Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern: Essays Inspired by Larry Syndergaard 9781580443630, 9783110661934, 158044363X, 9783110660456, 3110660458

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments and Tabula Commemorativa......Page 10
“Both Me and Mine He Causd to Dine”......Page 12
Bibliographical Note......Page 20
Part I: The Ballad Genre......Page 22
1. Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers......Page 24
2. The Relationship of the Anomalous Ballad Þorgeirs rímur [Stjakarhöfða] to Áns rímur bogsveigis......Page 50
3. Hervör, Hervard, Hervik: The Metamorphosis of a Shieldmaiden......Page 76
Part II a: Traditional Ballads in Context: Motifs and Themes......Page 92
4. Uncanny Cetology in the Sagas and Later West-Scandinavian Balladry......Page 94
5. If You Go Down to the Woods Today … Fateful Locations in the Ballad Landscapes of Three Kingdoms......Page 112
6. “His Hawk, His Hound, and Lady Fair”: Social Symbols and Ballad Metaphors......Page 144
7. Balladry and Social Mores: An Exploration of Attitudes to Sexual Relations in Songsters, Broadsides, and Oral Tradition......Page 160
Part II b: The Traditional Ballad in Context: Individual Ballads......Page 178
8. The Agnete Ballad of Denmark: Cultural Tool or Protest Song?......Page 180
9. From Sir Eglamour to “Old Bangum”: The Travels of a Ballad Hero......Page 196
Part III: The Afterlife of the Traditional Ballad......Page 214
10. Writing Romances for Amateur Singers: A Nineteenth-Century Danish Example......Page 216
11. The Secret Lives of Ballads: Fan Fiction as Folk Space......Page 230
12. A Game of Crows: Poe, Plagiarism, and the Ballad Tradition......Page 242
Notes on the Contributors......Page 262
Index......Page 264

Citation preview

Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern

FESTSCHRIFTEN, OCCASIONAL PAPERS, AND LECTURES

Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences   Western Michigan University

Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern Essays Inspired by Larry Syndergaard

edited by Sandra Ballif Straubhaar and Richard Firth Green

Festschriften, Occasional Papers, and Lectures MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University Kalamazoo

Copyright © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available from the Library of Congress

ISBN: 9781580443630 eISBN: 9783110661934 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Larry Syndergaard (1936−2015)

Contents

Acknowledgments and Tabula Commemorativa

ix

“Both Me and Mine He Causd to Dine” Sandra Ballif Straubhaar and Richard Firth Green

xi

Bibliographical Note

xix

Part I: The Ballad Genre

1

  1 Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers James Massengale

3

  2 The Relationship of the Anomalous Ballad Þorgeirs rímur [Stjakarhöfða] to Áns rímur bogsveigis 29 Shaun F. D. Hughes   3 Hervör, Hervard, Hervik: The Metamorphosis of a Shieldmaiden Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

55

Part IIa: Traditional Ballads in Context: Motifs and Themes

71

  4 Uncanny Cetology in the Sagas and Later West-Scandinavian Balladry 73 Sarah Harlan-Haughey   5 If You Go Down to the Woods Today … Fateful Locations in the Ballad Landscapes of Three Kingdoms Tom Pettitt   6 “His Hawk, His Hound, and Lady Fair”: Social Symbols and Ballad Metaphors James Moreira

91

123

viii  Contents

  7 Balladry and Social Mores: An Exploration of Attitudes to Sexual Relations in Songsters, Broadsides, and Oral Tradition David Gregory

139

Part IIb: The Traditional Ballad in Context: Individual Ballads

157

  8 The Agnete Ballad of Denmark: Cultural Tool or Protest Song? Lynda Taylor

159

 9 From Sir Eglamour to “Old Bangum”: The Travels of a Ballad Hero Richard Firth Green

175

Part III: The Afterlife of the Traditional Ballad

193

10 Writing Romances for Amateur Singers: A Nineteenth-Century Danish Example Hans Kuhn

195

11 The Secret Lives of Ballads: Fan Fiction as Folk Space Sally Ann Schutz

209

12 A Game of Crows: Poe, Plagiarism, and the Ballad Tradition Jennifer Goodman Wollock

221

Notes on the Contributors

241

Index 243

Acknowledgments

P

UBLICATION OF THIS VOLUME has been made possible by subventions from the Department of English at Western Michigan University and the Emeritus Academy of the Ohio State University. The editors gratefully acknowledge the generous contribution of these institutions to its realization.

Tabula Commemorativa Elizabeth P. Amidon Betsy Bowden Elisabeth Carnell Clifford Davidson Moyra M. Ebling Maryellen Hains John D. Niles Isabelle Peere Thomas Seiler Jennifer Syndergaard Snyder Allen Webb Department of English, Western Michigan University

“Both Me and Mine He Causd to Dine”1 Sandra Ballif Straubhaar and Richard Firth Green

A

NY ACCOUNT OF LARRY Syndergaard’s contributions to academia must begin with his more than forty years of work, planning, promoting, and participating in the International Congress on Medieval Studies, held first biennially, and then annually, every spring, at Western Michigan University since 1962.2 Larry began this work in 1971, only three years into his new job as a junior professor of English. His undergraduate degree from Iowa State College had been in forestry and general science, but following this, he and his wife Ardis had spent a gap year in Copenhagen researching European forests along with family genealogy. It was there that Larry had caught the ballad bug and changed his academic alignment to the liberal arts. After returning to the U.S. to pursue a PhD at the University of Wisconsin in English and Scandinavian Studies, in 1968 he and his family arrived in Kalamazoo for the new job. Larry’s involvement in the International Congress on Medieval Studies can be documented, via archived conference programs, from 1971 onward. From 1976 to 1989, and probably in numerous other years as well (the records are incomplete) he participated on the Congress program committee (reading proposals and abstracts, as well as organizing sessions), while his wife Ardis, too, worked intermittently with the Congress committees and in the Medieval Institute office. Over a period of thirty years, Larry organized and/or presided over paper sessions on (among others) Old English Literature; Beowulf and the Idea of the Heroic; Viking Studies; Saga and Epic; General Medieval Literature; Critical Approaches to Chaucer; The Pearl Poet; Chaucer and Women; Jungian Approaches to Medieval Literature and Culture; Texts, Transmission and Editing ; and Archetypal Theory and Medieval Literature. But from the early 1990s onward Larry began to organize the sessions on the ballad for which he is so fondly remembered by the contributors to this volume. These attracted scholars, not only of Anglophone balladry, but also of Hispanic, Nordic, Slavic, Celtic, and Sephardic ballads,

xii   SANDRA BALLIF STRAUBHAAR AND RICHARD FIRTH GREEN

among others. Paper topics included not only ballad texts, but also tunes and illustrations; ballad genre boundaries; Norse saga connections; Eddic poetry connections; connections to metrical romances; connections to the cantefable; women singers and informants; social class and singing style; ballads as cultural markers; ballads as cultural resistance; Robin Hood and other outlaw heroes; unquiet graves; abductions by elves; church frescoes; anti-Semitism; just and unjust queens; tragedy and gender; affect and emotion; and ballads in Jacobean drama. In connection with the ballad sessions at the Congress that he indefatigably organized and presided over through the years, Larry was made a Fellow of the International Ballad Commission / Kommission für Volksdichtung, and in that capacity tirelessly networked within and without the international community of ballad scholars. It delighted him to introduce like-minded “ballad-mongers” (as he called them) to one another. In 1995 Larry published the work for which he is best known, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads—a volume that includes an exploration of the connections between Anglophone and Nordic ballads and remains an invaluable reference work for scholars of both (closely related) ballad corpora.3 Larry retired from his post in Western Michigan’s English department in 2000, but remained on the list of affiliated faculty for WMU’s interdisciplinary medieval studies MA for some years, and stepped up his activity with the IBC / Kommission für Volksdichtung. Larry and Ardis attended IBC conferences in Austin, Texas (2003); Ukraine (2005); Germany (2006); and Scotland (2007). After Ardis’s death in 2008, Larry went solo to the IBC in Portugal (2011); Turkey (2012); and South Africa (2013). In 2009, ballad sessions at ICMS were held in memory of Ardis; and in 2016, they were held in memory of Larry himself. Larry’s daughter Jennifer brought balladrelated books from Larry’s extensive library to the 2016 sessions and generously invited the attendees to take home whatever they liked. One ongoing and unforgettable tradition for ballad scholars attending the Medieval Congress were Larry’s and Ardis’s annual dinners at the Syndergaard home near the WMU campus. From the very beginning, these dinners were determinedly inclusive affairs. Whether you were a senior rock-star academic or an independent unaffiliated scholar or a young ballad enthusiast with serious impostor syndrome, Larry and Ardis would make you welcome. There follows our attempt to re-create the experience of a typical Ballad-Mongers’ Dinner. First, participants would receive an e-mail (“with apologies for its form-letter nature”), reminding us that the “International

“BOTH ME AND MINE HE CAUSD TO DINE”   xiii

Congress on Medieval Studies [was] bearing down upon us,” and inviting our participation in “a kind of tradition that has developed over the last years, an informal dinner at our house for the ballad session participants and other friends of the ballad.” In due course we would all meet in the lobby of the Hadley-Britton student dormitory, since it was closest of all the conference buildings to Larry’s house, and while the lobby dutifully changed its furniture, floors, and wall treatments over the years, Larry himself never seemed to change. At the appointed hour, right on cue, Larry would walk in, tall and lanky (6’2” and 155 pounds, his family confirms); chances would be good he’d be wearing a plaid wool sport jacket, in mustardy colors. Larry would lead us eastwards across the damp evening grass, studded with dandelion and fleawort, through the gap in the chain link fence, and into a neighborhood of older houses, forest-like in its tall trees but garden-like in its plantings. Daffodils or tulips might be in bloom, depending on the year. The Syndergaard home on Prairie Avenue had been built in 1913, but there were trees on its lot far older than that. One had blown down in a recent year, and Larry, the ex-forestry student, had painstakingly counted the rings and nailed in little metal signs to mark dates, including the Revolutionary War, his and Ardis’s wedding, and the births of their children. We would visit and admire the playhouse Larry had built for his granddaughters Ellie and Maisie, a true miniature of the same era as the big house with many of the carpentry detailings of an actual residence. Then, we went inside to be greeted by Ardis—Ardis Carr Syndergaard, who had been Larry’s sweetheart since he took her to his senior prom in 1953, and whose printed memoir of her upbringing in rural Wisconsin Larry would proudly show his guests. She served us maybe a half-dozen different types of hors d’oeuvres—savory and sweet, beautifully presented: nuts and dates, bacon-wrapped water chestnuts, cheeses—as we sat in the pale-green-painted screened porch, perhaps in its two-seater porch swing. We had dinner in the dining room, its wood-beamed ceiling like something out of Rivendell, with the early-evening spring sun streaming through the high windows. Local wine from Paw Paw, local morels from the forest in the meat sauce, fresh asparagus on the side: beautiful presentations, on vintage china. Was the silver table service engraved with a C for Carr? No, said Ardis, laughing : we got it at an estate sale! We admired Ardis’s custom kitchen, with sink and range heights adjusted to Ardis’s petite proportions; the upstairs bathroom, with its claw-foot bathtub and books of Danish cartoons to peruse; and the living room, with its Chinese screen, and its solid wall of dark hardwood bookshelves built by

xiv   SANDRA BALLIF STRAUBHAAR AND RICHARD FIRTH GREEN

Larry himself, where we retired after dinner for stories and laughter and sometimes singing. These dinners continued even after Ardis’s death in 2008, with Jennifer Syndergaard Snyder and family friends cooking from the recipes Ardis herself had used. In the days and weeks following the various Congresses down the years, Larry would send emails out to the participants in the ballad sessions, praising the papers and suggesting like-minded scholars to contact, actively nourishing the international ballad community, as he also did after the annual IBC meetings all over the world. As Jennifer wrote to a group of us shortly after Larry’s death: You may know that my father collected many things (have you seen his library?). But by far his favorite “collectible” was people. He simply loved getting to know new people. Whenever it was that you and Larry first met, I have no doubt that he was genuinely interested in you—in your interests, your history, and your outlook on life— and he remembered what you talked about. And you probably found that he kept in touch! Correspondence was central to who Dad was. [5/14/2015]

Ample evidence that an international ballad researchers’ (and sometime singers’) community continues to thrive, and continues to owe an inestimable debt to Larry Syndergaard, can be seen in the varied banquet of ballad- and song-lore served up in the articles which follow in this volume. While this introduction, as its title suggests, is primarily intended to memorialize Larry Syndergaard himself, it must also serve to introduce the larger memorial to him that is Ballads of the North. Our title reflects Larry’s interest in the relationship between the ballads of Scandinavia (particularly Denmark) and those of Scotland, England, and the United States, and unsurprisingly many of the contributions to this volume began life as papers presented at the sessions he organized for WMU’s Medieval Congresses. This interest of Larry’s has a long scholarly pedigree (it reaches back at least to F. J. Child’s extensive correspondence with the famous Danish ballad scholar Svend Grundtvig),4 but, unlike Child, Larry was also fascinated by the cultural legacy the traditional ballad has bequeathed to the modern world—its ongoing presence in the literature, the music, and the art of our own day. This particular fascination of his is reflected in our subtitle, Medieval to Modern, and particularly in the essays that make up the final part of our volume. The introductory part of Ballads of the North, Medieval to Modern turns on the perennial question of how the ballad genre is to be defined and how far it resembles, or is distinct from, other forms. James Massengale’s

“BOTH ME AND MINE HE CAUSD TO DINE”   xv

“Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers” measures Bengt R. Jonsson’s five-volume Sveriges Medeltida Ballader [Sweden’s Medieval Ballads] (1983−2001) against the corpus of ballads included in earlier collections, and interrogates the grounds upon which some have been excluded; though, as he concedes, any selective enterprise of this kind must entail some kind of gatekeeping feature, its inevitable consequence is the large “shadow-corpus” of Swedish balladry on which Massengale concentrates. The two pieces that follow, by Shaun F. D. Hughes and Sandra Ballif Straubhaar, are more narrowly focused but both discuss the features that distinguish ballad versions from those of other genres. Hughes’s “The Relationship of the Anomalous Ballad Þorgeirs rímur [Stjakarhöfða] to Áns rímur bogsveigis” discusses the relationship of an Icelandic ballad about the wrestler Thorgeir to a rímnaflokkur (set of rímur) about Án Bow-bender, and suggests that the reason that the ballad of Þorgeirs rímur is so unusual in an Icelandic context is that the continuing popularity of formal rímur inhibited the development of ballads (such as those we find in the Faroe Islands) that might have been felt to be in competition with them. In the final piece in this part, “Hervör, Hervard, Hervik: The Metamorphosis of a Shieldmaiden,” Straubhaar concentrates, not on a male wrestler, but on a female warrior called Hervör, who appears in two Old Norse sagas and three later ballads (two Faroese and one Danish); to what extent, she asks, can we attribute the differences in the way Hervör is treated in these sources to the very different generic demands of saga and ballad? The first of the essays in our second part (which examines various aspects of the ballad cultures in both Scandinavia and the Englishspeaking world) is Sarah Harlan-Haughey’s “Uncanny Cetology in the Sagas and Later West-Scandinavian Balladry.” Harlan-Haughey covers material similar to that treated by Hughes and Straubhaar, but from a different perspective. She compares the literary trope of the beached whale and its butchering in the Icelandic Sagas with the appearance of this motif in later Icelandic and Faroese folklore. She shows how overtones of malevolent pre-Christian magic permeate the sagas’ treatment of whales, whose beached carcasses are often the impetus for social dissension and feuding, whereas the ceremonial aspects of the modern Faroese Grindadráp (and also later Scandinavian ballads and folktales) perform a quite different function—reaffirming order, efficiency, and community. Tom Pettitt’s “If You Go Down to the Woods Today … Fateful Locations in the Ballad Landscapes of Three Kingdoms,” combining as it does the study of a single formulaic setting, the rosenlund, across a wide range of both Danish and Anglophone ballads, forms an appropriate centerpiece to this tribute to Larry Syndergaard. The rosenlund (perhaps better translated as “flowery

xvi   SANDRA BALLIF STRAUBHAAR AND RICHARD FIRTH GREEN

grove” than “rose grove”) provides a “fateful location” for the action of many Danish ballads, and by examining the setting for such action in a handful of English and Scottish analogues to these ballads, Pettitt reveals far greater diversity in their Anglophone counterparts; whether this diversity is a result of topographical or generic differences he leaves an open question. James Moreira’s “‘His Hawk, His Hound, and Lady Fair’: Social Symbols and Ballad Metaphors” explores another set of ballad motifs, those of “hawks and hounds as agents of characterization,” but he restricts his investigation here to English and Scottish sources. His analysis exposes “the manner in which balladry plays on pre-established symbols in order to create unique effects in its own fictive universe,” in this case, how “references to hawks and hounds illuminate the potential for character weakness and vulnerability.” Continuing the investigation of Anglophone balladry, David Gregory’s “Balladry and Social Mores: An Exploration of Attitudes to Sexual Relations in Songsters, Broadsides, and Oral Tradition” concludes this section by comparing the attitudes of traditional ballads to sexual license with those of broadsides, drolleries, and popular songs. In an exhaustive examination of all the ballads in the Child canon, he concludes that while there is a small group of moralistic ballads in which adultery or premarital sex is explicitly condemned, a far greater number elicit our sympathy for the lovers or even condone their activities. The two essays that conclude this part offer readings of individual ballads, one Danish the other Anglo-American. Lynda Taylor’s “The Agnete Ballad of Denmark: Cultural Tool or Protest Song ?” discusses the supernatural ballad of “Agnete og havmanden” [Agnete and the Merman]. Taylor finds the emotional core of this ballad to be the relationship between Agnete and her domineering merman—itself a reflection of a marital relationship in the human world—and she asks whether this is not a ballad that “to all intents and purposes, could have been used as a protest song, shared amongst the sisterhood and presented in a subversive way?” Richard Firth Green’s “From Sir Eglamour to ‘Old Bangum’: The Travels of a Ballad Hero” traces the history of the ballad of “Sir Lionel” from its origins in a fifteenth-century romance to its emergence as a popular Appalachian ballad. How, Green asks, do the varied social and cultural contexts in which this story has resurfaced over time reshape and modify its meaning? He suggests that American versions of “Sir Lionel” (often called “Old Bangum”) are doing quite different cultural work from their British counterparts, and concludes that the common interpretation of “Old Bangum” as primarily a frivolous children’s song constitutes a serious misrepresentation of the latter.

“BOTH ME AND MINE HE CAUSD TO DINE”   xvii

Our final part represents an aspect of ballad study particularly dear to Larry Syndergaard’s heart—the influence of traditional ballads on later forms of artistic expression. This part begins with Hans Kuhn’s “Writing Romances for Amateur Singers: A Nineteenth-Century Danish Example,” a study of the parlor songs of Joseph Glæser (1835−1891). It is useful to be reminded that America in the 1960s was not the only time that old folksongs were revived and set to new uses, and just as the protest songs of the Vietnam War era are only dimly foreshadowed in the corpus of traditional ballads, so, too, the sentimental lyrics intended for communal singing in nineteenth-century middle-class Danish households seem to be far removed from Grundtvig’s great collection of medieval and early-modern ballads, despite the fact that some of their motifs (such as spring’s awakening, or the lovers’ farewell) are indeed very old. Sally Ann Schutz’s “The Secret Lives of Ballads: Fan Fiction as Folk Space,” presents us with a fascinating analogy between the traditional ballad and modern fan fiction. She speculates that fan fiction may function as a “folk space,” and suggests that it actually has “much more in common with oral performance than it does with conventional print authorship”; by comparing the process by which fan-fiction writers “create and perform their identities as they interact with each other in their digital space” with the creation and performance of ballads in an oral context, Schutz offers us new insights into the nature of the ballad genre. Our final contribution, Jennifer Goodman Wollock’s “A Game of Crows: Poe, Plagiarism, and the Ballad Tradition,” finds the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in the related traditional ballads of “The Three Ravens” and “The Twa Corbies”; Wollock makes this insight the starting point for an extended investigation into Poe’s relationship to the larger field of American and European romanticism, and into the poet’s internal struggle between the two sides of his creative persona, one beholden to the idealist Kant, the other to the traditionalist Herder. When William James Entwistle essayed a taxonomy of European ballads in 1930, he divided his category of “Nordic balladry” into two: the ballads of Scandinavia and the British Isles, and those of Germany and Central Europe: “with the ballads of Scandinavia go our own ballads,” he asserted confidently.5 It is this conjunction that informed the whole of Larry Syndergaard’s scholarly enterprise and it duly informs the collection, Ballads of the North, that is offered here as a tribute to his memory. But before we turn to this scholarly main course, here is a small appetizer, in the form of one of Ardis Carr Syndergaard’s memorable recipes, written down by Jennifer Syndergaard Snyder and annotated by Larry himself:6

xviii   SANDRA BALLIF STRAUBHAAR AND RICHARD FIRTH GREEN

Larry: Here’s Jenny’s e-mail of the recipe. It’s Ardis’s, based on something from a cookbook, then modified by Jenny (the pineapple juice, I think). Do enjoy. Jennifer: Here is Curried Coconut Chicken: 8 small chicken breasts (I used 4 XL ones, cut in half, fatter half flattened somewhat) 6 tablespoons butter, melted One 14-oz bag of Baker’s Angel Flake sweetened flaked coconut Approx. 3 tablespoons curry powder (to taste) 1 teaspoon salt Sauce: 2 cups Apricot preserves, warmed and thinned with a little fruit juice (I used about ⅓ to ½ cups pineapple juice. Could also use orange or apple). Stir in approx. ½ cup yellow raisins and 3 tablespoons [melted] butter. You can add a little ginger, curry, salt and pepper, to taste. [Serve this in gravy boats, on the table.] Melt butter in shallow bowl. In another shallow bowl, mix curry and coconut. Dip chicken pieces in butter, then coat on both sides with coconut mixture. Pat it back into place if it falls off. Place in greased casserole dish and sprinkle with salt. Bake at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes. Serve with rice. [5/18/2012]

NOTES “The King’s Disguise” (Child 151:38). The 1962 conference lasted one day, and consisted of two plenary addresses, six paper sessions, and an evening showing of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal. The 2017 conference, by contrast, lasted four days, and contained 574 paper sessions, several plenaries, and more evening performances and events than could be easily listed here. 3 Turku [Finland]: Nordic Institute of Folklore, 1995. 4 Reprinted in Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, Ballad Books and Ballad Men: Raids and Rescues in Britain, America, and the Scandinavian North Since 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930). 5 European Balladry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 203. 6 I have added two additional instructions in brackets [SBS]. 1 2

Bibliographical Note

T

HE FOLLOWING FIVE WORKS are cited by several authors, and in the interests of avoiding duplication we provide full bibliographical references here and abbreviated ones wherever they occur later in the text. For collections that are cited in only a single chapter—i.e., Svenska Folk-Visor från Forntiden (GA) and Svenska fornsånger (SF) in Chapter 1—full references will be found at the point of first citation. 1) The Corpus Carminum Færoensium: Føroya kvæði, ed. Napoleon Djurhuus, Christian Matras, et al., 8 vols. (Copenhagen and Hoyvik: Ejnar Munksgaard et al., 1945−2003), based on the work of Svend Grundtvig and Jørgen Bloch, is the standard edition of the Faroese ballads. References to individual texts are given as CCF, followed by ballad number and version; thus “CCF 28E.4” refers to the fourth stanza of the E-text of “Trøllini í Hornalondum”; volume and page numbers are also added in parenthesis. 2) The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child. Child’s collection was originally published in five volumes (of ten fascicles) between 1882 and 1898. Citations in this volume are taken from the second corrected edition prepared by Mark F. Heiman and Laura Saxon Heiman, 5 vols (Northfield, MN: Loomis House, 2001−2011). This edition conveniently collates both Child’s original ballad versions and those that he later appended in his “Additions and Corrections” sections, so that, while the original numbering system is retained,1 pagination can differ from that of the first edition. References to ballad texts are given by ballad number, version, and stanza; thus “Child 37A: 1” refers to the first stanza of the version, from Jamieson’s Popular Ballads (A), of “Thomas Rymer” (Child 37). Where reference is made to Child’s commentary or notes, citations are given by volume and page number; thus: “Child, ESPB, 1:452−83.”

xx   Bibliographical Note

3) Danmarks gamle folkeviser [Ancient Popular Ballads of Denmark], edited by Svend Hersleb Grundtvig, Axel Olrik, Hakon Harald Grüner-Nielsen, Erik Dal, and Erik Abrahamsen, 12 volumes (Copenhagen: Samfundet til den danske literaturs fremme, 1853–1976). Abbreviated here as DgF (as with the CCF, individual Danish ballads are referenced by the number assigned to them in this edition, plus, where relevant, the letter designating a particular variant). 4) Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads, edited by Bertrand H. Bronson, 4 volumes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959–1972). Bronson follows Child’s numbering system, but specifies individual versions by numerals rather than letters. Thus, “Bronson 7.1b:28” refers to the twenty-eighth stanza of a Northumberland version (1b) of “Earl Brand” (Child 7). Where reference is made to Bronson’s commentary citations are given by volume and page number; thus: “Bronson, TTCB, 1:266.” 5) The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue, edited by Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim, and Eva Danielson, in collaboration with Mortan Nolsoe and W. Edson Richmond (Stockholm: Svenskt Visarkiv; Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1978). (Contains summaries in English for each of the 838 ballads covered.). Abbreviated here as TSB. 6) Sveriges Medeltida Ballader [Sweden’s Medieval Ballads], edited by Bengt R. Jonsson, Sven-Bertil Jansson, and (melody edition) Margareta Jersild (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983−2001). Its five volumes comprise seven fascicles, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4:1, 4:2, 5:1, and 5:2. Volumes 6−9, mentioned as planned commentary and index volumes, have not appeared at the time of writing (some preparation for these was apparently left to the Archive by Bengt R. Jonsson at his death in 2008). This series is abbreviated here as SMB. NOTE 1

But see Pettitt (below), n. 44.

Part I

The Ballad Genre

Chapter 1

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers James Massengale

T

HE FIVE-VOLUME BALLAD EDITION completed in 2001 by researchers at the Swedish Folksong Archive—Sveriges Medeltida Ballader—will stand in the new century as a model for Nordic folksong scholarship and for international balladry as a whole. “SMB,” as it is called, is the most up-to-date and easily navigated ballad collection available. It is an inspiration for scholars both because of the types of material we may find there, and because of its consistency of focus and superior layout, with music and texts closely integrated, and needs no apology for what we may not find, though it lacks, at least in its textual volumes, all speculative or comparative theorizing. The edition’s conceptual author and driving force, Bengt R. Jonsson, left the job of text editing for the fifth and final, bipartite volume to SvenBertil Jansson; but he lived to see the completion of the enormous corpus, giving Sweden (and all enthusiasts of the old songs) a legacy that will hopefully stand the test of time. The edition now takes its place alongside Svend Grundtvig’s monumental Danish edition of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (DgF) as a worthy counterpart. That being said, I think it is also time to review not only what makes up the comprehensive Swedish ballad corpus, but also what does not. There have been gatekeepers at work, not only defining the term “ballad” in a way that still reflects early Romanticism, but also restricting the numbered representatives of the genre—making a large number of ballads, or, let us say, apparently balladic texts disappear from easily accessible view. Both the definition and the resulting disappearances affect not only our knowledge about specific songs, but also our understanding of Swedish balladry in general. Without wishing to undermine the corpus of SMB or the extraordinary erudition that lies behind it, I would submit that a rethinking of the ballad problem is in order.

4   James Massengale

We need to bring some neglected songs back into focus and to indicate some ways in which ballad scholarship might be developed in the new century. The point of departure for one such rethought may be exemplified by a poem published in 1767. It was written by Olof von Dalin as an entertainment piece some years before, at the court of Adolf Fredrik and Lovisa Ulrika: Kom låt oß nu dricka wårt goda Thé, Och tala om gårdags Legender, Och hwad som i dag vi tänka skal ske, Och hwad som förmodlig ej händer. I hafwen det wäl hört, at alla = = = ä skalkar. + Kom lät oß nu hastigt til nattduken gå; Men se hur den klockan hon löper: Friseuren är långsam och jag skyndar på: Jag tror detta Tyget jag köper. I hafwen det wäl hört, at alla = = = ä skalkar. + Kom lät oß nu ändtlig få mat klockan tu; Men soppan jag orkar ej smaka: Wi måste wäl wara tilreds klockan sju, Och sen öfwer midnatten waka. I hafwen det wäl hört, at alla = = = ä skalkar.

Or, as it might be rendered in a rhyming English variant: Come, let us have us a good cup of tea, And yesterday’s legends recall: And tell all the things that might come to be And things that won’t happen at all. Now, surely you have heard, that all those [pst, pst, pst] are scoundrels. + Come, to the dressing-table let’s go, But just see how the time is a-flying: The hair-dresser dawdles when I’m hurrying so, Here’s some cloth I think is worth buying. Now, surely you have heard, that all those [pst, pst, pst] are scoundrels. + Come, let us at least have some lunch now at two, But the soup is fit only for scorning;

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   5

By seven o’clock I’ll be ready as you To party till midnight or morning. Now, surely you have heard, that all those [pst, pst, pst] are scoundrels.

But what does this bit of jolly satire have to do with the balladry question? It depends, of course, on what you mean by “the balladry question,” which is to say, by the point of this brief essay. The little gossip-ballad was noticed by Karl-Ivar Hildeman, who anticipated some of the notions presented here in an excellent article in 1985.1 I would only like to twist Hildeman’s argument here (he considered songs like this one “pastiches,” as did Jonsson) in order to direct my reader’s attention to a deep-seated issue in Swedish ballad research that concerns SMB, and by extrapolation, most of the national ballad collections anywhere. Ballads are, of course, deucedly difficult to define and categorize. The complex story of balladry and ballad collection by various professional and amateur scholars is laid out in detail by Jonsson in his massive dissertation, Svensk balladtradition [Swedish Ballad Tradition].2 Since this volume has emerged as the initial basis or framework on which SMB was constructed, Jonsson’s working definition of a ballad may be taken as normative: Med ballad förstås i detta arbete den nordiska medeltidsballaden, dvs. en i ett begränsat antal strofformer uppbyggd och av vissa speciella stildrag utmärkt, berättande visa, som genremässigt är av medeltida ursprung. Balladen skall enligt definitionen uppfylla elementära krav i avseende på form, stil, innehåll och ålder. [By a ballad in this work is meant the Nordic medieval ballad, i.e., a narrative song constructed with special stylistic characteristics, and which, seen as a genre, is of medieval origin. The ballad must by definition fulfill basic demands with respect to form, style, content, and age.]3

That definition sounds a bit sketchy and abstract, but seems, prima facie, unproblematic. The technical “characteristics” (two or four-line strophes, the latter often alternating with four- and three-beat lines rhymed xAxA, with end- and sometimes mid-strophe refrain, etc.) are noted by Jonsson elsewhere. An apparent hedge is provided on the “age” issue: the Nordic medieval ballad is undeniably, seen as a genre, of pre-Reformation origin. The reasonable set of definitional criteria is, however, abnegated in his following gatekeeping (“must … ” ) statement, which for polemical purposes

6   James Massengale

may be twisted around negatively. Song poems which do not fulfill basic demands with respect to form, style, content, age, and (lack of ) authorship are therefore not ballads at all, or perhaps somewhat, but not enough. By reviewing the above points in turn, we may then begin to assemble what might be called a ballad gate or fence with multiple posts dug in, designed to repel a plethora of old songs. Is the poem “Nordic” (i.e., was it at no point translated or derived from any other non-Nordic language)? Does it tell a whole story, rather than a mere sequence of events? Does it have a single, stable refrain (or does the poem show decadent influence, such as a refrain that shifts, perhaps even requiring a change of melody)? Is its strophic form of the old, accredited type, with two lines rhymed [a a] or four lines rhymed [x A y A]? (Or has some unballadic or over-refined poetic influence crept in, with a cross-rhymed form [a B a B]?4 Is the poem completely anonymous (or is there any indication of individual creativity found or suspected or attributed)? And so it goes, but of course most crucially: is the poem truly medieval?5 With respect to this last question, it has been asked by numerous folklorists: how are we to know ? The preReformation requirement runs immediately into difficulty, as Jonsson himself explains in detail, because of certain aspects of the extant Swedish material, which (with only quite minor exception) is not directly found in medieval sources. Sweden’s case thus echoes that of Denmark and the English and Scottish collections, of course.6 Partly because of the academic challenge, and perhaps partly due to a fervent wish, the subject of the ballads’ medieval origin has attracted serious attention.7 Nothing like the same attention has been focused on the opposite end of the ballad genre’s development. The latter is intertwined with the gatekeeping issue, which needs to be established before much can be said about the ballads that find themselves on the wrong side of the fence. So where did this fence come from? We may begin with a simple exercise in the Swedish material, addressing the issue faced by the two watershed sets of ballads published in the early decades of the nineteenth century: first that of A. A. Afzelius and E. G. Geijer, and then that of A. I. Arwidsson. The two collections represent the foundation of Swedish ballad scholarship. The collaboration by Afzelius and Geijer, Svenska Folk-Visor från Forntiden (or GA, as this edition is usually referred to) is truly unique, in interesting contrast to that of their neighbors and immediate predecessors, the Danish editors Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek of Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middelalderen (UDVM).8 The Danes had been explicitly re-editing old published songbooks by A. S. Vedel, P. Syv, and Mette Göje, with some

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   7

additions and an updated commentary. Afzelius (who apparently took on the role of organizing the Swedish material for the new ballad collection) was starting from scratch. For his 100 numbered Swedish songs, perhaps an oblique nod to Vedel’s so-called Hundredevisebog [The Book of a Hundred Songs] (1591), he had no way of knowing what would ultimately land on his desk in the 1810s, or indeed how he would best be able to organize it at all, let alone how to define exactly what it was that he and his friends had collected. That statement is an exaggeration, of course: Afzelius himself was one of the collectors, and mentions his love of the old folksongs and ballads he had heard as a child in Västergötland.9 Whatever faults were (and still are) attributed to Afzelius’s talent or lack thereof at his chosen task, his determination to prioritize his field workers’ notes over broadsides and to attempt to provide at least minimal provenance information and a collected melody for as many as possible of his acknowledged and numbered songs left its significant mark on Swedish balladry.10 He cast a significant side-glance at the massive Danish material, but would not—indeed, could not—simply assemble a Swedish counterpart to it.11 That his work was later improved on and expanded greatly by subsequent collectors and editors goes without saying, but we should give Afzelius’s impulse its due. The Danish Vedel-Syv collection had already cemented the concept of age and Nordic mythology as the keystones of the ballad genre.12 The frontispiece for the well-known Hundredevisebog in its later, expanded edition advertises 200 Viser om Konger, Kæmper oc Andre [200 Songs of Kings, Old Heroes and Others], and the title page emphasizes their battle exploits “fra Arilds Tid,” which is something like saying: from the beginning of time. The “age thing” is thus laid out, front and center. It was then up to Afzelius, within the short timetable he had decided upon for the production and the necessarily amorphous nature of the Swedish field notes he received, to quickly establish a Swedish ballad genre and some subcategories, in a way that would show how (or if ) his material reflected or even competed with the established collections of Sweden’s southern neighbor. He was to become the first Swedish gatekeeper for the ballad. From the Danes, Afzelius would have found the following rubrics: a) Kjæmpeviser [Heroic songs] (derived from the lives of giants or heroes or related to a mythical sphere) b) Trylleviser [Magical songs] (concerning supernatural or marvelous happenings)

8   James Massengale

c) Historiske Viser [Historical songs] (linked to specific events or known people in Nordic history) d) Ballader & Romantser [Ballads and romances] (concerning the Age of Chivalry) The fourth category was split by the editors, such that “Ballader” in Danish parlance referred to songs with a tragic outcome and “Romantser” to those with a happy solution.13 Despite this small distinction in nomenclature that would later be refined, the original Danish genre designation and its four-part classification system would remain stubbornly in place, as may be seen today in DgF. One might note in particular that the subcategory Legendeviser [Ballads of religious legendry] only crept into Grundtvig’s “Tryllevise”-volume at DgF 96, without particular fanfare, and that the jocular ballads as a category never crept in at all, as will be noted below. Whether or not Afzelius tried to apply the Danish classification system, his project could hardly follow it closely. GA, at the perspective of this distance of 200 years, is a folklorist’s goldmine—but also something of an editorial hodge-podge. One finds a number of rather odd editorial decisions, among which are the publication of clear variants of a single folksong under different song numbers, a decision at times to include—while at other times to exclude—songs of religious legendry from the numbered corpus, and the acceptance of a non-balladic popular song by Carelius, the “Hen-Lady’s Song,” apparently because Afzelius knew that so many people liked to sing it.14 Two other authored songs, Dahlstierna’s “Konungen och Herr Peder” (no. 29) and Odel’s “Malcom Sinclair” (no. 30) may be found as well in his balladic corpus—also because of their popularity—and these inclusions (and their hedging introductions) may lead us—or perhaps could have led us at an early point—toward a folklorist’s crossroads. Afzelius was well aware of the authorships. He speaks of the first of these as a “lycklig härmning” [well-done imitation] of ballad style and meter, and of the second he notes: “För sitt poetiska värde, sin vackra gamla Melodi och såsom en redan öfver ett halft Århundrade allmänt känd och älskad Folkvisa, upptoges här detta stycke, fastän, strängt enligt planen, ej tillhörande denna Samling” [For its poetic value, its lovely old melody and as a generally known and beloved folksong for now over a half century, this piece is included, although, strictly according to plan, not rightfully in this collection].15 The issue of Afzelius as a reluctant gatekeeper—by today’s standards, a reluctant gate-opener—for the concept of the medieval Swedish ballad is thus one which has not been researched. It is particularly

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   9

difficult to know which ballads or “balladic” or “non-balladic” folksongs or popular songs he eliminated along the way.16 We must turn to his co-editor, Erik Gustaf Geijer, to get a notion of the genre the two collaborators had envisioned as the “Swedish folksong from the old times.” In addition to being one of Afzelius’s field collaborators, Geijer became the theoretician for GA. His sixty-page introduction to the collection was highly regarded by his contemporaries, but has not (at least to this date) been given attention in SMB, nor was it reviewed in Jonsson’s dissertation.17 His introduction is not only generally erudite, it appears sober and thoughtful. Geijer sidesteps any editorial glitches by his co-editor, insisting that it was “ett företag, hvaraf [Afzelius] tillhör hela äran och mödan” [an undertaking for which all the honor and the hard work belongs to (Afzelius)].18 His own contribution, he says, is only to supply a discussion of “begreppet om Folk-dikten” [the concept of folkpoetry] for the edition, and to make some basic observations. Beyond the neutral, generic title for all the songs in the collection—“Folkvisor” [Folksongs]—Geijer’s term for what later became to be known as the Swedish “ballads of chivalry” is “Romans” or “Romanz,” a term he used differently than the Danes had done: Romansen tillhör ursprungligen ej denna stam till namnet (det motsvarande Skandinaviska namnet är Wisa (Vise), det Tyska Lied, det Engelska och Skottska Ballad) men väl till saken; så vida Romansen är en berättelse i sång, såsom uttryck af en känsla eller lära [The romance did not belong originally to this (cultural/linguistic) branch in name (the corresponding Scandinavian name is Wisa or Vise, the German Lied, the English and Scottish Ballad) but rather in essence; insofar as the romance is a sung story representing a feeling or lesson].19

The knightly “romances” not only form the bulk of the collected Swedish material, but the moral framework which Geijer has found to be characteristic of the ballad genre. Geijer was convinced that the “lesson” supplied by the ballad is a Christian one, based in a cultural climate when all of Europe was united under the Roman Catholic church. When Geijer turns his attention to the ballads that refer to older, heathen elements connected to Eddic or mythological saga material, he uses the old term “kämpavisor” [heroic songs] for them, as the Danes had already done.20 But noting the paucity of the latter material in the volume going to press, he takes an interesting, negative stance in his observations:

10   James Massengale

För öfrigt, ehuru interessanta de egentligen så kallade kämpevisorna äro, såsom bevis på sagans liflighet i folkets minne, kan jag dock ej i dem finna det höga värde, som W. C. Grimm och de Danske utgifvarne dem tillägga. Det synes för väl, att den ursprungligt hedniska sagan förlorar sitt rätta förstånd i ett till Christendomen öfvergådt folks mun. Man ser allt för mycket, att de som i dessa visor besjunga en kolossal forntid, sjelfve äro utom den; hvarföre de också i allmänhet travestera den … och endera falla i matthet eller en löjelig öfverdrift, hvilka begge för den gamla sagan i sin äkta gestalt äro främmande. [Otherwise, however interesting the proper, so-called heroic songs are as a proof of the power of the sagas in the people’s memory, I cannot find in them the great value that W. C. Grimm and the Danish editors (of UDVM) attribute to them. It is too obvious that the original heathen saga loses its rightful meaning in an oral tradition of a people who have been converted to Christianity. One sees too clearly that those who sing in these songs about a colossal ancient time are themselves disconnected with it, so they also make a travesty of it as a rule … and either fall into insipidity or into a ridiculous exaggeration, both of which are foreign to the old saga in its genuine form.]21

