusively been focused on the ballads, leaving the rest of the text in the shadows. Secondly, there is a yawning chasm separating La Villemarqué’s work from that of his contemporaries who also collected popular songs. The book forms a space which is made up of de la Villemarqué’s words and serves as the locus for his reallocation of meanings to words. What we are given to read here is no less than a dissertation about the author himself. This paper therefore posits that the Barzaz-Breiz is not a mere collection of popular songs but rather a text — de la Villemarqué is not a mere collector but an author.

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics

‘A Curst Little Jew from Duke’s Place’: Daniel Mendoza and the Folkloric Representation of the Jew in Georgian England

At the end of the eighteenth century, Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836), a five-feet-seven, 160-pound bare-knuckle Jewish fighter, rose to become the world’s heavyweight champion; England’s first sports superstar; the author of the first book on boxing theory, The Modern Art of Boxing (1789), and of the first sports memoir in history, The Memoirs of the Life of Daniel Mendoza (1813); and the first Jew to shake the hand of an English king. This article examines the role that three folkloric communications—a mock-heroic epic, The Odiad (1788); an epistolary sparring contest; and an urban popular ballad—played in shaping his public identity in the boxing community and, consequently, in shaping the place of Jews in late eighteenth-century Georgian social life.

Germand Gladensvend and the monster

Abstract The present analysis discusses the narratological structures of the Danish folk ballad on ‘Germand Gladensvend’ (‘Happy Germand’, DgF 33). The text is preserved in six different manuscript versions, all of them written before appr. 1630, and in a printed version from 1591. Although the story is strongly related in all of them, including stanzas that are identical almost word for word, the different versions nevertheless have rather different narratological structures, depending on the strong variation between the conclusions of the different versions. In order to make these differences clear, the analysis uses classical narratological concepts, like movements of objects of value and the semiotic square. The narrative structures in the extant versions of the Danish popular ballad “Germand Gladensvend” (DgF 33).

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's Mid-to-Late Career, Philanthropy, and Activism in Nineteenth-Century America

Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

Whoso List to Find?

Seeing what Englishwomen saw in the early modern period brings them into view in a variety of new ways, many of them managed and enhanced by the machinery of cheap print. In contrast with Petrarchan poetry, which imagined women with fear and described love as plague, print established other models of health and wellness, and other ways of registering women’s powers. Women known as searchers who were charged to enter houses and locate plague rather than flee from it shared their findings with town officials who printed up statistics in weekly Bills of Mortality. The searcher was both a ‘harbinger of disaster’ and a tool of recovery, and popular ballads of the time frequently deploy her example along with her abilities to avoid ruin and register signs of life. These ballads supply alternatives to Petrarchan demographics, and I examine the ways early modern female poets draw upon their methodology, too.

El Cid Campeador between Luzán and Lorca: Recovering a Nineteenth-Century Pop-Culture Favorite

This article explores the circulation of popular ballads on El Cid in pliegos sueltos of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast to the ballads of the oral tradition, which were said to preserve medieval epic fragments, the texts under consideration here had their origins in the popular culture of the Baroque. Although we know a great deal about what El Cid meant for the literate elite of the Romantic and post-Romantic era, we know little about the knowledge and opinions of non-elites throughout the Spanish-speaking world regarding Spain’s “national” hero between the Enlightenment and the Spanish Civil War. Discussion of these pliegos sueltos and their distribution (to places as far away as New Mexico and Chile) may help shed light on this “pop-culture” Cid, what he would have meant for audiences of the period, especially in terms of religious and ethnic identity.

The Words ‘Laughter’ and ‘Laugh’ in a selection of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads

This paper wittily addresses the theme of laughing and laughter in eight ballads selected from Volume 1 of Gutenberg's three volume collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, including Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight, The Cruel Brothers, The Boy and the Mantle, The Laidley Worm, Clark Colven, The Broomfield Hill, King John and the Bishop and Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship, with a variety of other intertextual references. Drawing simultaneously on the two most comprehensive collections of English and Scottish Ballads: Francis James Child's and Steve Roud's, the paper demonstrates that laughter in ballads is "no laughing matter", and, indeed, the balladic laughter, no to be mistaken for (s)laughter, due to its social context of mediaeval times, prevails in various shades of negativity, as corroborated by Norbert Elias's sociological theory of laughter and Anca Parvulescu's study thereof. The paper provides a unique insight into the both merry and mirthless laughter prompted by a modern reading of English and Scottish folk ballads in today's cosmopolitan context.

Katharine Lee Bates’Ballad Bookand the Pedagogy of the Ballad

AbstractIn 1890, Katharine Lee Bates, Wellesley professor, published a college/upper high school textbook entitled Ballad Book. Bates’ volume pre-dates by 4 years Francis Barton Gummere’s Old English Ballads (1894) and Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge’s English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1904) by 14 years, making it the earliest ballad collection by an American scholar explicitly designed for classroom use. In 1904, Bates published a second edition of her textbook with the result that her two editions flank ballad work during the formative years of American ballad scholarship. This essay describes Bates’ approach to ballad teaching, how it changed between editions, and what her work demonstrates about early American academic ballad scholarship: that is, as an outcome of the political consequences of Bates’ promotion of a ballad study aimed at supporting classroom learning rather than one aimed at producing academic scholarship.

BUZAUL IN THE TIME OF TUDOR VLADIMIRESCU – GHEORGHILAŞ PANDUR, THE OUTLAW FROM THE CURVE OF THE CARPATHIANS

Through his activity, Tudor Vladimirescu left a strong impression on his contemporaries from Buzau and their descendants. Because they were at the crossroads connecting Muntenia, Moldova, Transylvania and Dobrogea, the people of Buzau suffered deeply from the chaotic confrontations between Arnauts, Etherists and Turks. However, aware of the importance of the ideas promoted by Theodor from Vladimiri, beyond the immediate failure of these principles, the inhabitants of Buzău honored the great hero, attributing his name to schools and boulevards, mentioning him in official historical speeches and popular ballads. Pandurul Gheorghilaş, who became an outlaw, continued the spirit of actions covered by the need for justice and fairness of Tudor Vladimirescu's social program, in the mountain area of Buzău county.

Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life

The works of Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) played a critical role in introducing his adopted Japan to a worldwide audience. In Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, he writes, “The papers composing this volume treat of the inner rather than of the outer life of Japan, — for which reason they have been grouped under the title Kokoro (heart). This word signifies also mind, in the emotional sense; spirit; courage; resolve; sentiment; affection; and inner meaning, — just as we say in English, ‘the heart of things.’” After centuries of isolation Meiji-era Japan was forced to adjust its customs and beliefs to Western influences, and Hearn reflects on the value of these traditions of the “heart” as seen in Japanese popular justice, arts, economy, patriotism, and religion. Chapters include: At a Railway Station • The Genius of Japanese Civilization • A Street Singer • From a Traveling Diary • The Nun of the Temple of Amida • After the War • Haru • A Glimpse of Tendencies • By Force of Karma • A Conservative • In the Twilight of the Gods • The Idea of Preëxistence • In Cholera-Time • Some Thoughts About Ancestor-Worship • Kimiko • Three Popular Ballads: The Ballad of Shūntoku-maru • The Ballad of Oguri-Hangwan • The Ballad of O-Shichi, the Daughter of the Yaoya.

The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources by Thor Ewing

Reviewed by: The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources by Thor Ewing Alexander L. Kaufman thor ewing, trans., The Original Robin Hood: Traditional Ballads and Plays Including All Medieval Sources. Edinburgh: Welkin Books Ltd., 2020. Pp. 263. isbn: 978–1–910075–13–5. $14.99. There are very few contemporary English translations of the Middle English and Early Modern English Robin Hood poems, plays/games, and chronicle entries. For a character and a tradition that is seemingly reborn and reimagined with each new era or after a major event, and one that continues to be recreated in various forms of media, the dearth of translations is surprising. Excellent translations do exist by Thomas H. Ohlgren (2005) and Lesley Coote (2020), though they are limited in the number of Robin Hood texts that they include. Thor Ewing's audience for his anthology is the general reader, and he is explicit when it comes to the aim of the book, which is 'to put the old poems, ballads and plays of Robin Hood back into a language that anyone can enjoy' (p. 10). Indeed, [End Page 86] these are very enjoyable translations, but Ewing takes a number of creative liberties with the source material in order to craft them. Moreover, there is another aim to his volume, and that is to explore, in a lengthy introduction, the historical origins of Robin Hood and other characters that dwell within the literary tradition. Thus, the translated works are meant to augment his evidence that he has located the origins of the original Robin Hood and of some of his associates. The works that Ewing translates are organized into four sections. The Gest of Robin Hood is first and resides alone. We then have 'Ballads of Robin Hood,' which contains twelve poems that are arrange according to the life cycle of the outlaw. 'Plays of Robin Hood' has the Paston-associated Robyn Hod and the Shryff of Notyngham, as well as Robin Hood and the Friar and Robin Hood and the Potter that were first included in William Copland's 1560 edition of the Gest. Lastly, there is an appendix, which comprises translations from chronicle entries (Wynton, Bower, the Polychronicon, and Mair), thirteenth-century legal records, a few early allusions to the legend, and music scores for ballads and songs (which is a welcome inclusion). For the medieval texts, Ewing bases his translations mostly on Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren's TEAMS edition Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales; for the later works, he relies heavily on Francis James Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. For a book that calls itself The Original Robin Hood, there is an inherent problem: with a translation, we are moving further away from the original sources of the Robin Hood literary tradition. Ewing's poems place the reader within his present artistic moment. Additionally, Ewing has taken certain liberties with a number of Robin Hood texts that are incomplete: 'I've tried to keep my own additions to a minimum, but I have felt the need to "restore" more than usual of the ballad of "Robin Hood's Death"' (p. 55). To this poem, he has added twelve verses; to Robin Hood and the Monk, where a single leaf of the manuscript is missing (and thus some 48 lines are absent), Ewing has added 'two blocks of one-and-a-half verses' (p. 56); and to Monk and the poem Robin Hood and the Potter, he has 'added occasional half verses to keep the regular pattern of four-line verses' (p. 56). Ewing unconvincingly argues that the opening of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne was part of a now-lost version of Robin Hood and the Monk and that the dream narrative in the former has no bearing in the plot of that poem; as such, some eighteen verses are excised from Gisborne, but two verses from the opening of Robin Hood and the Butcher from the Percy folio (where the only extant version of Gisborne is found) are added to the opening of Gisborne. Ewing in his introduction attempts to suggest that the original Robin Hood was not a yeoman (as...