Not only does Geijer here cut through some Romantic theory used by other ballad editors of his generation, he sets up a framework for a progressive reversal of the standard categories used by Svend Grundtvig a generation later for DgF.22 Grundtvig was of course well aware of the difference between the proposed age of any individual ballad text and the hypothesized age of a ballad category. But that the category of the heroic ballads is quite “disconnected” with the age and mythical culture it represents, as Geijer puts it, was a fresh idea for his time. Specifically, Geijer refers to GA’s ballad no. 4: “En sådan travestering of kämpalifvet företer äfven den enda visa af detta slag, som förekommer i denna samling, neml. den om Grimborg (No: 4.) och det med en temmeligen merkbar ironi; hvilken i ännu senare produkter af detta slag, t. ex. i den bekanta visan om Ramunder, blir allt mera högljudd.” [Such a travesty of the heroic is found in the single folksong (of the “kämpavisa” type) in this collection, namely the one about Grimborg (no. 4), and made with a rather noticeable irony; which, in still later products of this type, for example in the well-known song about Ramund, becomes increasingly obvious.]23 Travesty and exaggeration is their keynote, and the argument for their ancient heritage is

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   11

tenuous. Geijer makes no attempt to argue that these travesties had to have been serious ballads from the beginning, nor that they might ostensibly have lost some of their sheen over centuries of oral transmission. His implication is that the “kämpavisor” were conceived in a satirical vein. His argument could therefore be used in support of a continuum of travesty, politics and humorous engagement with written and oral sources contributing to the whole “kämpavisa”-concept.24 The second great Swedish ballad collection, Arwidsson’s Svenska fornsånger (SF), reflects the rapid development of folklore research in Sweden during the intervening 15 years after GA, as well as the talent of L. C. Rääf, one of the most remarkable of the nineteenth-century folklorists.25 Arwidsson’s work shows the felicitous advantage of a well-planned overview for a compendious collection. But it is more than this. While explicitly prioritizing in his first two volumes the “folkvisor, hvilkas grundton är episk eller historisk” [folksongs, the principal characteristic of which is epic or historical], his third volume opens out into two areas neglected—or rejected—by Afzelius: the lyrical ballads from the old manuscripts, and the jocular ballads, many of which were still widely sung. Both of these categories in turn merge into Arwidsson’s remarkable collection of sung folk dances and games, often with ballad refrains, little stories, and dramatic dialogs. This open-gated approach, to collect and publish everything folkloric that could be found, supplied the impetus for a long line of assiduous folklorists to follow, from Wiede and Dybeck to their twentieth-century counterparts such as Greta Dahlström in Swedishspeaking Finland and Märta Ramsten in Sweden.26 It is too late to speculate what might have hapened to the Swedish ballad corpus, had this progressive argument won the day. But DgF soon became established as the central Nordic ballad project, and its distinguished gatekeepers, Svend Grundtvig and his subsequent editorial cohorts, by the sheer weight of their combined academic prowess and acknowledged authority, established the concepts of the “DgF-type” and the “DgFnumber,” the parameters for the definitive collection and codification of ballads in all of the eastern portion of the Nordic region.27 “Danmarks ældste poetiske Literatur er den Kreds af Folkesange fra Middelalderen, som sædvanlig benævnes Kæmpeviser” [Denmark’s oldest poetic literature is the ring of folksongs from the Middle Ages, usually referred to as “Kæmpeviser”], as Svend Grundtvig put it at the beginning of the publishing project that would continue for 123 years.28 Grundtvig’s exemplary, modern technique in publishing “alt hvad der er – alt som det er”

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[everything that there is—everything just as it is] has been rightfully regarded as a unique model for folklorists everywhere.29 We must distinguish, however, between the progressively conceived variant apparatus and the conservative frame that determines where a ballad is placed in the massive corpus, or if it is placed anywhere at all. Two large categories of ballads—the “Skæmteviser” [jocular songs] and the amorphous “Efterklangsviser” [ballad echoes]—were categorically excluded from DgF, but were organized into a “Registrant” [registry] of gatekept, supposedly younger balladic material at the Danske Folkemindesamling, where they lay (and still lie) in uneasy and partially overlapping conjunction with the accepted and numbered songs. As is well known, Grundtvig used the problematical criterion of age as the organizing principle for the 539 numbered types of ballads ostensibly found in Denmark. The “Kæmpeviser” were considered the oldest group, the “Trylleviser” [magic/supernatural ballads] next, the historical ballads fell into a third category beginning with great age, and the “Ridderviser” [chivalric ballads] were considered to be too difficult to assign particular historical dates. The search for great age (quite obviously in conceptual conflict with Geijer’s conclusions from a generation before) colored the individual ballad commentaries as well. If the ballad categories are removed from the search, the argument changes slightly, but its contours remain: the “real balladry” was by this token to have been conceived deep in the Middle Ages; after some centuries, “productive balladry” ceased around the Nordic Reformation (early decades of the sixteenth century), and a period of “reproductive” or memorized balladry followed, gradually losing its life force by about 1700. The eighteenth century was characterized as a period of rejection of the old songs on the part of the upper classes, who turned to newer poetic forms, while the peasant class continued to sing old memorized ballads, but less and less, as they gradually forgot the lengthy texts. When Bengt R. Jonsson compiled the material that would become his thesis and later support the SMB edition, the Grundtvigian model was no longer possible to uphold rigorously. Jonsson took a middle-ground position. He chose to accept the Grundtvigian mantra of “otvivelaktigt medeltida ursprung” [undeniably medieval origin], while allowing that “enstaka ballader a priori antas ha tillkommit senare” [certain ballads a priori are considered to have come into being later]. The strict definition allows as well “ett antal s. k. skämtvisor, vilka endast somliga forskare velat räkna till balladen men som i detta arbete inte helt skall förbigås” [a number of so-called jocular songs, which according to some researchers

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   13

should be counted as ballads, but which in this (dissertation) shall not be completely excluded]. Yet another gatekept category is “en mer eller mindre ingripande nydiktning” [a more or less far-reaching new poetic production]. Jonsson refers obliquely here to the principal categories of Grundtvig’s Registrant, and apparently supports its gatekeeping basis. These borderline categories were de facto initially excluded from the new Swedish corpus, because Jonsson refers their discussion largely to “part II” of his dissertation, a work that has never appeared. 30 His conservative stance had the felicitous effect, however, of making the enormous Swedish corpus at least manageable. By applying the Grundtvigian categories, Jonsson could return to the problem traced by the early Romantics and sort out the material that was to become SMB. He gave the two publications, GA and SF, special attention in a song-by-song review, establishing when possible the provenance of each text and melody, and (not least) evaluating the quality and the balladic genre category in each case. It is important to note that while both Afzelius and Arwidsson mention their hesitation for printing or assigning type-numbers to some individual songs, as a kind of warning to their readership in borderline or apparently spurious cases, Jonsson makes the gatekeeping function categorical. If a Swedish song is not assigned a DgF-type number or a new Swedish type number in his dissertation, it disappears from the corpus. The borderline area is described briefly, with a few salient examples, in a chapter called “Pastischer och falsifikat” [pastiches and falsifications]. 31 We learn there that there are still other categories: “yngre visa” [younger song ], as well as “ballad efterklang” [ballad echoes] and “balladefterbildningar” [ballad imitations], to which we might also add Grundtvig’s “Efterslæt” [late harvest], applied to DgF 518−39. Jonsson notes that the gatekeeping work is difficult and that the borderlines are diffuse: “Gränsen mellan ballad och balladefterklang är i vissa tillfällen icke helt lätt att uppdraga. Stundom kommer också vad som kan misstänkas vara i senare tid vid skrivbordet diktade pastischer in i bilden, så att frågan rörande en viss bestämning kan bli: ballad, balladefterklang, eller balladpastisch?” [The line between ballad and ballad echo is in some cases not completely easy to draw. Sometimes there appear what might be suspected to be pastiches written in later times at a desk, so the question regarding a categorization can be: (is it) a ballad, a ballad echo, or a ballad pastiche?]32 The question comes quickly to mind, however, whether reasonable and sensible hesitations about individual songs’ ballad authenticity constitutes a legitimate ground for their banishment forever from our reach as

14   James Massengale

researchers? Or to reverse the question: since the gatekeeping exercise is so complex and so uncertain, and since in spite of every effort to maintain it, a number of arguably illegitimate songs have undoubtedly attained the status of numbered ballads, should the ballad researcher not abandon the authenticity exercise entirely, and deal with the extant material based on ballad-strophe songs, broadly defined? Or whatever happened to the dictum “everything there is—everything just as it is”? Certainly Jonsson did more than most ballad scholars even could dream of accomplishing, as he labored for decades to provide an optimal answer to an impossible question. Working through every twist and turn in the collecting and recording of those Swedish ballads deemed authentic, Jonsson arrived at a superb corpus of 219 types. But his decision to adhere to DgF’s flawed schematic and its gatekeeping procedure left some painful problems, and created for Swedish balladry a shadow-corpus, the outline of which may be seen below. In the case of GA, the following list of discarded songs may be culled from Jonsson’s notes:33 GA 5  “Skön Anna” (“Skön Anna hon går till sjöastrand”) [“Ballad echo”; DgF 258] GA 20  “Konungabarnen” (“Det voro två ädla konungabarn”) [“Ballad echo”] GA 29  “Konungen och Herr Peter” (“Herr Peter han drömde en dröm om en natt”) [probably: “Ballad pastiche,” by a known author (Dahlstierna)] GA 30  “Malcom Sinclair” (“Sist, när på ljuvlig blomsterplan”) [undoubtedly: song not in ballad meter, by a known author (Odel)] GA 31  “Oväntad Bröllopsgäst” (“Det var två såta vänner”) [“Ballad echo”; Ekl. B 47]34 GA 40  “Slottet i Österrik” (“Det ligger ett Slott i Österrik”) [“Ballad echo”; Ekl. A 5] GA 41  “Den förtrollade Prinsessan” (“Jag vet väl hvar, som står ett Slott”) [“Ballad echo”; DgF 57] GA 42  “Den Hedniska Konungsdottern i Blomstergården” (En hednisk Konungsdotter båld”) [“Ballad echo”; Ekl. A 4] GA 44  “Riddaren Bryning” (“Det var en gång en Riddare, en Riddare Son”) [“Ballad echo”; Ekl. B 96] GA 47  “Herr Heimer och Margreta” (“Stolts Margreta sitter i högan lofts sal”) [“Ballad pastiche”]

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   15

GA 61  “Om Brunkebergs slag” (“Willen ij höra, hvad iagh wil göra”) [possibly “younger,” or metrically unballadic]35 GA 64  “Gothlands Visan” (“Wi klaghe thet alle, för herrar och välde”) [possibly “younger,” or metrically unballadic] GA 65  “Thord Bondes mord” (“Then helga Trefaldighet med sin nådh”) [possibly “younger,” or metrically unballadic] GA 66  “Hönsgummans Visa” (“Hanar å hönor å kycklingar små”) [song not in ballad meter, by a known author (Carelius)] GA 76  “Vedergällningen” (“Om alla berg och dala de voro utaf gull”) [“Ballad echo”; DgF 306] GA 97  “Elisif Nunna i Risberga Kloster” (“I Östgjötha bodde en Herre så båld”) [“Ballad pastiche”; alternatively, ballad falsification]36 GA 100 “Stenen i grönan dal” (“I verlden medan vi lefve”) [undoubtedly: song not in ballad meter, of lyrical and moralizing content] With these seventeen exclusions—even reckoning with necessary adjustments in Afzelius’s corpus for obviously valid reasons—more than ten percent of GA has been consigned to a balladic limbo. The same gate, and about the same percentage, is closed before SF and the highly respected team of Arwidsson and Rääf: SF 11  “Herr Boo” (“Herr Boo han tala til svenarna små”) [“Ballad pastiche”] SF 42  “Skön Anna” (“Det bodde sju röfvare vid en strand”) [“Not a ballad”; DgF 258; TSB would modify this pronouncement to “Later ballad of German origin”] SF 93  “Johannes” (“Der bodde en skälm ibland alla”) [“younger song”] SF 115  “Konungabarnen” (“The vore två ädle konunge barn”) [“Ballad echo”] SF 119  “Den Öfvergifne” (“Jag var intet mer än på mitt femtonde år”) [“Ballad echo”] SF 120  “Det Hemliga Mötet” (“Jagh veet väll huar then suenn är”) [“younger song”] SF 121  “Wäktare-Varning” (“Then vintersnatt både kall och långh”) [“younger song”]

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SF 124  “Svennens Svek” (“Aldrig såg jag det gräset gro”) [“Ballad echo”] SF 130  “Jungfrun vid Källan” (“Jungfrun skulle vattnet hemta”) [“Ballad echo”] SF 144  “Riddaren och Hertigens Dotter” (“Jagh weet så rijk en riddare”) [“younger song”] SF 152  “Susanna i Babylon” (“I Babilon ther bodde en man”) [“younger song”] SF 158  “Slaget vid Stångebro” (“Lofvet vill jag begära”) [“younger song”] SF 159  “Konung Kristian IV:s anfall i Sverige” (“O Danmarck hör och marck”) [“younger song”] SF 160  “Slaget vid Narva” (“Czar Peter i Moscou en kämpe så rask”) [“younger song”] SF 161  “Slaget vid Helsingborg” (“Kong Fredric i Danmark han satt på sin stol”) [“younger song”] SF 162  “Konung Carl XII:s Fältmarsch” (“Marsch, bussar! gån på uti Herrans namn”) [“younger song”] SF 169  “Kämpen Hake” (“Hake han är en kämpe så båld”) [“Ballad pastiche”] SF 170  “Harald och Unge Thor” (“Unge Thor sitter på Vongaberg”) [“Ballad pastiche”] We thus find a rejection of 17 of 170 numbered songs from SF, volumes I–II, under the categories “not a ballad,” “ballad pastiche,” “younger song” and “ballad echo.”37 But having made the compendious ballad material manageable, Jonsson was then able to take the next step, coordinating the known Swedish materials with the already established DgF, and supplementing these with a new index of 34 indigenous types that had not found their way into the mother collection.38 In this way, a coordinated foundation was laid for the new Swedish edition. As SMB began to take shape at the Swedish Folksong Archive, the plan was made to expand the index to coordinate the balladry in all of the Nordic collections. This important idea, bolstered by the teamwork of Svale Solheim and Eva Danielson and others, became the indispensable handbook, The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad (TSB).39 The unique, crossreferenced guide with plot summaries in English makes sense out of the differing principles used to support both the Nordic countries with

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   17

finished editions (Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands) and those with unfinished plans at the time (Sweden, Norway, and Swedish-speaking Finland). Jonsson’s dissertation groundwork had been so reliable that the SMB-numbers could be entered into the TSB register before the first volume of the Swedish ballad edition was even published. However, TSB also bears witness to the fact that some of the early gateposts had been moved significantly. Religious ballads found their own category in the catalogue, next to the ballads of witchcraft and magic, which in turn became the “oldest” category. At the other end of the spectrum, Svend Grundtvig’s repository of “Skæmteviser” [jocular ballads] gained admittance as a new ballad category at the end, while the large group of “kämpavisor,” Grundtvig’s category of most ancient provenance, found itself re-defined and, by implication, degraded to a position next to the jocular ballads in the broadly sketched chronological sequence. “Humorous elements,” the editors wrote, “are to be found in many ballads grouped in both Group D [chivalric ballads] and Group E [heroic ballads or ‘kämpavisor’]. In fact, the burlesque character of some Group E ballads is especially striking.”40 The possibility of comic slippage was fully evident in the new descriptive catalogue, while at the same time, other standards of authenticity are retained without alteration. [W]e have employed the epithet medieval to refer to a typological age … [W]e have … somewhat arbitrarily accepted 1520 as the terminal date for the Middle Ages … An index of the medieval ballad must accordingly be based upon postmedieval sources … Consequently, we may have been too liberal when it came to including specific types in the catalogue. … On the other hand, we have excluded ballads written by authors known by name in postmedieval times and ballads treating events later than 1520. Songs of non-Scandinavian origin … which have become “balladized” in Scandinavia, are also excluded. In some cases, ballads have lost most or all of their narrative content … ; in other cases, purely lyrical songs have been created in the stanzaic form of the ballad: both of these categories have been excluded from TSB.

The editors are thus only too aware of the conundrum that a catalogue of medieval balladry must be based upon a post-Reformation corpus, the ancient societal and stylistic features of which could have been remembered as a heritage of old oral tradition, but just as often might have been—and probably were—produced by poets interested in creating only the illusion of antiquity, or indeed, sometimes satirically pretending to create an illusion of antiquity.

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Meanwhile, ballad identity boundaries had already been expanded and challenged by Danish folklorists by those last decades of the twentieth century. The complex of approaches taken by the Danes between the 1920s and the 1980s would properly require an exposition far beyond the limits of this short article. But sketched in broad strokes, it took the following paths. The DgF collection of texts was completed, in a certain sense, already in 1923. Hakon Grüner-Nielsen’s edition of volume IX, based on Grundtvig’s and Axel Olrik’s preparatory work, included the established, numbered Danish ballads 490−539, the now-famous endpoint for the collection. The Danish jocular songs (including, but not limited to material with balladic form) emerged during that period in two important publications: the orally collected songs from Jutland by E. T. Kristensen and the archival selection from manuscripts and broadsides by Grüner-Nielsen, the latter tying his selection specifically to Grundtvig’s Jocular Song Registrant.41 While not exhaustive, these works when taken together were at least sufficient to provide insight into the range—as well as the stumbling blocks— connected with the material. In Grüner-Nielsen’s conservative overview of the amorphous literature, he noted the difficulty in determining if a source is traditional or literary; if it constitutes a “half-private occasional song” or a poem designed for wider consumption as a broadside ballad. With regard to authenticity, Grüner-Nielsen was inclined, however, to stick to Grundtvig’s older model: “Jo længere vi kommer ned i Tiden efter det 16. Aarh. jo mere er det selvfølgelig at betragte som et blot Kuriosum, naar et skæmtsomt Emne bliver behandlet i middelalderlige Folkeviseversemaal” [The later in time we come to after the 1500s, the more it becomes apparent to consider it as a mere curiosity, when a jocular subject is treated in the form of a ballad from the Middle Ages].42 Yet Grüner-Nielsen worked untiringly to bring great quantities of new song material to a twentieth-century Danish public. He was responsible for the important and massive edition of Danske Viser (DV), culled from the manuscripts of the nobility and the broadsides from 1530 to 1630.43 It was Grüner-Nielsen’s intent to complement DgF by publishing all the known material from that crucial early modern period that were not ballads, not religious songs, and not jocular songs, all of which he felt could be found in other publications. On the surface, it must have seemed a reasonable compromise at the time; and its six text volumes attest to the magnitude of the secular, lyrical corpus during that productive century. But the compromise was also a faulty one: Iørn Piø found a mass

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   19

of younger balladry in those volumes—once again, a shadow-corpus—of fifty-seven “ballad echo” types that could easily evade observation, having been gate-kept out of DgF by Grundtvig and then ostensibly excluded as a category in Grüner-Nielsen’s introduction.44 The shadowy existence of such ballads means that their relatively modern form and content is left outside balladic discussions, which in turn reinforces the conservative view of how balladry evolved—or devolved—over time. By the 1940s a change of attitude about all this was evident, for example, when Nils Schiørring began his search for the previously neglected melodies to Grüner-Nielsen’s text material.45 But the idea of looking at the entire Danish ballad corpus along “new paths” was left to Iørn Piø, whose dissertation from 1985 contains a summary of the Romantic and Grundtvigian heritage, and a rebellion against its premises. 46 Piø launched and supported a strong argument based upon two important ideas: 1. “at der i hvert århundrede siden det trettende og indtil slutningen af det attende er digtet viser i den gamle, middelalderlige markedsvisestil, før 1500 af markedssangere—de gamle folkeviser … —og efter 1500 af skillingsviseforfattere og af litterære mennesker … —i den gamle markedsviststil” [that in every century since the thirteenth and until the end of the eighteenth, songs in the old medieval market-song style were composed, before 1500 by market-singers (minstrels)— i.e., the old folksongs … —and after 1500 by broadside authors and by literary folks … in the old market-song style]. 2. “at det er folketraditionen … der har inspireret de musisk begavede, både professionelle og amatører, i adelsmiljøerne fra det femtende til det syttende århundrede til at skabe en adelsvisetradition” [that it is the folk tradition which has inspired the talented poets, both professionals and amateurs, in noble milieus from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century to create the tradition of the songbooks of the nobility].47 Piø’s thesis not only turned the “gesunkenes Kulturgut” idea upside down, but made a clear opening for a long-standing, medieval jocular tradition and a close creative interaction at an early point between the classes.48 On the other end of the scale, it allowed for the inclusion of literary (i.e., authored) material, and a time frame that recognized creative balladry in more recent times.49 Piø was not alone in the new movement; he references at least a half

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dozen folklorists and literary scholars who apparently independently found their thought heading along his “new paths”: Rubow (1936), Toldberg (1958), Meisling (1976), Sønderholm (1978), Holzapfel (1980), and Brask (1984), all of whom reflected the upheaval of the ballad genre that Piø formalized in his dissertation, although from differing points of view and providing differing degrees of substantiation of the new theory.50 Sweden, meanwhile, had followed a different path, but a felicitous and productive one in its own right. The oldest songbooks were published in diplomatic editions—unlike the highly edited DV volumes—without any categorization of their contents.51 These allowed researchers to make their own decisions about that vital early modern period for Swedish balladry and its closely related lyrical song corpus. Much later, the broadsides, with a careful registering of the various types of song material up to 1800 and without any restrictions at all, was cataloged by Margareta Jersild.52 The relatively late beginning for the publication of SMB then provided numerous advantages for the twenty-first-century researcher. First, some vital new collecting activity could be directly funneled into the core of the collection. Second, much of the jocular material, having been ungated in TSB, could become integrated into the core (nos. 220−63 in the much expanded edition), and the “kämpavisor” properly repositioned in the edition. At the same time, the songbooks of the nobility and from broadside printings could be compared textually in the chronological order of variants—or studied separately, using those publications mentioned directly above. As stated in the beginning of this essay, the edition will stand as a model—at least, for those principles upon which TSB was constructed. Given the sheer mass of the Nordic balladry now coordinated and published, there are plenty of projects within easy reach of the Scandinavian-speaking, folklore-trained twenty-first-century scholar— given that such a scholar follows the rules. However, another research area, more like a gravel path heading into a wilderness, is that of changing the rules. On the far side of TSB, outside the gateposts, still lies that shadow-corpus that this article has barely begun to describe. For what if the ballad genre did not “originate, flower, and decline” at all in the way that Grundtvig outlined? What if the old chivalric ballads largely emanated from what Bengt R. Jonsson once referred to as a “une seconde chivalrie,” rather than the old, initial chivalry?53 Or was there no “old, initial chivalry” in Sweden at all like those beloved balladic clichés? Those knights in blue capes tapping at the bower doors of proud maidens could have had little conceptual connection with

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   21

any real experience except in the erotic imagination of much later songsters. When we accept the idea that the ballads were all authored (as many folklorists have said for some time), the only reason to think they are anonymous in the modern sense is that the authors’ or jesters’ names were unimportant to remember or credit, until at least the end of the 1600s; or that the names were known and respected at one time only in smaller circles and gradually were lost as songs were passed on orally or paper copies were made (as happened with so many poems and songs of every type in the manuscripts well into the eighteenth century as well). What if the criterion of giving a new ballad a “fornåldrig prägel” [ancient appearance] is not a new, decadent phenomenon employed only by modern falsifiers and plagiarists, but was also common to the 1500s—or even the 1400s?54 What if “serious” and “satirical” is another false distinction? Following Piø: what if the 1600s comprised not a period of decay, but rather an intensively creative period for all types of poetry, including balladry? What if the gated-out stanzaic form “abab” is not “un-balladic,” but rather one of a series of poetic innovations, as the ballad developed and flourished, increasingly experimentally, during the post-Reformation period? What if a new wave of interest in the 1700s began with a certain nostalgia for the past, but also combined with other poetic impulses to imitate a more recent “ancient” past such as the 1500s—or the sixteenth century’s own imitation of an imagined ancient chivalry? What if the authors of the 1700s found this retrospective view useful as a means to spur them to still newer innovations in ballad poetry for their flourishing contemporary table song tradition?55 This line of questioning leads me to conclude with a single, speculative progression connected with the beginning of this essay. What if a younger, or even a newly composed imitation chivalric ballad about “Flores og Margreta” was current in Denmark in the late 1500s?56 What if a Swede did a creative, sentimental translation of this song from the Danish and it caught on in Sweden in the following generation?57 What if this new Swedish ballad, boosted by some broadsides and a nice tune, was popular enough that one of the poets in the court of Charles XII heard it, and found it useful as the basis for a new political ballad about the King’s victory at Narva?58 What if this authored ballad, despite its complexity as an allegorical encomium, was whittled into a real folksong and sung all over Sweden during the 1700s and collected—with that caveat about its balladic status—as no. 29 in GA?59 What if a talented poet like Dalin then heard this supposed “kämpavisa” in the 1730s and found it useful

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for a whole series of new table songs? For this last supposition, at least, there is not the slightest doubt. We may assume that Dalin heard some orally transmitted variant of the Narva ballad, since his own imitative ballad compositions were undoubtedly designed as songs. So Dalin initially responded with a jolly “kämpavisa” about two young heroes on their way in a two-wheeled buggy to a dance; driving too fast, they had smashed their vehicle and ended their journey in a puddle.60 Whether or not this satire achieved any sort of folksong status is uncertain. But anonymous copies are found in numerous eighteenth-century manuscripts, a good indicator that it was sung widely, and by people who had no direct connection with those embarrassed noblemen. And the folk melody continued to attract new texts (not only by Dalin) throughout the century. But the final step in my argument, and in Dalin’s work with this strophic pattern and its melody—the three stanzas quoted at the beginning of this essay—dates from his activities at the royal Swedish court in the 1750s. Far from closing down Dalin’s poetic talent, as has sometimes been assumed, the court of Adolf Fredrik and Lovisa Ulrika was often a stimulus to his remarkable powers of verbal experimentation. His final restructuring of the old “kämpavisa” and the use of an orally transmitted melody gave him the poetic wherewithal to satirize a lady-in-waiting of somewhat dubious character—having her (or more likely, a male courtier pretending to be her) sing her petulant complaint to a delighted audience.61 The speculative progression sketched above is made possible by the identity of a single balladic strophe form and melody over a period of 250 years. This was by no means the principal way in which ballads ordinarily developed and morphed during the early modern period in Sweden; but it was certainly one way. There is an intimate connection between the “authentic” ballads or ballad variants involved and the not-so-authentic (depending on whom you ask about it) or intentionally satirical entertainments. But two points must be emphasized. First, all of the ballads or balladoids in the progression contain folkloric elements, whether or not their status is subsequently considered authentic and they are allowed inside the published balladry gates. And second, the songs depicted are both preservative and creative, with continual intertextual references and poetic innovations at work simultaneously. “The Scandinavian medieval ballad is an unusually well-defined genre,” Bengt R. Jonsson concluded at the apex of his career, with his extraordinary dissertation done, and with TSB and three volumes of the new SMB edition guided into print.62 If ballads appeared unusually welldefined by those last decades of the twentieth century, it was certainly

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   23

thanks to his tireless efforts to make that happen. For ballad enthusiasts of the twenty-first century, it may still be a question of some importance whether to consider the genre a conclusively well-documented art form or a gated community. The ballad strophe is indeed reasonably easy to spot on a written page or perceive in an oral performance, or indeed to define. The genre may still be up for grabs. NOTES “Kring Dalins balladpastischer,” a chapter in Hildeman’s book, Tillbaka till balladen (Stockholm: Sv. visarkiv, 1985), pp. 236−77. 2 Bengt R. Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, vol. 1. Balladkällor och balladtyper (Stockholm: Sv. visarkiv, 1967). It is a valuable companion-volume to SMB, especially in the absence of the projected commentary volumes. 3 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 1. His definition reflects that of Erik Dal in Nordisk folkeviseforskning siden 1800 (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1956), pp. 18f. 4 In normal parlance, the two four-stressed strophe lines are usually terminated in a masculine [a a] rhyme pair; but feminine rhymes [A A] are also possible. The four-line strophe often alternates four and three stresses, only rhyming lines 2 and 4 with feminine rhyme words [x A y A]; the mid-strophe refrain, if it exists, and the burden are unrhymed and show differing numbers of stressed syllables. 5 These questions were asked cogently long ago about the Danish material by Lauritz Bødker. See the online article, “Folkeviseforskningens problemer,” from a lecture delivered in 1975: www.balladeskolen.dk/boedker.htm 6 The interesting case of Iceland’s old rimur and the Faroe Islands’ new traditions stretch the Nordic boundaries, as is known; but both of those traditions lie outside the present argument. 7 See, in addition to Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, David Colbert’s The Birth of the Ballad: The Scandinavian Medieval Genre (Stockholm: Sv. visarkiv, 1998), and the excellent bibliography there. 8 E. G. Geijer and A. A. Afzelius, Svenska Folk-Visor från Forntiden, 3 vols; each volume has an appendix with printed music (Stockholm: [Strinnholm &] Häggström, the music printed by Åhlström, 1814−1816). Jonsson corrects the printed year for the completed publication to 1818, Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 467. Abrahamson, Nyerup, and Rahbek, Udvalgte Danske Viser fra Middelalderen, 5 vols., with a musical appendix at the end of vol. 5 (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1810−1814). 9 A. A. Afzelius, Minnen (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1901), especially p. 82 and 134; his work during the production period for GA is, in contrast, hardly touched upon. But the gaps during the years 1810−1818 are filled by the exhaustive research in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 400−513. 1

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The Danish editors of the contemporary UDVM had more difficulty in assembling a body of melodies for their texts. See the correspondence in the “Fortale” to the musical appendix in vol. 5 of that edition. 11 The fact that Sweden had early manuscript collections of songs, a counterpart to the Danish songbooks of the nobility, was apparently unknown to Afzelius at the early stages of the production of GA. See Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 485. 12 A. S. Vedel and P. Syv, eds. Et Hundrede udvalde Danske Viser … forøgede med det andet Hundrede Viser (youngest edition Copenhagen: Hopffner, 1787); Vedel’s Hundredevisebog had appeared in 1591. 13 UDVM vol. 3, p. 402. It would be tempting to suggest that the Danish editors found the “Romantser” to be younger as a category; but they only say that the tragic “Ballader” are taken from Mette Gjøe’s Tragica (1657). 14 Nos. 93 and 94 are variants of the same song. “Magdelena” (GA II: 229), “Underbar syn” (GA II: 233), and “Resan till Österlandet” (GA II: 235) are not numbered. The numbered corpus contains “Liten Karin” (no. 3), “Sanct Göran” (no. 60), “Duvans sång” (no. 70), “Staffans visa” (no. 99), and “Stenen i Grönan Dal” (no. 100). “The Hen-Lady’s Song” is no. 67. See also the long summary of criticisms in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 817−30. 15 GA I: 201 and 220, respectively. The “lovely old melody” was that of La Folia. 16 He probably closed the gate on the jocular ballads. See SMB 224A, 229A[?], 233A−C, 236A−B[?], 239A[?], 245A, 253C−D. Other types of exclusions would require intensive study of manuscript material, beginning with signum Vs 2:1−3 at the Royal Library in Stockholm. 17 Concerning the high regard, see for example Arwidsson’s remarks in the introduction to Svenska Fornsånger, 3 vols. (Stockholm: Norstedt, 1834−1842), vol. 1, p. v. See Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 410−526 passim, with regard to Geijer’s own activity as a collector for GA nos. 34, 48, 8 (variant 3), 49, 91 (variant 3), and 36, and Jonsson’s comment p. 418. Concerning Geijer’s 68-page introduction to the first volume of GA, Jonsson noted his intention to treat this material “i annat sammanhang” [on another occasion], for which I can find no publication (see Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 410, n. 82). 18 Geijer, “Inledning,” p. ii. 19 Geijer, “Inledning,” p. xxxiii. 20 The term “Kämpavisa”/ “Kiämpawisa” relates to Vedel’s usage in the Hundredevisebog (1591); but the term was also current in Sweden, as we see from Dahlstierna’s “Göta Kiämpa-Wisa” (1701) mentioned in this essay. 21 Geijer, “Inledning,” pp. xxxiv−xxxv. Cf. the stance of the Danish editors in UDVM vol. 5, pp. 2ff. 22 Geijer’s point of view was strongly promoted and expanded by Christian Molbech regarding the Danish material in a book-length review of the Danish edition. See his Bemærkninger over vore danske Folkeviser fra Middelalderen 10

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   25

(Copenhagen: Seidelin, 1823), especially pp. 48−53. Molbech also uses the term “Efterklang” [ballad echoes] on p. 113, for more recently composed ballads. This term is often attributed to Svend Grundtvig. 23 Geijer, “Inledning,” p. xxxv. Geijer’s opinion about the “Ramund” (or “Ranild”) song (DgF 28) has recently been discussed in an excellent new article by Lene Halskov Hansen, “Ironi og forvirring i 1800-tallet—perspektiver på viseforskningens alvor og almuens humor,” in En alldeles egen och förträfflig National-Musik, ed. Märta Ramsten and Gunnar Ternhag (Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien, 2015), pp. 113−34. 24 Something like Geijer’s polemic point of view, expanded to include the entire Nordic region, may be found in Vésteinn Ólason’s article, “Literary Backgrounds of the Scandinavian Ballad,” in The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. Joseph Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), pp. 116−38. Of particular interest with respect to ballads of a satirical or humorous nature is the work of Iørn Piø, which is treated below. 25 A. I. Arwidsson, Svenska fornsånger. Rääf had been contacted by Afzelius, but showed reluctance to send him any significant amount of material from his enormous field collection. The music editor for Arwidsson was Erik Drake, also a close friend of Rääf ’s. 26 There may have been an important Danish heads-up for Arwidsson’s attitude here as well. Nyerup had followed his work on the “kæmpeviser” with an important edition of newer songs, many of which were found with ballad strophes. See R. Nyerup, ed., Udvalg af Danske Viser fra Midten af det 16de Aarhundrede til henimod Midten af det 18de, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Schultzske Officin, 1821). 27 And including Norway in this case. The Icelandic and Faroese ballad text collections pose a different kind of problem for the researcher, and lie outside the argument of this essay. 28 “Forord,” p. v of the “first booklet of the first part” of DgF (1853). 29 See, for example, Erik Dal’s chapter on Svend Grundtvig in Nordisk folkeviseforskning siden 1800 (Copenhagen: Schultz, 1956), pp. 66−73; his publishing formula quoted here is placed by Dal in direct contrast to a criticism by Chr. Molbech, see p. 69. 30 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 3, footnotes 2, 3, and 4. 31 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 675−704. 32 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 675. A similar hesitation is noted in his following chapter, pp. 775−91. Jocular ballads, song games and (once more) “ballad echoes” were relegated to Chapter 12 in the projected “Part II” of his work. 33 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 802−15. I have added Jonsson’s reasons for individual rejections, or my own guesses, based on his research, when no reason is given. 34 The abbreviation “Ekl. B 47” and similar type notations are nowhere explained in Jonsson’s dissertation. They derive from Grundtvig’s “Registrant” of numbered “Efterklangsviser” in the Folkemindesamling in Copenhagen. Ekl. A

26   James Massengale

refers to biblical, religious and moral songs; Ekl. B to secular songs and Ekl. C to historical songs. See Nils Schiørring, Det 16. og 17. århundredes verdslige danske visesang, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Thaning & Appel, 1950), vol. 1, p. 50ff., where a more comprehensive breakdown of the concept is given. 35 There are no grounds for exclusion given in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition; the possibilities for this exclusion and that of the following two songs are from Karl-Ivar Hildeman, Politiska visor från Sveriges senmedeltid (Stockholm: Gerber, 1950), p. 205. That GA 61 and 64, which share the same strophic form, are not in a strophic form that is related to balladry is not at all certain; that of GA 65 is more difficult to analyze. 36 The latter designation is found in Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 685, where the ballad is discussed in depth. 37 The difference between the Danish “Efterslæt” [late harvest, DgF 518−39], “Efterklang” [ballad echo], influenced by Grundtvig’s “Registrant,” and “yngre visa” [younger song] is not, as far as I can determine, ever made entirely clear; but Jonsson made no claim that his combination of metric, stylistic and chronological criteria for exclusion were watertight ( Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 674ff.). 38 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, pp. 714ff.; the Swedish types are described on pp. 768−75. 39 Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim, and Eva Danielson, eds., The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue (Stockholm: Sv. visarkiv, 1978). In addition to the then complete publications of Danish, Icelandic, and Faroese balladry, the catalogue provides a key to SMB which was begun five years later, as well as Astrid Nora Ressem’s edition of Norske middelalderballader: Melodier, I–(IV) (Oslo: Norsk folkeminnelag, 2011–). 40 TSB, “Introduction,” p. 17. 41 Evald Tang Kristensen, Et Hundrede Gamle Danske Skjæmteviser (Århus: Zeuner, 1901); H. Grüner-Nielsen, Danske Skæmteviser, I:1−2 (Copenhagen: Luno, 1927−1928). The planned second (commentary) volume of GrünerNielsen’s edition never appeared. 42 Grüner-Nielsen, Danske Skæmteviser, I:2, p. iii.
 43 H. Grüner Nielsen, ed., Danske Viser fra Adelsvisebøger og Flyveblade 1530−1630, 7 vols. (Copenhagen: Nielsen & Lydiche, 1912−1931; rpt. 1979), “Plan for Udgaven,” vol. I, pp. vi−vii. 44 Piø’s critical essay, apparently from 1979, is printed as an appendix to the reprint edition of DV, in vol. VII, pp. 321−42, with the “shadow corpus” identified and listed on pp. 326−27. 45 Nils Schiørring, Det 16. og 17. århundredes verdslige danske visesang, I−II (Copenhagen: Thaning & Appel, 1950). 46 Iørn Piø, Nye veje til Folkevisen (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1985). 47 Piø, Nye veje til Folkevisen, p. 21.

Swedish Ballad Authenticity and Its Gatekeepers   27

“Gesunkenes Kulturgut,” the well-known term for supposed folkloric productivity and decay, is attributed to a German nationalist, Hans Naumann: “Volksgut wird in der Oberschicht gemacht,” he stated categorically in Grundzüge der deutschen Volkskunde (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1922), p. 5. 49 Piø refers to Henrik Schück, who as a philologist was reluctant to attribute any poem in an old manuscript to an age older than the manuscript itself, unless there were special criteria that proved the contrary (Piø, Nye veje til Folkevisen, p. 21). 50 Piø, Nye veje til Folkevisen, p. 316, fn. 59; the references to the other authors may be found in his “Litteraturfortegnelse,” pp. 323−26. A quite critical review of the dissertation by Bengt R. Jonsson appeared in Sumlen 1986, pp. 166−70. But Piø’s fundamental points quoted above are not specifically refuted there. 51 A. Noreen, H. Schück, J. A. Lundell, and A. Grape, eds. 1500- och 1600-talens visböcker, 3 vols. (Stockholm: Norstedt and Uppsala: Berling, 1884−1925). 52 Margareta Jersild, Skillingtryck: Studier i svensk folklig vissång före 1800 (Stockholm: Sv. visarkiv, 1975). 53 Bengt R. Jonsson, “Oral Literature, Written Literature,” in The Ballad and Oral Literature, ed. Joseph Harris (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 161. 54 Jonsson, Svensk balladtradition, p. 682, citing Schück, Sv. litt. hist. 1890, p. 369. The third, revised edition is Schück and Warburg, Illustrerad sv. litteraturhistoria, I (Stockholm: Geber, 1926−1927), and the discussion of stylistic uncertainty is found on pp. 295ff. 55 Hildeman leans in this direction when he concludes that “Dalins hovkretsar nog kände balladen, men få ballader” [Dalin’s circles at the (Swedish) court certainly knew the ballad, but only few (actual) ballads], p. 275. 56 DgF 86, “Flores og Margrete,” is a Tryllevise [magical ballad](!) in the accredited corpus. It is found in Karen Brahe’s folio as no. 69, with the refrain “Y lader eder myndis, y soffuer saa gierne y skøne fruer deres arm!” [You call to mind, (how) you so gladly (would) sleep in the arm of lovely ladies]. The Danish melody has not been recorded. Grundtvig’s headnotes express rather great skepticism about the age of the ballad, that “kan nærmest betragtes som en Efterklang af den berømte Tristrams-Roman” [can properly be considered an echo of the famous novel about Tristan] (DgF, II:423). 57 SMB 190, “Florens Benediktsson och fru Margareta,” is reclassified as a chivalric ballad, in the accredited corpus. The translated refrain reads: “i hafven thet väl hört, at florens bär sorgen för henne” [You have surely heard, that Florens bears sorrow for her]. 58 This is, of course, Gunno Dahlstierna’s “Giöta Kiämpa-Wisa” from 1701. Although now considered “authored,” it was spread anonymously at the time, not least via broadsides. See Jersild, Skillingtryck: Studier i svensk folklig vissång före 1800, pp. 308f., and Hildeman, Tillbaka till balladen, pp. 262ff. The characteristic 48

28   James Massengale

refrain for the political ballad is “J hafven det väl hört, att Carl kung bar sorgen för henne” [You have surely heard that King Carl bore sorrow for her]. 59 And gatekept by Jonsson, as noted above. The result is that even the orally transmitted melody for GA no. 29, collected by Afzelius’s team, is not recognized in SMB as a legitimate variant of the ballad melody for “Florens och Margareta.” Unfortunately, Afzelius did not print a complete text from the field collection that brought him the melody. 60 Olof von Dalin, Samlade Skrifter: Poesi, I:2, ed. I. Carlsson, J. Massengale, G. Carlsson, and B. Sjönell (Stockholm: Sv. vutterhetssamfundet, 2017), pp. 73−76. 61 Karl-Ivar Hildeman’s negative opinion about the folkloric value of this “anti-ballad” stands in sharp contrast to the above argument; see Hildeman, Tillbaka till balladen, pp. 264f. 62 Jonsson, “Oral Literature, Written Literature,” p. 140.

Chapter 2

The Relationship of the Anomalous Ballad Þorgeirs rímur [Stjakarhöfða] to Áns rímur bogsveigis1 Shaun F. D. Hughes

M

ANUSCRIPT AM 569 a 4to in the Arnamagnæanan collection contains a fragmentary and incompletely remembered poem with the title Þorgeirs rímur to which the manuscript collector Árni Magnússon (1663−1730) has added, in parentheses, [stjakarhỏfða].2 This poem seems to have come from Guðrún Hákonardóttir (1659−1745) from Sólheimar in Mýrdalur whom Árni had visited in 1704.3 In AM 153 8vo, which is a manuscript containing ballads from various sources, item 4 contains five ballads collected from Guðrún. 4 Additionally, there is a series of slips in Árni’s hand with notations concerning the poems in the manuscript. The slip designated “d” contains a list of poems which Árni wished to acquire from Guðrún, among them being [Rímur af] Þorgeire Stiakarhỏfða.5 Árni has crossed this title out and written “habeo” (I have it) beside it. Manuscript AM 569 a 4to is furthermore written in the same hand as item 4 in AM 153 8vo,6 so all the evidence points to Guðrún as the source for the poem. Þorgeirs rímur is in two fitts but incomplete. The first fitt is 60 stanzas but the second is only three, and there are explanatory prose links of varying lengths between stanzas 23−24, 27−28, 34−35, 35−36, 40−41, 43−44, 50−51, 51−52, 53−54 of the first fitt, and between stanzas 1−2, 2−3, and after 3 of the second one.7 The poem is followed by two additional prose passages each in a different hand, but which Bjarni Einarsson considers to have been written under the supervision of Árni Magnússon by two of his scribes.8 The second of the two passages must have been written first despite its position in the manuscript and it is headed by the signature “A. Magnæus” in Árni’s hand. The first person narrator (that is, Árni Magnússon) says that he had heard a story about Þorgeir stjakarhöfði when he was young from his father’s brother, Leirulækja-Fúsi.9 The story takes place in the time of a King Ólafur, Tryggvason presumably, and Árni

30   Shaun F. D. Hughes

had heard it said that this was all there was of the story.10 King Ólafur was passing by some cliffs or anchored off them. Neither the king nor his men paid any attention until the ship was half-way or more drawn into the rock face. The inhabitant of the cliff (bergbúi) was using his magic to draw the crew in. One of the crew members, Þorgeir, seized a yard-arm or beam (ás). He placed one end on the cliff-face and the other against his chest. The magic of the bergbúi continued to draw the ship in, but Þorgeir stood firm. Eventually, the beam crushed Þorgeir’s chest, but in that instant the ship came free and the king and the crew were saved. For this reason Þorgeir was given the by-name “stjakarhöfði” (head-land of the beam), that is the land (his chest) against which the beam was positioned, which is why I have translated it “bulwark.”11 The first of the two passages is headed “Þetta vantar við relationina” (this is missing in the story). King Ólafur Tryggvason lies anchored under some cliffs when an old man comes out of the cliff and greets him. The king asked where he lived, and was told, in the cliff. Then the king asked how many people lived with him and the old man answered: Eg hef tólf bátar fyrir landi og tólf men eru á hverjum báti, tólf selur drepur hver maður og í tólf lengjur er skorinn hver selur, og hver lengja er skorinn í tólf stykki. Þá eru tveir um toddan og teldu þar af kóngur.12 [I have twelve boats off the land / and twelve men are in each boat, / each man catches twelve seals / and each seal is cut into twelve strips, / and each strip is cut into twelve pieces. There are two for each piece, / and work that out there, Sire.]

While the king was trying to work this out, the old man enchanted the king’s ship into the cliff as far as the mast, at which point the king had an answer. And here the passage ends. The story of King Ólafur and the troll is found elsewhere in Scandinavia, and particular interest here is the Faroese ballad, “Trøllini í Hornalondum.”13 In three of the versions, the hero who deals with the troll is “Tormann skvald” or “hin ungi Tormaður,” that is, the poet Þormóður Kolbrúnarskáld Bersason.14 If this identification is correct, then the king must be Ólafur Haraldsson, but in CCF 28E.4 (1:577), the king is specifically identified as “Ólavur Tryggvason,” who also seems to be the king

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ANOMALOUS BALLAD ÞORGEIRS RÍMUR  31

in two other versions where his ship is identified as “Ormin langi.” 15 However, it matters little which King Ólafur it is, for there is no Þorgeir, and the encounter of the king and his crew with the troll is told otherwise than in the Icelandic version recorded by Árni. Pálmi Pálmason said it was not at all clear that the Þorgeir of Þorgeirs rímur and the Þorgeir of the tale related by Árni Magnússon were the same individual, even if Árni seemed to think that this was the case, as there are other Þorgeirs who just as likely to be the one intended.16 Bjarni Einarsson points out that the person who recorded the poem gives no indication that Þorgeir has the by-name “stjakarhöfði” but that Árni may have thought that it belonged to this time period because the Hákon in the poem who worships the goddess Hörgðabrúður (stanza 1.29) is clearly meant to be Hákon Hlaðajarl Sigurðarson (ca. 937−995) whose de facto rule of Norway was interrupted by the return of Ólafur Tryggvason to Norway.17 There is, however, a Þorgeir stakahöfði mentioned in chapter 344 of the Flateyjarbók version of Ólafs saga Tryggvason as one of the builders of Ólaf ’s great warship, Ormurinn langi, although apart from his name little other information is given about him.18 Bjarni Einarsson says that the meaning of the by-name is unknown,19 but E. H. Lind in his volume on Icelandic by-names has a very plausible explanation, with the result that stakahöfði may be translated as “bobble-head.”20 In the light of this, the word stjakarhöfði looks like a folk etymology attempting to make sense of stakahöfði when the connection to the otherwise unrecorded noun *stǫk had been forgotten. The element höfði is now given a geographical rather than an anatomical interpretation, and it is possible to interpret the first part of the name as an irregular genitive of stjaki (pole).21 *** Yet none of this brings us any closer to Þorgeirs rímur, its form and content. Before turning to these matters in detail, a summary will be given of the contents of the poem. (Stanza numbers are shown in parentheses.) Fitt 1: Þórir wants to spend Christmas with jarl Hákon (1). When the jarl asks Þórir who is the large man sitting beside him (2), the individual responds that he is Þorgeir, an Icelander (3). The jarl replies that if such is the case, Þorgeir must be a wrestler (4). Þorgeir replies that he has never tried to wrestle (5). The jarl says he will have an opportunity the next day (6). Þorgeir answers that he will fight neither troll nor wizard nor slave (7), but rather have a free

32   Shaun F. D. Hughes

man against whom to test himself (8). The next day comes and Þórir says he will loan Þorgeir his wrestling jacket (fangastakkur)22 in case he has to face an Ethiopian (blámaður). He must not let Hákon trick him into taking it off (9−11). An Ethiopian in an iron collar is led out of the forest and a wrestling stone (fanghella) placed on the field (12−13).23 It says in the story (þáttur), the Ethiopian nails the head of his barbed spear to the shaft.24 He whistles and shouts at Þorgeir and howls to the four quarters (14). They wrestle and Þorgeir is protected by his garment. He will not let Hákon persuade him to remove it (15−18). Þorgeir is pushed up to the wrestling stone. When he feels his heels against it, he leaps over it backwards, pulls the Ethiopian across and splits him in two (19−21). He throws the top half of the body at Hákon, knocking out two of his teeth (22). The jarl would have captured him had not Þórir arrived with four hundred men (23). Þórir says he cannot protect Þorgeir from Hákon, but will send him to the widow, Ragnhildur, who lives near Heiðarskógur and will give him a horse, Krákur (24−27). Hákon discovers by magic where Þorgeir is and casts a spell so that Krákur’s legs are ensnared in herfjötur (28−30).25 Þorgeir carries Krákur to Ragnhildur’s house on his back (31−33). There he finds the place is being terrorized by Hárekur, a man who wishes to marry Ragnhildur (34 and prose). She says that Þorgeir will not sleep with her until he has proved the equal of his foster-brother [presumably Þórir] (35). Hárekur says he has been frequently chased and dares not go into Heiðarskógur, but Þorgeir asks if Hárekur will follow him into the forest (36−37). They come to a stable and find fifteen horses there (38). They do not let this bother them. Þorgeir places his horse in the stable and chases the others out (39). Þorgeir wants to know how many people are there. He has heard mention of the brothers Rauður and Svartur and eight others (40 & prose). Svartur says he will give Þorgeir three horses and six marks of gold if he will leave the forest with greater honor (41). Hárekur says he will accept and leave, but Þorgeir says that would be accepting a coward’s way out (42−43). They ask each other their names. Svartur refuses, for he knows Þorgeir wants Svartur to be afraid of him (44). All Þorgeir will say of himself is that he is a kitchen fool from Iceland (45).26 Svartur praises him and says he is no fool. Svartur has never been to Iceland to test his sword although he has heard that men there fight courteously and kill many (46−47). Then he asks if he is the Þorgeir who killed the jarl’s Ethiopian. Þorgeir replies that he will not listen to Svartur’s moody speech any longer. They have squabbled for a long time and now go outside (48−50). Svartur and Rauður watch Þorgeir and Hárekur fight their band of men.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ANOMALOUS BALLAD ÞORGEIRS RÍMUR  33

Þorgeir has the axe called “The sound of Slíður”27 (prose & 51). He and Hárekur kill four. Rauður fights with Hárekur and kills him. Þorgeir kills Rauður. He and Svartur talk (prose). Svartur asks Þorgeir if he will take off his fangastakkur if he, Svartur, takes off his coat of mail (brynja). They do so (52−53). They fight without protection, wounding each other, but Þorgeir cuts off Svartur’s foot (prose). Before he dies, Svartur reveals that his father is jarl Ævar in Hálogaland and Ölvir in Heiðarskógur is his foster-father. He gives Þorgeir a knife and belt to take to the latter (54−56). Svartur wants Þorgeir to marry his sister, Æsa, who is as fair as the lily. He gives Þorgeir his embroidered cap to give to her (57−58). He asks Þorgeir to cut off his head and to bury all the dead in a mound (59). Þorgeir takes the belt and knife and the ríma is brought to an end (60). Fitt 2: Þorgeir cuts off Svartur’s head without delay. This seems to him to have been his greatest achievement (1). He buries the dead and goes to Ölvir Svartsfóstri who takes him for Svartur (prose). Þorgeir does not conceal his killing of Svartur (2). Ölvir answers that it is good he has not lied. He will get jarl Ævar to hang Þorgeir (3). Next Þorgeir finds Æsa and gives her Svartur’s gift. He meets jarl Ævar and is well received by him so that he marries the jarl’s daughter, Æsa (prose).

*** There has been scholarly disagreement over how to classify Þorgeirs rímur. Jón Þorkelssson declared that it belonged among the early rímur and discussed them along with poems such as Móðars rímur and Illuga rímur eldhúsgoða.28 Björn K. Þórólfsson, on the other hand, rejects Þorgeirs rímur for inclusion in his comprehensive study of the early rímur because he claims that the poem does not belong there since the rímur “eru eins konar millistig á milli dansa og rímna, en munu vera ungt fornkvæði, sem breytist hefur undir áhrifum rímna, líklega á 17. öld.”29 The most important part of this statement is that Björn considers the poem a ballad and dates it to the early modern period.30 All subsequent studies of the poem have considered it a ballad. Although Þorgeirs rímur are for the most part in the standard ballad meter, four-line non-alliterating stanzas, alternating seven and six syllables per line and rhyming xbyb, there are clear influences on the poem from the rímur. Two stanzas are in ferskeytt (a 4-line stanza, 7 syllables in lines 1 and 3, 6 syllables in lines 2 and 4, rhyming abab [a rhymes masculine, b rhymes feminine]), the most common and important rímur meter31:

34   Shaun F. D. Hughes

  Þr 1.7

“Heyri þetta hirðin öll hvað eg kann að mæla: Glími eg ei við griminlig tröll galdramenn né þræla. ...

   1.54

Þá nú linnti þessum leik þanninn lýðum gengur, Svartur lagðist upp við eik, ei vill berjast lengur.32

[Hear this, all the retinue, / what I am able to say: / ‘I will not wrestle with a fierce troll, / wizard or slave.’ ... Now this game then tapered off, / so it goes with people, / Svartur propped himself up against an oak, / did not wish to fight any longer.’]

Furthermore, stanzas 3, 8, 21, 35, 38, 48, and 52 come close to being ferskeytt, except for their imperfect alliteration or rhyme. Also many stanzas show the rhyme scheme abab even if the stanza as a whole is without alliteration. There is frequent incremental repetition in the stanza as for example 9, 13 or 19−20, 26−27, a common feature of the ballads but never found in the rímur. 33 Another important feature of the rímur is the highly specialized poetic language they inherited from the practitioners of the skaldic court poetry. This manifests itself in a delight in kennings (genitive paraphrases), heiti (synonyms), and a highly specialized vocabulary developed to assist the poet in keeping strictly to the rules of alliteration and when necessary, internal rhymes. The ballads on the other hand avoid this type of poetical diction, but it is found in Þorgeirs rímur. Among the heiti are “kempur” (1.31) and “lýður” (54) for “man” and there are two kennings, “fleygir spjöta” (the caster of spears > man) (1.8) and “sverða róg(ur)” (strife of spears > battle) (1.36). In the introduction to his edition of Þorgeirs rímur, Bjarni Einarsson has pointed out that the poem has been influenced in a number of narrative details by some of the family sagas, particularly Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls and Kjalnesinga saga.34 The precise details of this indebtedness are summarized in Appendix 2.1. From the tables there it is clear that while Þorgeirs rímur may have relied upon these sagas for some names and some episodic detail, they are not dependent upon any one source. Nor does the poem draw its narrative structure from any of these sagas, and the resemblances between the rímur and the sagas remain superficial. The poem, therefore, cannot be based upon any one or any combination of the sources that have been suggested for it.

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ANOMALOUS BALLAD ÞORGEIRS RÍMUR  35

The narrative of the poem centers on the following incidents: there is a wrestling match at court; the hero escapes from the ruler’s hostility; there is an encounter with hostile forces in a forest; there is the marriage of the hero to a ruler’s daughter, a woman whose brother he has earlier killed. Despite some narrative compression and the inevitable distortion on the part of Þorgeirs rímur, this outline is still recognizable as identical with the narrative structure of Áns saga bogsveigis.35 Even though at one point the narrator says: “Neglir hann sitt krókaspjót36 / sem segir í þessum þætti37” [He (the Ethiopian) nails (the head) to his spear / as it says in this story] (1.14), this does not necessarily mean that a specific prose text was intended. Instead of basing his text on a prose source, I want to suggest that the compiler of Þorgeirs rímur, in addition to the partial use of a rímur meter and other features from that tradition, is rather drawing upon a poetic source, namely Áns rímur bogsveigis.38 The relationship between Þorgeirs rímur and Áns rímur is outlined in tabular form in Appendix 2.2, and some of these similarities will be taken up in detail in the following discussion. *** Áns rímur bogsveigis appear to have been among the most popular of the early rímur, surviving in three vellum and five paper manuscripts from before 1600.39 In the form edited by Ólafur Halldórsson, the rímur are taken from the version found in Kollsbók, a fifteenth-century manuscript now in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany.40 There is no indication who the author of the poem may have been, but as Ólafur Halldórsson says “hann hefur tvímælalaust verið í hópi hinna beztu rímnaskálda” (he has indisputably been in the company of the best rímur poets).41 The poem is in eight fitts ranging from 57 to 89 stanzas each and the poem as a whole is 545 stanzas long. Ólafur dates the poem to the first part of the fifteenth century.42 He notes that it is clear that the rímur are based on Áns saga, but a different and fuller text than that which has survived.43 Generally speaking, Þorgeirs rímur follow the narrative sequences of Áns rímur in the proper order and some of the names, such as Þórir and Æsa/Ása have been retained in their appropriate place in the narrative. Þorgeir comes to the court of a ruler with someone called Þórir who is apparently his foster-brother (see 1.35), and in the same way, Án comes to the court of a ruler with a Þórir, his brother.   Þr 1.1

Margur hyggur sér til fjár, mun sá virðing þiggja. Þórir vill hjá Hákoni jólaveislu þiggja.44

36   Shaun F. D. Hughes

[Many a one hopes for money for themselves, / will accept that honor. / Þórir wishes to accept (the invitation to) / a Yule banquet at Hákon’s.] Árb 1.40

Þorer byzt a þengels fund þegar at lidnvm uetri ferian hans var færd a sund finzt þar eingi betri.45

[Þórir made ready to meet the prince / at once at the end of winter; / his ferry was launched onto the ocean, / there one might find none better.]

In both cases the ruler wants to know more about the new arrival.   Þr 1.2

Margir eru í höllinni sterkir menn og stórir. “Hvör er sá hinn mikli maður hjá þér situr Þórir?”46

[Many are in the hall, / strong men and large. / ‘Who is he, the big man, / sits beside you, Þórir?] Árb 2.10

Hilme þackar hreysti mann huer geck madur j kongsens rann var þad nockud þegnen þinn Þorer seier hann brodur sinn.47

[The prince thanks the bold man / ‘What man went into the king’s dwelling? / Was that one of your attendants?’ / Þórir says that he is his brother.]

In Þorgeirs rímur, jarl Hákon decides that Þorgeir must be a good wrestler because he is from Iceland and arranges a match for him against one of his Ethiopians. Án too has a wrestling match with one of the king’s men, Björn inn sterki, but this is the result of a simmering feud between the newcomer, Án, and some of the more arrogant of the retainers at court. In both matches, clothing plays a crucial part in the outcome of the content. Þorgeir is given a wrestling cloak by Þórir, while Án has a cloak his mother gave him.  Þr 1.10

“Eg á mér fornan fangastakk, með slægðum lét eg hann giöra,48 viljir þú við blámann berjast skaltu í honum vera.49

[I have with me an old wrestling jacket, / I had it made with cunning skills; / if you wish to fight with an Ethiopian / you ought to be in it.]

THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE ANOMALOUS BALLAD ÞORGEIRS RÍMUR  37

Árb 2.36 Kapu hefer hann klæda yzt katlegt mart af Ani spyrz moder hans hefer makad þa smid mattar rvm og alluel sid. 2.37 AlnaR fra eg hann epter dro eigj stytti kapu þo ytar gerdv at Ani glamm ermar hengv af noglvm fram.50 [He has a cloak outermost of his clothing, / much that is amusing is noised about concerning Án;/ his mother had made that item / ample of strength and extremely long. / I heard he trailed yards (of it) behind him; / nevertheless he did not shorten the cloak. / The men made cat-calls at Án, / the arms hung down to the nails.]

In the account of Þorgeir’s wrestling match, the ballad conflates two episodes from Áns rímur. Án’s wrestling match in court has been combined with Án’s encounter in the forest with the footpad Garan, which comes to a head in a wrestling match. Both opponents are killed by having their backs broken over a stone which has been set up for just that purpose; the fanghella Hákon’s men have set up in the wrestling area, and the special stones that Garan has set up outside his dwelling on which to test his guests’ backbones. Þorgeir breaks the Ethiopian in two, and Án snaps Garan’s spine over the stone. Þr 1.13 Það var einn so fagran myrgin sólin skein á slétt, þar var tekinn fanghellan og fram á völlinn sett. . . .     1.19 Þorgeir var sig óstyrkri, það kann margann sækja, eitt sinn kom hann so hellu nær að hælar henni mæta.     1.20 Þorgeir var sig miklu styrkri, hans var mikill kraftur, vefur sig í hnipri upp og stökk yfir hellu aftur.     1. 21 Kippti hann að sér kauða leiðum, kalla mátti undur, hljóp hann ofan á herðahlut só blámann tók í sundur.51

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[It was such a beautiful morning, / the sun shone on the plain; / then a wrestling stone was taken, / and placed out onto the field. / … / Þorgeir defended himself the less strongly; / the other was able to attack often, / on one occasion he came so close to the stone, / that his heels touched it. / Þorgeir defended himself the more strongly, / his strength was great, / he coiled himself up into a crouch / and leaped over the stone backwards./ He tugged towards him the advances of the wretch, / one might call it a wonder; / he brought him down on the part of his shoulders / so that he broke the Ethiopian asunder.] Árb 4.33

Þar eru storer steinar tveir standa utar at veggnum meir frændi Hængs ed fleygdi geir52 frettj at hvad skylldu þeir.

    4.34 Lyddan svaradi laufa ygg lvnden hans var longum dygg þar hef eg reyntt a recka hryg ef rædezt hefer j gliman stygg …     4.43 Allrar hafde audnu mist Ani vard j glimu list fallid er nu fanti vist fæti stigur hann honum a rist     4.44 Olboga setur j bringu bein b[r]ytur hryggin aptur um stein þad uar darans dauda mein dreinguren bregdur sara tein.53 [There are two large stones / standing more further out from the wall; / the kinsman of (Ketill) Hængur (i.e., Án bogsveigir) who dispatched the weapon / asked what they should be for. / The wretched fellow answered him54 / his disposition was always trustworthy:55 / ‘There have I tested the backbone of men, / if one is proven shy in the wrestling.’ / … / He (Garan) had missed all of his good fortune, / lost to Án in the art of wrestling, / the oaf has indeed fallen; / he (Án) steps on him on his instep with his foot. / He places his elbows on his chest/ breaks his spine backwards on the stone, / that was the fool’s mortal harm./ The noble fellow (Án) draws a sword.56]

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In Áns rímur the dispute between Án and King Ingjaldur occupies a considerable portion of the narrative. In Þorgeirs rímur the dispute between Þorgeir and jarl Hákon is only alluded to, no more details being given outside Hákon’s attempt to prevent Þorgeir’s escape by casting herfjötur (war fetters) on the legs of Krákur, Þorgeir’s horse. Þórir in the ballad sends Þorgeir to the widow Ragnhildur in her forest dwelling. Án comes across the widow Jórunn in her forest home some time after his defeat of Garan. This is the one occasion in which the first lines of the equivalent stanzas in the ballad and the rímur are the same.  Þr 1.25

Ragnhildur heitir ekkjan sú sem býr á Baugabrandi, ræður fyrir á Heiðarskóg, eg skal þig til hennar senda.57

[The widow is called Ragnhildur / who lives at Baugabrandur, / she is in charge over Heiðarskógur, / I shall send you to her.] Árb 4.53 Jorunn hejter eckian sv ætud vel og. rik sem fru þar geck Ann med brudi j bu og byggia eina reckiu nu.58 [The widow is called Jórunn / of good lineage and wealthy as a woman. / Án went there with the woman into the household / and they now occupy one bed.]

Ragnhildur, on the other hand, is not quite so easily taken in by Þorgeir.  Þr 1.35

“Aldrei skaltu,” ekkjan sagði, “sofa á beðnum mín nema þú viljir frægum fylgja fóstbróðurnum þín.”59

[“Never will you,” the widow said, / “sleep in my bed, / unless you wish to follow in the footsteps / of your famous foster-brother.”]

The encounter between Þorgeir and Hárekur and the occupants of the forest hall is also a compression of two episodes from Áns rímur, the encounter between Án and Garan already mentioned, and the attack on Án’s forest stronghold by Ingjaldur’s men in the sixth ríma. In this attack Án loses his companion, Grímur, as Þorgeir does Hárekur. And when

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Þorgeir reveals he is a “kitchen fool” from Iceland, this recalls the unpromising nature of Án’s childhood.  Þr 1.45

En því svarar hann Þorgeir ungi: “Eg er til víga seinn, eg er utan af Ísalandi eldhúsglópurinn einn.”60

[But to that he answers, young Þorgeir, / “I am late come to battles, / I am overseas from Iceland, / a kitchen fool.”] Árb 1.25

Ecki lagdezt sifellt sia sueinn j ellda skala fæddezt þann veg folke hia flester hvgdv hann gala.61

[That lad did not continually / lie around in the kitchen; / he was brought up that way among people. / Most thought him mad.]

Áns rímur end with the account of Án’s son, Þórir háleggur and the final dealings with King Ingjaldur. Þórir kills Ingjaldur and then marries the King’s sister, Ása. In Þorgeirs rímur, Þorgeir who has mortally wounded Svartur, is told by Svartur that among the matters he has to attend to is to marry his sister, Æsa.  Þr 1.57

“Æsa heitir systir mín, fögur er sem lilja, vilda eg það væri víst þú fengir hennar vilja.”62

[My sister is called Æsa, / she is as fair as the lily; / I would that it might be assured / you should receive her consent.]

Æsa is a by-form of Ása,63 which is also the name of King Ingjaldur’s sister and who was introduced early on in Áns rímur. Árb 1:9

    1.10

Asa heiter Olafs mey Jngialldz kongs uar syster margan fra eg þa menia ey mann ad eiga lystj. Asa var þa eigj gipt vng og mannuond bæde sidar verdur af silke nift sagt j þessv frædi.64

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[Ólafur’s daughter is called Ása, / she was the sister of King Ingjaldur; / I heard that many a man / desired to marry that woman.65 / Ása was then not married, / young and picky about a husband ; / later in this poem / it will be told about this woman.66]

Despite the initial hostility of Ölvir Svartsfóstri, it appears that Þorgeir encounters no opposition in his marriage to Æsa. Nor is there any resistance on Ása’s part in the rímur toward her marriage to Þórir háleggur despite her earlier fastidiousness towards men. Árb 8.30 Þa tok An uid Þori blitt þegar vill Asu finna kæran tok at kvejna litt kat var bruderenn suinna.67 [Then Án received Þórir graciously. / He (Þórir) wishes to meet Ása immediately. / The woman began to bewail little (i.e., she did not bewail at all), / the wise woman (bride) was joyous.]

While Þorgeirs rímur apparently ends with Þorgeir marrying Æsa, domestic bliss is not Án’s lot. He leaves that to his son Þórir and retires north to the island of Hrafnista which is his ancestral home. But his peaceful retirement is threatened by his rowdy neighbors. Árb 8.43 Furdu jllur flagda gangur fra eg j eynj væri sialldan var þad Ani angur þott jdner68 geingi næri.     8.44 Ef uilldv garpj veita sman vætter klæddar skinne þegar at glettuzt þær vid An þeirra hlutur var minnj.69 [An incredibly bad plague of female trolls / I heard was on the island; / seldom was that a distress to Án / although the mischief-makers should come close. / If the creatures clad in [animal-]skin / wished to bring disgrace down on the warrior / when they played tricks on Án / their lot was the lesser.]

On the other hand, Þórir and Ása, like Þorgeir and Æsa, live happily together and their descendants were numerous and famous. One additional matter is that Áns rímur report that Án had a daughter with Jórunn

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called Mjöll, the grandmother of Ingimundur inn gamli who was the first settler in Vatnsdalur in Iceland (8.49−53).70 *** The condensed and compressed form of the narrative in Þorgeirs rímur is the natural consequence of the 545 stanzas of the rímur being reduced to the 63 stanzas and the few prose passages of the surviving ballad. The fact that the ballad’s hero is Þorgeir and not Án is paralleled by numerous other examples in ballad history where the same story is attributed to different individuals. Even in their fragmentary state, Þorgeirs rímur are complete. There can be nothing more intended after the marriage of Þorgeir and Æsa. The evidence of Þorgeirs rímur seems to further substantiate the view that rímur and ballad shared a parallel though separate development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If there was to be any cross-genre influence it was from the rímur to the ballad and not vice-versa. Þorgeirs rímur are also the only surviving Icelandic ballad which shows a division into parts, the second section being specifically called “Onnur ryma” in the MS. It is therefore possible that the poem is the sole Icelandic example of the same impulse in the West Nordic ballad tradition that led to the multi-episode Faroese heroic ballads. If this is the case, it must be assumed that the presence of the rímur acted as a constraint and inhibited further development of this innovation in the ballad tradition. The Icelandic ballad and the rímur could survive together only if they did not encroach upon each other’s prerogatives, and the example of Þorgeirs rímur seems to show why there was no chance for the Icelandic ballad to develop along the same lines as the ballad did in the Faroes.

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Appendix 2.1 Þorgeirs rímur and their prose analogues Þorgeirs rímur

Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls71

Kjalnesinga saga72

Þorgeir goes to jarl Hákon’s for Christmas.

Bárður & Gunnar go to a feast held by jarl Hákon.

Búi is set a task by King Haraldur hárfagri.

Hákon asks Þórir who Hákon asks Bárður who is the man with him. his friend is. Þorgeir says he is an Icelander.

Gunnar says he is an Icelander.

Hákon asks if he wrestles. Þorgeir says he has never tried in his 14 years. He says he will not fight troll, wizard, or slave.

Hákon asks Gunnar his age and is told he is 18. … Hákon asks Gunnar if he is good at sports. Gunnar says he will wrestle a fitting opponent.

Þórir loans Þorgeir his fangastakkur.

Bárður loans Gunnar a cloak (hjúpur) to wrestle in.

Búi having completed the task meets a farmer, Rauður, who says Haraldur will make him fight a troll. He gives Búi a fangastakkur.

An Ethiopian is led out.

An Ethiopian is led out.

Haraldur tells Búi he must fight an Ethiopian. Búi puts on the fangastakkur.

A fanghella is placed on the field.

There was a large rock on the field.

The field is flat but with a large rock with a sharp upper edge called a fanghella.

The fangastakkur protects Þorgeir. It is a hard fight and he is pushed to the fanghella.

The fangastakkur protects Búi. The Ethiopian tries to get him to the fanghella.

Þorgeir feels the rock Gunnar is driven back so with his heels. his feet are at the stone.

When Búi can feel the stone with his heels, the Ethiopian tries to restrain him. (continued)

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(continued) Þorgeirs rímur

Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls71

Kjalnesinga saga72

Þorgeir jumps over the stone backwards pulling the Ethiopian with him so that he is broken in two.

Gunnar jumps over the stone backwards pulling the Ethiopian with him so that he is broken in two.

Búi jumps over the stone backwards, pulls the Ethiopian to him and cuts his chest open on the sharp edge of the fanghella. [Búi dies after having broken his ribs on a stone during a wrestling match.]73

Hákon wishes to take Þorgeir, but Þórir comes with 400 men to help him.

Hákon wishes to take Gunnar, but Bárður is there with a large band to protect him. Búi leaves the King alone.

Svartur and Rauður are Þorgeir’s opponents in the forest.

Þórgrímur has a slave called Svartur whom Gunnar kills by breaking his back on a foot-board (fótskör).74

Þorgeir cuts off the wounded Svartur’s head.

Helgi kills a viking called Svartur by splitting him in two.76

Búi meets a farmer called Rauður.75

Þorgeirs rímur

Þorsteins þáttur uxafóts77

Þorgeir comes to a hall in Heiðarskógur and fights Svartur, Rauður and their band who have been menacing the countryside.

Þorstein comes to a hall in Heiðarskógur and kills a family of trolls who have been menacing the countryside. Vatnsdæla saga78

Þorgeir fights Svartur in his forest hall and mortally wounds him. Before he dies, Svartur reveals his father is jarl Ævar of Hálogaland. He gives Þorgeir his embroidered cap as a token for Þorgeir to take to his sister, Æsa, and tells Þorgeir that he should marry her.

Þorsteinn Ketilsson fights the footpad, Jökull in his forest hall, wounding him badly. Before Jökull dies he reveals he is the son of jarl Ingimundur of Gautaland. He tells Þorsteinn to seek his sister, Þórdís, have her intercede with his father so she may marry Þorsteinn. He gives him gold as a token.

Þorstein is well received by jarl Ævar and marries Æsa.

Things turn out as Jökull says and Þorsteinn marries Þórdís.

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Appendix 2.2 Þorgeirs rímur and Áns rímur bogsveigis Þorgeirs rímur

Áns rímur bogsveigis

Þórir and Þorgeir go to the court of jarl Hákon for a Jule banquet.

Þórir and Án come to the court of King Ingjaldur for the winter (1:40, 58−61, 2:5).

Hákon asks Þórir who is with him.

Ingjaldur asks Þórir who came in with him (2:10).

The jarl says this man, Þorgeir, must be a wrestler and will have a match the next day.

The King’s men say to Án one day that he must be strong (2:32). They ask him to test his strength against Björn inn sterki (2:33). Án agrees and asks for a fire built behind him (2:34).

Þórir gives Þorgeir a fangastakkur which will protect him in the coming encounter.

Án is wearing a great cloak (kápa) his mother made for him (2:36). They wrestle and Björn throws Án in the fire, but he is protected by his cloak (2:8−39). Án tucks up his cloak and they wrestle a second time. Án throws Björn in the fire and he is almost burnt to death (2:45−45).

A fanghella has been placed on the field.

Árb: The Garan episode

Án comes to a hall in the forest where lives the footpad Garan (4:28). After an initial encounter, Garan asks for quarter (4:30).

Garan has two large stones in front of his hall on which he breaks the back of travelers (4:53−54). (continued)

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(continued) Þorgeirs rímur

Áns rímur bogsveigis

The Ethiopian and Þorgeir wrestle furiously. Þorgeir breaks the back of the Ethiopian on the fanghella, splitting him in half.

Árb: The Garan episode After trickery on Garan’s part, he and Án fight (4:40). They wrestle furiously (4:42−45). Án breaks Garan’s back over a stone (4:44).

Hákon wishes to take Þorgeir, but he gets away with the help of Þórir. The jarl uses magic in an attempt to capture Þorgeir, but is foiled.

Later, Án becomes an outlaw. The King tries several schemes to capture him, all of which fail (ríma 5).

Þorgeir comes to the forest home of the widow, Ragnhildur.

Án comes to the forest home of the widow, Jórunn (4:49−53).

Þorgeir and Hárekur find a hall in the forest. They are attacked by the band of Svartur and Rauður. Hárekur is killed, Þorgeir kills Rauður and Svartur. He cuts off Svartur’s head.

One day Án is attacked in his forest home by Ingjaldur’s men. His ally, his cousin Grímur, is killed, but Án escapes (4:15−79).

Þorgeir marries the sister of Svartur, Æsa.

Án’s son, Þórir, kills Ingjaldur (8:6−21). Þórir takes the king’s sister, Ása, and marries her (8:26, 30−32).

[Án comes to the forest hall of Garan.] [They fight and Án kills Garan.] [Án cuts off Garan’s head (4:45).]

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NOTES 1 An earlier unpublished version of this essay is referred to in Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, Íslensk rit 5 (Reykjavík: Rannsóknastofnun í Bókmenntafræði og Menningarsjóður, 1979), 380; and Vésteinn Ólason, The Traditional Ballads of Iceland: Historical Studies, Rit 22 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússsonar, 1982), 380. 2 Kristian Kaalund, Katalog over den Arnamagnæanske håndskriftsamling, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1889−1894), 1:731. 3 On Guðrún Hákonardóttir and the ballads collected from her, see Jón Helgason, ed., Íslenzk fornkvæði Islandske folkeviser, 8 vols., Editiones Arnamagnæanæ, B:10−17 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard and Reitzel, 1962−1981), 4 (1968): xli−xlvi. 4 Kaalund, Katalog 2:418−19. Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:xxxiv−xxxvi details the contents of the manuscript. 5 Transcribed in Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:xlii−xliii. 6 Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:xlv. 7 The poem has been printed on numerous occasions. Among the more important editions are: Hannes Þorsteinsson et al., eds., Huld: Safn alþýðlegra fræða íslenzkra, 6 vols. (Reykjavík: Sigurður Kristjánsson, 1890−1898), 1:19−31 [ed. Pálmi Pálmason]; Hannes Þorsteinsson et al., eds., Huld: Safn alþýðlegra fræða íslenzkra, 2nd ed., ed. Þorvaldur Jakobsson, 2 vols. (Reykjavík: Snæbjörn Jónsson, 1935−1936), 1:16−28 [with an additional note by Jón Jónsson að Stafafelli, 19−20]; Bjarni Einarsson, ed., Munnmælasögur 17. aldar, Íslenzk rit siðari alda 6 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fræðifélag, 1955), cxix−cxxiv, 49−59; Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:167−77; Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 287−95. Unless otherwise noted all citations to Þorgeirs rímur are taken from Vésteinn’s edition. 8 Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur cxxi. All references to these passages are to Bjarni’s edition, 58−59. 9 On Vigfús Jónsson (ca. 1648−1728), see: Fúsa-kver: Kveðskapur eftir Leirulækja-Fúsa, ed. Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (Reykjavík: Letur, 1976), 7−10. 10 Árni’s hesitation on this point is not unfounded, as the various traditions which record this story assign it to the time of either King Ólafur Tryggvason (†1000) or that of King Ólafur Haraldsson (Saint Ólafur) (ca. 995−1030). 11 This story is first printed in German in Konrad Maurer, Isländische Volkssagen der Gegenwart (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1860), 306−7. Maurer translates “stjakarhöfði” as “Balkenvorgebirg” (the foot-hill of the beam). It was first printed in Icelandic in: Jón Árnason, Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, 2 vols. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1862−1864; Rpt. [Reykjavík: Sögufélagið, 1925−1938]), 1:164−65. 12 Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur 58. In AM 124, 8vo (Kaalund, Katalog 2:404), a miscellany from the seventeenth century, Bjarni Einarsson found a prose version of the same riddle which he printed as “Ólafur kóngur og kerling” (King

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Ólafur and the old woman), Munnmælasögur cxxiii, clxv, 107. He also makes reference to a story collected by Gísli Konráðsson (1787−1877) (cxxiii−cxxiv). This was printed as “Vigt Látrabjarg” (The consecration of Látrabjarg), Björn Jónsson, Sögur Ísafoldar, ed. Sigurður Nordal, vol. 1 (Reykjavík: Ísafold, 1947), 264−67. It was believed in the days of Bishop Guðmundur the Good (1161−1237), that a bergbúi lived in the cliff (Látrabjarg). The fowlers in the district asked the bishop to drive the creature away as it was interfering with their catch. The bishop and the bergbúi came to an agreement that the creature would move away from the main birding-cliff. The bishop asked how much room would he need? The bergbúi said that depended on the size of his household and when the bishop asked how large that was, the bergbúi posed the same riddle (266). 13 The standard edition of the Faroese ballads is Corpus Carminum Færoensium: Føroya kvæði, ed. N. Djurhuus and C. Matras et al. (based on the work of S. Grundtvig and J. Bloch), 1−8 (Copenhagen and Hoyvik: Ejnar Munksgaard et al., 1945−2003). The ballads in this collection are numbered with the designation CCF. The collection has been re-edited as Föroya kvæði, ed. Dánjal Niclasen and Tummas Lenvig, 37 vols. (Tórshavn: Bókagarður, 1998−2005). The ballads from this collection are designated FK. Jens Christian Svabo (1746−1824) collected ballads in the Faroes which he called kvæði and rímur during 1781–1782, among them this ballad. Svabos færøske visehaandskrifter, ed. Christian Matras, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur 59 (Copenhagen: Bianco Lino, 1939), 62−68 (= CCF 28A (1:566−68); FK 30A (8:202−8)). When the king’s poet, Tormann skvald, asks the troll how many people live with him, the creature replies with a version of the riddle mentioned above (stanzas 22−26). The ballad is mentioned in the appendix to Hans Christian Lyngby, Færøiske Qvæder (Randers: S. Sigmenhoff, 1822; Rpt. Tórshavn: Emil Thomsen, 1980), 553−54. and there is a version collected on Mikjunes in 1847 in V. U. Hammershaimb, Færöiske kvæder, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Brødrene Berlings bogtrykkeri, 1851−1855; Rept. Tórshavn: Emil Thomsen, 1969), 2:118−26 (= CCF 28F (1:580−82); FK 30F (8:237−45)). 14 “Tormann skvald,” CCF 28A.22 (1:567); “Ungi Tormaður,” CCF 28F.37 (1:581) and version CCF 28E.30 (1:578). 15 CCF 28B.8 (1:569) and CCF 28C.8 (1:572). Note in CCF 28B.32 (1:570) and CCF 28C.33 (1:573) the hero is called “Torbergur.” In CCF 28D.29 (1:575), he is unnamed. 16 Hannes Þorsteinsson, Huld (1890−1898) 1:21; Hannes Þorsteinsson, Huld (1935−1936) 1:18. 17 Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur cxxii−cxxiii. In The Saga of the Jomsvikings, ed. N. F. Blake, Nelson’s Icelandic Texts 3 (London: Thomas Nelson, 1962), chap. 32, jarl Hákon Sigurðarson calls on his protector, Þorgerður Hǫlgabrúðr in his prayers (36). See further in the same volume, “Þorgerður Hǫlgabrúðr and Irpa” (51−52).