HE BLACK SEA AND THE SEA OF AZOV IN UKRAINIAN COSSACK EPOS

This article describes the attempts of Ukrainian historians of the 1920s–1930s, in particular, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, to actualize the significance of sea as a geographical and natural sub-foundation of the territorial history of Ukraine. These efforts were necessary to revise and dismantle the imperial construct of “Novorossiya” (literally “New Russia”). Hrushevsky was interested, first of all, in the Cossack era (late 16th–18th centuries) and the era of repopulation of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov coastal areas after liquidation of the Zaporozhian Sich. Mykhailo Hrushevsky’s ideas drove the research work by Kateryna Hrushevska, who published in 1927–1931 a two-volume corps Ukrainian Folk Dumas in search of field materials that could prove the organic relation of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov with historical life of Ukrainians. Kateryna Hrushevska pointed out the publication of a duma about the seafaring adventure of Oleksiy Popovych in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads by Francis James Child (1882–1898) – it was presented as a parallel to the Scottish ballad Brown Robyn’s Confession. The text of a Ukrainian folk duma was thus included to a broad circle of folklore songs popular among seafaring peoples (meaning Swedish, Norwegian and Danish folk ballads). Kateryna Hrushevska focused on the study of ritual practices related to a departure to the sea, particularly those recorded by the ethnographer Vasyl Kravchenko in 1926 in Berdiansk. It provided a basis for the study of folklore works and customs of seafarers as a separate social group. Hrushevska also reviewed the field records made by the renowned Ukrainian artist and ethnographer Porfyrii Martynovych. His archives contained, in particular, the texts of folklore prose concerning the Sea of Azov, recorded during 1897–1902 in the Cossack village of Veremiivka in the Zolotonosha Povit (district) (in the 1950s, the village was flooded due to construction of Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Power Station). These texts under the general title What Zaporozhians Were are the fables in which Zaporozhians are associated with the image of Jesus Christ (this approximation took place on the basis of realization of the soteriological function of Cossacks in the history of Ukraine). Folk narrators considered Cossacks not only knights but also the “righteous of God”, and therefore, they were attributed the ability to “sit on water like on the ground” (evangelistic stories depict Jesus Christ who can “walk on water”). In the course of sacralization of the image of a Zaporozhian produced by collective work, his verbal portrait attained the features of a saint and a bogatyr, the birth of which has mythological explanation (this is a very old man in a white shirt). Memorialization of Cossacks is related to the experience of their Triumph and their Tragedy (meaning the destruction of the Sich), which on the whole has created the image of a Zaporozhian as a hero and defender impersonating the idea of chosenness. The hydronyms of Ukrainian heroic epos, particularly the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, became an important marker of the Cossack space with its triumphs and defeats.

Shakespeare's Notation: Writing Sound inMuch Ado about Nothing

In Act 5 ofMuch Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare Dramatizes Two Consecutive Episodes in Which Writing Poetry is Mixed suggestively with singing, recalling, or imitating music. The first comes when Benedick sings or speaks several lines from the popular ballad “The God of Love.” The second is Claudio's musical rite of contrition for slandering Hero and (he believes) causing her death. In both cases, poetry is produced through writing practices that are interwoven with song. Indeed, Shakespeare yokes literacy and aurality together in the same keyword,noting, which referred both to writing and to musical notes, and which (as scholars have long observed) is hownothingwas pronounced in early modern English. Benedick seeks poetic inspiration from the notes of balladry, then bemoans his inability to versify in rhyme. Claudio not only sees that his epitaph is notated, read aloud, and hung on the tomb; he calls for a corresponding hymn to be sung. Taken together, the scenes attune us to forms of poetic making that are irreducible to writing or language—those overdetermined categories in literary studies that have enabled our neglect of the role that nonverbal sound has played in poetic composition.