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Flateyjarbók: En samling af norske konge-sagaer, ed. Guðbrandur Vigfússon and C. R. Unger, 3 vols. (Christiania [Oslo]: P. T. Malling, 1860−1868), 1:433−34. This is the only version of the saga in which this name occurs. See Óláfs saga Tryggvason en mesta, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, 3 vols. Editiones Arnamagnæanæ A:1−3 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard and Reitzel, 1958−2000), 2:173 (there chapter 223). 19 Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur, cxxiii. 20 E. H. Lind, Norsk-isländska personbinamen från medeltiden (Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequist, 1920−1921), col. 355: “Stakarhǫfði … Förleden gen. av ett fem. *stǫk samhörigt med v. staka ‘snubbla, vackla, ragla’” (“Bobble-head … the first element is the genitive of a lost noun, *stǫk, related to the verb staka ‘stumble, falter, stagger’”). 21 Normally, stjaki, as a masculine weak noun, would have a genitive singular, stjaka. The genitive form stjakar suggests, however, that for Árni Magnússon or his source, the noun was either interpreted as a masculine strong noun, stjakur, whose genitive would then be stjakar or as a feminine strong noun, stjaki with the same form in the genitive singular. Þorgeir saves the ship in the narrative told by Árni by placing an ás (yard-arm) between him and the cliff-face, and stjaki is close enough to be a synonym, especially since the word bátstjaki means a punting-pole or a boat-hook. This is certainly the way in which Maurer’s Icelandic informants interpreted the word in the 1850s leading to the translation “Balkenvorgebirg.” Possibly related to stjakarhöfði is the name of the talking ship “Stakanhöfði” in chap. 26 of Flóamanna saga. See Harðar saga, ed. Þórhallur Vilmundarson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, Íslenzk fornrit 13 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1991), 229−327 at 307 and footnote 3 (307−8) which surveys the scholarship on the meaning of stakanhöfði without coming to any conclusions. For an English translation of this passage, see The Saga of the People of Flói. trans. Paul Acker, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, ed. Viðar Hreinsson, 5 vols. (Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997), 3:270−304 at 296. The name of the ship is left untranslated. 22 A fangastakkur is mentioned in chap. 15 of Kjalnesinga saga, Kjalnesinga saga, ed. Jóhannes Halldórsson, Íslenzk fornrit 14 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1959), 1−44 at 34−37 which is given to Búi Andríðsson by the farmer Rauður to assist him in his wrestling-match with an Ethiopian (blámaður). English translation: The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes, trans. Robert Cook and John Porter, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:305−38 at 322−24. Björn Bjarnason, Íþróttir fornmanna á Norðurlöndum, 2nd ed. (Rekjavík: Bókfellsútgáfan, 1950), 161 discusses the fangastakkur, although he personally cannot see the point of such a garment. 23 On the fanghella, see Björn Bjarnason, Íþróttir fornmanna, 144−45. 24 In Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk fornrit 7 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1936), chap. 48, 153−58, Grettir, on his 18

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way to settle matters with Þorbjörn øxnamegin, his brother’s killer, sits down and takes out the rivet that holds the head of his spear firmly to the shaft because he did not want his adversary to be able to return the cast (154). English translation: The Saga of Grettir the Strong, trans. Bernard Scudder, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 2:49−189 at 123. These examples suggest that in proceeding into battle, it was up to the combatants to decide if they would go with the spear-head firmly attached to the shaft or not. 25 In chap. 36 of Harðar saga Grímkelssonar, Harðar saga, Íslenzk fornrit 13, 1−97 at 85−88 when Hörður is attempting to outdistance his pursuers he is several times afflicted by a condition described as herfjötur (war fetters) which slows him down to the point where he can finally be surrounded. These were thought to be caused by magic with the aim of immobilizing the target. Herfjötur is also the name of a Valkyrie. See The Saga of Hord and the People of Holm, trans. Robert Kellogg, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 2:193−236 at 230−32. 26 All the early editions read “taðhúss glópurinn” (dung-house fool) at stanza 45.4—a taðhús being an outbuilding where dung or peat was dried so that it could be used for fuel. However, Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:173 argues that the correct reading is “elldhuß glöpurinn” and in this he is followed by Vésteinn Ólason, Sagnadansar, 292. This means that Þorgeir is one of a long list of problem male children who hang out in the female space of the kitchen. The common motif of the unpromising hero who is lazy as a youth (Inger M. Boberg, Motif-Index of Early Icelandic Literature, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæanæ 27 [Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966], Motif L 114.1), and a hearth-dweller or “male Cinderella”—i.e., a kolbítur (cinder-eater) (Boberg, Motif-Index, Motif L131)—is frequently encountered in all genres of saga writing (see the list of occurrences in Boberg, Motif-Index, 189). The motif is found as early as Beowulf, where at lines 2187b/2188a, it is said of Beowulf: “þæt he slæc wære, / æðeling unfrom” (that he was slothful, an unpromising noble). 27 The early editions read the name as “Slíðrasvellur” which would mean something like “the swelling of Slíður [an elf woman].” Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur 55 reads “Slíðra hvell” without comment and is followed in this by subsequent editors. “Hvellur” is usually an adjective meaning a loud noise, but here being used nominally to mean something like “the sound of Slíður.” Not that this makes much sense and probably at the back of this is a misunderstood kenning for “axe” of the variety, “the X of the troll-woman.” 28 Jón Þorkelssson, On digtningen på island i det 15. og 16. århundrede (Copenhgen: Andr. Fred. Høst, 1888), 116. On 139−40 he discusses the poem briefly, quoting stanzas 1.1−4 and 2.1 as well as the two prose passages Árni Magnússon had inserted at the end of the text of the poem in AM 569 a 4to. 29 Björn K. Þórólfsson, Rímur fyrir 1600, Safn fræðafjelagsins um Ísland og Íslendinga 9 (Copenhagen: S. L. Möller, 1934), 34. “[Þorgeirs rímur] are some kind of intermediary step between the dances and the rímur, but must be a young ballad which has become changed under the influence of the rímur, likely in the seventeenth century.” Björn’s thesis that the ballads developed from the medieval

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dance lyric or carole and that this new form then gave rise to the rímur is now no longer considered tenable. See Vésteinn Ólason, Traditional ballads, 34−82, esp. 52−81 on the rímur and the heroic ballads. 30 Only one other Icelandic ballad associates itself with the rímur tradition in its title, and that is Eyvindar ríma ( Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:110−13; Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 295−98. In Icelandic terms, the use of ríma is a misnomer as the poem is a classical heroic ballad with no influence from the rímur tradition evident. The poem is found AM 153 8vo, section IV item 4. This part of the manuscript contains a single poem (Eyvindar ríma) written in an unknown hand with an annotation by Árni Magnusson “uppskrifud epter gamalli konu” (copied down from an old woman) ( Jón Helgason, Íslenzk fornkvæði, 4:xxxv, xxx–viii, 110). However, rather than referring to the Icelandic rímur tradition, the title might be inspired by the Faroese ballad tradition, where it is perfectly appropriate to call a ballad a ríma, as for example, Gátu ríma, Hammershaimb, Færöiske kvæder 2:26−31 (= CCF 17 (1:426−27); FK 19 (6:173−76)). 31 See Helgi Sigurðsson, Safn til bragfræði íslenzkra rímna að fornu og nýju (Reykjavík: Ísafold, 1891), bragaætt (“metrical family”) 5, 588 variants, 67−128. 32 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 287, 293. 33 See Shaun F. D. Hughes, “Völsunga rímur and Sjúrðar kvæði: Romance and Ballad, Ballad and Dance,” Ballads and Ballad Research, ed. Patricia Conroy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1978), 37−45 at 42. 34 Bjarni Einarsson, Munnmælasögur, cxx−cxxi. 35 For an annotated translation of this saga, see “Áns saga bogsveigis: The Saga of Án Bow-Bender,” trans. Shaun F. D. Hughes, Medieval Outlaws: Twelve Tales in Modern English, ed. Thomas H. Ohlgren, rev. ed. (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2005), 290−337, and further: Shaun F. D. Hughes “The Literary Antecedents of Áns saga bogsveigis,” Mediæval Scandinavia 9 (1976): 196−235. 36 A krókaspjót was a flanged or barbed spear. See Hjalmar Falk, Altnordische Waffenkunde, Videnskapssellskapets skrifter II: Hist.-Phil. klasse 1914, 6 (Christiania [Oslo]: Jacob Dybwad, 1914), 69−70 and illus. 12. 37 It is difficult to know how to translate þáttur here. Is it a short narrative, a chapter in a larger work, or just a heiti for “poem” or “story”? I have chosen the third option in the absence of any clues about a more specific meaning. 38 Áns rímur bogsveigis, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Íslenzkar miðaldarímur 2; Rit 4 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar á Íslandi, 1973). See my review: “Ólafur Halldórsson, ed., Áns rímur bogsveigis …” Mediæval Scandinavia 8 (1975): 205−13. The poem is also discussed in Björn K. Þórólfsson, Rímur fyrir 1600, 410−12. If in fact Þorgeirs rímur and Áns rímur are related, this seems to provide additional evidence that the Þorgeir of the rímur and Þorgeir stjakarhöfði are unrelated, for there is no place for any adventures with Ólafur Tryggvason in the story of Án bogsveigir, no matter what adjustments the ballad tradition may want to make to the saga’s narrative structure. 39 Áns rímur bogsveigis, lines 7−54.

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For a facsimile of the manuscript see: Kollsbók: Codex Guelferbytanus 42. 7. Augusttus Quarto, ed. Ólafur Halldórsson, Íslenzk handrit, Series in 4to, 5 (Reykjavík: Handritastofnun Íslands, 1968). Áns rímur are found between Bl. 14v, 22–25v, 15. Ólafur dates the manuscript to 1480−1490. 41 Áns rímur bogsveigis 72. Halfdan Einarsson (1732−1785), reports in his entry on “Sigurdus cæcus” (Sigurður blindur), a poet from the east of Iceland, active around the time of the Reformation (i.e., 1550), that: “Sunt qui ei tribuunt carmina … viii. qvæ Anis Bogsvegis” (there are those who attribute to him … the 8 [fitts of the Rímur] of Án bogsveigir). Sciagraphia historiæ literariæ Islandicæ autorum et scriptorumtum editorum tum ineditorum indicem exhibens (Copenhagen: Sander and Schröder, 1777), 87. However, the poem clearly predates this figure, on whom see further, Björn K. Þórólfsson, Rímur fyrir 1600 431−40 and Ármann Jakobsson, “The Homer of the North, or: Who was Sigurður the Blind?” European Journal of Scandinavian Studies 44 (2014): 4–19. 42 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 74. 43 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 74. This was also the conclusion of Björn K. Þórólfsson, Rímur fyrir 1600, 410−11. 44 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 287. 45 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 40. 46 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 287. 47 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 99. 48 Þorgeirs rímur 1.33 (Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 290−91) gives more information about this garment: 40

Kom hann fram að Höfðabrekku í fangastakki síðum, álfkonur höfðu ofið hann tvær í gjörninga hríðum. [He (Þorgeir) made his way to Höfðabrekka / in his long wrestling jacket, / two elf women had woven it / in bursts of magic.] In Elis saga ok Rósamundu, ed. Eugen Kölbing (Heilbronn: Gebrüder Henninger, 1881; Rpt. Neiderwalluf bei Wiesbaden: Martin Sändig, 1971), chap. 40, 86, Rósamunda dresses in elegant clothes in order to meet her father, including a mantel of which it is said: “þriar alfkonur vafu þat klæði þraðum hins bezta gullz með allzconar haglæki með sua miclum uirkðum, at þeir satu yfir IX vetr þessu klæði, fyrr en full ofit væri” (three elf-women wove that garment with threads of the finest gold with all sorts of skillfulness with such great care, that they sat over this garment nine winters before it was fully woven). For further examples of garments woven by elf-women see: Gustaf Cederschiöld, ed., Fornsögur suðrlanda (Lund: Gleerup, 1884), xxiv. 49 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 288. 50 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 104. 51 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 288−89. 52 In stanza 4.30, Án had shot an arrow at Garan wounding him, not a spear. Therefore geir should be understood as just meaning a weapon. There is a

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syntactically similar phrase in 4.29: “Garan sier ed giptu þraut / ganga mann vm skogar laut” [Garan who has exhausted his luck / sees a man walking across a forest hollow]. Garan’s lucklessness is also referred to in the first line of stanza 4.43. 53 Áns rímur bogsveigis, 127, 129. 54 Yggur laufa, “the Yggur—Óðin of leaves—shields,” is a kenning meaning “man.” 55 This line is ambiguous in that the “hans” (his) could refer grammatically to either Garan or Án. However, in terms of what we have learned from the narrative it can only refer to Án. 56 Sára tein, “a rod of wounds” is a kenning meaning “sword.” This is the weapon he uses to cut off Garan’s head in the next stanza. 57 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 290. 58 Áns rímur bogsveigis 131. The principle meaning of brúður is “bride,” although in poetry it is a heiti or synonym for “woman.” Here both meanings appear to be intended, as they are not getting “married,” yet they are setting up a household. 59 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 291. 60 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 292. 61 Áns rímur bogsveigis, 91. 62 Vésteinn Ólason, ed., Sagnadansar, 294. 63 On this name, see: E. H. Lind, Norsk-isländska dopnamn och fingrade namn fran medeltiden (Uppsala: A-B. Lundequist, 1905−1915). “Ása” is quite a common name and the variant “Æsa” is also frequently encountered (cols. 60−62). “Ása” is a feminine o-stem noun, and “Æsa” a feminine jo-stem (col. 1230). 64 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 88. 65 Menja ey, “island of necklaces” is a kenning meaning “woman.” 66 Silki-Nift, “silken-nift,” that is, “a woman.” Here Nift is a half-kenning meaning “goddess” based on such kennings as Nera nift, “the sister of Neri—a Norn” and Nara nift, “the sister of Nari—Loki,” that is, the goddess, Hel. 67 Áns rímur bogsveigis, line 176. 68 This looks like the plural of iðn (occupation, doing something) applied to those whose occupation is to make mischief. However, it may be a corrupted form of Iði, one of the two brothers of the giant Þjazi who kidnapped Iðunn and stole the Apples of Immortality, here used in the plural to indicate monstrous beings. See Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 2 vols. (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998), 1:3.5. 69 Áns rímur bogsveigis 178: In the Icelandic version of Áns saga bogsveigis published as item 15 in Erik Julius Björner, ed., Nordiska kämpa dater, i en sagaflock samlade om forna kongar och hjälter … (Stockholm: Joh[an]. L[autentius]. Horrn, 1737) (each item separately paginated), the equivalent text reads: “For An til Hrafnisto og bio þar, mikill flagda gangur giordist i eyum þeim sem voru naglægt, enn honum bloskrade þat litt og þegar þau troll villdu vid An glettast, vard þeirra hlutur æ minne” (Án went to Hrafnista and dwelt there. A great plague of female trolls happened on those islands that were nearby. But that

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upset him little and when those trolls wished to played tricks on Án, their lot was ever the lesser) (Björner, Nordiska kämpa dater, Áns saga, 34). There is no scholarly edition of Áns saga bogsveigis and all the published versions depend on the text published by C. C. Rafn, Fornaldar sögur Norðrlanda, 3 vols. (Copenhagen: Hardvig Fridrek Popp, 1829−1830), 2:323−62 which he based on that in AM 343, 4to, a fifteenth-century vellum manuscript (Kaalund, Katalog 1:578−79). As Rafn noticed (Fornaldarsögur 2:xii), Björner’s Icelandic text of the saga appears to be a prose recasting of Áns rímur, probably made in 1683, because the Icelandic version ends by declaring that even then there were still numerous individuals in Iceland who could trace their ancestry back to the people of Hrafnista (Björner, Nordiska kämpa dater, Áns saga 35). See also Áns rímur bogsveigis, lines 57−59 where Ólafur Halldórsson comes to the conclusion that the version of Áns rímur upon which Björner’s text is based is a lost manuscript of a variant version of the poem at some remove from the text in Kollsbók (see the stemma on 85). 70 See Vatnsdæla saga, Vatnsdæla saga, ed. Einar Ól. Sveinsson, Íslenzk fornrit 8 (Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka fornritafélag, 1939), 1−131 at 3; The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal, trans. Andrew Wawn, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 4:1−6l at 1. 71 Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 341−79; The Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of Keldugnup, trans. Sarah M. Anderson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:421−36. 72 Kjalnesinga saga, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 1−44; The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes, trans. Robert Cook and John Porter, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:305−38. 73 This takes place in the final chapter of the saga when Búi wrestles with Jökull, the son whom he refuses to recognize. He takes a fall and crushes his ribs on a stone lying in the field, dying of his injuries three days later. Kjalnesinga saga, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 43; The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes, trans. Robert Cook and John Porter, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:327. 74 Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 346−47; The Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of Keldugnup, trans. Sarah M. Anderson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:423. 75 Kjalnesinga saga, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 29; The Saga of the People of Kjalarnes, trans. Robert Cook and John Porter, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:319. 76 Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls, Kjalnesinga saga, Íslenzk fornrit 14, 371−72; The Saga of Gunnar, the Fool of Keldugnup, trans. Sarah M. Anderson, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 3:434. 77 “Þorsteins þáttur uxafóts,” Harðar saga, Íslenzk fornrit 13, 339−70; “The Tale of Thorsteinn Bull’s-Leg,” trans. George Clark, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 4:340−54. 78 Vatnsdæla saga, Vatnsdæla saga, Íslenzk fornrit 8, 1−131 at 6−19; The Saga of the People of Vatnsdal, trans. Andrew Warn, The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, 4:1−61 at 3−9.

Chapter 3

Hervör, Hervard, Hervik The Metamorphosis of a Shieldmaiden Sandra Ballif Straubhaar

M

Y ORIGINAL INTENTION FOR the study outlined in the following pages was to take a new look at the several narratives (sagas and ballads) of Hervör the warrior maiden, using an anthropological/ folkloristic and/or sociological point of view—much as I have previously done for other, comparable narrative strands in the Old Norse legendary sagas (Fornaldarsögur norðurlanda), unrelated to the Hervör narrative.1 It quickly became apparent, however, that the anthropological approach didn’t work as well for shieldmaidens as it does for other characters from the legendary sagas—the Burgundian heroes of the Gjúkung tribe, for instance, or the Hrafnista tribe of Norwegian fishermen—largely because of the outsider, fantastical space that shieldmaidens occupy. Warrior-women do, indeed, play a role in a number of legendary sagas.2 But not every narrated farmstead, or even every narrated royal court, can boast one; nor are they expected to. To put it another way: an anthropological approach can be quite effective for examining eventualities that are potentially found not only in sagas (including fantastical legendary ones), but which also existed attestably and frequently in real-life early Nordic communities and tribal groupings. These would include such eventualities, for instance, as fishing disputes, territorial boundary challenges, inter-tribal warfare, or exogamous marriages. But such an anthropological approach does not apply as well to anomalies like young sword-wielding noblewomen, who demonstrably existed more prominently (and fairly prominently at that) in stories than they did in real life. I have thus changed my focus for this project to narratology and genre-studies—with what degree of success, the reader will be able to judge. Different narrative genres—e.g., sagas and ballads—have different audiences, and those audiences have observably different ideas about the

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necessary framing, contents, and characters of a story. Let us see how our featured heroine fares, and how her character arc varies, as she steps out on these differing generic stages.

Source Texts The clustered and interrelated narratives of the shieldmaiden Hervör and her doomed family3 are found in seven texts: First, two legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur): Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs (The Saga of Hervör and King Heiðrek, found in numerous fourteenth- and fifteenth-century MSS in three variant versions); and Örvar-Odds saga (The Saga of Arrow-Odd, found in two variants in a number of fourteenth- century MSS).

It is typical of Old Norse sagas to contain older poetry embedded within their prose matrices, and Hervarar saga is no exception to this trend. Although its manuscripts date from the early modern era, the saga’s poems—which provide the framework upon which the story is constructed—may be centuries older, based on linguistic evidence. Hervarar saga’s poems are unusual in one respect, however. The saga’s plot seems curiously to travel backward in time as the narrative goes forward; it becomes apparent that the interspersed poems are referring to events of increasing historical antiquity. We start in what feels like the Viking Age (eighth to eleventh century) with the poem Hervarakviða, in which our heroine, Hervör, leads a team of Vikings raiding the Danish islands. But we end up, three to five generations later, depending on how you count, in terms of the characters in the story, in the fifth-century landscape of the poem Hlöðskviða, populated by specifically named Migration-Age tribes—Goths and Huns—who fight against each other, just as their namesakes did in real history. These anachronisms seem to have bothered no one down the centuries, though, because the saga has demonstrably been extremely popular. Arnamagnæan Institute researchers in Denmark Matthew Driscoll and Sylvia Hufnagel have produced an online list of 70 extant manuscripts, each containing one of the three main variants of the story.4 Örvar-Odds saga, our second legendary-saga source, is roughly contemporary to Hervarar saga, and is similarly ornamented with poetry that is older than the saga itself. It was also similarly popular, since Driscoll and Hufnagel list 68 manuscripts, containing two variants—or possibly

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three, depending on how you slice things.5 It contains a vignette in which the saga-hero, Arrow-Odd, fights with one companion, Hjálmar, against a troop of twelve berserker brothers—Hervör’s father and uncles, in fact, although this saga doesn’t mention her. (We know they are her father and uncles because the metrical list of their names matches the one in Hervarar saga; and also because this same battle is recounted in that saga as well, with the same participants.) The third and fourth source texts for the Hervör narrative are two independent Old Norse poems—i.e., poems not embedded (or not always embedded) within a matrix of saga prose. The first, “Hjálmar’s Death Song,” is variously present in many of the same manuscripts as the two abovementioned sagas, and contains a monologue spoken by ArrowOdd’s dying companion, after the battle involving the twelve berserker brothers. The second poem, Hyndluljóð, contains (among other lists and catalogues of past lore deemed worth knowing, unrelated to our story) the same metrical list referred to above, containing the names of our heroine’s grandparents and those same twelve berserker sons. Hyndluljóð is thought to be of a similar age as the poems found in the Poetic Edda, contained in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius MS—some of which may have been composed as early as the tenth century. Source texts five through seven are Scandinavian ballads—two Faroese and one Danish—which contain pieces of Hervör’s story. They are: “Kappin Angantýr” (“Angantýr the Champion,” CCF 15 / TSB e89); “Arngríms sinir” (“Arngrímr’s Sons,” CCF 16 / TSB e89) and “Angelfyr og Helmer” (“Angelfyr and Helmer,” DgF 19 / TSB e89). Which parts of the story each of these includes will be recounted below.

Hervör’s Story: Two Necessary Sequences As I see it, there are two central and necessary narrative sequences, outlined in brief and expanded versions below, that make up the greater narrative of the shieldmaiden Hervör—or Hervarðr, or Hervík.6 (Note that the second of our heroine’s, Hervör’s, three possible given names in the sagas and ballads—Hervarðr—is a man’s name. We’ll get back to that later.) I consider the saga-narrative (as we have it) faulty on its own, since it cuts short the second of these two narrative sequences, winding down instead in a multi-generational coda that includes a number of memorable scenes and narrated set-pieces but makes little dramatic sense in connection with what has gone before. In this evaluation of the saga’s

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faulty narrative logic I have at least the partial company of two English scholars of the early twentieth century, Nora Kershaw Chadwick and E. V. Gordon, although subsequent commentators have not consistently interrogated the saga’s narrative structure in this way.7 And here are the two narrative sequences that I consider necessary to frame Hervör’s complete story:

The Berserker Duel An uneven warrior’s duel is scheduled and fought on the Danish island of Sámsey (Samsø), in which the berserker chieftain Angantýr and his eleven berserker brothers are slain by a team of two warriors, Örvar-Oddr (Arrow-Odd) and Hjálmar the Swede. This sequence is found in both sagas, Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs and Örvar-Odds saga; in the Faroese ballads “Kappin Angantýr” (CCF 15 / TSB e89) and “Arngríms sinir” (CCF 16 / TSB e89); and in the Danish ballad “Angelfyr og Helmer” (DgF 19 / TSB e89).

The Revenge Hervör, the daughter of Angantýr, the eldest of the slain berserkers, acquires the ancestral sword from her father’s grave and avenges her father with it. This sequence is found in the Faroese ballad of “Arngríms sinir” (CCF 16 / TSB e89) only. The Danish ballad DgF 19, “Angelfyr og Helmer,” contains a similar revenge, but from the other side: the father of the Hjálmar-analogue avenges his death, instead. The problem, as I see it, is that there is only one narrative text—the Faroese ballad “Arngríms sinir” (CCF 16), as I have just indicated—which retells both Sequence I and Sequence II, thereby making a complete and logical narrative out of the Hervör material. Every other text of the seven I have listed above either contains only random fragments of the Hervör story—sometime with the characters’ allegiances reversed—or obscures and frustrates the natural vector of the narrative by replacing the Sequence II arc with the confusing multigenerational coda I have alluded to above.

The Story’s Beginning: The Twelve Berserkers Let us begin a review of the Hervör narrative with one of the most commonly occurring poetic fragments attached to it: the metrical, alliterative catalogue of the twelve berserkers, listing Hervör’s father and his eleven brothers, the protagonists and/or antagonists of what I am calling

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Sequence I. This passage’s common occurrence, even in contexts like the poem Hyndluljóð where it serves no particular purpose—except as an item of genealogical lore that one of the speakers deems important—attests to the fact that numerous listeners and readers down the centuries have found it memorable. It does stick in the mind quite readily.8 Hervarðr, Hjörvarðr, Hrani, Angantýr, Bíldr ok Búi, Barri ok Tóki, Tindr ok Tyrfingr, tveir Haddingjar, þeir í Bólm austr bornir váru, Arngríms synir ok Eyfuru.

(Hervard, Hjörvard, Hrani, Angantýr, Bild and Búi, Barri and Tóki, Tind and Tyrfing, two Haddings; in Bólm to the east born they were, Arngrím’s offspring and Eyfura’s.)9

Such potentially obscure genealogical fragments as this one are common in Old Norse tradition, and there may or may not be a corresponding prose text which recounts the deeds of the celebrated presumedancestors so listed. This particular fragment shows us a clan of fourteen legendary personages, “out of the far past” in Chadwick’s phrasing; what are they presumed to have done, in that far past? We can observe, across all of our seven source texts, significant variations occurring within the narrative of Hervör and her tribe as it passes through time and across borders. These variations include the reconfiguration of family relationships; the eventual marginalization of the warrior daughter (or niece); and, as is often the case with legendary-saga material, the late application of an ironic or disbelieving attitude towards the recounted events. But still, the multiplicity of genres, versions, and manuscripts in which this story-cycle is found do attest to its lasting popularity through many centuries. In today’s post-Xena-Warrior-Princess era, the appeal of a Hervör-figure—a fearless young woman who wields her cursed sword without fear of consequence and welcomes the prospect of a revenge-quest—to a popular reading or listening audience might be obvious.10 What her changing appeal in various past centuries would have been, seen against a backdrop of the social assumptions of those times, was my original goal for this project. But as that goal has proven elusive I will instead make some guesses about the various impacts of evolving audiences and genres on the evolving narrative and the role of our warrior maid within it. A more detailed retelling of the two central episodes of the Hervör narrative (Duel and Revenge, above) would proceed as follows.

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Sequence I, Expanded We are introduced to a warrior family with twelve berserker-warrior sons, who are known for going raiding abroad. One of the brothers (usually Hjörvarðr, but not always) wishes to marry Ingibjörg, the daughter of the Swedish king at Uppsala, but she rejects him. All twelve brothers issue a battle-challenge to the man whom the king’s daughter really loves (Hjálmar), who comes with one friend (Örvar-Oddr [Arrow-Odd]) to the Danish island of Sámsey (Samsø) for the duel (holmgang ). On the island, the berserker team fights against Hjálmar and Oddr. All of the fighters are killed except Hjálmar, who dies shortly thereafter; and Oddr, who survives and carries the news of Hjálmar’s death back to Ingibjörg in Uppsala—plus a keepsake arm-ring, and a poem Hjálmar composed for her while in his death-throes.

Sequence II, Expanded Sequence II deals with the following generation(s). The posthumous daughter of the eldest of the twelve brothers, named Hervör or Hervík, is raised by maternal relatives. She exhibits exceptional martial tendencies and skills but does not know why she has them. Eventually there are catalytic events at home in which the young woman either flogs the manservants unfairly, or consistently beats “the other lads” (note the gender ambiguity here) at jousting. The wronged young men taunt her, leading her to ask her guardian about her parentage and thereby find out about the violent death of her father and uncles years before. In many versions of the story she is then motivated to fetch the ancestral (cursed) sword, Tyrfing, buried with her father on Sámsey; but in only one version (Faroese ballad CCF 16, “Arngríms sinir”) does she then use the sword to avenge her slain father and uncles. In Hervarar saga, however, she only fetches the sword – and then seems to drop the vengeance idea. She then proceeds to have several generations of descendants, each of whom has his or her own violent history, but none of whom thinks of avenging dead ancestors.

Gender Change It is worth mentioning that in Hervarar saga Hervör changes her name and gender upon reaching young adulthood, becoming for a while “Hervarðr” the viking raider. It is a name close to her own name, and also the name of one of her berserker uncles.

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Síðan bjóst hún í brott ein saman ok tók sér karlmanns gervi ok vápn ok sótti þar til, er víkingar nokkurir váru, ok fór með þeim um hríð ok nefndist Hervarðr. Litlu síðar tók þessi Hervarðr forræði liðsins.11 (After this, she left home by herself, took up men’s gear and weapons and sought out a place where some vikings were. She traveled with them awhile, calling herself Hervard. Soon afterward, this Hervard became the leader of that viking band.)12

The scene which comes next, namely, the retrieval of the sword from out of Hervör’s father’s grave—related to Aarne-Thompson-Uther motif # E323, and echoed in the Grimm version of “Cinderella”13—is a potentially hyper-dramatic event, as it in fact proves to be in Hervarar saga (where it is retold in verse, in a poem certainly older than the saga) and in CCF 16. Years ago, in an Old Norse session at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress (1987), I attempted to examine the Hervarar saga version of this hair-raising scene, focusing on its problematic status as a dead-end motif in the saga. Why, I asked, does Hervör want the fatally cursed sword in the first place, demanding it from her dead and recalcitrant father amidst haunted flaming gravemounds, if she is not going to eventually use it for something important? In the potentially useful answers which came up from myself and from discussants that day, arguments were deployed from narrative logic, from Freudian symbolism and from modern anthropological data, as you can see here: 1. E. V. Gordon (1927): “The basis of the poem [about the grave-visit, in the saga] is the need for revenge.” Gordon thus presumably assumed there would be a revenge, even though none was forthcoming in the saga.14 2. Joseph C. Harris (1987, comment after my paper): It’s a penis, and women want to have one.15 3. Carol Clover (1986), paraphrased: She is the sword’s only inheritor, regardless of gender; only a descendant of the earlier owner can claim it. Compare the institution of “sworn virgins” in twentieth-century Albania: in the absence of sons, women cross gender boundaries in order to inherit.16 Of course we expect saga-Hervör to take up the cursed ancestral sword Tyrfing, seek out Örvar-Oddr, her father’s slayer—and kill him with it. It is frustrating that this happens only once, and not in Hervör’s

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own saga. But there is an inter-textual rationale for this. Specifically, there is a fully logical reason why the heroine of Hervarar saga cannot kill her enemy Örvar-Oddr. It is because in his own saga Oddr is doomed by prophecy to a rather specific death—from the bite of a venomous snake that has been nesting in a buried horse’s skull, just waiting for him to pass by. Minus this inconvenient contradiction, we could quite understand­ably expect Oddr to meet his death at Hervör’s hands in one, or even both, sagas. However, what actually happens in Hervarar saga is not this. After the retrieval of the sword, Hervör is called upon in the saga-narrative to do a series of unrelated things—including, anticlimactically, to abandon the Viking-warrior life, get married to a king’s son, and have descendants.

Hervor’s Genealogy17 And here they are—those descendants, with their ancestors and in-laws— several different whole tribes of them.18 Sigrlami / Sváfrlami Eyfura

Arngrímr

Twelve berserker brothers, including Hervarðr Hjörvarðr Hrani and Ángantýr Tófa / Sváfa

Höfundr

Helga

Hervör

Ángantýr (II) and Heiðrekr

Ángantýr (III)

Sifka

Hlöðr

Hervör (II) (mother: Hergerðr)

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As can be seen here, the generations after the original Hervör include (confusingly enough) one more Hervör, and two more Angantýrs. Some of these people are Goths, some of them are Huns, some of them are lords of the Kievan Rus’, and some of them come from homelands known only to legend.

How the Saga Continues the Story Hervarar saga narrates the consequences of these complex and lengthy “begats” in the following fashion. First, Hervör marries the son of the legendary giant-king, Guðmundr of Glæsisvellir. After this marriage, she instantly becomes less warlike, and more domestic. The ancestral sword Tyrfing (from Angantýr’s grave-mound) is inherited by a series of descendants who do tend to kill each other with it, just as Hervör’s dead father warned her at his own graveside that they would. (There are even two brother-against-brother slayings.)19 Hervör’s restless-shieldmaiden DNA passes on to a granddaughter, also named Hervör, who leads a gallant defense of a Gothic border fortress, but then gets killed by Huns under the command of her Hunnish half-brother. So much for narrative failure, or at least narrative de-railing. We must turn to the ballad tradition for a more satisfactory conclusion. Hervör lives on: not in the Iceland of the saga narrators, or in the panEuropean saga setting—but in the Faroe Islands. In fact, as should be clear by this point, CCF 16, “Arngríms sinir,” contains the only satisfactory incorporation of both Sequence I and Sequence II.

How CCF 16 Expands the Story “Arngríms sinir,” taking into account all of its variants as published by Jens Christian Svabo (ca. 1800) and V. U. Hammershaimb (ca. 1850), includes the following : the duel for the princess, just as in the sagas; an account of the martial character of Angantýr’s daughter, here named Hervík; the catalytic event that leads to her discovery of her parentage; her recovery of the sword from her father’s grave; and her quest to kill Arrow-Odd, here called Örvarodd. Some of the pertinent stanzas, starting with the Swedish princess’s rejection of the berserker warrior’s proposal, are as follows:

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24 Eg hàvi ikki Angantýr, hann er so leitt eitt tröll, so er fàðir, so eru brøður og so er hirðin öll.

(“I will not wed me to Angantyr: He is so vile a troll; So is his father and so his brothers, And so are his liegemen all.*”)20

With the events in the following stanzas, the shieldmaiden daughter is motivated to question her origins: 5 Hervík heitir dottir teirra, vil eg firi idrum greina, hon er sàr á leikvöllum burtur hjá öðrum sveinum.

(This maiden was named Hervík, ’Fore all men I declare, She tilted in the tourney When the other lads played there.)21

7 Niður settust sveinarnir, reiðir íð teir vóru: líkari vàr tàr fàðir at hevna enn berja os so stórum.

(Down then sat the lads there; Angry were they each one. “Better than fighting us so fierce,* Go ’venge thy father anon!”)

She confronts her mother: 8 Hon kastar vatn á herklæði, og listir ei longer at leika, gekk so inn firi móður sína við reyða kinnar og bleika.

(Water she cast on her armor; She list no longer to fight, But went and stood before her mother, With cheeks all red and white.)

9 Hoyr tàð mín hin sæla móðir, tú sig màr satt ífrá: vàr mín fàðir við vápnum vigin, ella doyði hann á strá?

(“O hearken, hearken my Mother dear, The truth from thee would I know. Was my father slain in battle Or did he die on straw?”)

She demands the sword from her father’s ghost: 28 Hervík er gingin á heygin fram, sum hennar lá fàðir í mold, fátt vàr tá til ráða at taka, kik gekk jörð á fold.

(Hervík has gone to the barrow* Where her father lies dead and cold. Little recks she of fear or favor, Though quake now fell and fold.)

31 Viltú ikki mín sæli fàðir brandin senda màr, eg skàl eld í heygin leggja, brenna ivir tàr.

(“O haste thee, my noble father,* The good sword to give me;* Or shall I set fire to this barrow, And burn it over thee?”)

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She gains the sword: 33 Hann fekk henni svörðið tàð, mikið var tàð vert, tàð vàr átján àlin langt, í eitri vàr tàð hert.

(He gave to her the sword then, ’Twas wonderfully made.* The length of it was eighteen ells,22 And poisoned was its blade.)

34 Hann fekk henni svörðið tàð, nú er um tàð at kvøða, hvör sum skein útàv tí fekk, eingin mann tàð grøða.

(He gave to her the sword then, ’Twas wonderfully made.* No leechcraft could avail the man Was wounded by its blade.)

She goes avenging: 36 Og so búgvin gongur hon í høgar hallir inn, sum Ørvaroddur á borði sat við mann og hundrað fimm.

(She busked her in her cloak of fur And entered the high hall belive, Where Örvarodd sat before the board With a hundred men and five.)

And—finally!—she achieves her revenge: 41 Árla vàr um morgunin, roðar firi sól, tá hevði reysti Örvaroddur brinjað út hundra tolv.

(It fell full early on a morning tide, Before the sun rose high, Örvarodd had a hundred men and twelve Accounted royally.)

44 Ríður Hervík jallsdottir, so listuliga fram, hon klývur hvönn um tvörar herðar, íð móti henni rann.

(It was Hervík, the Earl’s daughter, So gallantly she rode; She clove to the shoulders every knight Who forth against her strode.)

50 Hon kleyv reystan Örvarodd sundir í luti tvá, allar hans deyðu herkempur hàr legði hon omaná.

(She has slain the warrior Örvarodd And cut him in pieces twain, And all his men so brave and true She heaped on his corpse amain.)

Thanks to the Faroese ballad tradition and its early collectors, then, we can assemble a narrative that works. In CCF 16 the shieldmaiden daughter both recovers the ancestral sword from her dead father—disregarding the curse and putting the revenge first, as E. V. Gordon wrote— and actually gets to enact the revenge herself. We have here a complete, combined story with internal logic and not many loose ends.

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Conclusions The story of Hervör (or Hervík) the shieldmaiden has adapted to its narrative environment as time has gone on and its hosting genres have changed, moving from a landscape populated by berserker Vikings and early European tribes (sagas and poems) to one of knightly tournaments (ballads). The basic elements, however, remain the same: A young woman with semi-outlaw (but noble) male warrior ancestors is born with warlike tendencies and skills which are seen as uncommon, but not necessarily transgressive. She has adventures, may inherit a cursed sword, and may or may not make a special journey to avenge her father’s death. The narrative gives her heroine status and celebrates her prowess, while also potentially according her and/or her descendants a tragic doom—which is also a common hero-trait, by the way. But why does the legendary-saga version—arguably the best-known incorporation of this story—go out with (what looks like to us) a whimper, rather than a bang?

Genealogy, Revisited I believe the answer is to be sought in the narrative traditions of the several Icelandic saga genres. In all of these, genealogy is a significant element. In all saga genres—Icelandic family sagas, Norwegian kings’ sagas or fornaldarsögur—the late-medieval and post-medieval Icelandic scribes and compilers tended to salt the central narratives with genealogical lists, tying the saga-heroes and heroines of the past to the original settlers of Iceland in the ninth and tenth centuries—the ancestors of the original saga audiences. If all the heroic stories of the past turn out to be about one’s ancestors in the end, then it is crucial to know how these family connections work out. Additionally, the saga-compilers had at their disposal a number of good heroic poems, already in existence, that could be woven in to the story as it already stood. All the saga-compiler had to do was make the protagonists of those (more or less) homeless poems relatives and descendants of the main characters of the saga, et voilà! The following annotated version of Hervör’s family tree shows where each (earlier, source) poem is attached to its pertinent characters and time-sequence in the compounded saga-narrative:

Hervör, Hervard, Hervik   67 Poems:

Sigrlami / Sváfrlami Arngrímr

Eyfura

Berserker Catalogue Hjálmar’s Death Song

Twelve berserker brothers, including Hervarðr Hjörvarðr Hrani and Ángantýr Tófa / Sváfa

Hervararkviða Höfundr

Heiðrek’s Riddles Helga

Hervör

Ángantýr (II) and Heiðrekr

Ángantýr (III) Hlöðskviða (Goth/Hun Battle Poem)

Sifka (2)

Hlöðr

Hervör (II)

Additional Conclusions It is worth pointing out here that an entirely analogous narrative mismatch exists in the Sigurd/Siegfried material. For the Völsungs and their Burgundian in-laws, the “better” story-arc is not found in any ballad tradition, but in the stanzas of the (arguably ballad-like) Nibelungenlied. In the German poem, the Burgundian widow of the dragon-slaying hero makes a second exogamous marriage in order to arrange for her first husband’s avenging, and dies dramatically in the course of achieving that goal—thus achieving a satisfying, logical and narratively economical end. In the Norse poems and in Völsunga saga, by contrast, the analogous figure achieves her own avenging in the same way as her German counterpart does, but then heads down to the ocean with weights in her skirts, tries to drown herself and fails; and then marries a third foreign husband and has children of tragic destiny, enabling the splicing-in of yet another heroic poem with a doomed ending. It is almost as if the legendary-sagas—at

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least, Hervarar saga and Völsunga saga—have Beethoven-symphony endings: one big majestic chord. And then another. Whew, all done now; that was lovely. But no—here comes another Final Chord! Here’s where genre studies and narratology can help us out of this endless chain of plot complications. The various audiences of the various genres involved in these two cases—whether legendary saga, courtly Continental epic, or ballad—are markedly divergent, and they are looking for different kinds of stories. The medieval Icelandic saga audience, for example, is known for its hyper-awareness of the geographical distance from the old country, manifesting in a fierce desire for the preservation of past narratives, the better to establish connections to the people in them. Of course the medieval Icelanders wanted an extended “what happened later?” section; of course they wanted genealogies, for the purpose of making these connections; of course they didn’t care how long the tragic endings stretched out. I would argue that the Faroese ballad audience, by contrast, largely wanted a good story to dance to: it could be long, but not saga-long, since it had to fit into a single evening. Hence CCF 16 as we have it in Svabo and Hammershaimb. These Faroe Islanders of the past may also have had the same objections as I have had over the years to the inconclusiveness of Hervör’s character arc as it appears in the saga, and so they preserved (or perhaps even crafted) a version that made better dramatic sense for the central character. Finally, there was no “Oddr died another way” impediment present in the Faroese tradition: as far as I know, there is no Faroese ballad relating Oddr’s previously prophesied death-by-snakebite as his own fornaldarsaga tells it. Q.E.D. NOTES Sandra Straubhaar, “Iarpskammr: Tribal Taxonomy and Trangressive Exogamy in the Fornaldar Sögur,” The Legendary Sagas: Origins and Development, ed. Annette Lassen, Agneta Ney, and Ármann Jakobsson (Reykjavík: University of Iceland Press, 2012), 103−19. Sandra Straubhaar, “Trolls and Fishing-Grounds: Ketill Salmon’s Family and Their Relatives-in-Law,” International Congress on Medieval Studies (2007). Sandra Straubhaar, “Nasty, Brutish and Large: Cultural Difference and Otherness in the Figuration of the Trollwomen of the Fornaldar sögur,” Scandinavian Studies 73:2 (2001). 2 Jóhanna Friðriksdóttir (2013) lists fifteen “maiden kings” from the fornaldarsögur and riddarasögur (chivalric sagas) alone, many of whom wield weapons. Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, Women in Old Norse Literature: Bodies, Words and Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 107−33. 1

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The family is under a curse because of a dwarf-cursed sword, which they insist on passing down the generations. 4 http://www.am-dk.net/fas/. 5 http://www.am-dk.net/fas/. 6 This is assuming that we are to consider her as the main character of the saga sometimes named after her. Sometimes it is named after her son, the sociopathic tyrant King Heiðrekr, who is perhaps best known for having competed against the god Óðinn in a riddle-contest (never a good idea). And sometimes it is named after both of them. 7 Nora Kershaw Chadwick, Stories and Ballads of the Far Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 195−96. E. V. Gordon, Introduction to Old Norse, second edition revised by A. R. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 142: “The basis of the poem is the need for revenge, and Hervör has to choose between the revenge and the curse. In accordance with heroic tradition she puts revenge first.” (This anticipated revenge never occurs in the saga, though, as Gordon well knew.) 8 As readily, I would argue, as stanzas from any perennially popular Anglophone ballad tend to do, for Anglophones. 9 My translation. 10 In fact it can be argued that her story is the direct inspiration for certain classic tropes of modern fantasy fiction and its descendants in role-playing gaming—digital and otherwise. Poul Anderson’s Broken Sword (1954) and Michael Moorcock’s Elric series (1961−1991) particularly come to mind. Anderson read Old Norse, and certainly knew the saga; and Moorcock read Anderson. 11 Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfan Forni, 1943−1944). Digital version at http://www. heimskringla.no/wiki/Hervarar_saga_ok_Hei%C3%B0reks. 12 My translation. 13 In both cases, an orphaned daughter is given metallic valuables at a dead parent’s gravesite, although Aschenputtel’s inheritance is, of course, not as warlike in nature as Hervör’s. 14 Gordon, Introduction to Old Norse, 142. 15 Joseph C. Harris, commenting on my paper (1987). 16 Carol Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 85:1 ( January 1986): 35−49. 17 The following chart is based on Hervarar saga and Örvar-Odds saga. The family is configured slightly differently in the Faroese and Danish ballads we will visit later. Boldface indicates a wielder of the cursed sword Tyrfing. 18 Sigrlami is a king of Garðaríki (a collective name for the states of Kievan Rus’). Arngrímr has ancestral land on the island of Bólmr, somewhere north of that. Tófa is the daughter of a jarl Bjarmar, of uncertain nation. Höfundr is the son of Guðmundr, king of Glasisvellir (Glittering Plains)—a place known from other legendary sagas as being the abode of giants. Helga is the daughter of 3

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Haraldr, king of Reiðgotaland, which is possibly meant to be an old homeland of the Goths in eastern Europe. Sifka is a daughter of the king of the Huns. Hergerðr is the daughter of a king of Garðaríki and thus possibly Heiðrekr’s close relative, but neither he not the saga-narrator seems to care about this. 19 Angantýr’s warning: “Sjá mun Tyrfingr, ef þú trúa mættir, ætt þinni, mær, allri spilla.” (This Tyrfing—if you’ll believe me, maiden—will destroy all your kin.) 20 Original texts from V. U. Hammershaimb, “Færøiske Kvæder henhørende til Hervarar saga,” Antiquarisk Tidsskrift: udgivet af det kongelige nordiske oldskrifts-selskab (Copenhagen: Brødrene Berling, 1852), 64 (stanza 24) and V. U. Hammershaimb, Færøiske Kvæder (Copenhagen: Det nordiske LitteraturSamfund, 1851−1855) (stanzas 5−50). Available digitally at http://heimskringla. no/wiki/Arngr%C3%ADms_synir. Translations adapted from Chadwick, Stories and Ballads of the Far Past, 190−209. Asterisks mark lines that I have altered from Chadwick’s (wonderfully overheated) translation, sometimes to better match Hammerhaimb’s text (since I suspect she is working from Svabo) and sometimes to repair the metrics. 21 Note: Gender permeability! 22 Maybe that Freudian reading ( Joseph C. Harris, 1987) wasn’t so far off ?

Part IIa

Traditional Ballads in Context Motifs and Themes

Chapter 4

Uncanny Cetology in the Sagas and Later West-Scandinavian Balladry Sarah Harlan-Haughey

I

N THE SAGAS OF the Icelanders, whales are often beached on the shores, and men scramble to gain control of their precious fat, meat, and bone.1 Most scholars read incidents of whale beaching as illustrations of Icelandic resources whose scarcity and value generates feud cycles. As Vicki Szabo notes, the whales in the sagas are “little more than medieval roadkill”—people fight over them as valuable resources, but they are dead as dead can be, and not too interesting in themselves.2 A survey of many moments in the sagas of human/whale interaction shows that, beyond generating feud, whale bodies represent a complex of magical or demonic influences, and they generate conflict by leading men away from Christian behavior. They hearken back to an age that the saga redactors perceive as an atavistic time of need and magic, and they penetrate to the harsh core of human life in the North Atlantic. They are cross-temporal signs of great cultural anxiety. Like the draugar, the revenants lurking at the margins of an increasingly Christian world, the whales’ bodies haunt medieval narratives with their iconic connectedness with a past about which the saga audience feels ambivalent. This ambivalence continues into the modern era in a strain of folklore about magical whales that are co-opted by powerful magician-priests for Christian ends. Exploring stories and ballads about magical whales from the later Icelandic and Faroese traditions shows how the legacy of uncanny cetology extends to at least the nineteenth century.

Beached Whales and Feuds Before exploring the ways in which whales express the supernatural, let us explore the theory that whale-beachings are a feud-generating narratological mechanism—that is, that whales beach in the sagas to cause fights, or, put another way, the fights caused by whale beaching show their importance

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as resources.3 In his Feud in the Icelandic Saga, Jesse Byock notes: “because of the value of a whale, the question of who would claim this enormous resource at times caused contention among the men of a whole region.”4 And certainly, at least in part, the outbreak of tension over whale carcasses is a result of the immediacy of the experience of the beaching, and of the paramount importance of harvesting the whale before it rots or is scavenged too much by other animals—this adds to people’s anxiety, and to their unwillingness to take time to discuss things in a rational way. But the ubiquity of the motif suggests the saga-authors were thinking of these fights over whales within a broader context of generic symbolism and folkloric meaning. In general, saga whale-feuds begin because the more atavistic, aggressive, or even feral character aggressively obtains whale flesh. The more protoChristian character—or at least the better-behaved person—generally loses his share of the claim. The whale’s huge resource potential often provokes this more aggressive figure to openly steal, cheat, or kill his adversary; the whale catalyzes evil. The most famous whale stranding episode of the Saga Age seems to be an incident recounted in two intertextually linked sagas, Grettis saga and Fóstbrœðra saga.5 As it is recounted in Fóstbrœðra saga, Þorgils Másson, a good man and a close relative of Grettir’s father Ásmundr, is a “mikill maðr ok sterkr, vápnfimr, góðr býþegn” (a big strong man, strong in weapons, a good farmer).6 This honest farmer is cutting up a whale when the thuggish fóstbrœðr (sworn brothers) Þorgeirr Hávarsson and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld show up. They demand a share of the whale, antagonizing Þorgils by implying that he has selfishly taken too much of the mammal, though in reality Þorgils is within his rights. Þorgils resists their bullying and defends his find, and the aggressive Þorgeirr threateningly declares: “Þat munu þér þá reyna verða, hversu lengi þér haldið á hvalnum fyrir oss.” (We shall see how much longer you can keep this whale away from us.) 7 The ensuing fight culminates in Þorgils’s death. This murder of a good man who dared to resist the overbearing duo marks a turning point in the foster brothers’ character: they become more vicious and uncontrollable after this episode, and the saga audience likely censured the overbearing tyrrany of the unjust foster brothers.8 Saga composers perhaps recognized these moments of whale beaching and distribution as an opportunity to present a turning point in the narrative, when characters could become actively antisocial. Sagas often make moral points about the problems inherent in whale-harvesting—sometimes figures within the text make deprecatory statements about how undignified and inhuman it is to fight over “roadkill”

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with its own blubber and bones, and sometimes the saga author himself comments on the characters’ having crossed some moral line, often using biblically resonant language. In the case of the foster brothers, their narrator notes that after this episode the two men begin to dominate the landscape of Strandir, “ok gengu þeir einir yfir allt sem lok yfir akra.” (They took over everything, like weeds over a field.)9 This could be a conscious echo of biblical language, specifically Jesus’s parable of the weeds, though it is also suggests a traditional mode of comparison between men common to eddic poetry.10 The episode where Þorgils Másson is killed by the foster brothers is recounted in chapter 25 of Grettis saga, and there, too, the foster brothers’ behavior is presented as unjust—the narrator tersely states that “the sworn brothers kept the entire whale for themselves.”11 Grettis saga also features another dramatic whale-carcass fight, set during a famine in the days of Önund Tree-foot, Grettir’s grandfather. The starving settlers battle over a whale carcass stranded on a section of the shore, which the people of Kaldbakr feel lies in their scavenging territory, while the people of Vík believe it is theirs. “[F]áir menn hǫfðu þar vápn, nema øxar þær, er þeir skáru með hvalinn, ok skálmir.” (Hardly anyone had any weapons apart from the axes and knives they were using to cut up the whale.)12 With these decidedly unheroic tools of battle, the men attack one another, even resorting to the use of whale bones: “Leifr, bróðir Ívars, laust félaga Steins í hel með hvalrifi. Þá var með ǫllu barizk, því er til fekksk, ok fellu þar menn af hvárumtveggjum.” (Ivar’s brother Leif clubbed one of Stein’s companions to death with a whale rib. They fought with everything they could lay their hands on, and men were killed on both sides.)13 According to Richard Harris, “this altercation intentionally depicts a society discouragingly inferior to that of Grettir’s adventurous ancestors who sought violence to try their strength where the battle was fiercest, and the situation is made even less admirable in the paltry weapons chosen, or at their disposal, for the battle.”14 The verses composed at the scene of the “battle” imply that the scene is not only degenerate, but embarrassing : “Hǫrð frák heldr at yrði / hervǫpn at Rifskerjum, / mest þvít margir lustu / menn slyppir hvalklyppum; / en malm-Gautar móti / mjǫk fast hafa kastat, / oss lízk ímun þessi / óknyttin, þvestlyttum.” (I’ve heard how steely weapons were used, when whale-blubber was wielded at Rif Skerries. The fighters kept exchanging lethal whale-meat missiles. That’s how these boors play the game of battle.)15 Amidst the stench, the blubber, the use of filthy flensing knives and axes to kill, and the commingling of human and whale remains, the sagas

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criticize the somewhat debased nature of whale scavenging.16 The whale may be an invaluable resource, but at what point does it make more sense just to put down one’s weapon—be it blubber, bone, or blade—and walk away, perhaps to return another day? After all, in at least one saga, the much-contended body of the whale turns out to be too much for the victor to use, and is left behind to rot for a season. The set-piece of the divisive whale-butchery party recurs throughout the saga corpus. In Eyrbygg ja saga, Óspakr’s gang imposes on Þórir’s party, who are busy taking apart the carcass of a whale.17 They fight using whale-butchering axes, and Óspakr’s party makes off with a wrongful share of the whale. In Gull-Þóris saga, Steinólfur í Fagradal steals already cut whale meat from Gull-Þórir, while in Víga-Glúms saga, a dispute arises between Klængr and Hagi after the two men initially agreed to cooperate to hook and tow a dead whale: Hagi prevails over Klængr and obtains the whole carcass through force.18 These episodes suggest there is more to these whale battles in the sagas than meets the eye. These whale-beachings serve as a window into the worst of the human soul—and a channel for the chaotic forces of chance and nature. Even when battle does not break out, characters are compelled to steal—beachings draw them away from ethical behavior and towards a more “primal” way of life, of killing or stealing. The carcass of the whale in its physical reality is a viscerally moving thing. It is a powerful residual meaning-holder—partly, I believe, because of the material reality of its products, which are emphatically residual. Upon smelling a whale for the first time, one modern author is overwhelmed by its stench, which he describes as “a deep, insupportable smell, somewhere between a cow’s fart and a fishy wharf.”19 Melville describes a whale in process thus: “it smells like the left wing of the day of judgment; it is an argument for the pit.”20 The smell of a rotting, beached whale is not pleasant, no matter one’s cultural conditioning, and even if the medieval Norse had different stench response continuums, they must have recognized the powerful odor of this “gift from the sea.” In Kormáks saga, when offered the choice between working on a whale-processing site or going to pasture, it is telling that Kormák quickly chooses the latter: “Þat var eitt haust, at hvalr kom út á Vatnsnes, ok áttu þeir brœðr Dǫllusynir. Þorgils bauð Kormáki, hvárt hann vildi heldr fara á fjall eða til hvals. Hann kaus at fara á fjall með húskǫrlum.” (It became known that a whale had come out at Vatnsnes, and the two brothers, Dolla’s sons, had it. Þorgils asked Kormák whether he’d prefer to go to the hills or the whale. He chose to go with the servants [to herd sheep].) 21 The understatement of the last sentence suggests that extended sheepherding is vastly preferable for the

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sensitive Kormák to backbreaking work on the putrefying mammal. And Kormák is wise instinctively to avoid whales—he will run up against a sorcerer in whale-form later in his saga, as we shall see. In these sagas, the festering wound of the feud is mirrored on the beach by the putrefying corpse of the whale that caused it. There is a formula for ascribing the feud’s generation by whale beaching: a whale comes aground, someone starts cutting it up, and a rival appears. Perhaps these are not so much historical realities as they are literary set-pieces, meant to showcase personality. One wonders why there are no happy whale stories, where a whale comes aground and all in the district can take what they need?22 If certain motifs don’t occur in the literature, why not? What is missing? Surely plenty of whales were harvested on the beaches of Iceland without incident—in fact, a look at modern Scandinavian whaling practices and the medieval laws themselves show that an equitable distribution of the resources was possible.23 In many ways, the regimented, tightly choreographed Grindadráp (see below) of the modern Faroese, with its reaffirmations of order, efficiency, and community expresses the opposite behaviors and values to those we see in the medieval sagas; this contrast also makes the consistently discordant results of the whale beaching seem like a literary trope. And archeological information from the Westfjords of Iceland suggest that many whales were peacefully harvested and stored in a kind of processing plant—in particular as provisions for Lent. Whales were used specifically for Christian ends in the Christian period, but this historical reality gains no foothold in the saga narratives, which look back to the settlement period and the era of conversion. In the sagas, the hostility generated by the carcass is the work it does. The question, then, is why?

Whale Magic Perhaps we can answer this question if we look at a subcategory of whale beaching moments. Many involve a dangerous magician who causes a beaching—as in that famous moment in Eiríks saga rauða, where the pagan magician Þórhallr tries to spare his shipmates from famine by pinching himself and chanting for three days, using magical ritual to bring in a supernatural and mysterious whale: Þeir leituðu Þórhalls um þrjú dœgr ok fundu hann á hamargnípu einni; Hann lá þar ok horfði í loft upp ok gapði bæði munni ok nǫsum ok þulði nǫkkut. Þeir spurðu, hví hann var þar kominn. Hann kvað þá engu þat varða. Þeir báðu hann fara heim með sér, ok

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hann gerði svá. Litlu síðar kom þar hvalr, ok fóru þeir til ok skáru, ok kenndi engi maðr, hvat hvala var. Ok er matsveinar suðu, þá átu þeir, ok varð ǫllum illt af. (They searched for Þórhallr and after three days they found him on a ledge. He lay there and stared up at the sky and gaped his mouth, nose, and eyes and scratched himself. They asked, why had he come there? He responded that it was nothing. They told him to come home with them, and he did so. A little later a whale came aground and they went to it to cut it up, though no one knew what kind of whale it was. Then the cooks boiled it and everyone ate of it, but it made everyone sick.)24

Þórhallr’s lying out on an isolated rock while chanting is his attempt to replace the traditional seiðhjallr (spell-worker’s scaffold) with a natural substitute—a raised platform created by water against rock.25 This magical ritual results in chaos. When eaten, the whale’s flesh causes illness, an effect that whales generate elsewhere in medieval Scandinavian literature. In Konungs skuggsjá, for example, several evil or unidentifiable whales cause sickness due to their poisonous blubber.26 In Eiríks saga Thor the god seems to have sent this gift, and indeed this is in keeping with that god’s association with sea storms and the products of the sea, as Richard Perkins has argued.27 Such characters as Eirík with his blustery temperament and Þórhallr with his weather magic are identified with Thor “the windraiser;” it is likely that the strange whale is a product of the magician’s prayers to that god as a controller of storm and sea.28 Ironically, the magician himself is soon after forced ashore by weather-magic, which kills him.29 According to Szabo: “This association of the whale as an associate of the pagan past is reminiscent of the pan-European traditions which showed whales as representatives of malevolence.” 30 This insight can be applied with an even greater level of specificity in Norse material, wherein the whale is often attached to magic practices.31 This particular incident is portrayed as sinister and bizarre, and ultimately, at cross-purposes with the expedition’s agenda, as it makes the settlers ill. In the context of Eiríks saga, the consumption of a supernatural whale becomes particularly fraught, for questions arise: is Þórhallr’s unfamiliar whale a physical manifestation of some part of himself, and does consumption of such a beast taint the eater with a symbolic cannibalism? Such dependence on whale for sustenance had its own moral problems—for one need only read a few accounts by authors like Giraldus Cambrensis, who marvels at the Irish sustaining themselves on animals alone, or Jordanes’ observation in his

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De origine actibusque Getarum (a summary of Cassiodorus’s History of the Goths) that the Northerners eat only flesh to see that complete dependence on animal flesh for survival is aligned with “savage” peoples.32 This same anxiety is seen in the Historia Norwegie’s note that “on the half-raw flesh of [beasts] the [Sámi] feed themselves.”33 What does that make the Icelanders, then? In their dependence on whales, eggs, dairy, and fish, they might be no better than the “savage” Sámi. It is thus unsurprising that in their consumption of the unfamiliar whale in Vinland, the settlers appear to be sliding down a slippery slope of humanity. The story of the unknown whaleflesh reflects anxieties that lie much closer to home. If this episode in Eiríks saga rauða were the only association of whales with magic, it would be an exceptional instance in a sea of more realistic whale moments in the Íslendinga sögur. But it isn’t. Magic and whales are often intermixed. Consider another famous magical whale moment—in Egils saga. A girl, Helga, becomes ill because some besotted illiterate has carved the wrong magic runes into a whalebone and placed it under her bed.34 Egill fixes the problem by writing healthful runes over the botched ones. Egill’s manipulation of the magic whalebone mirrors his runic curse in the horse’s head (níðstöng ) episode; both emphasize Egill’s potency as a magician and his old-fashioned nature. 35 Arguably the whiteness of the whale’s magical bone foreshadows that other bony reminder of a heroic heathen past—Egill’s own monstrous skull—which also seems to resist Christian contexts, since it is discovered in the church and experimented upon.36 Generally in Norse society, the body of the whale is processed and domesticated as needles, pins, etc., but when used for magic, the wild power of the living animal is maintained and even amplified. Certainly, as in Egils saga, many objects of great cultural importance were carved of the white whalebone—some might have been part of ritual. One can see why whalebone might seem to have special power; it retains massive amounts of oil, and continues to smell—or, depending on the species, even drip oil—for up to centuries after the creature’s death. One can understand the logic that would attribute to this residual spell a “presence” that remains of the animal’s power. David Robertson argues that the “act of inscribing the runes [on whalebone or wood] gave special force to the formula by converting it from ephemeral to permanent and concrete.”37 The residual power of the whale is also important in Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, an early modern work that seems to preserve many important pieces of medieval folklore: “Those who sleep inside [houses made of whale ribs] are forever dreaming that they are toiling

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incessantly on the ocean waves or, harassed by storms, are in perpetual danger of shipwreck.” 38 The ribs retain a memory of the sea, and that residual whale-consciousness haunts the human inhabitants. Finally, and ironically, whalebone’s habit of smelling and oozing parallels saints’ miracles, in which a holy scented oil oozes from the saintly body.39 In other sagas, not only the whalebone or the whale’s dead body is associated with magic or supernatural illness—in a remarkable number of instances, magicians shapeshift into the forms of whales or summon whales to cause problems. Fantastic whaleriders and whale shapeshifters recur in Örvar-Odds saga, Friðþjófs saga frækna, and Halfdanar saga. 40 And this happens not only in the fornaldar sögur and later chronicles, but throughout the earlier saga corpus as well. In Vatnsdœla saga, Ingimundr sends a Sámi spy over to Iceland, disguised as a whale.41 In the Historia Norwegiae, the Finnar (Sami) magicians agree to check on Iceland, and enter trances in their tents for three days, presumably sending their hamrs (shapes) across the water. 42 In the same episode in Landnámabok, their journey is described as a hamfǫr—a shape-journey. It is particularly significant that these revered accounts of the settlement of Iceland should preserve the tales of malignant whales as heathen spies—such prominence in the national imagination is not easily forgotten. This motif is analogous to an episode in Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar, chapter 33, wherein Haraldar Gormsson sends a spy to Iceland in a whale’s skin—a sinister shapeshifting episode that threatens to erode Icelandic autonomy. “Haraldr konungr bauð kunngum manni at fara í hamfǫrum til Íslands ok freista, hvat hann kynni segja honum. Sá fór í hvalslíki.” (King Harald bade a cunning man to go on a shape-shifting journey to Iceland to see what he could find out for him. This man went in the form of a whale.) 43 The whale spy crosses the ocean, only to be kept at bay by the powerful landvættir, the landspirits of Iceland, which protect the land and keep him from completing his mission. In Kormáks saga, chapter 18, a strange “hrosshvalr” attacks Kormák’s boat, and the men think they recognize in the eyes of the beast the eyes of the witch Þórveig, Kormák’s nemesis. The hrosshvalr is speared or poked with a pole; it sinks; and Þórveig dies some days later. The malignant witch has assumed the hamr of this terrifying sea creature, and its undoing is hers.44 The notion of the malignancy and magic of magician/whales seems to have intensified in the later sagas—see, for example, Friðjófs saga frækna, where two seiðr-performing hamhleypur (skin-changers) appear in the sea riding whales and attack Friðjóf. 45 When he attacks the whaleriders in

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return, the magicians standing on their platforms simultaneously fall with broken backs. This is a threefold manifestation of the magicians’ selves— those performing on land, the avatars at sea, and the animal helpers. In Jóns saga baptista II, we learn that hamhleypr “could traverse vast distances in an instant, riding whales or seals, birds or wild animals.”46 Other nearcontemporary writers note the connection between ancient traditional magic and whale beaching. For example, Adam of Bremen, in his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, tells us that The king of the Danes told that a certain people [the Sámi] were in the habit of descending from the highlands into the plains. … These people, it is said, are to this day so superior in magic arts or incantations that they profess to know what everyone is doing the world over. Then they also draw great sea monsters to shore with a powerful mumbling of words and do much else of which one reads in the Scriptures about magicians.47

In Clive Tolley’s thorough study of Shamanistic influence on Old Norse literature, we learn that Sámi magicians were consistently perceived by Christian viewers as menacing sorcerers who could summon “an unclean spirit … [which] could assume the shape of whales/water-beasts and other objects.”48 This seems to be the sort of thing Þórhallr in Eiríks saga rauða attempts, and that other magicians, like those in the fornaldar sögur, achieve. But not all of these magicians are Sámi. The thing they have in common is their antagonism to political or religious change. Let us return to consider the physical reality of the whales’ beaching in those more “realistic” incidents with which we began this discussion. Even today, we still don’t always know what causes these beasts to come aground: magnetic jams in their blood, sonar malfunction, population control, or changes in the coastline not registered in time by the cetacean “oral tradition.” To medieval Icelanders, and to us, such a strange event could seem an act of God, or of chaos, or of a malignant nature. To the Norse, the liminality of the beaching would be disturbing, as the amphibious creature inexplicably presents himself in that classic locus of landscape anxiety, the beach. A whale’s suffering is particularly moving, as whales have mammalian eyes, and one might feel that there could be a human consciousness trapped in all that blubber.49 To what kind of god does a newly converted population ascribe such an event? To be sure, the beaching of a whale brings food and forestalls famine—an act of a benevolent god—but at what cost? It kills a moribund animal by dehydration,

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excruciatingly slowly; it causes chaos and disunity among humans; and it can serve as a tool for malevolent powers. The phenomenological experience of the whale’s beaching likely motivates the literature of whale stranding in the sagas. In the works in which the whale appears, there tends to be some pagan or atavistic dimension to the events which surround it. Whales’ obvious knowledge of the sea and their ability to lead ships near land aligns them with supernatural knowledge.50 Their appearance on or near land seems odd—perhaps a result of witchcraft or divine intention. Certainly the practice of eating something that seemed so sentient must have involved a certain cognitive dissonance and required some mental or moral gymnastics. One pertinent question is: why would thirteenth-century authors feel uneasy about the consumption of whale meat? After all, we know that Icelanders and the Faroese consume whale meat to this day and did so throughout the Middle Ages. Why then look for an uneasiness about whaleflesh in the past or in the sagas specifically? The most basic answer is that literature, folklore, and myth are able to explore the basic problems that lie unexamined yet inherent in the life of every society. Another answer is that the whales eaten today tend to be small, freshly caught pilot or minke whales—but they, too, contain dangerous levels of mercury: the whales still carry our sins in their flesh. No one eats the rotting flesh of a dead beached whale anymore. That is a food only consumed by necessity—true, its blubber and bone are invaluable, but as a food source, it was then, as now, decidedly not choice. Reconsidering the more benign-seeming whale beachings in the sagas—those not explicitly connected with magic or supernatural events—one notes that these beached whales are made to represent an older order of chaos and demonic anarchy loosed upon the world. The formulaic, almost hackneyed way in which whale conflicts are set up reinforces the sense of the whale as a bringer of discord—a demonic discord, brought on not by human nature, but by a malevolent, and supernaturally aligned force of nature, which seeks to sow discord in human, or often Christian settlements. The saga composers were aware of and sensitive to the implications of this “pagan” uncanny. The whale’s flesh has a built-in mechanism of exchange—it is a gift reminiscent of the pagan past that obligates the receiver to unwittingly do some sort of homage to malignant powers—either by sustaining damage, or by behaving badly. We can bring these seemingly disparate bodies of literature together by examining the physical body of the whale as a nexus of atavistic conflict. It plays that role throughout many different genres of Icelandic literature.

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In both realistic and fantastic literature, it is aligned with magic or chance, and with some force of evil. Christian modes of thinking about whales and sea monsters have influenced Norse literature about whales, but these texts also seem to retain a relatively fresh memory of whales as a symbol of power and menace in a distinctly non-Christian tradition. The whale can be a sign both of prior pagan practice and of diabolical influence more in line with a Christian thoughtworld. In a way, there’s no need to make an arbitrary distinction; in the end, it only makes for a richer experience of the literature to acknowledge that the whale is a multivalent and syncretic symbol of great power. The body of the whale carries prolonged echoes of previous practice and belief. To sum up the argument to this point, there are any number of factors in whale-beaching narratives which could cause uneasiness: 1) the whale is a magician’s sending, or is the magician herself, shapeshifted; 2) The whale is a gift from the gods, which requires reciprocation; 3) the whale’s species is unidentifiable, and the meat may be dangerous or even deadly; 4) the whale is infused with demonic power; 5) it is unclear when a whale is really dead, and it could still be dangerous / it is bad to consume living flesh; 6) the whale is a liminal animal, and as such causes ontological discomfort; 7) the whale beaching is a product of unknowable forces of weather, perhaps set in motion by demonic supernatural entities; 8) the whale’s appearance on the seashore exacerbates the geographic and legal difficulty in defining borderlands of sea and shore, in defining the edges of hirðig jar; 9) the whale is a spy of a hostile political power; and 10) its presence causes fights.

Whales, Magic, and Community in Later Tradition I will now turn to later extensions of some of the motifs we have seen, in the material found in Scandinavian balladry and folktale.51 We will notice a general turn towards Christian (not heathen) magicians exerting control over the moral and physical landscape as well as over the whale’s nature. If the whale is still a force of chaos in these later narratives, its power is channeled by these magicians towards Christian ends. Arguably, their actions represent a defense of community over malign supernatural powers. We see a good example of this turn in the Icelandic ballad Kvaeði um sankti Hallvarð (ÍF 78). Saint Hallvarður, a miracle-worker, answers the prayer of a poor farmer, who sees a giant log float by and wishes it were a whale.52 The log obliges, and transforms. In spite of a supernatural fog

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and storm, the farmer manages to bring in the wondrous whale, with the saint’s help. Later on, a dangerously suicidal man, who has been shackled to keep him from self-harm, comes upon the enchanted whale, and the meat cures him of his madness. This ballad, though unusual, “has enjoyed a lengthy oral existence” in Iceland. 53 It is intriguing in its echo of the strange miracle of the swine performed by Jesus in the synoptic gospels— as in that biblical story we are dealing with a chained madman, a food taboo, and an itinerant miracle-worker. But where in Mark 5:1−20 the man’s legion of demons were cast into swine, here, the strange enchanted whaleflesh cures the man who ingests it, i.e., takes its spirit into itself. The inversion of the motif is provocative, and it is certainly a departure from the earlier material, where whaleflesh brought chaos to human society. In the folktale Rauðöð, translated as “The Red-Headed Whale” or “The Man-Whale,” collected in Suðurnes by Jón Árnason and anthologized in his Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, a young man is stranded while foraging out at Geirfuglasker by inclement (read: supernatural) weather over the winter.54 He is saved by an elf woman whose lover he becomes. He promises to baptize any offspring and then returns to human civilization. But when a baby suddenly appears at the church door, he denies paternity. The elf woman takes revenge by transforming her former lover into a monstrous whale with a red head. Redhead becomes a great nuisance in Icelandic waters, staving in boats and drowning sailors. Matters continue in this way until a priest who is also an accomplished magician summons Redhead to Hvalfjardarströnd with his Christian power and his beautiful daughter. The whale is entranced and the magician and his daughter slowly walk upstream, with the whale following, heaving himself forward. When they reach a great waterfall that cascades from the highlands, they climb along the narrow gorge and Redhead leaps up like a great salmon. When they finally arrive at a lake, the water is too shallow, and the monstrous and irreligious Redhead expires, his malice with him. The lake gains the name Hvalvatn as a result. This story of Redhead contains many elements that align it with medieval whale folklore. The bad Christian is stranded by a potentially supernatural storm, and his lack of piety—first in accepting the love of the elf woman and second in denying his own child entry into the Christian faith through baptism—dooms him. This transformation into a demonic whale whose intelligence and malevolence cannot be matched and who terrorizes Iceland is a fitting punishment: the lost soul becomes guilty through a sort of contrapasso of murder. His evil is not just dangerous, it

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must be eradicated, and magic must be fought with magic! The priest is performing the same work that Thor-worshipping Þórhallr did in Eiríks saga rauða, pulling in a dangerous and malevolent whale, though with opposite intent. In this folktale, as in the ballad, the saintly magicians help eliminate evil through their interaction with supernatural whales—and thus the dark tradition is rewritten. Finally, I wish to offer a brief note on another important whalerelated ballad tradition, the infamous Grindadráp in the Faroes. This event occurs spontaneously when a pod of pilot whales appear (or offer themselves?) in the bays of the Faroes. Able-bodied men drop whatever they are doing, don wetsuits, hop into boats, and begin spearing whales and pulling their bodies ashore. Another team slits their throats and organizes them on the beach in regimented lines. The bay turns red; sixty or more pilot whales bleed out. Although this scene has been denounced as barbaric by animal rights activists, it is an expression of Faroese tradition and identity. The orderliness of the slaughter continues in the butchery of the whales and the precise sharing out of their flesh to all community members, according to their rank and desert. Women have traditionally played an important role in the process, laboring mightily to process and preserve the great quantity of meat and blubber. The grand event ends with a communal feast and celebration, ornamented by exultant performance of many traditional ballads, as well as the grindavísan, specially composed for the occasion. The pilot whale is the reason for the performance of the ballads—its sudden appearance and death in Faroese waters occasions this important bonding ritual and strengthens Faroese identity by reminding all participants of their meaningful place in a multispecies ecosystem. For this reason, the event has persisted—in spite of pressure from the outside. It is an affirmation of art and a call for participation in the cycles of nature, however red in tooth and claw she may be. NOTES 1 To begin this study on a personal note, I wish to remember a pivotal moment in my own budding academic career. After a year of graduate school in 2005, I was unsure whether medieval studies or even academia was right for me when I attended Kalamazoo for the first time, presenting my early research on Robin Hood rhymes in Larry’s ballad sessions sponsored by the Kommision für Volksdichtung. Far from making me feel like the tyro I was, Larry warmly welcomed me into the ballad circle and invited me to one of the storied ballad dinners

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that he and his wonderful wife Ardis staged at their impeccable home near campus. It is not an exaggeration for me to say that that night of fellowship, conversation, beauty, and delicious food changed the course of my career. I discovered that one needn’t sacrifice aesthetics, love, or well-being in order to be an academic, and that cutthroat competition was not the only way to become a distinguished member of one’s field. Collegiality, warmth, and serious dedication to one’s subject and to those who think hard about it was Larry’s way, and it took him far, lodging him forever in the hearts of those whose lives he and Ardis touched. 2 Vicki E. Szabo, Monstrous Fishes and the Wine-Dark Sea: Whaling in the Medieval North Atlantic (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 212. 3 “Beached whales were clearly regarded as valuable food resources, generating disputes, litigation and other social conflict among the communities of the Icelandic Commonwealth.” Ian Whitaker, “North Atlantic Sea-Creatures in the King’s Mirror (Konungs Skuggsjá),” Polar Record 23, no. 142 (1986): 3–13. 4 Jesse S. Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982), 230. 5 ÍF 7: Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. Guðni Jónsson (1936). ÍF 6: Fóstbrœðra saga, in Vestfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Björn Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson (1943). All citations from the Old Icelandic come from the Íslenzk fornrít series, which will be abbreviated as ÍF. 6 7.148. Translations mine, unless otherwise indicated. 7 7.148−49. 8 As Richard Harris notes in his forthcoming book, Wisdom of the North: Paroemial Allusion and Patterning in the Icelandic Saga (Ithaca: Islandica, 2019) “Any sympathy the audience might have for the fóstbrœðr is strained beyond tolerance” by this unjust killing (318). My personal thanks to Dr. Harris for sharing his working manuscript with me as I prepared this article. 9 7.149−50. 10 Cf. The parable of the weeds, Matthew 13:24−36, and Guðrúnarkviða II 2: “Svá var Sigurđr / of sonum Gjúka / sem vӕri grœnn laukr / ógrasi vaxinn,” in ÍF Eddukvӕđi II (353). See also Guðrúnarkviða I, 17 in ÍF Eddukvӕđi II (332), and Helgakviða Hundingsbana II, 37, in ÍF Eddukvӕđi II (279). My thanks to Joseph Harris for pointing out these analogous passages. 11 Grettis saga, 12.30/ The Saga of Grettir the Strong, 25. 91. 12 Grettis saga, 12.30/ The Saga of Grettir the Strong, 12.61. 13 Grettis saga, 12.30/ The Saga of Grettir the Strong, 12.61−62. 14 Harris, Wisdom of the North, 226. 15 Grettis saga, 12.31.v.7./ (Grettir’s Saga, 12, tr. Fox and Pálsson 1974, 20). 16 C.f. Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings, chap. 10, in ÍF 6: Vestfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Björn Þórólfsson and Guðni Jónsson, 1943, or The Saga of Havard of Isafjord, chap. 10, where Brandr kills Án with a whale’s rib ship-runner. This is a parody of earlier saga material, and it is significant that the whale’s rib is used by an old-fashioned

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strongman in place of a normal weapon for a particularly brutal act of manslaughter. Translated by Frederk J. Heinemann in Comic Sagas and Tales From Island, ed. Viðar Hreinsson (New York: Penguin Classics, 2013), 155−204, 179. 17 ÍF 4: Eyrbygg ja saga, Eiríks saga rauða, ed. Einar Sveinsson and Matthías Þórðarson. See chapter 57. 18 Víga-Glúms saga, in ÍF 9: Eyfirðinga sǫgur, ed. Jónas Kristjánsson (1956), see chapter 27. 19 Phillip Hoare, The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 214. 20 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: A Longman Critical Edition (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), 379. 21 Kormáks saga, in ÍF 8: Vatnsdœla saga, ed. Einar Sveinsson (1939), 3.207. 22 The only possible exception would be the prelapsarian language characterizing pristine pre-Settlement Iceland in Egils Saga, chap. 29, where the tameness of whales at Mýrar (which might be walruses) is mentioned as a fantastic example of the bounty of early Iceland. This tameness is linked with the taking and naming of the land, and there are subtle echoes of Genesis. 23 See Andrew Dennis, Peter Foote, and Richard Perkins, trans., Laws of Early Iceland, Gragas: The Codex Regis of Gragas with Material from Other Manuscripts (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1980), 57−72. 24 Eiríks saga rauða in ÍF 8: Vatnsdœla saga, ed. Einar Sveinsson and Matthías Þórdarson (1985), 8.224. 25 For more on the seiðhjallr, see Clive Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (Helsinki: Nuomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2009), 545. 26 Larson, Laurence Marcellus (trans.), The King’s Mirror (Speculum regaleKonungs skuggsjá). Scandinavian Monographs 3 (New York: The AmericanScandinavian Foundation, 1917), chap. 12, pp. 120−22. 27 In his study of the figure of Thor as a wind god, Richard Perkins argues that “wind-magic may probably be said to be more common amongst pagan peoples than, say, Christians”; that wind and weather were seen as fickle, hard to predict, out of control, and a great mystery; and that wind-magic used to the detriment of others appears often in the Icelandic saga corpus. Richard Perkins, Thor the Wind-Raiser and the Eyrarland Image (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2001), 9−12. See also A. E. J. Ogilvie and Gísli Pálsson, “Mood, Magic and Metaphor: Allusions to Weather and Climate in the Sagas of Icelanders,” in Weather, Climate, Culture, eds. S. Strauss and B. S. Orlove (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 264. 28 On this, see Richard Perkins (note 27, above). 29 As Clive Tolley notes in his survey, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic (p. 39), the Vikings were connected with Finns and Sámi from the Bronze age and with Russia through the Merovingian Period—so if the “sendings” and summonings we see in Norse material look like shamanistic magic, they may well be

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literary representations of practices with which the Norse were at least familiar. For an exploration of the complex of weather-magic and atavistic behavior, see my “A Landscape of Conflict: Weather Magic and Colonialism in Færeyinga Saga and Sigmunds Kvæði Eldra,” in New North-American Studies of Medieval Iceland, Islandica 58 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 345−87. 30 Szabo, Monstrous Fishes and the Wine-dark Sea, 234. 31 Tolley argues that the episode is part of the author’s strategy of launching “a polemical attack on the pagan practices still supposedly prevalent around the year 1000 in Greenland; the author manufactures some extraordinary scenes to illustrate his point, notably the beached whale,” Tolley, Shamanism in Norse Myth and Magic, 488. 32 Jordanes, Gothic History of Jordanes, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (Cambridge: Speculum Historiale, 1915), 56. 33 Historia Norwegie, ed. Inger Ekrem and Lars Boje Mortensen and trans. Peter Fisher (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculaneum Press, 2003), IV, 59. 34 ÍF 2: Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ed. Sigurður Nordal, chap. 73. 35 Egils saga, chap. 57. 36 Egils saga, chap. 86. 37 David Robertson, “Magical Medicine in Viking Scandinavia,” Medical History 20, no. 3 (1976): 317–322, at 320. 38 Olaus Magnus, Description of the Northern Peoples, trans, ed. Foote. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996), Book 21, chap. 24, p. 1107. See also Book 2, chap. 10, p. 104. 39 Cf. Saint Nicholas. 40 In Örvar-Odds saga, chap. 21: two evil whales plague Örvar’s ships; both are sent by his nemesis. In Hálfdanar saga Eysteinssonar, chap. 12: a Saami magician turns into a whale. In Hjálmpérs saga ok Olvis, chap. 20: King Hundingi dies at the same instant as a large whale, to which he seems spiritually linked. “The notion may well be indigenous, but the evidence is somewhat weakened by the lateness of the material,” notes Tolley (p. 266,) but indeed, this does look quite a lot like other instances of characters dying at the same time as or shortly after their hamrs have. 41 ÍF 8: Vatnsdœla saga, ed. Einar Sveinsson (1939), 12.123. 42 Historia Norwegiae. Trans. Devra Kunin, London, Viking Society, 2001, 27−34 (p. 7). See also Tolley (p. 63). 43 ÍF 26:271. 44 ÍF 8: ch. 18. The hrosshvalr is perhaps a walrus, perhaps a whale, perhaps a monster. 45 In Fornaladarsögur norðurlanda, ed. Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, 3 vols. (Reykjavik: Bókaútgafn Forni, 1943−1944), Vol II, chapters 5 and 7. 46 Jóns saga baptista II, in Postola sögur, pp. 849−931, chap. 35. See also Tolley, p. 509.