Plebeianizing the Female Soldier: Radical Liberty and The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies

This article examines the work-related dimensions of The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies (1740). A rollicking account of a plebeian female soldier, the Life is a key document for the history of eighteenth-century working women and their representation in narrative. By portraying both the industriousness and the radical liberty associated with the lower-class milieu of real-life female soldiers, Davies’s narrative challenges the depiction of plebeian identity in numerous early eighteenth-century fictions of low-born women, whether picaresque like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders or sentimental like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Drawing on genres such as jest-books, criminal biography, and amatory fiction to break with heroic images of well-born women warriors (including those in popular ballads), it voices a resistant outlook on the regulation of women’s labour and sexuality. And, with a social perspective springing as much from class status as sexual identity, Davies’s Life marks a literary epoch in which female soldiering is plebeianized in plays and novels as diverse as John Gay’s Polly and Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom.

Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms by Andrew Davis

Reviewed by: Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms by Andrew Davis Jonathan D. Bellman Sonata Fragments: Romantic Narratives in Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. By Andrew Davis. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. [ix, 203 p. ISBN 9780253025333 (hardcover), $80; ISBN 9780253028938 (paperback), $35; ISBN 9780253025456 (e-book), $34.99.] Tables, music examples, bibliography, index. This study builds on the work of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy in their Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types, and Deformations in the Late [End Page 454] Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Davis's book may be seen as an effort to expand sonata theory more solidly into the nineteenth-century repertoire, seeking to explain the continuities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works so designated. The connection with Hepokoski and Darcy is clear from the adoption of their terminology: P and S zones (primary and secondary thematic areas, action zones, rotations, etc.). This flexible model for how the sonata conducts its business is well suited to the ideas Davis seeks to develop, particularly as he sees sonata form beginning to reflect romantic aesthetics: increasing reliance on the fragment (an idea masterfully developed by John Daverio in Nineteenth-Century Music and the German Romantic Ideology [New York: Schirmer Books, 1993]) and on the pastoral narrative, a concept adopted from literary criticism that he finds especially relevant for romantic music as a whole. Pastoral narratives "can be either narrowly or broadly defined," the narrower deriving from classical poetry that celebrates bucolic life and evolving through the Enlightenment (with its shepherds and shepherdesses in the unspoiled countryside) into nineteenth-century novels in which the landscape itself plays a central role—Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony is one of Davis's examples of a musical manifestation of this kind of narrative. More broadly, the pastoral narrative refers "to mythological narratives of wish fulfillment" centering on "oppositions between, for example, humans versus nature, urban versus rural, or generally anything conceived as idealized (and unattainable) versus something else understood as less than perfect (human frailties, urban environments, or a present-day, complex world fraught with distress and anxiety)." The broad theme of retreat and return is key: "a retreat from some sort of flawed, present-tense site or state of being into a simpler, more innocent, venerated, and always intentionally fictitious time or place that came to be known by the generic name Arcadia" (p. 21). For Davis, the literary model suits the essentially narrative character of the sonata: "Some musical forms should be understood as narrative forms precisely because they depend for their expressive meaning on an ordered presentation of events in time. … Perhaps the most obvious example of a narrative form in music is sonata form" (p. 38). So the sequence of sonata components—primary theme zone, transition, medial caesura, secondary theme zone, essential expositional closure (perhaps followed by closing material), multipartite development, and the partial or full rotational rehearsal of exposition material found in the recapitulation—amounts to recounting a narrative, a sequence of necessary events that must occur in a fixed and proper order, and the novelistic arcs of the nineteenth century provide an apt model. Moreover, Davis draws a distinction between time and temporality, both of which are relevant to an unfolding form but which do not operate congruently: time is understood as real time, as it unfolds in seconds and minutes; temporality has to do with the timing of perceived events, which in any narrative are not synchronous with anything resembling real time. (James Parakilas has used the felicitous phrase "leaping and lingering" to describe this principle as it appears in epic poetry; signal events are set up, emphasized, and lingered over, while the time between them is telescoped, passing much more quickly [James Parakilas, Ballads without Words: Chopin and the Tradition of the Instrumental Ballade (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1992), 46ff.]. The phrase "leaping and lingering" originated with Francis B. Gummere [The Popular Ballad (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1907), 90–91].) [End Page 455] After establishing the framework of the argument, David follows with a detailed discussion of specific issues. In chapter 3, "Music with Text," Davis discusses the slow movements of Johannes Brahms's op. 1...

Interpretation of the Popular Ballad from the Documentary Graţian by Thomas Cuilei

Interpretation of the Popular Ballad from the Documentary Graţian by Thomas Cuilei