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History of the Bishops of Hamburg-Bremen. Trans. F. J. Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), iv. xxxii, 31. 48 Tolley, p. 264−65. 49 It is significant that the only animals in the sagas that are described as having human eyes are sea mammals. 50 The whale’s navigational aptitude is of course memorialized in the famous kenning, “whale-road.” 51 Jaqueline Simpson in Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 43, notes that “monster whales play a great part in Icelandic lore.” 52 Islenzk fornkvædi, ed. Jon Helgason (Copenhagen, Munksgaard, 1981), vol. 8, p. 189. 53 Vésteinn Ólason, The Traditional Ballads of Iceland (Reykjavik: Stofnun Ama Magnussonar, 1982), 374. 54 See ( J.á. 628−32) (available online at http://baekur.is/bok/000197672/ Islenzkar_thjodsogur_og), translated by Jaqueline Simpson, in Icelandic Folktales and Legends, 40−43, as “the Red-Headed Whale,” and Powell and Magnusson, in Icelandic Legends (London: Richard Bentley, 1864), 65−72, as “The Man-Whale.” 47

Chapter 5

If You Go Down to the Woods Today ... Fateful Locations in the Ballad Landscapes of Three Kingdoms Tom Pettitt

Introductory Remarks: Landscapes in Ballads In a respectful echo of Larry Syndergaard’s commitment to international ballad studies, this contribution will glance at the nature and role of ballad landscapes across the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Denmark. “Ballad Landscapes” could legitimately be taken to mean ballads in landscapes, the significant and as yet unresolved matter of whether certain types of eco-cultural environment are particularly conducive to a vigorous ballad tradition, or otherwise influence its character, but what follows will be restricted to the inverse, if ultimately related, topic of landscapes in ballads—the material environment, natural and man-made, constructed by the narrative, in which ballad action is located and with which ballad figures interact.1 Given the notorious reticence of traditional balladry in both Britain and Scandinavia on details of both place and person,2 it is natural that such landscape specifications as do occur should be a matter of interest, with regard to the work they do by way of both narration and signification. This in turn prompts the question of whether such features vary between national ballad traditions, and if so, why? Into this substantial field the present essay can undertake only an exploratory excursion (or, in this age of media archaeology, can excavate only a trial trench) whose point of departure is a quite specific topographical feature of the Danish ballad landscape, the rosenlund, which in many ballads (folkeviser) provides the setting for fateful action. If lund is a grove and rose is a rose was the rosenlund a grove of wild roses or a grove of trees in which roses grew, or should rose in this combination be taken to mean something else? (This last uncertainty prompts

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the reluctance in what follows to translate rosenlund systematically as “rose grove.”) Where, in the ballad world in which it features, is it located in relation to any other specified landscape features, and how does this relate to the realities of the early-modern Danish landscape? Or are we in the presence of a reverse phenomenon, in which the rosenlund is not so much a location existing independently of the ballad protagonists and in which fateful events occur, as something which springs up around such game-changing action?3 A provisional (“manual”) sweep of the standard scholarly edition of Danish ballads identified a minimum of sixty-two in which (in one version or more) rosenlund and fateful action coincide,4 and they provide the basis for the general survey of its incidence and role in Danish balladry5 which prefaces the international comparisons to follow. The former will include discussion of the relative distribution of the references between the respective (content-based) subgenres of Danish balladry, but here too a reverse phenomenon may be a possibility: a ballad subgenre, rosenlundsviser, for which deployment of this feature was the definitive characteristic. The subsequent juxtaposition with English and Scottish ballad traditions will be in pursuit of reciprocal enlightenment, to which end the most viable and efficient procedure is to seek out in English and Scottish ballads the kinds of situations and events that in Danish balladry tend to occur i rosenlunden, and to ascertain how they handle them—whether the material context is at all specified; if so as what; and how such specification is integrated into the narrative and the ballad world it constructs. This is indeed the approach adopted here, but within the constraints of a scholarly paper it will be narrowed to juxtaposing not similar events but the same events, in that it is restricted to seven (of the, in all, ten6) Danish rosenlund ballads which have generally recognized English and Scottish analogues.

The Rosenlund in Danish Balladry Among the wonders of Danish vernacular culture is the wealth of early modern (sixteenth and seventeenth century) manuscript songbooks (visehåndskrifter) largely compiled in aristocratic or gentry households, together with a couple of derivative printed collections from the same period. (Imagine Anglo-Scottish ballad scholarship had at its disposal ca. 35 Percy Folios, most of them containing mostly ballads). They are

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matched by the wealth of transcripts from a living performance tradition in the Danish provinces, made in the latter half of the nineteenth century by collectors dedicated to recording exactly what was sung and by whom. (Imagine the English Folk Song Society had been founded fifty years earlier, that its collectors had been as interested in words as in melodies, and had left informative notes on the singers). Together they form the basis of Grundtvig’s authoritative collection of 539 folkeviser (DgF)7—not including the 100 or so satirical and salacious jocular ballads (Skæmteviser) which to their credit the founding editors considered beneath their notice8— and this from a population on average one tenth that of the united British kingdoms throughout the period 1700−1900.9

Sub-Generic Distribution Danish scholarship has long operated with what has proved a generally viable system of ballad subgenres which may be summarized as follows:10 DgF 1−32 (= 32 ballads): Kæmpeviser —Heroic Ballads —narrating the deeds of warrior heroes (kæmpe, “champions”) in ancient times; the kind of material otherwise encountered in Beowulf, the Edda, and other Germanic epics (but these are not the primeval ballads from which those epics are sometimes thought to have derived); DgF 33−95 (= 63 ballads): Trylleviser—Wonder-ballads —action and ambience of the kind now more often associated with wondertales (aka fairytales), in which human characters are advantaged or challenged by occult forces, or by supernatural figures; DgF 96−114 (= 19 ballads): Legendeviser—Holy Legend Ballads —narrating marvellous events in the lives of the Holy Family or Christian saints and martyrs11 DgF 115−182 (= 68 ballads): Historiske viser—Historical Ballads —the kind of material that would be at home in chronicles, including events (that we would call “legendary”) believed to be historical (a Danish Robin Hood would belong here); DgF 183−489 (= 307 ballads): Ridderviser—Gentry Ballads —drastic events involving relationships and conflicts within and between households of the land-owning classes.

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It is a persistent frustration that the designation of this last, the largest and in many ways most interesting of the subgenres of Scandinavian balladry (not least in relation to the rosenlund), should be so difficult to render satisfactorily into English. Ridder in Danish translates culturally as “knight,” technically (in the sense of horseman) as “cavalier,” but “Knighthood Ballads” (not to mention “Ballads of Chivalry”) has connotations of the medieval romances which are distinctly misleading : the male protagonists in the ballads are on balance less likely to rescue damsels in distress than to be the direct cause of the distress. From this perspective “Cavalier Ballads” would be better, but would invoke a too specific English historical context. The ideal would be whatever sociocultural designation best fits the rumbustious Paston family of fifteenth-century Norfolk, whose celebrated letters reflect a society and people quite reminiscent of (and to a degree contemporary with) the world of these ballads.12 My latest bid, “Gentry Ballads,” invokes this period’s “rise of the gentry” in England of which the Pastons were symptomatic, but may smack too much of the Jane Austenish gentility which has intervened in the meantime.13 The incidence of game-changing rosenlund action within Danish balladry displays a distinct preference for some of these subgenres rather than others, figuring in none of the Holy Legend Ballads, in only one Heroic Ballad and two Historical ballads. In contrast it features in thirtyfour Gentry Ballads, and fifteen Wonder-ballads. In addition there are ten rosenlund-ballads among the fifty which the standard edition consigns to a recalcitrant miscellaneous section (DgF 490−539) of songs whose place within the subgenres (or even the ballad canon) was found problematic because of content, style, or chronology. More importantly, the distribution reflects a deeper trend (which might support the notion of a rosenlund category) in that the Gentry Ballads as a whole are almost definitively about problematic-antagonistic interpersonal relationships: both within households (intra-domestic conflicts—between generations or among siblings) and/or between households (inter-domestic conflicts— particularly in the field of sex and couple formation), and this is emphatically the case with those featuring action in the rosenlund. To these we may add most of the fifteen cases from the Wonder Ballads, which involve very much the same kind of conflicts, only now with a complicating supernatural aspect (involvement with elf-maidens; animal transformations; spells), and a similar focus on interpersonal relationships in a gentry setting characterizes the ten rosenlund ballads in the Miscellaneous category.14

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Rosenlund: Real World and Ballad World Like “grove,” lund designates a small wooded area,15 and in both languages the respective term can be further specified by the tree species concerned: ash grove (askelund); birch (birkelund); hazel (haslund); linden/ lime (lindelund); oak (egelund); white- or blackthorn (tjørnelund).16 But left to their own devices native rose species of all three kingdoms form not so much a grove as an impenetrable thicket (Danish krat)—a place of entanglement (as occasionally in folktales) rather than adventure. This is presumably why as a place name “rose grove” is extremely rare in England, withal associated with somewhat unrosy environments (Google insistently directs us to a run-down railway station in the western suburbs of Burnley). In Denmark in contrast Rosenlund is now ubiquitous as a name for houses, streets, suburbs, and farms, but there are signs that the fashion post-dates the ballads. A substantial if geographically incomplete scholarly database of historical Danish place names characterizes about a quarter of its 94 instances of rosenlund as “recent” (in quite a few cases substituted for an earlier name). Of the remainder, significantly, only two refer to a small wooded area.17 And contrary to what one might expect from the ballads, there seem to be no instances of a rosenlund on the oldest (around 1800) cadastre maps showing the grounds and estates of the Danish nobility and gentry.18 Meanwhile the landscape constructed within the Danish ballads has no instances of a rosenlund with roses actually growing in it: the ambient flora seems rather to have been dominated by the lime or linden-tree (e.g., DgF. 230, 284, 321, 440), also familiar from medieval love-lyric,19 and still a favorite around Danish stately homes. Indeed the original expression may not necessarily have indicated the presence of roses (wild or cultivated) in the modern botanical sense. In some dialects of early-modern Danish rose could mean simply flower, the species rosa distinguished as “thorn rose” tornerose.20 This is presumably why James Moreira, in his study of the representation of place in a Norwegian regional ballad tradition, invoked earlier, translates rosenslund as “flowering place,” and certainly in Denmark in spring the floor of small deciduous woods becomes a variegated carpet of anemones, bluebells, and primroses worthy of Botticelli.21 The likelihood is, therefore, that to the extent the ballad rosenlund had any real-world connotations for the original singers and audiences of the Danish folkeviser, these would have been with a feature of the landscape more usually designated as something else. The closest the ballads themselves come to an equivalence with a historical landscape is

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in their frequent specification that the most normal and natural activity undertaken in a rosenlund—unmotivated by balladesque pursuit of fateful encounters—is hunting (with bow, falcon, or hounds). Bedelund (“hunt’s grove”) is accordingly an occasional alternative designation, and the indigenous fauna of the ballad rosenlund includes suitable quarry such as hares (DgF 34, 475) and deer (DgF 34, 58, 180, 348). But it is far from the dark Wald of wondertales or the mysterious forêt of medieval romance. Often explicitly located on the edge of human habitation (DgF 34, 57, 58, 78, 180, 230, 284, 348, 405, 415A, 440, 470, 475, 503), indeed within earshot of the church bells (DgF 458), the rosenlund is regularly passed through on the way from one manor house to another (DgF 5, 46, 47, 54, 73, 82, 84, 85, 333, 416E, 417, 499, 501, 506, 519), and people in a given residence can on occasion hear (DgF 54) or even glimpse (DgF 85, 303) what is happening within it. Most of this is compatible with the parks which came into fashion in the neighborhood of European stately homes in the late-medieval generations immediately prior to the Danish ballad manuscripts. In England a distinction was sometimes made between the “little park” (“pleasure park” / “pleasance”) where ladies looked at the animals, and the “great park” where men hunted and killed them, but this was far from universal,22 and the rosenlund of Danish balladry tends to encompass both. While hunting may point in the direction of the great park, other, ordinary, functions of the ballad rosenlund are more redolent of the little park, notably recreational walking (DgF 57) and social dancing (DgF 503), not to forget romantic or sexual dalliance, the rosenlund also being a place where lovers make assignations (DgF 8, 230, 284, 405, 470). The spheres of “great” and “little” park significantly overlap when, on a lucky (or rather, fateful) day, a huntsman finds, sheltering beneath a linden-tree, a hapless maiden whose lover has stood her up (DgF 230). Eminently compatible with this topographical liminality (between little and great parks, and, on a broader scale, between the garden and forest that, in their respective direction, lay beyond them) are the ambivalent creatures who are denizens of, or encountered in, the ballad rosenlund: humanoid but alien species such as dwarves (DgF 34; 35) and elves (DgF 36; 37), and, more often, human-animal hybrids, be it animals with human characteristics—the talking bird (DgF 506) or wolf (54)—or humans transformed into animals—eagle (12), werewolf (57), falcon (56), and deer (58), plus, one step further down the great chain of being, into a tree (DgF 66—linden of course).

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Ultimately, the rosenlund is a feature in a self-contained ballad world which is not obliged to display real world equivalences, and whose function is as the location for fateful, most often fatal, events, whose nature is evident from the following list. It is in the rosenlund that transformed humans are disenchanted (DgF 12, 56, 57, 66); feuds conclude in violence (DgF 30, 164, 195, 321); a husband kills his wife’s lover (DgF 348); a wife’s lover kills her husband (DgF 296); lovers plan to meet (DgF 230, 440, 470); eloping lovers are caught up with by pursuing families (82); a man is intercepted and attacked by the menfolk of his sweetheart’s household (DgF 303, 415, 416, 417); women are courted or seduced (DgF 220, 230, 308, 415, 416, 440, 503), or raped and/or murdered (DgF 311, 312, 438); seduced maidens give birth to bastard children and kill them (DgF 529) or themselves die in childbirth (DgF 54, 270, 271).

Rosenlund and Ballad Formulas As this may suggest, the rosenlund, however little it may achieve by way of denotation (specifying a particular place), does significant connotative work in establishing an atmosphere and adumbrating upcoming narrative developments. 23 In this it is close to qualifying, as Otto Holzapfel originally suggested, as one of the “narrative formulas” (episke formler) he identified as a characteristic feature of Danish balladesque narrative, unlike other landscape specifications such as trees, mountains, fields, and heaths.24 Holzapfel is less confident in his later definitive study, Det balladeske, observing that as a location for fateful action the rosenlund “has not sustained a constant and distinct character in ballad tradition.” 25 The problem may be rather that unlike most of Holzapfel’s other narrative formulas entering a rosenlund in itself does not encompass simultaneous interpersonal action or communication, and more recently Sigurd Kværndrup has suggested that alongside purely “ornamental” formulas and Holzapfel’s “narrative formulas” it might be possible to discern a class of “location formulas” (lokalitetsformler) which also have atmospheric (mood-establishing ) and event-preparing (narratively anticipatory) connotations, and so link to the song’s deep structure, without themselves narrating events. By way of illustration Kværndrup explores the location formula Ude ved aa (“Down by the river”), but suggests that i rosenlund also merits investigation, 26 as indeed demonstrated in the course of his later study on the substantial repertoire of a seventeenthcentury Swedish singer.27

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Rosenlund, Landscape and Body Although the rosenlund need not have a convincing equivalent in the real world, it must nonetheless function plausibly within the spatial environments established by the ballad world (alongside related social and cultural environments): a constructed, imagined or inscribed landscape with which characters interact, or in the context of which they interact with each other. In Danish balladry (particularly among the Gentry and Wonder Ballads), the most often specified features of that landscape, alongside the occasional wood (skov) or meadow (eng), and a variety of groves, are the domestic residences of the households involved, typically the gentleman’s gaard, corresponding to the “hall” of the Anglo-Scottish ballad world. Naturally enough there is a deal of travel between them along a road (vej or bro) or across a bridge (bro in a narrower sense),28 but the relationship between ballad locations has more than practical aspects, and as the above summary may suggest, has evident gender perspectives. A woman’s place is in the gaard /hall of her father, until she is transferred to the gaard /hall of her husband. Transitioning between them, or exiting one of them into its immediate vicinity, she risks entering the rosenlund (or having one sprout up around her) where the only unaccompanied females fit for survival are elf-maidens or dwarf-daughters. In his earlier systematic surveys of that ballad landscape, Sigurd Kværndrup may have been too categorical in consigning manly activities such as hunting, encountering supernatural creatures, and fighting enemies to the “nature” of the deep forest (skov), and in assigning to the “civilized nature” of the rosenlund less violent events with female participation such as romantic assignations, rest on journeys, dancing, or secret childbirth:29 the two realms very much overlap. Similar softening of the connotations of the rosenlund is reflected in the views of Denmark’s leading expert on historical roses, Torben Thim. He notes correctly that on the basis of the ballad texts it is evident that the rosenlund was not a garden with roses but an area of deciduous woodland. Consequently the rose, if not the plant, must be a symbol for the woman, or the beauty of the woman, who was so often to be met with, and whose love could be won, in that fateful location.30 This may be the truth, but is not the whole truth, for this rose is more often a fleur du mal, the undeniable identification of rosenlund and woman having a more bodily, and much darker, side.31 This is being written within sight of a subspecies of alba roses (supplied by the same Torben Thim), the disturbing flesh-pink of whose flowers is rendered somewhat coyly in their English name, “Maiden’s Blush.” The French cuisse de nymphe (“Maiden’s [or “Whore’s”] Thigh”) brings us closer to the late medieval identification,

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immortalized in the Roman de la Rose, not merely with womanhood, but with a specific and definitive feature of the female anatomy.32 And there are few fateful events in the rosenlund of Danish balladry in which this particular “rose” is not, directly or indirectly, the ultimate issue. Most of the bloody conflict of males is effectively a contest, between husbands, lovers, fathers, and brothers, over sexual access to a given woman. Even if a gentleman has gone to the rosenlund to hunt, he is often diverted from the pursuit of the bestial quarry in favor of other game (there are hints, touched on below, that the metaphorical potential of small, furry animals was appreciated), and however they are staged, encounters between men and women in the rosenlund not infrequently lead to sexual intercourse, be it seduction or rape. This inward transgression of the rose can in due course be followed by the outward transgression by which its fruits are delivered—sometimes in that same fateful location. Had Shakespeare, a notable contemporary of the Danish ballad manuscripts, been asked, it is very likely, mixing another traditional metaphor for the same anatomical feature with the bawdy wordplay of which he was so fond, that he would have translated rosenlund as “coneygrove.”33

International Comparisons In what follows, each of the Danish rosenlund ballads with English and/or Scottish analogues (most often the latter) will be analyzed in turn in its own right. This will have the dual purpose of providing retrospective documentation for the survey just concluded, and of establishing the yardstick for examining the Anglo-Scottish analogues of the ballads concerned.34 These may appropriately be grouped in terms of the fateful (track-switching) events occurring in the rosenlund, of which, as may be predicted from the above, there are basically three: a fatal birth (in connection with which mother and/or offspring die); an erotic encounter; and an armed conflict. As we approach this complex of ballads, themes, analogues, and variants, it may be useful to provide a schematic list (which also doubles as a program for the analyses to follow): Fatal Birth35 DgF 529: Barnemordersken (“The Child-Murderess”) / Child 20: “The Cruel Mother” DgF 270: Bolde Hr. Nilaus’ Løn (“Bold Sir Nilaus’s Secret”) / Child 15: “Leesome Brand”

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DgF 271: Redselille og Medelvold (“Young 36 Redse and Medevold”) / Child 15: “Leesome Brand” Erotic Encounter37 (Female Predator) DgF 47: Elveskud (“The Elf-Shot”) / Child 42: “Clerk Colvill” (Male Predator) DgF 183: Kvindemorderen (“The Lady-Killer”) / Child 4: “The Outlandish Knight” Combat (Lover vs. Lady’s Menfolk) DgF 82: Ribold og Guldberg (“Ribold and Guldberg”) / Child 7: “Earl Brand” DgF 416: Ridder fælder … syv Brødre (“Knight slays … Seven Brothers”) / Child 71: “The Bent Sae Brown”

Fatal Birth As is most often the case,38 the birth in the rosenlund in the three ballads considered here is the result of an illegitimate liaison, which brings with it the possible environmental implication (explicit in other ballads), with thematic and structural repercussions, that the erotic encounter leading to the conception occurred in the same location. DgF 529: Barnemordersken (“The Child-Murderess”), surviving only in a couple of versions from nineteenth-century performance tradition, and perhaps therefore assigned to DgF’s Miscellaneous category, is implicitly qualified as an interpersonal relations ballad by virtue of that antecedent liaison which must have led up to the woman’s situation, and more specifically as a Gentry Ballad by her heading for the seclusion of the rosenlund in the company of her five “women,” personal attendants appropriate to upper class auspices: Lidel Kirsten tog med sig de Kvindere fem, ad Rosenlund gik hun med dem. (529A.1) Young Kirsten took with her her five women;39 she went into the rosenlund with them.

She lays her cloak on the ground (as her seducer may have laid his in the same place 40), gives birth to twins, buries them under a green turf (the exact manner of the killing is not specified), and places a stone over it. But the song also qualifies as a Wonder Ballad when some years

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later the murdered babes, now at the age they would have been had they lived, appear to her as revenants. And in a manner with which we will become familiar, the antecedent infanticide, including specification of the location as a rosenlund, is repeated almost verbatim in the narrationwithin-the-narration, when the revenants remind her of her crime (as narrated for the first time in the quotation above): I tog med jer de Kvindere fem, ad Rosenlund gik I med dem. (529A.11) You took with you your five women; you went into the rosenlund with them.41

The very numerous versions of the analogous Anglo-Scottish ballad, Child 20: “The Cruel Mother,” are very similar, except that the girl delivers, slays, and buries the children alone.42 Her gentry status is in some versions established by a token narrative prelude identifying her as a “lady” who had an affair with “her father’s clerk” (e.g., 20D, E, H; all Scottish), or confirmed by her subsequent encounter with the revenants, which in Scottish tradition usually occurs as she looks over her father’s “castle wall” (Child 20C: 6; D: 7; F: 14; H: 7; I: 7; J: 3) or walking through “her father’s hall” (Child 20E: 8). (In the Danish ballad the revenants come to her home and knock at her door.) Although with substantially less frequency and applicability, this “looking over the castle wall” formula is highly analogous, as the spatial context for a fateful encounter, to the Danish rosenlund.43 A rare English version recorded in Shropshire offers the socially equivalent “walking in her own father’s park” (Child 20Q: 6), effectively a rosenlund in all but name, and which in view of the discussion above may not be too far from where they were born and buried (and perhaps even where they were conceived). A landscape location for the antecedent pivotal scene of birth, slaying, and burial is often specified or strongly implied, but its nature, and the way it is adumbrated, vary. A repeat of the narrative, within the narrative, when the babes recount the infanticide and its location is not a regular feature, but does occur (e.g., 20E: 13−14). One of the English versions from performance tradition specifies “Down by the greenwood side” (Child 20G: 1; cf. also Scottish 20I), a location we shall meet often, but not often enough to be decisive, in what follows. In this instance, the evocation is reinforced by the occurrence of the same phrase in the internal refrain, while in others it is in the refrain alone (20O, R 44; Scottish Child 20D, E, H).

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Several versions however deploy a fateful giving-birth formula familiar elsewhere in Anglo-Scottish balladry: “she’s leand against / set her back to a thorn” (Child 20A: 1, C: 1, F: 4, I: 4, J: 1).45 Consideration of whether this would be at all realistic (or whether the choice of tree has occult overtones) is largely pre-empted by the obvious rhyme-factor, for the next line will duly end with variations on “and there she has her two babes borne.” That rhyme is the priority is suggested by further variant phrases prefacing “thorn”: “sat down below …” (20B: 1); “set her foot unto …” (20E: 4; G: 2). The thorn itself can sometimes be replaced by support from a style (20Q: 2—English tradition) or a stone (20H: 3), but as both are actually in a rhyming position with “borne,” this probably represents the detritus of a recurring feature in the location of ballad action, in which significant action is split up into segments so the whole can be narrated deploying incremental repetition, in this case with the lady leaning against one or more other supports, say an “oak” (D: 3; O: 4) and/or a “tree” (D: 4; E: 3), before the thorn does the trick. The impression given of a highly pregnant woman staggering from tree to tree in search of the one with the right rhyme is distinctly odd, however, and this may qualify rather as an essentially inert repetition, symptomatic of a ballad esthetic given to iterating the same information in variant formulations, presumably with a view to emphasis (i.e., her labor was long and hard). In the remaining two ballads in this group the birth occurs in the course of the unfortunate couple’s last-minute elopement, their progress interrupted by the girl going into labor before they reach their destination, explicitly or implicitly the lover’s family home. This is a motif common to a small cluster of the Gentry Ballads, the location fateful not merely for the birth, but for the immediately ensuing deaths of the woman (usually of natural causes), of the child or children (naturally or by the hand of their father or ambiguous) and sometimes of the father himself (by his own hand). The situation with regard to DgF 270: Bolde Hr. Nilaus’ Løn (“Bold Sir Nilaus’s Secret”) is very straightforward, since it survives in only one version (from an early song manuscript), and in it this multi-fateful location is specifically a rosenlund. Serving at the royal court, Sir Nilaus has an affair with the king’s daughter, and makes her pregnant. As her time approaches they elope together, but: Der de komme i rosenslund, liden Kirsten hun baad dem huille en stund. (DgF 270A.23) When they came into the rosenlund Young Kirsten asked to rest a while.

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She dies as she gives birth to twins, and evidently with a view to concealment of the affair Hr. Nilaus digs a grave and buries them all (270A.26−7); however he is so unnerved by the cries of the children from under the ground that he kills himself. DgF 271: Redselille og Medelvold (“Young Redse and Medelvold”), in contrast has been preserved in over 50 versions, the earliest from an eighteenth-century broadside, the rest from performance tradition. The origin in cheap print may explain the more circumstantial opening moves in which the girl’s condition is revealed when her mother notices she is lactating and threatens to have the man responsible put to death, prompting Young Redse to visit her lover (who in some versions is her brother) and warn him, so it is not until a dozen or more stanzas into the ballad, and after a sometimes elaborately narrated departure, that they enter the fateful location. The ensuing action involves her going into labor, her death, the birth and death of the offspring (this time of natural causes). The fate of the lover varies, in some versions committing suicide, in others proceeding to his family home and reporting the tragedy. The fateful location is specified as a rosenlund in at least half of the versions, but a survey is complicated by two further ways in which the narrative is elaborated. In a manner not unfamiliar in traditional balladry, and as we have just glimpsed in “The Cruel Mother,” an event (here a journey) can be related in two or more stages, each in its respective location, before it reaches the fateful location where it will culminate: Then they rode lightly over the bridge (bro) … Then they rode softly through the street (gade) … And when they came a little further … But when they came to the rosenlund … (DgF 271C.17−22)

other versions have for example: courtyard (gaard) …, road …, bridge …, green grove (grønnen lund) …, fair meadow (fageren eng) … (271B.24−28); a little on the road (vej) …, rosenlund …, green meadow (grønnen eng) … (271E.19−23); street …, bridge …, green meadow …, rosenlund (271S*.20−23).

Mostly these represent materially “incremental” repetition, each specification indicating an advance in their progress, but as we approach the fateful location the repetition becomes more inert, closer to saying the same thing

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twice (using two or more designations for the same spot) rather than marking actual narrative increments. And here too rhyme is a factor: in the rosenlund she will ask to rest a while (stund), while in the green meadow (eng) she will need a bed (seng). The sequence should clearly not be taken too literally, not least because, whatever the sequence in the actual narration, when later stanzas refer back to the fateful location, it can just as easily be the one as the other. This is the situation for example when the girl insists her lover leave her, as rather than him seeing her give birth she would rather die in “… [the fateful location].” The narrative having specified “meadow” as their final destination, it is in some cases correspondingly “meadow” to which she now refers (271A.26 & 29), but in others, rosenlund (E.23 & 29). This is one of several later opportunities (in which rosenlund looms large) to specify the location, for in the second of this ballad’s narrative elaborations the girl instructs her lover to fetch water from a nearby spring or stream. While he is there, a nightingale sings to him that his beloved and her offspring are now lying dead in “… [the fateful location],” and on returning to “… [the fateful location]” he finds this to be true, they are indeed lying dead in “…[the fateful location].” There is even a last chance of specifying the location if a concluding statement notes there are now in all four bodies in “… [the fateful location],” and in one version (271B.50) this is the rosenlund, even though all previous specifications have been as something else. This in turn means that when that fateful location is specified as a rosenlund at an early stage in the narrative, the term can occur within a given version up to five times (e.g., 271B.10, 17, 21, 23, 24), and it may be significant that such multiple retrospective specification as rosenlund occurs in versions from performance tradition, while in what may be the (broadside) original rosenlund makes only a token appearance as the penultimate stage of the outward journey (271A.25). Their shared Scottish analogue, “Leesome Brand” (Child 15) is closer to the Danish Bolde Hr. Nilaus’ Løn, both in having the lover impregnate the king’s daughter while in service at a foreign court, and in providing a very limited number (here two) of versions (the ballad does not seem to have been encountered in England). The fateful location is initially identified as a place only indirectly, as relative to their point of departure (the royal court), in that she goes into labor “When they had ridden about six mile” (Child15A: 19). Implicit but more specific indication is provided when she urges him to “hunt the deer and roe” (15A: 27) while she gives birth, suggesting a park, and again when, after doing so,

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he decides to return “to yon greenwood tree” (31).46 In the second version, collected by Motherwell, there is even less than this. Its suggestive internal refrain, The broom blooms bonnie and so is it fair And we’ll never gang up to the broom nae more (15B: 1.2&4)

seems rather to refer back to the sexual encounter which led to the pregnancy (and which Anglophone balladry sometimes assigns to the “merry broom field”). When she goes into labor this female protagonist instructs her lover to go with his bow and arrow “to yon hill so high” (15B: 2), but the exact purpose is unclear.47 Very similar is the climactic situation in another ballad with an only sporadic (and most often fragmentary) occurrence in Scottish tradition, Child 16: “Sheath and Knife.”48 Here the lover and pregnant girl are brother and sister, the internal refrain suggesting archly that the liaison was cultivated where “The brume blooms bonnie.” As just noted this is in accordance with Anglo-Scottish tradition for sexual dalliance, but as her time approaches it is as if the ballad modulates into Danish mode, as he takes her specifically to “her father’s deer park” (16A: 2), one of the likely real-world meanings of rosenlund. There she duly gives birth and dies, leaving him to bury her and the child.

Erotic Encounters Danish balladry’s erotic encounters in a rosenlund generally tend to the explicitly sexual, 49 but as it happens the two with Anglo-Scottish analogues seem rather to involve a fatal attraction that was not consummated. And atypically if not uniquely, in one it is the female party to the encounter who takes the initiative (but she is elvish). DgF 47: Elveskud (“The Elf-Shot”) is a widely distributed and justly appreciated international ballad in which a young gentleman, out riding on the eve of his wedding, encounters one or more elf-maidens and is dealt his death blow for rebuffing an invitation to dance with them (or is mysteriously stricken as a result of accepting the invitation). He just makes it home and dies surrounded by his grieving family, who now face the challenge of breaking the news to his sweetheart, who will shortly arrive. It is of course the location for his fateful encounter with the elfmaidens that the ballad tends to designate as a rosenlund, and in earlier

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versions he passes through it specifically on his way home from delivering invitations to the upcoming wedding. In later versions from performance culture (in which the incidence of rosenlund increases), he may rather be in the grove to take advantage of its hunting affordances.50 With the rare exception of a few versions which use what we might term the species-specific “elf-knoll” (“elverhøj”; 47D*.2; F*.2— perhaps a contamination from the rather similar ballad with this title, DgF 46), 51 the location is most often a grove (lund), reinforced by the frequent refrain line “Yet the dancing goes so lightly through the grove” (“Men dandsen den gaar saa let gennem lunden”; here from 47B.1). It is sometimes merely “green” (“grønnen lund”; 47K*.2; cf. C*.2), but most often specifically and explicitly a rosenlund, and indeed “red” (47G.2). As in previous instances the location can also appear retrospectively, when the deceased’s mother delays breaking the bad news by explaining to the betrothed that the absent bridegroom is out hunting y rosenslund (47D.27, E.15, H.25, I.21), in some of these instances reiterating what he had instructed her to say before he died (so that there are in all three opportunities—one direct and two indirect—for specifying the fateful location). In some versions the term’s incidence is further multiplied by the kind of inert repetition which adds little by way of pertinent information and is not altogether compatible with the topographical logic applying outside the ballad world (as here from nineteenth-century tradition): Sir Rolig he rode in the rosenlund to break in his horse and hunt with his hound Ridder Rolig han red sig i Rosenslund at tømme sin hest og at jage sin hund Sir Rolig he rode in the rosenlund to break in his horse and look around Ridder Rolig han red sig i Rosenslund at tømme sin hest og at se sig lidt om

— but nonetheless: And then when he came into the rosenlund he met an elfwoman loathly and grim Og der han nu kom udi Rosenslund, der mødte ham en Ellekvinde fæl og grum. (47F.1−3; cf. also I.1−2).

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Compared to this, “Clerk Colville” (Child 42) is niggardly in its topographical information, and with nothing like the same verbal consistency, but direct juxtaposition with the Danish analogue is disadvantaged by differences in narrative substance, for here the fateful encounter is with a mermaid, and takes place, accordingly, in an aquatic setting. In this respect there is a closer analogue in Child 37: “Thomas Rhymer” in which an encounter with the Queen of Elfland on “a grassy bank” (37A: 1) has equally fateful but less fatal consequences. In all three versions of “Clerk Colville” there is a lacuna concealing exactly what transpired between them—evidently not the rebuttal that doomed the Danish protagonist— but in each case he returns home marked for death. The fateful location is variously specified as the “wall [presumably ‘well’; source] o Stream” (42A: 2—where the mermaid makes off “into the fleed,” A: 11), “the wells of Slane” (42B: 2) where the mermaid is washing her “sark of silk” (42B: 5), and “Clyde’s water” (42C: 2), which is mentioned several times subsequently (42C: 4, 5, 6). Although geographically specific, this last may be the variant most to approach formulaic status, as there are other Scottish ballads in which engagement with “Clyde’s water,” even without a mermaid, can be perilous or fatal : “Young Hunting” (Child 68); “The Drowned Lovers” / “Mother’s Malison” (Child 216). The more normal rosenlund encounter in which the male takes the initiative is represented by DgF 183: Kvindemorderen (“The WomanKiller”), which relates the near-fatal adventure of a maiden from a noble family who is enticed into running off with an attractive stranger only to find, when they arrive at a remote spot, that he is intent not on dalliance but on Lustmord, and she is at the mercy of a ballad Bluebeard, a femicidal serial killer who has already made away with several gullible predecessors.52 Unlike them, however, she manages by a ruse to turn the tables so he suffers the exact fate he had intended for her, and she returns home unscathed. In most Danish versions the fateful location where this decisive action occurs is predictably a grove, which is sometimes “green” (“grønnen lund”; 183A.16; D.14) but more often a rosenlund. It is ostensibly on their itinerary to wherever it is he has told her they are going, and since she is not in advanced pregnancy it is he who suggests they stop there for a rest (e.g., 183.A.16; E.11). If she anticipated this was for the purpose of sexual dalliance she will be disappointed, for instead of laying his cloak on the ground as any respectable seducer should, he proceeds to dig a grave with his sword.53

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As in some other ballads we have examined there is some verbal repetition which, when it is not merely static, renders the journey into stages: Der de kom ad Heden bred  (when they come to the broad heath) —he tells her his intentions Der de kom ad Rosenslund  (when they come to the rosenlund) —he stops and digs a grave (183I.6 & 9).54

But in a version recorded in a town just north of Copenhagen in 1854, from a family singing tradition going back three generations, passing through such stations involves encounters with other figures, the whole with a chiastic structure displaying a skill matching anything one is likely to find in traditional balladry in Britain or Scandinavia. On their outward journey (G.5−7): Og der de kom til vilderen Hede —1. heath der holdte hans tolv Svende, de alle vare rede And when they came to the heath so wild There stood his twelve henchmen, all at the ready Og da de kom til grønneren Lunde —2. green grove der holdte hans Søster med tolv glubske Hunde. And when they came to the grove so green There stood his sister with twelve fierce hounds Og da de kom til Rosenslund … —3. rosenlund And when they came unto the rosenlund …

… he reveals his murderous intentions, but she turns the tables and kills him. Then on departing (bearing his sword), she traverses those intermediate stages in the reverse order (25−29): Og da hun kom til grønnere Lunde —2. green grove der holdte hans Søster med tolv glubske Hunde And when she came to the grove so green There stood his sister with twelve fierce hounds

—to whom she reports that her brother ligger i Rosenlund død (lies dead in the rosenlund), then kills the twelve dogs;

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Og der hun kom til vilderen Hede —1. heath der holdte hans tolv Svende, de alle vare vrede And when she came to the heath so wild There stood his twelve henchmen, all of them angry

—to whom she reports that their master ligger i Rosenlund død (lies dead in the rosenlund), then kills the twelve servants. Not for the first time, the incidence of rosenlund in relation to the alternatives is enhanced as a result of such retrospective accounts supplementing the actual narrative. But here too direct juxtaposition with the Anglo-Scottish analogue, in this case “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” (Child 4), is hampered by material narrative discrepancy, in that the fateful location is now the waterside (by lake, river or sea), where drowning was to be the means of both murder and disposal of the body: little place here for a rosenlund and no need for a grave. The only exceptions to this are a Scottish version which echoes the Danish analogue in placing the murder in the “greenwood” (Child4A: 5 & 6) with slaying by the sword intended, and a not altogether logical hybrid from English singing tradition which locates the murder attempt in “The green, green wood,” while drowning in the sea is nonetheless intended (Child 4G: 3ff.). Otherwise, if it is not assigned a specific name (“Wearie’s Well,” 4B: 3; “Bunion’s Bay,” 4D: 8), honors are fairly evenly shared between “sea side” and the equally generic “water side.” As both of the Anglo-Scottish analogues of Danish ballads with a sexual encounter in a rosenlund uncooperatively locate the action by the seashore, it may be legitimate to end with a supplementary glance at a Scottish ballad which for once offers something very close by way of landscape, “Gil Brenton” (Child 5). Shortly before her wedding a lady cannot conceal the fact that she is pregnant, and relates to her prospective mother-in-law how she was forcibly taken in a lonely spot by a young man who gave her tokens, but failed to reappear: predictably the tokens reveal that her assailant was precisely the man she is about to marry. Of the eight available versions six locate the sexual encounter in the “greenwood,” and another suggests this indirectly by noting the man was out hunting (5E: 1 & 19). Of those which explain why she was there, some specify gathering late-summer or autumn berries and nuts (5D: 39−40; F: 7−8), others (alternatively or as well) that she was picking flowers, including roses (5A: 49−51; B: 39−41; C: 59−62; H: 6−7).55 Two (5B&C) explain that this was to strew the bowers of the womenfolk (suggesting late-spring or midsummer ceremonies), and that the man appeared, as if in response to a call or provocation, when she “had

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na pu’d a flowr but ane” (5A; cf. B; H). This is a motif that occurs elsewhere in Scottish balladry,56 the classic instance probably “Tam Lin” (Child 39), in which the sexually aggressive half-elf is conjured forth by specifically plucking roses, in a location he himself refers to as “groves” (39A: 19−29). Picking roses to provoke a sexual encounter is altogether what one feels ought to happen in a rosenlund, but is paradoxically useful in highlighting the fact that that in Danish balladry it never does.

Combat Trouble with the lady’s family is at the core of the two Danish ballads with Anglo-Scottish analogues in which the rosenlund is the scene of armed conflict: in both cases her lover is pitted against her close male relatives.57 There are differences however in the exact circumstances for the encounter, including the respective movements in relation to the landscape. This context is simplest in DgF 416: Ridder fælder Jomfruens Syv Brødre (“The Knight Slays the Maiden’s Seven Brothers”), where after a night with the “maiden” her lover is waylaid by her brothers: she had warned him, but he deemed it dishonorable to avoid the encounter by taking a different route. In what is probably the earliest available version, from an early modern printed collection, it is the sexual encounter itself that occurs in a grove (lund), technically qualifying this form for inclusion rather in the preceding group. This is a result of the classic combination of motives on the part of the participants: the knight is in the grove hunting ; the maiden, presumably in anticipation of an assignation with a lover, is sheltering in the small branches at the base of a linden tree (DgF 416.1−2). Having spent the night with her lying on his blue cloak in the grove, the encounter and subsequent combat with her waiting brothers accordingly occur not within this location but “as he came out of the grove” (“der hand kom aff Lunden ud”; 416A.12). In contrast, with the exception of a version from performance tradition where they spend the night in “the greenest meadow” (“den grøn­ neste Eng”; 416Cn258), manuscript songbook and performance tradition alike place the sexual encounter implicitly or explicitly in the maiden’s chamber. This renders the grove an available option as the location of his encounter with the brothers as he leaves, but the two instances where this is specifically a rosenlund (416B.8; E.3) must share the honors with mountains, valleys, a broad bridge/road (bro), heath, and streams. As in previous

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instances when two or more of these (sometimes including a rosenlund) are mentioned in sequence, the narration hovers uncertainly between inert repetition and narrative movement across the landscape. But while the rosenlund figures only sporadically as the location for fateful action in the narration of the ballad, it is effectively the default mode when it is narrated retrospectively in the ballad, that is when one character reports to another what has transpired. Thus wherever it was he actually spent the night with their sister, and wherever it is that the brothers accost the lover, when they ask him what he is doing there so early, he regularly responds that he has been hunting “in the rosenlund.” As he was given the chance to avoid the encounter this is manifestly not a lame excuse designed to ward off a conflict, and it almost seems that the lover, within this ballad, is taunting the brothers who are so jealous of their sister’s virginity by evoking the erotic connotations of the rosenlund known to singers and audiences in the wider ballad world outside this one – not least when he enhances the imagery by specifying the objects of his hunt as small furry animals: “little hares,” “the wildest hares,” “little small hares,” “wild small hares” (DgF 416 passim). He is indirectly confronting them with the truth, for what he claims to have been doing is a metaphor for what indeed he was doing. 59 Alternatively it might almost be claimed he is narrating his exploits of the night as if in a ballad – where the likely consequences of hunting in a rosenlund, as we have seen, often involve a sexual encounter. Be that as it may, this “fictional” or meta-narrative rosenlund looms even larger in the several versions where the brothers refuse to believe his assertion, in so doing, in standard ballad fashion, repeating his original phrasing. This ballad’s analogue, “The Bent So Brown” (Child 71), can offer only one (Scottish) version, published in Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland. Here the lover visits the girl in her bower (71A.5; 6), and her three brothers resolve to lie in wait “amang the bent sae brown” (71A.19), the tall grass that gives the ballad its title. This then becomes the location for the fateful action when they intercept him (27), its significance emphasized by the several further iterations of “amang the bent sae brown” punctuating the narrative: when the girl warns him they may be there (4), when he responds (5), when the mother hears her sons have been killed there (35), and when she complains to the king that this killing is an outrage (43). The opening of DgF 82: “Ribold og Guldborg” in contrast takes the form of an elopement, as was the case in a couple of ballads in the “Birth”

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group discussed earlier, except that now the crisis in the fateful location is not her going into labor but combat with the girl’s father and brothers, who have been in hot pursuit, and who are all slain. But there can be two subsidiary fateful moments, one on each side of it. Least often, as they make off the couple run into a member of the lady’s household who duly reports the elopement to her father. After the fight, alerted by his taciturnity and/or a flow of blood, the lady discovers that her lover has been mortally wounded. All three fateful locations can be, and to varying degrees and in varying ways are, specified in landscape terms. If the location for the initial encounter with the informer is in any way specified, instances seem to be fairly evenly distributed between “on the heath” (e.g., 82A.9, B.16, E.16, F.17) and “in the rosenlund” (e.g., 82D.13; P.6; X.7), the frequency of the latter perhaps increasing as we move from manuscript to performance tradition. The combat with the lady’s menfolk, in too many cases to number, is specifically in a rosenlund, although “green groves” or just “groves” also appear. Subsequently, there is a varying and sometimes confusing relationship between this central location and the next, where the girl discovers her lover is mortally wounded. They are evidently to be perceived as distinct when specified differently, the battle say in the rosenlund (or some other lund), the revelation, in quite a number of versions, as they ride through the “Twelve Mile Forest” (tolv mile skov: U*8 and 19; S*17 and 31; L*8 and 17). Conversely the locations are clearly the same when he reveals his wound before they move on (P*20). But there are also cases where both combat and (after further travel) revelation are specified with the same designation, be it “green grove” (H39 and 59), a “grove” (L9 and 25) or a rosenlund (P12 and 27), and others where the location of the combat is not specified, but the revelation occurs in a rosenlund (A.30; G.45; I.22). It cannot be excluded indeed that this ballad has been sung in versions where all three major events—the meeting with the informer, the combat, the revelation of the mortal wound—are set in a rosenlund, leaving singer or audience to wonder just how many such there were in this landscape, or whether the whole ballad world outside the gentry residences was one large rosenlund. There is little danger of such confusion (if such it is) in the versions of the analogous “Earl Brand” (Child 7), recovered from Scotland and Northern England. Most of them also encompass the same three main events, but their location is less often specified as a particular geographical feature, and no common terminology is displayed. Specification is most common in connection with the revelation of the lover’s condition, for

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here it invariably takes the form of his pausing to wash his bloody wounds in a lake or river, either a vague “wan water” (7B.11; C.10) / “water flood” (G.22) or the more specific “water o Doune” (A.27; cf. Bronson 7.1b:28). The striking feature in the narration of the other events is not so much the lack of specification (although this happens), as the specifying of the location in terms of the movement by which it is reached. Thus the informer is encountered after they have been riding “ower moss and … ower moor” (7.G.2; cf. A.6; Bronson 7.1b:6) or “over the lea” (H.3). Similarly the combat occurs when the pursuing father and brothers catch up with the absconders, and with one exception when it is located “in yonder pleasant mead” (E.3) this too tends to be specified in terms of the relative movement of the parties, after the pursued see the pursuers “riding over the lee” (B.4) or “riding down the glen” (E.1 and 2), or of the distance traveled by the lovers from their point of departure, when they “… had not ridden past a mile / A mile out of the towne” (7F.7).60

Concluding Discussion The most fundamental perception prompted by the preceding survey and comparative analyses, perhaps predictably, is that the rosenlund needs to be seen in the broader context of how ballads relate events to narrative space. This evidently includes a zero option in which (beyond the universal absence of any description of space), there is effectively no spatial specification at all. On balance it would seem that Danish tradition has a greater preference than Anglo-Scottish for specifying locations for fateful action, however little the formulations might actually mean, and that the rosenlund is one of its preferred designations. But an event can also be assigned a spatial location by indirect rather than direct specification, and in relative rather than absolute terms, that is, how far (as measured by distance travelled or time traveling) the location is from that of preceding significant action. This latter procedure may be more characteristic of Anglo-Scottish balladry, but it is certainly found in Danish tradition too. A variant means is to specify the terrain over or through which protagonists approach the location of their encounter rather than the location itself. And when location is specified, it is not just Anglo-Scottish ballads that place elsewhere kinds of action that in some Danish ballads are located in a rosenlund. In some instances the difference is an inevitable consequence of actual discrepancies in the physical setting of the action, often reflected in the nature of the action itself. Anglo-Scottish ballads,

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as we have seen, are prone to situate at a water’s edge fateful events that in Danish tradition are more often assigned to an inland landscape, so fatalities tend to have an aquatic dimension. But even with the same kind of events in the same kind of (outdoor; countryside) environment specification can vary. There is variation between national traditions in the sense that Anglo-Scottish balladry both fails entirely to locate fateful action within a rosenlund (except, paradoxically, in the sense of woodland-with-roses), and lacks a formula with the same ubiquity as the Danish rosenlund. The incidence of the latter, meanwhile, manifestly differs bet­ ween different ballad subgenres in Denmark, and undoubtedly also between different ballads within a given subgenre, say the Gentry Ballads, although this has not been an issue above. More significantly, and perhaps not sufficiently acknowledged in earlier and current discussion, is the discrepant incidence of the rosenlund between different versions of a given Danish ballad. Some of the alternatives are merely different kinds of “grove,” but there are also somewhat different landscape features, notably “green meadow” (grønnen eng) and “green wood” (grønnen skouff), plus the materially quite different road or bridge (bro) and heath (hede). Among the implications of this interchangeability, is the evident functional equivalence of the alternatives, which in turn complicates the formulaic status and function of the rosenlund (and the integrity of a possible rosenlund sub-category). In such cases there is evidently nothing decisive about the rosiness, or groviness, of the rosenlund, or any of its other inherent qualities or affordances, that qualifies it as the location for the fateful action concerned, since different singers locate the action variously. All the specifications concerned are effectively downgraded to shorthand for “the place where the next decisive event happened” within particular subgenres or regional traditions, but with rosenlund manifestly as primes inter pares in this role. But this perception is muddled by the circumstance that there was evidently a technique, fairly widespread in all three ballad traditions studied, of splitting a given fateful action into narrative segments, for each of which a different location could be specified: stage one here, stage two there, stage three (in Denmark often but not invariably) in the rosenlund. So some of the alternative locations may be the debris of such sequences, perhaps via an intermediate stage (of which we have seen evidence) where the narratively progressive iterations have decayed to mere (if sometimes emphatic) repetition.

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And it remains a fact that rosenlund is a frequently occurring specification for the location of fateful action in Danish balladry, with a far and away greater incidence than any of its rivals. Its relative success may have something to do with its affordances (when these matter), or its flexibility, sharing connotations of both garden and wildwood, its rhythm or its convenient rhyming with stund—it is entered at a fateful “hour,” by people who anticipate staying there a “while.” But whatever the reason for this general popularity, there are very strong hints that its relative incidence increases over time, perhaps in balladry as a whole, demonstrably in the transmission of a given ballad. Despite its archaic feel, it is not an original form which has sporadically been replaced by more current alternatives, but has on the contrary emerged into dominance, apparently by processes of verbal interference between different ballads (external contamination) and between parts of individual ballads (internal contamination), in a manner characteristic of performance traditions. It is interesting in this connection that the incidence of rosenlund seems to be greater in retrospective accounts of preceding events in the ballad than in the original narrating of the latter. This process of consolidation has evidently not occurred in English or Scottish balladry, where a variety of localizations (wood, greenwood, broom field, riverside) compete with each other (and with non-spatial options) without one of them dominating.61 The reason may well lie in the relative weakness in these insular balladries (or in our evidence for them) of the performance tradition which may have reinforced the incidence of rosenlund in Denmark. There, the early inception of accurate recording from performance tradition made a wealth of “oral” versions available to the editors of Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, research on which also persisted a century or more beyond Francis James Child’s one-man show. And this will have been enhanced by the relative homogeneity of song tradition in a small country (in terms of geography and population) with little ethnic, linguistic or even regional segmentation. NOTES 1 The two perspectives are explored and linked in James H. Moreira’s paradigmatic study of a Norwegian regional tradition, “Narrative Expectations and Domestic Space in the Telemark Ballads,” Scandinavian Studies 73.3 (2001): 317−48, which has more about the outdoor landscape (since it provides a necessary contrast) than the title implies. Until quite recent times cultural and

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institutional ties between Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were very close, one of them ruling part or all of one or more of the others for lengthy periods, and their ballad repertoires substantially overlap. 2 The topic is explored in a pan-European context and from a sophisticated theoretical perspective in Natascha Würzbach, “Figuren, Raum, Zeit in der klassischen Volksballade,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 30 (1985): 43−53. 3 In which case it would partake of the “isolation” (and “depthlessness”) folklorist Max Lüthi finds characteristic of wondertale characters and objects: Das Europäische Volksmärchen: Form und Wesen (Berne: Francke, 1947; 7th ed. 1981), published in English as The European Folk Tale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles (Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982; repr. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986). 4 See below for details of the edition concerned. A digital sweep might identify a few more in which an occasional rosenlund figures among the many versions from later tradition, and subsequent discussion here will identify analogous lunde which are rosen in all but name. I omit a very few items where a passage through a rosenlund is no more than that, neither the scene of fateful action nor the cause of fateful action elsewhere. 5 It summarizes the survey offered in the course of my “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Life at the Flurgrenze in Medieval and Traditional Narratives,” in The Edges of the Medieval World, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Juhan Kreem, CEU Medievalia 11 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009): 82−98, online at: https://www.academia.edu/4208754/Darkness_on_the_Edge_of_ Town_Life_at_the_Flurgrenze_in_Medieval_and_Traditional_Narratives. 6 The three omissions explained in due course below. 7 There is a good review in English in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Danmarks_gamle_Folkeviser. Danish ballads were also published on broadsides, but thanks to the ample manuscript sources and recordings from performance tradition these do not loom as large in DgF as in Child’s analogous Anglo-Scottish collection. 8 In due course published separately (by the same publisher) as Danske Skæmteviser (Folkeviser og Litterær Efterklang), ed. H. Grüner Nielsen (Copenhagen: Universitets-Jubilæets Danske Samfund, 1927−1928). An AngloIrish illustration would be the familiar (to my generation) Dubliner’s popular hit, “Seven Drunken Nights.” There is a parallel English instance in the related but separate publication of the “Loose and Humorous Songs” from the Percy Folio Manuscript. 9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history#Early_modern_Europe; http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/25061-Historical-populations-of-Europechanging-proportions. 10 The English terminology here is partly derivative, but ultimately my responsibility. The most authoritative typology in English is that applied in the

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TSB. As in German-oriented folktale studies the “type” in the title refers to the individual ballads, not as would be normal in English to varieties or subgenres. For a substantial review essay see David G. Engle, “Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: Some Considerations,” Jahrbuch für Volksliedforschung 24 (1979): 161−66. Ways of categorizing Danish ballads are usefully discussed from both theoretical and practical perspectives in David Colbert, The Birth of the Ballad. The Scandinavian Medieval Genre (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1989), pp. 15−21. 11 The specification “holy” is needed as “legend” in English is exceptional among European languages in also encompassing quasi-historical narratives concerning other than holy protagonists and other than Christian supernatural forces—in Danish such narratives are distinguished from the Christian legende as sagn (cf. German Sage). 12 Colin Richmond, The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, The First Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; vol. 2, Fastolf ’s Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); vol. 3, Endings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 13 “Manor house ballads” might be an option. 14 Of the odd items in other categories DgF 12: Raadengaard og Örnen (“Raadengaard and the Eagle”) merits classification as a Heroic Ballad purely through its protagonist’s status as a minor figure in the Dietrich-cycle: its action, in which he deploys runic magic in a stand-off with an aggressive talking eagle, qualifies it rather as a Wonder Ballad, but there is a strong interpersonal aspect with overtones of sex and violence, as the eagle evidently has an appetite (gustatory and quite likely otherwise) for both our champion’s sister and his sweetheart. Among the Historical Ballads DgF 164: Niels Paaskesøn og Lave Brok indeed reports an actual feud—and political not personal, which culminated in a murder in a rosenlund, but DgF 180: Folke Algotsøn recounts, if circumstantially, the classic Gentry Ballad scenario of a young nobleman who steals his beloved as she is about to consummate her marriage to someone else—qualifying as historical only as allegedly based on a true event. 15 Ordbog over det danske sprog. Historiske Ordbog 1700–1950, “lund,” online at: http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=lund. 16 Examples are from, respectively, Gazetteer of British Place Names, http:// gazetteer.org.uk/; Danmarks Stednavne (Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, University of Copenhagen), http://danmarksstednavne.navneforskning.ku.dk/ 17 Rosenlund skov/plantage, Krarup sogn, Sallinge herred; Rosenlund Bakker Granslev s., Houlbjerg h. source Danmarks Stednavne as in preceding note. One of these is reported by a colleague as currently displaying “no roses; plenty of elders.” A nineteenth-century map names as “Rosenlund” what looks like a small copse close to the University of Southern Denmark’s Odense campus (not covered by the list cited), but it has now disappeared beneath a golf-course.

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Personal communication, 27 April 2016, from Assoc. Prof. Per Grau Møller, Director, Cartographical Documentation Center, University of Southern Denmark. 19 A. T. Hatto, “The Lime-Tree and Early German Goliard and English Lyric Poetry,” MLR 49 (1954): 193−209. Shakespeare’s Tempest has a “line grove” adjacent to Prospero’s cell. 20 V. J. Brøndegaard, Folk og flora: Dansk Etnobotanik (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde & Bagger, 1987), III, 135. Tornerose is thus distinguished from the “peasant rose” (bonderose; peony) and “staff rose” (stokrose; hollyhock). 21 “Narrative Expectations and Domestic Space,” p. 329. 22 See for example Sylvia Landsberg, The Medieval Garden, pp. 13 and 21−25; Paul Stamper, “Woods and Parks,” in The Countryside of Medieval England, ed. Astill and Grant, chap. 7, esp. pp. 140−45, “Parks and Hunting”; Oliver Rackham, “The Medieval Countryside of England: Botany and Archaeology,” in Inventing Medieval Landscapes, pp. 13−32 at pp. 22−23. For a European perspective see Architecture, jardin, paysage: L’environnement du château et de la villa aux xve et xvie siècles, ed. Jean Guillaume (Paris: Picard, 1999) and on parks in Scandinavia, A. Andrén, “Paradise Lost: Looking for Deer Parks in Medieval Denmark and Sweden,” in Visions of the Past: Trends and Traditions in Swedish Medieval Archaeology, ed. Hans Andersson et al. (Stockholm: Central Board of National Antiquities, 1997), pp. 469−90 (no mentions of roses). 23 In addition to the sources cited, I am grateful to Lise Præstgaard Andersen and Vibeke A. Pedersen for useful advice on what follows. 24 Holzapfel, Studien zur Formelhaftigkeit der mittelalterlichen dänischen Volksballade (Frankfurt am Main: Universität Frankfury a. M., 1969), p. 113. 25 Det balladeske: Fortællemåden i den ældre episke folkevise (Odense: Odense University Press, 1980), pp. 74−75. 26 Sigurd Kværndrup, Den østnordiske ballade – oral teori og tekstanalyse. Studier i Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2006), p. 549. 27 In Sigurd Kværndrup and Tommy Olofsson, Medeltiden i ord och bild Folkligt och groteskt i nordiska kyrkmåningar och ballader (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2013), pp. 39−41. I am grateful to Kværndrup for supplying me with his original Danish draft for this section of the Swedish publication. His interpretation of the connotative force of the rosenlund location will be further touched on in following paragraphs. 28 The exact meaning of bro may be uncertain in some of the instances discussed below. Its normal usage now is specifically “bridge” but previously it applied more broadly to a stretch of road, not necessarily over a river, where passage was facilitated by laying down timber or stone: paving stones in Denmark are still called bro-sten. http://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=bro. The problem is more than semantic, for bridge-crossing can be a fraught moment in Danish 18

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ballads, not least for those in the process of entering a new life-phase: Willy Sørensen, “Folkeviser og forlovelser,” in Digtere og dæmoner: fortolkninger og vurderinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1959); repr. in Synspunkter på Folkevisen, ed. Jørgen Bang (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972), pp. 245−85, esp. pp. 250−53. 29 Sigurd Kværndrup, “Folkevisen,” in Kasper Sørensen et al., Dansk litteraturhistorie, Vol. 1, Fra runer til ridderdigtning o. 800 – 1480 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1984; repr. 2000), Part III, chap. 3 (= pp. 476−546), at p. 521; “Kamp og Latter, Kærlighed og Død: On Folkeviseforskning, Balladesang og Dans” (Diss., University of Southern Denmark 1997), Part 2, pp. 52−53. But see below, n. 31, for his later assessment. 30 Torben Thim, Historiske Roser (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2004), p. 36. 31 In a later exploration, touched on earlier above, in Kværndrup and Olofsson, Medeltiden i ord och bild, pp. 39−41, Sigurd Kværndrup acknowledges the more violent, masculine aspects of the rosenlund, at least within the repertoire of a peasant woman who might not share what he sees as the aristocratic tendency to telescope rosenlund and rose garden (rosengaard). Kværndrup’s distinction between peasant and aristocratic traditions, as between Gentry Ballads and Wonder Ballads, applies a finer mesh than is achieved here. 32 For which cuisse may itself be a euphemism. The cuisse de nymphe emue (“Aroused Maiden’s [or “Whore’s”] Thigh”) seems to be a recent garden variant. 33 That is, “coney” in the sense of rabbit, but at that time pronounced “cunny,” close to both the English vulgar term and the French con; there are several places called “coneygrove” in England today. 34 The latter will be based on the material in Child, ESPB, and Bronson, TTCB. 35 I have excluded from consideration here DgF 84 Hustru og Mands Moder (“The Wife and the Mother in Law”) and the closely related DgF 85 Hustru og Slegfred (“The Wife and the Concubine”), partly because the birth of the children and the death of the mother do not occur in the rosenlund, but are the later result of a purely mechanical accident occurring there, but mainly because, in their shared Scottish analogue, Child 6: “Willie’s Lady,” the problem of the wife’s delayed pregnancy is solved without her needing to leave her home, so there is no fateful engagement with the landscape. 36 Here and elsewhere in the Danish ballads, lille (“little”) applied to a young woman probably refers to relative age or junior status (perhaps also implying likability) rather than size, as still in lillesøster (“younger sister”). The same probably applies to the “wee” sometimes applied to male protagonists in Scottish ballads. 37 Omitted here, for reasons of space but with no reluctance, is the only Danish ballad with rosenlund in its standard title, DgF 230: I Rosenlund (“In the Rosenlund”) and its ubiquitous Anglo-Scottish analogue, Child 112: “The Baffled Knight.” It is a jocular piece in which a resourceful maiden, out and about alone and accosted by a gentleman with dishonorable intentions, offers to take him

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home, but on arrival shuts him out and taunts him for not taking her when he had the chance. It would be quite out of place in present company. 38 Other Danish ballads where the rosenlund or some other lund is the location for a fateful birth include: DgF 54: Varulven (“The Werewolf ”—in which the beast rips out the foetus and so kills the pregnant woman); DgF 272: Sønnens Sorg (“The Son’s Sorrow”—pregnant girl goes into labor during elopement; dies and is buried with child); DgF 273: Stallbroders Kvide (“The Comrade’s Lament”— ditto); in DgF 439: Hr. Østmand (“Sir Østmand”) a lady gives birth to her brother’s child at home, but the brother takes it to a green grove (rosenlund in a Swedish version cited in the DgF headnote) and kills it there. 39 Had the Scottish analogue done the same they would likely have been called her “Maries.” 40 See below for an instance of this motif. 41 There is a full English translation of this ballad in Child’s headnote (ESPB, 1:300). 42 For an illuminating comparative analysis of how two Scottish singers handle this material, deploying the skills of vernacular transmission, see Flemming G. Andersen, “Voices from Kilbarchan: Two versions of ‘The Cruel Mother’ from South-West Scotland, 1825,” Oral Tradition 29.1 (2014): 47−68, online at http://journal.oraltradition.org/issues/29i/anderson. 43 For its incidence and connotations in Anglo-Scottish balladry see Flemming G. Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity. The Role of Formulaic Diction in Anglo-Scottish Traditional Balladry (Odense: Odense University Press, 1985), pp. 138−47. 44 The Heimans’ revised edition has renumbered these from Child’s first edition where numbering 20N is assigned to two quite distinct versions (in the “Additions and Corrections” section of Volumes 1 and 2 respectively). In the revised version, Child 20N2 becomes 20O and Child 20Q becomes 20R. 45 Its connotative dimensions, with illustration from other ballads as well, are explored in Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 181−83. 46 This version, reported by Buchan, has a baroque sequel in which girl and baby are restored to life by drops of St Paul’s blood from a vial in the possession of the hero’s mother. 47 Child 101: “Willie O Douglas Dale” tells a very similar story with a happy outcome: the birth in the “green wood” is successful, the lover finds a shepherdess in the wood to act as wet-nurse, and they all travel happily to his home. Child 102: “Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter” is similar but with a different turn at the end, the girl’s father fetching the babe from “the greenwood” and bringing him up (and in one version names him Robin Hood). 48 The weirdly Freudian title reproduces the weird metaphorical lament of the lover at the end that he has lost an irreplaceable “sheath and knife” (presumably the lady and the child in her womb).

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Other Danish ballads in which the rosenlund or some other –lund is the location for a fateful sexual encounter include: DgF 34: Hr. Tönne af Alsø (“Sir Tönne of Alsø”—knight charmed by dwarfmaiden); DgF 35: Peder Gudmandsön og Dværgene (“Peder Gudmandssön and the Dwarfs”—ditto); DgF 46: Elvehøj (“The Elf-Knoll”—encounter with elf-maiden); DgF 66: Jomfruen i Linden (encounters and rescues a maiden transformed into a linden-tree); DgF 78: Hr. Peder og Mettelille (“Sir Peder and Young Mette”—a premarital assignation); DgF 79: Kongesönnens Runer (“The Princes Runes”—casts spell on desired maiden); DgF 191: Grev Tue Henriksön (“Count Tue Henriksön”—lady mutilated when she refuses the Count’s sexual advances); DgF 196: Stolt Margrete (“Proud Margrete”—girl kills knight who attempts to rape her); DgF 220: Stolt Elselille (“Proud Young Else”—series of events in attempt to abduct girl); DgF 284: Mödet i Skov (“The Encounter in the Woods”—successful seduction); DgF 296: Iver of Erland (“Iver of Erland”); DgF 308: Svanelil Eriksøn (“Young Svane Eriksøn”— seduction); DgF 312: Gøde og Hillelille (“Gøde and Young Hille”—rape); DgF 438: Broder myrder Søster (“Brother Murders Sister”—having first raped her); DgF 503: Frieriet (“The Courtship”). 50 In which case his fate is somewhat paralleled by that of the young man in the (mainly) Scottish ballad Child 12: “Lord Randal,” who returns home close to death from eating poisonous fish, which, he explains to his mother, he was served by his sweetheart while out hunting “at the greenwood” (12A: 1) or in “the wild wood” (12D: 1; cf. E: 1). 51 In one version (47P: 22) the performer sang, or the recorder heard, elverhøj as elleve høje (“eleven knolls”)—where there were correspondingly “eleven women” (elleve kvinder) rather than elvish women (elvekvinder). 52 For these concepts and their cultural manifestations (in which ballads are sadly neglected), see, respectively, Maria Tatar, Lustmord. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell, eds., Femicide. The Politics of Woman Killing (Buckingham: Open Univ. Press, 1992). 53 In 183M.7 the grave has evidently been dug in advance (as in some variants of the Bluebeard story) as it is there when they arrive. 54 183H.7−9 offers a three-stage journey which sadly muddles the topography: over the bridge, through the town, to the castle gate (unless it is his castle). 55 Cf. Child 52: “The King’s Daughter Lady Jean” in which the princess goes to “the merry green wood” to pick nuts and is raped by a man who turns out to be her brother; Child 111: “Crow and Pie” involves a simple rape “upon the green” in a forest. 56 For example, in some versions of Child 14: “Baby Lon,” where two of three sisters are raped and killed by an outlaw before the third’s expostulation reveals that he is their brother: the setting for the atrocity is variously a wood (14A: 14; D: 2), “amang the broom” (14C: 6), “greenwood” (14E: 1)—in this last it 49

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is specifically rose-picking that heralds the aggressor’s appearance. For a complete survey of the formula and its connotations see Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 116−18. 57 Other ballads in which an armed conflict between a suitor and the menfolk of the girl’s family is located in a rosenlund include DgF 415: Hr. Hjælmer; in DgF 417: Den listige Kæreste (“The Crafty Lover”) the suitor, warned that the brothers are waiting for him in the rosenlund, sensibly leaves by another route. There is a more general analogue in the Scottish ballad Child 214: “The Braes o Yarrow” where the lover (or just as often, husband) is slain by group of men in what he anticipated was a duel, the location (i.e., “slopes …”) specified in the title, and at the end of most stanzas. 58 Exceptionally, DgF conglomerates sixteen distinct versions of this ballad under one variant (while providing full texts of each), specified by lower case letters, 416Ca–p. 59 On the imagery, also relevant for the discussion of the “coneygrove” above, see Bruno Roy, “La belle e(s)t le bête: Aspects du bestiaire féminin au moyen âge,” Études françaises 10.3 (1974): 319−27. 60 For this quite widespread fateful location formula (which can be applied to both sea and land journeys), see Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 259−65. 61 With the obvious exception of the English Outlaw Ballads, where the narrative sources effectively dictate a woodland setting for much of the fateful action.

Chapter 6

“His Hawk, His Hound, and Lady Fair” Social Symbols and Ballad Metaphors1 James Moreira

B

ALLAD COMMONPLACES AND FORMULAS were once viewed, at best, as stylistic redundancies or, at worst, as outright error. For some time, however, folklorists have recognized that commonplace elements often occur in particular narrative settings, which suggests a “foreshadowing” effect2 or “supra-narrative function”3 for recurring motifs and formulas. This revised perspective, which has an often-overlooked connection to Albert Lord’s “tension of essences,”4 holds that commonplace and subsequent action cohere as a traditionally recognizable pattern, and through the habitual association of image with action, a reference to a single motif can establish a situation or a dramatic tension which a literary author might establish through description. The foreshadowing effect is normally viewed in relation to plot, but that should not rule out other possibilities. Flemming Andersen himself suggests that character enhancement may be one such function,5 and an emphasis on characterization is further supported by David Buchan’s tale-role research, which holds that “part of the ballads’ psychological functioning within culture is their concern for, depiction of, and consequent informing about human relationships.”6 Such findings open the way for a complementary approach to motif analysis that foregrounds the psychological, emotional, moral, and motivational qualities of characters with which the motifs are associated. This essay examines hunting motifs, specifically hawks and hounds, as agents of characterization in classical ballads and argues that they establish a complexity within a character’s personality, just as “riverbank,” “walking-out,” and “May morning” bring an instantaneous tension to the ballad stage in Roger Renwick’s analysis of English broadsides.7 The analysis is limited to the Child anthology 8 in order to draw texts from a relatively uniform cultural environment, given that most of Child’s texts stem from pervasive collection activity in lowland Scotland between

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about 1770 and 1830. A further limitation—the exclusion of horses and steeds—is warranted because hawks and hounds can be shown to have a fairly stable poetic function in the corpus, whereas horses appear in a wide range of narrative settings. The study also excludes simple allusions to game animals and general references to hunting, of which there are many. The reason is that, in ballads, hawks and hounds have surprisingly little to do with actual hunting, a curious fact that argues in favor of them having a symbolic function. Thus, the following offers an admittedly partial assessment of hunt symbolism in ballads. My sense, however, is that what we say below regarding hawks and hounds may not apply to other kinds of hunt imagery. The material is examined at the level of motif, not formula, for the poetic function of the symbols extends beyond their crystallization in particular verbal patterns. Each of the following appears in multiple ballad types and can therefore be classed as formulas, but they clearly do not belong to a single formulaic system by any definition of the term: My hounds they all run masterless, My hawks they flee from tree to tree. It is the blude of my gay goss-hawk, He wadna flee for me. Is not thy hawk upon the perch?

They nonetheless belong to a common semiotic network. In keeping with established trends, the motifs are considered in relation to narrative action. As with Andersen’s handling of formulas, the approach used here is “verbcentred”9: what happens to the hunting animals or their expressed relation to their owner significantly influences their symbolic function. In ballads that simply show a character “riding to hawks and hounds,” dramatic texturing is minimal and the semiotic function of the motif is weak. Conversely, hunting images achieve their greatest effect when they are dramatically highlighted and given clear relevance to the character and the narrative. *** For centuries, animals used for hunting have been preeminent social symbols in Europe. As Edith Rogers states, “‘the insignia of a gentleman from Norway to Spain,’ both in fact and in song, are his hawk and hound.”10 Hawks and falcons are common motifs on coats of arms, crests,

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seals, coins, and portraiture of the Middle Ages.11 The Boke of Saint Albans (1486) famously includes a list that assigns specific species of birds to various levels of nobility, yeomanry, and peasantry, although scholars doubt that it reflects actual custom.12 The English, by and large, had abandoned hawking by the Restoration, but a century later, antiquarianism fueled a revival of the sport about the same time, and for more or less the same reasons, as the great ballad revival. As with ballad collectors, revival austringers and falconers sought out people who still hunted with raptors— the lowland Scots.13 So, the region known for ballad traditions also maintained an active knowledge of traditional hunting practices. Semiotically, hunting animals have links to both natural and cultural domains. They are animals, yet they are also trained and counted among a knight’s possessions. The images carry a burden of the cultivation of nature; the possessor of hawks and hounds is in control of his environment (and it is by and large a masculine trope): Nature/Wild   Hawk/Hound  Culture/Trained Hawks, even more than hounds, suit the model well, as they are not true domesticates. They were not bred in captivity until the mid-twentieth century, 14 and poorly managed hawks are notorious for quickly reverting to a wild state. Accordingly, hunting animals represent a hesitation15 between nature and culture; their standing is a matter of question, and as symbols they are inherently dynamic. The key element in the system, however, is the human one, the animals’ master. As writings from both medieval and revival periods show, the training, care, and use of hunting animals is a painstaking process, one that routinely tests the skill, self-control, and self-discipline of the hunter. The sport is physically demanding, but experts stress that it has many intellectual and temperamental demands, too. The comments below, excerpted from De Arte Venandi cum Avibus by Frederick II,16 highlight just a few of the latter qualities: an appreciation of the esthetic as well as the practical principles of sport hunting, a propensity for self-evaluation and criticism, resourcefulness, courage, maturity, patience, and diligence: •• The falconer’s primary aspiration should be to possess hunting birds that he has trained through his own ingenuity to capture the quarry he desires in the manner he prefers. The actual taking of prey should be a secondary consideration.

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•• The falconer should … keep in mind both the good and the evil that he encounters in his contacts with falcons, whether they be his own, the bird’s, or of some other origin [my emphasis]. •• He must possess marked sagacity; for … he will … have to use all his natural ingenuity in devising means of meeting emergencies. •• He must be of daring spirit … •• He should not be too young, as his youth may tempt him to break the rules governing his art. •• A bad temper is a grave failing. A falcon may frequently commit acts that provoke the anger of her keeper, and unless he has his temper strictly under control he may indulge in improper acts toward a sensitive bird so that she will very soon be ruined. •• Laziness and neglect in an art that requires so much work and attention are absolutely prohibited. •• The falconer must not be an absent-minded wanderer, lest because of his erratic behavior he fails to inspect his falcons as often as he should. The character of the hunter stands at the heart of falconry, and by extension it is a core feature of the symbolic complex that surrounds hunt imagery. Classical ballads inevitably draw on the conventional associations of hunt symbols and the human characteristics they embody: strength, grace, discipline, masculinity, and most importantly control. Accordingly, Rogers suggests that hawks and hounds represent security and peace of mind. 17 But the process does not end there. In his essay, Mythologies, Roland Barthes argues that semiotic systems often build in chains. Once established, any sign can become a signifier at another level in the system, where it forms new links with other concepts, resulting in a new signification. These compound structures he terms “second-order semiological systems.”18 Hunt imagery, in general, constitutes a system of this sort: when the animals are used as social signifiers, the original idea, “hawk,” recedes in importance and secondary associations of status, control, and dignity become paramount. Balladry, however, goes a step further through a generic tendency to invert the symbol’s usual association with elevated status. The ballad maker’s favorite application of symbols of strength is to strip them away to display the failings, insecurities, and weaknesses of the character behind them.

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In Kinloch’s version of “Young Beichan,” for example, the jailed hero laments to his captor’s daughter: “My hounds they all go masterless, My hawks they flee from tree to tree,[”] (Child 53H: 9)

The motif ’s immediate function, as Rogers states, is to signify duress. 19 Duress, however, is a momentary condition imposed from without. On a deeper plane, the motif establishes two opposing traits within Beichan’s character: he possesses hawks and hounds, which gives him qualities of strength, yet he cannot control them, which gives him qualities of weakness. The tension does two things. First, it intensifies the immediate scene by presenting polar contrasts of strength and helplessness: Beichan is not simply a man in duress; rather, his powerlessness is intensified by a customary position of power. Second, it sets up a conflict in his essential character. The extremes of strength and weakness point to an imbalance, a capriciousness, which parallels his irresolute behavior after being freed. So while hunt imagery continues to bear on human qualities, balladry displays a marked tendency to negate the standard social symbolism, and the constructed ambiguity that results is what the ballads play with. Through the interplay of conventional and genre-based associations within specific narrative settings, balladry can supply the image with a more concrete function, and invariably the motifs create textures within a character’s personality. It is crucial to stress that this additional layer of signification is a product of the genre itself. The great majority of the ballads under review present hawks, hounds, and their human owners in adverse situations, indicating a pattern of positive/negative polarities. In all but three of the texts examined,20 the relationship between hawk/hound and owner either is distorted in some way, or, when social or personal security is signified, it is soon inverted through misfortune. These relationships can be grouped into three major categories, “Parallel Relationships,” “Distanced Relationships,” and “Inverted Relationships,” and two lesser groups, “Incidental” and “Miscellaneous” (see Appendix 6.1). In the first group, a specified condition of the hawk or hound reflects the general condition or quality of the character in question. “Young Beichan” is a case in point. A parallel relationship occurs on a purely narrative level in “Lord Randal” (Child 12), where the poisoning of the animals leads immediately to the revelation of the hero’s own murder. In “Edward” (Child 13) and “The Twa Brothers” (Child 49), the lead

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characters, guilt-ridden by their culpability in the death of a relative, kill their hawks, hounds, and steeds, the very items which establish their station in society. When pressed for an explanation, they say the animals were uncontrollable: again, individuals who possess symbols of status are unable to cope with their care and handling. And if the animals are an extension of the character, then their killings could be viewed as a metaphorical suicide, an outward, active display of the character’s inner remorse. In the “B” version of “Edward,” the animals are killed despite their excellence, which by contrast emphasizes the atrocity of the murder and the odiousness of the murderer. Not all the formulations are negative. When King Henry (Child 32) kills his hawks, hounds, and steeds, he demonstrates the kind of selfsacrifice that enables him to unspell the “griesly ghost.” Moreover, his animals are killed with reason: for food, as sacrifices to the woman in distress. Child 32 is among the ballads examined in Buchan’s tale-role analysis of witches, in which he suggests that magical bespelling is a metaphor for a psychological transformation caused by emotional trauma. The heroine, “grievously altered and injured by a previous relationship” (the loss of her mother and her replacement by a cruel surrogate), is restored through “exemplary demonstrations of trust, love, physical courage, and the indispensable acknowledgement that ‘a woman will have her will.’”21 The forthright sacrifice of possessions that signify social strength underscores the compassion of the hero, a trait that allows him to deal sensitively with the transformed (emotionally embittered) heroine and achieve a successful union. Positive applications of the motif occur also in ballads where threats directed toward hawks or hounds reflect a challenge faced by the hero. In most ballads of this type, the hero pursues a noble fight heedless of the risk involved. Sir Lionel (Child 18A), instructed by a giant to forfeit “Thy hawkes and thy lease [leash]” for killing a boar, instead combats and defeats him. In “Johnny Cock” (Child 114), when the hero’s hounds are placed in iron bands, he not only continues to hunt but defeats seven foresters who attempt to arrest him. Jamie Telfer, after his house and cattle are plundered by thieves, seeks help from the man to whom he has paid blackmail and who should therefore be his protector. When the request is denied, he vows to pursue the matter, even though My hounds may a’ rin masterless, My hawks may fly from tree to tree. (Child 190:12)

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Child says that the formula “could not be more inappropriately brought in than here,”22 referring to the apparent incongruity between symbols of high status—hawks and hounds—and a tenant farmer like Telfer. To the contrary, the example shows clearly that the motif characterizes the inner man, not his social station; his cause is noble even if he is not. Telfer bucks the odds, persevering even when both social convention and his supposed protector conspire against him, and the motif shows that he has the resolve and determination to see the wrong corrected. Distanced relationships between motif and character occur in seven types. Here the character is tangentially connected to the hunting animal, either through a dream or wish, through an obvious metaphorical link, or through social juxtaposition. In “Sir Aldingar” (Child 59), the heroine dreams of rescue by a hawk, while “Fair Annie” (Child 62) wishes she were a hound and her sons were hares that she might run them from her life. Euphemistic references to hawks occur in “Fause Foodrage” (Child 89), in which the mother must covertly refer to her son as a “gay gose-hawk,” and in “Jamie Douglas” (Child 204), where the strong-willed heroine refers to herself on the eve of her divorce as “The hawk that flies far frae her nest.”23 A heroine and the hero’s dogs are socially juxtaposed in “Child Waters” (Child 63): in some versions, she must lead a pack of hounds during the couple’s travels, while in others she is given a lower grade of bread than the dogs eat. Invariably, this form of the motif deals with female characters, and the distance between the character and the signifier also reflects the social distance of women from positions of power in patriarchal culture, again emphasizing the theme of control over one’s destiny and one’s environment as a central component of this symbolic network. In the above types, all the women but one attain their goals despite their subordinate social positions. In Child 204, the resolution can’t really be called positive or negative: the heroine’s divorce frees her from a bad marriage, but given the social context, she would be left in a precarious situation. This paradox, however, is precisely what the motif elucidates, by contrasting the dynamic yet socially powerless character of the heroine with her ineffectual but socially empowered husband (see note 23). Inverted relationships occur in ballads where the security of hawks and hounds contrasts sharply with the vulnerability of their owner or with his subsequent defeat; in other words, the hunter becomes the hunted. In the first sub-group, “Secure hawks: Vulnerable lover,” an immanent threat to the hero is intensified by an ironic portrayal of his hawks and

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hounds at rest. The adulterous heroines in “Little Musgrave” (Child 81) and “The Bonny Birdy” (Child 82) reassure their lovers—wrongly, it turns out—that no danger is near, saying, “Is not thy hawk upon the perch?” The motif of hunting as a prelude to misfortune, dealt with at length by Rogers, is present in several ballads. Among the texts surveyed, however, this application of the motif achieves relatively little metaphorical depth, and all that connects it to the other interpretations is the negation of security through misfortune during a hunt. In the “I” version of “Tam Lin,” for instance, the hero claims that as a boy his uncle sent for him To hunt and hawk, and ride with him, And keep him companie. (Child 39I: 29)

During the hunt, he is captured by the fairy queen. The image makes no explicit connection between the motif and the hero, and little to nothing is revealed of the character. This is true of most ballads under this heading.24 Hunting and hunt motifs play a stronger role in the “E” version of “Sheath and Knife” (Child 16; the fragmentary “D” version also seems to fit this pattern). When two princesses ride out as “sister and brither” for a day’s hunting, one of them is injured and inexplicably left to die, unmourned and unburied. The hunt imagery, coupled with the sexual overtones normally associated with this ballad type, possibly suggests a lesbian relationship between the two characters—the implication of the line, “The hawk had nae lure,” 25 support the interpretation. Several years ago, I posted this reading to the Ballad-L listserv,26 to which one member replied that “riding out like sister and brother” was a common motif in European tradition and simply meant a chaste relationship. In the Child corpus, comparable “sister and brother” motifs appear in only five ballad types: Child 16, already noted, Child 110, “The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter,” Child 112, “The Baffled Knight,” Child 216, “The Mother’s Malison,” and Child 222, “Bonny Baby Livingston.” It’s true that the motif always suggests a chaste relationship at a particular point in the narrative, yet all but the fourth ballad deal with abduction and rape or the threat of rape. In the fourth ballad, drowned lovers must “sleep in Clyde’s water / Like sister an like brither” (Child 216C: 29), their love having been fatally cursed by the hero’s mother. Here, the motif underscores an absence of sex in a desired and desirable relationship. So while the formula, “like sister and brother,” has limited distribution in classical ballads, its supra-narrative function consistently highlights adversities in

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sexual relationships, and Child appears justified for including the 16E text under the “Sheath and Knife” heading. In the material surveyed for this paper, 16E is the only instance where hunt motifs have overtly sexual overtones, though it does illustrate what Rogers calls the “puritanical tendency” of ballads to use commonplaces as “acceptable substitutes for the direct mention of taboos.”27 A different kind of inversion occurs in “The Gay Goshawk” (Child 96), where the hawk is a dramatically interacting character, not merely a possession. Here, the goshawk is an inversion of a commonplace ballad character: namely, the dutiful messenger who crosses field and flood and leaps castle walls in the devoted execution of his lady’s errand.28 The bird messenger, who runs his errand for a male character, is less resolute, asking in all versions for instructions and in one version demanding payment for his services. Buchan’s tale-role analysis of “marvellous creature” ballads isolates fidelity/perfidy as integral themes of this subgenre.29 In this ballad, the unwavering fidelity of the heroine is the core theme, and the rather diffident hawk seems a comic foil by contrast. It nonetheless reflects the polarity of positive/negative behavior characteristic of this symbolic network. In the remaining sub-groups of “inverted” relationships, the poetic function of hunt imagery tends to be muted, with one obvious exception: the English variant of Child 26, “The Three Ravens.” This ballad and its Scottish counterpart warrant special attention because of the starkly contrasting uses of hunting motifs, but there isn’t space here to give a proper account. Suffice to say that the English variant is rather curious, given the readings presented here, in its representation of the steadfast fidelity of the hero’s hawks and hounds. The Scottish variant, despite the “cynical” label that Child applied to it,30 seems more in keeping with other examples of the motifs. In the “Incidental” category, hawks and hounds are possessions of secondary characters, and in most cases their function as agents of characterization is not deeply felt. In a version of “Young Hunting” (Child 68J), in which the deceased hero is described as the keeper of the king’s hawks and hounds, the motif adds no real depth to his character. Nonetheless, even when animals are associated with secondary characters, they may still actively signify human weakness. In “Young Allan” (Child 245), vacuous pride is characterized by men bragging about their hawks and hounds. In Child 31, the decidedly unchivalrous knights in Gawain’s company run for their hawks and hounds when faced with the possibility

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of marriage to the hideous lady. One of the more interesting examples occurs in “Lord Ingram and Chiel Wyet” (Child 66), where a heroine’s brothers, usually the most active opposers of marriages in ballads, are “bought” with gifts of hawks from the unwanted suitor. Here, normally superordinate character-types are symbolically shamed for shirking their family responsibilities. The preceding examples illustrate that while symbols of the hunt are consistent in their overall textural effect, they are sometimes dramatically interwoven with the character, while at others they linger in the background as subtle reminders of a personality flaw or an attribute left wanting. Such fluidity is accounted for by James Fernandez who argues for a holistic view of traditional metaphor, one that is “symphonic” in its approach. In his view, individual tropes, like instruments in an orchestra, are at times brought to the fore and at others left in the background but serve a function that, by virtue of sonority, is in many ways constant.31 Throughout the Child corpus, references to hawks and hounds illuminate the potential for character weakness and vulnerability, qualities which have reverberating implications for the character in his or her relationships with other dramatis personae. The stress on “potential” is important, for not all possessors of hawks and hounds are weak and vulnerable. Rather, the motifs tend to flag behavioral extremes, and that is the key to their metaphorical value. Claude Lévi-Strauss once likened the working of metaphor in primitive culture to standing in a room full of mirrors, where each image casts multiple reflections.32 Individual symbols in balladry are not so multifaceted that their reverberations are infinite, but their function is in essence refractive. They establish multiple possibilities through the presentation of a single motif. We noted at the outset that, semiotically, hunt imagery conforms to Barthes’s notion of a “second-order system.” (And given that the social symbolism is itself a second-order sign, what we’re actually seeing in balladry is a tertiary construct.) The ballad relies heavily on contrast33 to achieve this effect. It takes a preestablished sign and creates a mirror image, such that both positive and negative attributes are established simultaneously, resulting in a conflict between the conventional image and its genre-specific applications. In the case of hawks and hounds, the social image is weighted toward the positive side of the model, toward culture and control, while generic expectation pulls in the opposite direction, toward nature and chaos. The resulting ambiguity is resolved, and thus “meaning” is made clear, by how the motifs are applied in specific narrative settings.

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The refractive function of symbols may well be an inherent esthetic construct in balladry. In Andersen’s analysis, the formula “He’s taen her by the milk-white hand”34 is shown to precede the murder or rape of a girl, and thus the innocence connoted by a fair-handed maiden contrasts sharply with the brutality of the subsequent actions. Similarly, misfortune soon befalls the character who looks over a castle wall,35 thereby negating the strength and security of the fortress. To extend the analogy of refraction a step further, one can think of the transparency of a prism as equating the “emptiness”36 or “depthlessness”37 of the folklore text, and just as the refraction of light through crystal produces a spectrum, the interplay between image and what Anna Caraveli eloquently terms “the song beyond the song”38 throws the ballad world into complex relief. The preceding analyses of hunt imagery have shown the manner in which balladry plays on preestablished symbols in order to create unique effects in its own fictional universe. It is, of course, curious that this vernacular genre uses one of heraldry’s more potent symbols to indicate vulnerability, which might suggest that the motifs engage class tensions at some level. In other words, were hunting viewed as a purely elite activity, it may have generated negative associations among the classes who sang the ballads. There may be something to the idea, but looking at the genre itself, we find that hunt motifs point more often to domestic matters than to social concerns. The texts surveyed can be divided into two groups depending on whether the source of narrative tension is domestic—i.e., between lovers or immediate family members—or public, i.e., between social (normally male) rivals. Of the forty-two ballad types reviewed, twenty-eight (66 percent) focus on domestic issues, and in eighteen of these (64.3 percent) the motif illuminates weak or objectionable behavior in men. As such, hunting motifs show a concern for the vulnerabilities of males in domestic relationships. In the ballad world, as in the real world, icons of social strength are of little value when one has to confront deeper issues in life: compassion in love, honor in the face of adversity, coping with grief or remorse, culpability for one’s transgressions, and the ability to stand firm in times of trial. An absence of such qualities in the human character cannot be glossed over by symbols.

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Appendix 6.1 Symbols of the Hunt: Motif/Character Relationships Letters in parentheses denote the Scots and English variants of Child 26; all other letters indicate versions. Relationship

Condition

Child Type Number

1) Parallel

Uncontrollable Killed/Sacrificed Threatened/Pursued

26 (S), 43, 53, 260B, 263 12, 13, 49, 32 18, 88, 114, 190, 305

2) Distanced

Dream or wish Metaphorical link Social Juxtaposition

59A, 62 89A, 204B 62I, 63, 260

3) Inverted

Secure hawks: Vulnerable lover

69F, 81, 82

Hunt leads to misfortune 7, 16E, 39I, 117, 162B, 193B, 214, 257B Faithful animals of deceased hero

26 (E), 259

Human messenger: Avian messenger

96

4) Incidental

Possessions of secondary characters

31, 66C, 68J, 151, 189, 245, 246A, 265

5) Miscellaneous

Hawks and hounds listed with other characters

44, 73I, 270

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NOTES 1 Research for this paper was funded by fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the School of Graduate Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland. An earlier version was published in German as, “‘His Hawk, His Hound’: Geschlechterrollen, gesellschaftliche Symbole und Balladenmetaphern,” in Gender : Culture : Poetics: Zur Geschlechterforschung in der Literatur – Kulturwissenschaft, ed. Andrea Gutenberg and Ralf Schneider, trans. Caroline Scheider-Kliemt, Köln: Universität zu Köln, Englisches Seminar, 1999, pp. 173−89. I would like to thank the following for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts: John Ashton, David Buchan, Melissa Ladenheim, Martin Lovelace, Cathy and Mike Preston, Neil Rosenberg, Larry Syndergaard, and Barre Toelken. 2 Barre Toelken, “An Oral Canon for the Child Ballads: Construction and Application,” Journal of the Folklore Institute 4 (1967): 75−101; Roger Renwick, English Folk Poetry: Function and Meaning (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), Chap. 1. 3 Flemming Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity: The Role of Formulaic Diction in Anglo-Scottish Traditional Balladry (Odense: Odense University Press, 1984), pp. 31−37 and 102−282. 4 Albert Lord, A Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 97. 5 Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, p. 31. 6 David Buchan, “Propp’s Tale Role and a Ballad Repertoire,” Journal of American Folklore 95 (1982): 169; repr. in W. F. H. Nicolaisen and James Moreira, eds., The Ballad and the Folklorist: The Collected Papers of David Buchan (St. John’s, NL: Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Publications, 2013), p. 117. For similar comments on the psychological function of ballads, see Renwick, English Folk Poetry, p. 7, and Barre Toelken, “Metaphorical Ambiguity and Narrative Meaning in the English-Scottish Popular Ballad,” Arv 45 (1989): 125−37. “Tale-role” refers to an essential narrative function served by one or more characters in folk literature. Buchan’s tale-role articles are reprinted in Section II of Nicolaisen and Moreira, eds., The Ballad and the Folklorist, pp. 101−239. 7 Renwick, English Folk Poetry, pp. 18−19. 8 The survey includes 84 versions of 42 ballad types. Location of relevant items was facilitated by Cathy Lynn Preston, “A ‘Working’ KWIC Concordance to Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882−1898),” University of Colorado. Unpublished MS in possession of the author. 9 Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 24−40, esp. pp. 27 and pp. 30−31. 10 Edith Rogers, The Perilous Hunt: Studies in Hispanic and European Balladry (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1980), p. 7. 11 This art and iconography is well-surveyed in Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, eds., The Art of Falconry, being the “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus”

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of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943). Commentaries on various aspects of hunting and the arts are included as “Appended Material,” pp. 419−556. 12 Rachel Hands, “The Names of All Manner of Hawks and to Whom They Belong,” Notes & Queries, New Series 18.3 (March, 1971): 85−88; and Rachel Hands, English Hawking and Hunting in The Boke of St. Albans (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 54−55 and 116n. 13 Francis Henry Slavin and William Broderick, Falconry in the British Isles (1855; repr. Maidenhead: Thames Valley Press, 1971), pp. 3−8. 14 Tom J. Cade, The Falcons of the World (Ithaca, NY: Comstock/Cornell University Press, 1982), p. 55; and Joseph B. Platt, David M. Bird, and Lina Bardo, “Captive Breeding,” in Raptor Research and Management Techniques,” ed. David M. Bird and Keith L. Bildstein, 2nd ed. (Surrey, BC, and Blaine, WA: Hancock House Publishers, 2007), p. 383. 15 Cf. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973). 16 Wood and Fyfe, Art of Falconry, pp. 105−6 and 150−51; comparable comments are found in Slavin and Brodrick, Falconry, pp. 14−15; see also Leslie Brown, British Birds of Prey: A Study of Britain’s 24 Diurnal Raptors (London: Collins, 1976), p. 352. There are a number of autobiographical accounts that show the challenges of training raptors. T. H. White’s The Goshawk (London: Penguin, 1951) is probably the best known, but see also David Bruce, Bird of Jove, 2nd ed. (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1994), and, most recently, Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk (New York: Grove Press, 2014). 17 Rogers, Perilous Hunt, pp. 6−7. 18 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1959; repr. New York: Noonday Press, 1972), pp. 112−15. 19 Rogers, Perilous Hunt, p. 8. 20 In these texts, hawks or hounds are simply listed among other animals. 21 David Buchan, “Taleroles and the Witch Ballads,” in Ballads and Other Genres/Balladen und andere Gattungen, ed. Zorica Rojkovic (Zagreb: Zavod za intrazivanje folklore, 1988), pp. 136−37; repr. Nicolaisen and Moreira, eds., The Ballad and the Folklorist, p. 176. 22 Child, ESPB, 4:6. 23 Her husband, historically described as “morose and peevish, and incapable of managing his own affairs” (quoted in Child, ESPB, 4:91), is characterized as “The hawk that flies from tree to tree” in a balancing version of the motif (Child 204B: 14−15). 24 See, for example, “The Gest of Robin Hode” (Child 117), “The Hunting of the Cheviot” (Child 162), “The Death of Parcy Reed” (Child 193B). 25 In falconry, a lure is an artificial bird used to attract a hawk after a flight (and “bird” being a common euphemism for penis).

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Founded in the mid-1990s, Ballad-L is an open forum for ballad researchers. “List.Indiana.Edu Mailing Lists,” Indiana University, https://list.indiana. edu/sympa/info/ballad-l 27 Edith Rogers, “Clothing as a Multifarious Symbol,” Western Folklore 34 (1975): 294. 28 See for example Child 65A: 18−22, and Andersen’s discussion of the formula “Where will I get a bonny boy?” (Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 193−201). 29 David Buchan, “The Marvellous Creature Ballads,” in Inte Bara Visor: Studier kring Folklig Diktning och Musik Tillägnade Bengt R. Jonsson, ed. Eva Danielson and Sven-Bertil Jansson (Stockholm: Svenskt Visarkiv, 1990), pp. 43−51; repr. Nicolaisen and Moreira, eds., The Ballad and the Folklorist, pp. 179−88. Oddly, Buchan does not cover “The Gay Goshawk” in his schema, but the ballad adheres to his general pattern. 30 Child, ESPB, 1:350. 31 James Fernandez, “The Argument of Images and the Experience of Returning to the Whole,” in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 172−75. 32 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 263. 33 Cf. Axel Olrik, “The Epic Laws of Folk Narrative,” in The Study of Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 135−36. 34 Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 161−74. 35 Andersen, Commonplace and Creativity, pp. 138−47. 36 Lauri Honko, “Empty Texts, Full Meanings: On Transformal Meaning in Folklore,” Journal of Folklore Research 22 (1985): 37−44. 37 Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 11. 38 Anna Caraveli, “The Song beyond the Song: Aesthetics and Social Interaction in Greek Folksong,” Journal of American Folklore 95 (1982): 129−58. 26

Chapter 7

Balladry and Social Mores An Exploration of Attitudes to Sexual Relations in Songsters, Broadsides, and Oral Tradition David Gregory

I

T IS A COMMONPLACE of popular music scholarship that much, perhaps even most, popular music is in one way or another about sex.1 In some genres, such as the classic rock of the 1970s, sexual intercourse has been openly evoked, as in David Bowie’s celebration of the liberated mores of “Suffragette City,” in which the increasing tempo and intensity of the pounding guitar is accompanied by the shouted lyric “here she comes, here she comes,” ending with the orgasmic ejaculation “Wham Bang, Thank you Ma’am!”2 Similarly in postwar rhythm & blues sexual references were overt, as in the Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man,” or the innuendos were as blatant as Hank Ballard’s “Work with Me, Annie.”3 The American vernacular song tradition is similarly replete with bawdy material, as Ed Cray has illustrated in his compilation The Erotic Muse.4 However, in the older songs in this genre sexual acts are often merely suggested or are expressed in street slang or other forms of linguistic code.5 To what extent is this thesis—that sexual activity, albeit referenced by discreet allusion or by means of some form of linguistic code, is a common subject of popular song—also true of the ballad tradition? Balladry is, of course, diverse in character, and whereas one might expect to find sexuality in the cruder forms of the broadside ballad, it might well be less evident, or even non-existent, in the traditional ballad of the Child corpus. In fact, although the majority of traditional ballads are about non-sexual subjects, there are a significant minority that deal with sexual relations, usually extramarital, and their consequences, often tragic, sometimes comic. Sex is rarely explicit, but it is quite often alluded to or presumed. We can therefore explore the value for social historians of old narrative songs as primary documents revealing prevalent attitudes to extramarital

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sex in different historical eras. Even Child ballads need not be exempt from the scrutiny given to broadsides and songsters, although as usual we face the difficult problem of dating them. Before focusing on the traditional balladry of the Child canon, it will be useful to provide some context by briefly probing the treatment of sexuality in British popular song from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Those of us interested in British cultural history in general and urban vernacular song in particular, are now fortunate to have the four volumes of Bawdy Songs of the Romantic Period, which together reprint forty-nine songsters comprising over eleven hundred individual songs.6 My examples are taken from volume 3 of the collection.7 The thirteen songsters reprinted in this volume were published in the 1830s but some of the songs date from over a hundred years earlier, including several from Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy.8 The tunes employed go back to the sixteenth century, the earliest probably being “Derry Down” which was current in the Elizabethan era and used for the traditional ballad “The Three Ravens” printed in Ravenscroft’s Melismata (1611).9 The titles of items printed in these songsters were often quite explicit. They ranged from “The Accommodating Abbess” (about how a madam ran her bawdy house), through “Black-Ey’d Sal and the Juicy Orange” and “The Lasses’ Arses O” to “Moll Slobbercock,” and “Wrymouthed Bob and his Jolly Red Knob.” Almost all of them were overtly sexist in the sense of regarding women exclusively, or at least primarily, as sex objects: “mutton” was an unflattering term commonly used. Hundreds made use of double entendres as their principal source of humor, although many of the ubiquitous word plays have become obscure with the passage of time. There were several dozen slang synonyms for vagina although, curiously, “cunt” was a rarity, with the softer “cunny” or “coney” sometimes substituted, but it was brazenly featured in a ditty called “The C, the C, the Open C!” Black cats, black holes, black jokes, blue veins, bushes, fountains, gape-holes, hare-skins, hairy rings, muffs, spittoons, twitchers, verdant spots, and water closets were among the many tropes for vagina and/or pubic bush. Cock, too, was used for both male and female genitalia, and one becomes weary of the anonymous songwriters’ delight in repeating the word as often as possible, in the belief that its very mention would induce a laugh. Certainly, many of these songs were pedestrian and tedious; others, however, were quite sophisticated. Perhaps the cleverest were those, such as “The Primrose Girl,” “The Ballet Girl,” and “John Long and his I Know What,” that derived their humor from carefully avoiding

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the expected slang word. This is part of “The Ballet Girl,” which explicitly treats voyeurism and suggests masturbation, from The Fal-Lal Songster: I knew a little ballet girl, bright as the opening day, Who fondly oft I gazed upon when she danced at the play. I always went into the pit, three sittings from the front, ’Cause there it was that I could see this pretty creature’s Cunning leer and lovely smile, and form of beauty’s mould – Her graceful legs and pretty feet and locks of beaming gold. With love my heart was brimming o’er, I breathed forth tender sighs, And longed to wed, when gazing on this little dancer’s eyes. One night o’erborne with love I jumped upon the seat quite quick, And to this little maiden then, then, I showed my Presence there, and love so strong; I wished to urge my suit – My faltering tongue refused to speak and I was wellnigh mute. I sat me down and waited there until the play was o’er, And then to see this maiden bright went round to the stage door. I begged that I might walk with her. She said, “Sir, we must part.” And then in mode unlady-like turned round and let a Fancy man go home with her, I saw them walk away. And when I’d watch’d them out of sight, I sigh’d, and cut away.10

Many of the songs revealed much about London low-life and the daily lives of working-class people in central-east London. Some were clearly set in an area that ran eastwards from Covent Garden and St. Giles (a district notorious for its crowded housing, criminal gangs and lower-class prostitutes) through Holborn and St. Paul’s to Eastcheap and Whitechapel. This body of song, which often employed cockney dialect, can be divided

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into three groups: songs about prostitutes and prostitution, such as “Love in a Watch Box,” “The Little Go,” and “The Blowing’s Lament”; songs of criminal low-life, including “Dick Hellfinch, the Link-Boy” and “The St. Giles Flashman”; and songs like “Knowing Bill, the Costermonger” and “Conger Nell and the Clerkenwell Porkman” depicting the lives, and often the sexual prowess, of barrow-vendors, fishwives, and chimney sweeps. A fairly typical example of an eighteenth-century bawdy song about London low-life is one called “Let Shame Crown the Strumpet,” a parody of William Shield’s “national” song “Let Fame Sound the Trumpet.” Included in The Flash Casket, A Very Curious Collection of Mouth-Watering Parodies, Funny Fakements, &c., it reflects the underground culture of London life in the late Georgian era, a form of low-life that spanned the class divide by means of the exploitation of poor women by richer men. My main reason for selecting it is to demonstrate a major obstacle that we face in understanding and interpreting songs about sex: it heavily employs dialect and code. It is the story of a Presbyterian preacher who extols teetotalism and abstinence but who is in fact a hypocrite, gets drunk, and resorts to a prostitute. Here are the verses: Let shame crown the strumpet, and to bed budge with Joe, Let Roger hard wriggle for a bad bob again; A dribble when on her may come from the blow, And back bones may creak, may creak at the pain, The measures of gatter let lushers display, And stagger about cheek by jowl, On skience Dutch Sam may lecture away, And spoonies may squander their cole. And spoonies, &c. Let windows uphold their prime grubb to the view, The swallows to tempt each woman and cove, But tip me a jimmy made into a stew, And the grey peas, and grey peas I tenderly love. What’s wooing but lust? Dutch Sam is all bounce, And lushing but coming it fine; What’s pastry to meat, a pound to an ounce, But wittles and drink are divine! A jimmy and broth, &c.11

While it is obvious that the song describes activities (drinking, eating, talking, and copulation) in a brothel, to fully understand the first two

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lines one needs to know that “budge” is slang for “jump in,” “hard wriggle” means copulate, and a “bob” is a shilling (a unit of currency, one twentieth of a pound sterling ). A “dribble” is a louse; the suggestion is that the prostitute has caught lice from a client while having sexual intercourse (“the blow”), although there is a double entendre here since “dribble” also implies a rather feeble ejaculation by the man. “Cole” is money, “gatter” is beer and “lushers” are drunkards, as are “spoonies,” who are also addicts. The humor of the second verse depends on an allegory: ostensibly about eating various dishes, lines three and four are double entendres that suggest intercourse. The “grubb” in the windows are not only tempting plates of food but also girls showing off their charms; while a “jimmy” is an example of cockney rhyming slang : a jimmy (or jemmy) is a crowbar, hence a crow or a fowl such as a chicken (or “cock”), big enough to be made into a stew; and “stew” is also slang for vagina, so the crowbar is also a stiff penis. “Grey peas” are a well-lubricated vagina: this is more rhyming slang in which “peas” is short for “peas in the pot” and “pot” is a rhyming substitute for “hot,” meaning sexy, lecherous, or horny. As for Dutch Sam, he is the puritan preacher who ostensibly visits the brothel in an effort to save souls from sin (he extols “skience,” that is, abstinence) but in fact brags of his sexual performance (“bounce” is braggadocio) and indulges fully in both drink and sex (he “lushes” and “comes it fine,” which suggests he drinks heavily and orgasms vigorously). The song thus combines social satire against hypocritical clergy with a lively, if coded, account of the scene in a bawdy house. Both sex and alcohol are condoned, even celebrated. So much for London. If at much the same date we had journeyed to the countryside around the new industrial towns of Lancashire, a broadside ballad might have given us insight into the kind of sexual activity occurring between youthful workers in the textile industry. It was called “The Bury New Loom” and it again used code—this time a rather elaborate metaphor—to describe intercourse. It had three verses: As I walked between Bolton and Bury, ’twas on a moonshiny night, I met with a buxom young weaver whose company gave me delight. She says, “Young fellow, come tell to me if your level and rule are in tune, Come, give me an answer correct now, can you get up and square my new loom?”

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I said, “Dear lassie, believe me, I am a good joiner by trade, And many a good loom and shuttle before in my time I have made, Your short lams and jacks and long lam I quickly can put them in tune; My rule is now in good order to get up and square a new loom. She took me and showed me her new loom, the down on her warp did appear, The lam jacks and healds put in motion, I levelled her loom to a hair, My shuttle ran well in her lathe then, my treadle it worked up and down, My level stood close to her breast-beam, the time I was squaring her loom.12

In this instance the technical terms hardly need explanation; the allegory is obvious. Internal evidence suggests that that broadside was probably created during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Broadside balladry was still going strong at that time but its heyday was the previous century. So can we find earlier street ballads that illuminate attitudes to sexual activity? Yes, many black-letter broadsides in the Roxburghe and Pepys collections date from the decades after the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, with some broadsides apparently reprints of items published earlier. Moreover, we can corroborate what the broadsides tell us with the bawdy content of Thomas D’Urfey’s Pills to Purge Melancholy, which was an expanded edition of Henry Playford’s collection of the same title,13 and the various Cavalier drolleries edited by Joseph Ebsworth between 1661 and 1672.14 The Restoration era seems to have been a period of sexual license on the part of those relieved to escape from the Puritan morality imposed under the Commonwealth. A ballad titled “The Wanton Wenches of Wiltshire” captures the spirit of sexual liberation evidently felt by some, although it was still necessary to use code to describe an episode that involved lesbianism, voyeurism, and masturbation, and which apparently ended with an orgy. These are eight verses excerpted from a slightly longer narrative: Now, young Batchelors, all draw near, and you a pleasant Discourse shall hear, Of four young Damsels all meeting and greeting each other together in fair Wiltshire.

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All complain’d at a sorrowful rate, because they could not enjoy a mate: Whilst they made their sad pitiful moan, they thought they were private and all alone. One said: “I must depart a space, for here I am in a woful case: I find I’m ready to scatter my [laugh]ter, therefore I must find a convenient place, Where no younge man may see what I do: and then I’le streightways return to you. But unto this they would no ways agree, they’d “all go together for Company.” Hand in hand then away they go, like loving Sisters all in a row. Two young men, hearing their talk and prattle, resolved some more of this gigg to know; Therefore, watching them, whither they went, these two young men, by joint consent, Both resolved in ambush to lye, where both words and actions they might descry. “My sweet sister,” says One, “I find, night and day, such pain in my mind; Because I am not the blessing possessing which I might enjoy if young men were kind: How I tremble, while here I reveal the inward torments which now I feel! But yet in vain do I utter my grief, since no one will yield me the least relief.” Said the Second: “Young sweet-faced John, you know he is a young lusty man: I dearly love him, provoke him and stroke him, yet he will not kiss me, do what I can. I have fed him with Custards and Cream, and all things that can pleasant seem: Nay, call him my honey, my love and dear: and yet I protest I am ne’r the near!” Said the Third: “I am pure, [my hair’s] cole-black; and that you know has a dainty smack:

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Besides, I know I am witty and pretty: then why should I not have those joys I lack? Being youthful, and just in my prime, and loth to lose my teeming-time: Yet brisk young Gallants no kindness will show! What reason have I to be served so?” Then the Fourth did begin to prate, and that was bonny brisk bouncing Kate, Who did with fury behold ’em, and told that she was stark mad for a man-like mate: “Tho’ I am shorter than others may be, yet wherefore should this hinder me? Behold, I am of a delicate Brown; no colour is better in all the Town!” “Nay, the worst of us all might serve! For surely Batchellors don’t deserve To have our favour, who spight us, and slight us, and suffer poor Damsels to pine and starve. But we’l tattle no longer of this [foul wrong]!” So e’ry sister sat down to [a song]: And yet, before they had perfectly done, the young men they laught, and the wenches [did run].15

Of course, we do not know how widespread the liberated attitudes expressed in a ballad like this were, but the ballad-monger expected his ditty to sell to an audience that was neither shocked by the subject matter nor appalled by the song’s condoning of extramarital sex. Moving backward in time, the so -called Bishop Percy Folio Manuscript has been dated to ca. 1650. It contains both traditional ballads and some forty broadsides and other songs about sex. They include such titles as “Walking in Meadow Gren” (on the theme of impotence), “Off a Puritane” (a satire on licentious Puritan ministers and not-so-holy nuns), “A Maid and a Younge Man” (about a Midsummer encounter in the woods), “Lye Alone” (on the want of a man), “A Mayden Head” (an attack on virginity), and “Come Wanton Wenches” (advice from an old courtesan).16 Evidently all the Puritans had succeeded in doing was to drive underground song-makers’ and singers’ fascination with sex. It is time to change gear, go even further back in history, and look at the far end of the spectrum from license to prudery. While Francis Child’s second collection did not include all the known narrative songs that we

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might reasonably classify as traditional ballads,17 it did include enough of them to use as the basis for a preliminary analysis. So what do the Child ballads tell us about sexuality in the late Middle Ages and the Tudor era? Unfortunately, we face the insurmountable problem of dating the putative original versions or prototypes of ballads that we possess in later iterations. In most cases the English broadside variants of a given ballad type are the oldest we have, and we cannot be sure whether they were the original versions (as I suspect) or whether they were poor copies of items borrowed from oral tradition. Did Thomas Deloney write the original “Fair Flower of Northumberland”? 18 Did “A Warning to Married Women” predate “James Harris” and other versions of “The Daemon Lover”?19 We don’t know for sure, but the existence of a goodly number of broadsides in the Child collection that definitely date from the Elizabethan era underlines the fact that we are dealing, at least in part, with the vernacular literature of the English Renaissance, which is usually dated from the mid-sixteenth century to the outbreak of the Civil War. And the sizable number of quotations from ballads found in the works of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights confirms this. I suspect, then, that the attitudes to sexuality found in many Child ballads often reflect values that were fairly widespread in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Nonetheless, there are good reasons for thinking that a minority express older, late medieval, attitudes and values rather than those of the Renaissance era. At least 125 of the Child ballads indicate or imply sexual activity as part of the story they tell. Admittedly, in some cases, for example “Thomas Rymer,” the sexual relationship is not explicit but merely suggested. I have therefore made some interpretative judgments that could be disputed, and my numbers must be regarded as approximate rather than exact. A little arbitrarily (there are some overlaps and ambiguities where judgment calls are also required) they can be sorted into the following ten categories: (i) rape, (ii) voyeurism, (iii) promiscuity, (iv) adultery, (v) incest, (vi) dire consequences of extramarital sex, (vii) dire consequences of premarital sex between lovers, (viii) lovers punished by family, (ix) premarital sex between lovers condoned, and (x) extramarital sex condoned. There are at least eight Child ballads in which rape is part of the action: “Gil Brenton” (Child 5), “The Twa Magicians” (Child 44), “The Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter” (Child 110), “Crow and Pie” (Child 111), “The Broom of Cowdenknowes” (Child 217), “Rob Roy” (Child 225), “The Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie” (Child 290), and “Walter Lesly” (Child 296). Rape is usually condemned, as in “The Knight and

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the Shepherd’s Daughter,” but pardoned if the man subsequently marries his victim, as in “The Broom of Cowdenknowes.” “The Whummil Bore” (Child 27) appears to be the only ballad with voyeurism as its main theme. There is promiscuity (i.e., sex with multiple partners) in “Leesome Brand” (Child 15) and in “The Maid and the Palmer” (Child 21). This is condemned explicitly in the latter ballad (the wanton woman endures multiple punishments prescribed by the Christ figure) and implicitly in “Leesome Brand” (the eleven-year-old young lady who was “oft in bed wi’ men” becomes pregnant and dies in childbirth). Leaving aside sexual activity between married partners, which ballad authors rarely seem to have found worth writing about, we can divide all the other instances of intercourse into two categories: premarital sex between young lovers, and extramarital sex between men and women who seemingly had no intention or no possibility of marriage. Let us take the latter category first. Eight ballads warn against the dire consequences of indulging in extramarital sex for the fun of it. They are “The Cruel Mother” (Child 18), “Burd Ellen and Young Tamblane” (Child 28), “Clerk Colville” (Child 42), “Young Andrew” (Child 48), “Glasgerion,” (Child 67), “Young Hunting” (Child 68), “Mary Hamilton” (Child 173), and “The Coble o Cargill” (Child 242). Fourteen Child ballads have adultery as a principal subject: “The Boy and the Mantle” (Child 29), “Old Robin of Portingale” (Child 80), “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” (Child 81), “The Bonny Birdy” (Child 82), “Queen Eleanor’s Confession” (Child 156), “Earl Bothwell” (Child 174), “The Gypsy Laddie” (Child 200), “The Earl of Aboyne” (Child 235), “The Baron o’ Leys” (Child 241), “James Harris” (The Daemon Lover) (Child 243), “The White Fisher” (Child 264), “John Thomson and the Turk” (Child 266), “Our Goodman” (Child 274), and “Earl Rothes” (Child 297). Most, but not quite all, of the ballads about adultery explicitly condemn it or the result is tragedy for at least one of the partners, an implicit condemnation. Moreover, retribution of some kind is normal for all those involved in incest. The six incest ballads are “Sheath and Knife” (Child 16), “The Maid and the Palmer” (Child 21), “The Bonny Hind” (Child 50), “Lizzie Wan” (Child 51), “The King’s Dochter Lady Jean” (Child 52), and “Brown Robyn’s Confession” (Child 57). In four of them the female is either murdered or commits suicide. Most of these ballads, although not quite all, have overtly medieval settings: they involve clerks, knights, lords, harpers, or kings and queens that seemingly belong to the Middle Ages. That does not entail that they

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were composed in the late medieval period, but it does at least suggest that, at the very least, we are here dealing with Renaissance-era perceptions of what those late medieval values were. In sum, there is a sizable, if still fairly small, group of around two dozen Child ballads that were intended as warnings against incest, adultery, and other forms of extramarital sex. It is noticeable that in some instances, for example “The Cruel Mother” and “The Boy and the Mantle,” the woman is unequivocally condemned. In “Sheath and Knife” and “Lizzie Wan,” she is obviously a victim, but her death is portrayed as a necessary and inevitable consequence of her sin. Women are judged harshly in these, the ballads with the most medieval feel. There is an evident double standard, since the men involved in incest tend to get off more lightly: they may experience loss, sadness, and remorse but they apparently do not face severe social sanctions. The only surprise here, perhaps, is that there are not more of these “hard line” moralistic ballads, and that there are some ballads that take a different perspective. Of the incest ballads, two—“The Maid and the Palmer” (Child 21) and “Brown Robyn’s Confession” (Child 57)—have a strong Christian ring to them, and the guilty protagonists, although punished, are ultimately forgiven and saved because they confess their sins.20 In “Leesome Brand” the promiscuous and pregnant girl dies in childbirth but in one version is resurrected by the witch-mother of her lovers. And in three of the adultery ballads—“The Baron o’ Leys,” (Child 241), “The White Fisher” (Child 264), and “Our Goodman” (Child 274)—the guilty party is either forgiven or the matter is treated lightly. Moreover, extramarital sex seems to be condoned in eight other ballads: “Thomas Rymer” (Child 37), “Child Waters” (Child 63), “Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter” (Child 102), “Rose the Red and White Lily” (Child 103), “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” (Child 150), “The Baron of Brackley” (Child 203), “The Twa Knights” (Child 268), and “The Jolly Beggar” (Child 279). That’s only fourteen against twenty-five, but it does suggest either that there was a minority in late medieval society who had an unorthodox view of sexual behavior or, more likely, that most of these songs were later reflections of a somewhat more diverse and tolerant Renaissance society. Let us now turn to the category of premarital sex between two lovers who want or intend to be married. By my count there are sixty-six Child ballads on this subject, and they divide into three groups. Some of the most striking and moving ballads are about lovers punished by the families for giving their affections to the wrong kind of person or simply for giving in to their sexual urges before tying the knot. Upper-class society in

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late medieval England normally viewed marriage as a transaction intended to forge or consolidate kinship links, maintain social status, or enhance the family’s possession of landed estates. Romantic love was a menace that interfered with this hard-headed, materialistic approach to matrimony. So daughters especially who tried to exercise their own choice of a marriage partner were either prevented from so doing or punished if they transgressed, especially if the transgression involved sex with a social inferior. Thirteen Child ballads exemplify this social code, and they include several of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching of traditional ballads. The thirteen are “The Cruel Brother” (Child 11), “Susie Cleland” (Child 65), “Clerk Saunders” (Child 69), “Willie and Lady Maisrie” (Child 70), “The Clerk’s Twa Sons o Owsenford” (Child 72), “Prince Robert” (Child 87), “The Braes of Yarrow” (Child 214), “The Mother’s Malison, or, Clyde’s Water” (Child 216), “Andrew Lammie” (Child 233) “ Lord Saltoun and Auch-anachie” (Child 239), “The Rantin Laddie” (Child 240), “Lady Isabel” (Child 261), and “ Lady Diamond” (Child 269). Let’s illustrate this group with some verses from of one of the finest, “Clerk Saunders”: Clerk Sanders and May Margaret walkt ower yon graveld green, And deep and heavy was the love, I wat, that fell this twa between. “A bed a bed,” Clerk Sanders said, “a bed, a bed for you and I.” “Fye no, fye no,” the lady said, “until the day we married be. “For in it will come my seven brothers and a’ their torches burning bright, They’ll say, We have but ae sister and here her lying wi’ a knight.” “Ye’l take the sourd fray my scabbard, and lowly, lowly lift the gin, And you may say, your oth to save, you never let Clerk Sanders in.” In and came her seven brothers, and all their torches burning bright; Says thay, We hae but ae sister, And see there her lying wi a knight.

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Out and speaks the first of them, “A wat they hay been lovers dear;” Out and speaks the next of them, “They hay been in love this many a year.” Out an speaks the third of them: “It wear great sin this twa to twain;” Out an speaks the fourth of them, “It wear a sin to kill a sleeping man.” Out an speaks the fifth of them: “A wat they’ll near be twaind by me;” Out and speaks the sixt of them: “We’l tak our leave an gae our way.” Out and spoke the seventh of them, “Altho there wear no a man but me, I bear the brand, I’le gar him die.” Out he has taen a bright long brand and he has striped it throw the straw, And throw and throw Clerk Sauders’ body a wat he has gard cold iron gae. Sanders he started, an Margaret she lapt, intill his arms whare she lay, And well and wellsom was the night, a wat it was between these twa. They lay still, and sleeped sound, until the sun began to shine; She lookt between her and the wa, and dull and heavy was his eeen. She thought it had been a loathsome sweat, a wat it had fallen this twa between; But it was the blood of his fair body, a wat his life days wair na lang. (Child 69A, from David Herd)

There is a curious ambivalence in this ballad. We recognize that the lovers were duplicitous in breaking their vow of chastity and that they knowingly courted danger. The text implicitly suggests that they brought upon themselves the punishment that the conservative family would be expected to impose. On the other hand, we sympathize with them giving into their

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passion, and wish that the last brother had been as merciful as the others. So along with providing a warning against premarital sex, the balladwriter is suggesting that the penalty for it in medieval society was too harsh. Young lovers who have indulged in premarital sex come to grief in other ways. Females are sometimes abandoned by their lovers, either voluntarily or involuntarily. In Child 88, for example, Young Johnstone refuses to marry his girl, murders her, and is caught and killed while trying to escape. Lord Gregory in Child 76 fails in his last-ditch attempt to save the lover he has neglected. Drowning is a frequent fate: Bonnie Annie and her baby are thrown overboard when the ship in which they are eloping won’t sail properly; Rare Willie is drowned in Yarrow (Child 215), and the male lover in “Broughty Wa’s” (Child 258) isn’t a good enough swimmer when escaping a burning house. Sometimes ghosts bring about the demise of one of the lovers, as in “Willie’s Fatal Visit” (Child 255) and “The Suffolk Miracle” (Child 272). Deserted women may die of penury, as in “The West-Country Damosel’s Complaint” (Child 292) or a broken heart, as in “Fair Janet” (Child 64). Or they may exact fatal revenge, as in “Young Hunting” (Child 68), “Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick” (Child 257), and “The Brown Girl” (Child 295). And then, of course, there are those lovers, almost always female, punished by their families. The fate of Tifty’s Annie in “Andrew Lammie” (Child 233) and Susie Cleland in “Lady Maisrie” (Child 65) are the most gruesome. Note, however, in how many of these tragic ballads our sympathies lie with the protagonists. These songs portray a society in which premarital sex is unacceptable and results in dire consequences, but our hearts go out to the lovers. They are victims of a mean and unjust society, whose values we do not accept. It sounds, then, as though the ballad-writers are on the outside of this world, looking in and describing it, but not embracing it as their own. Could it be that they are in fact looking back, judging the Middle Ages from the vantage of the Renaissance? This sense that the majority of relevant Child ballads repudiate the traditional morality of Christianity and caste on the issue of premarital sex is reinforced when we realize that there are no less than thirty-seven ballads in which the sexual activity of (usually young ) lovers is condoned and in which they usually end up successfully married in spite of the obstacles that they have encountered. I can only cite a few as illustration, but think of “Tam Lin” (Child 39), “Hind Etin” (Child 41), “Johnie Scot” (Child 99), “Willie o Winsbury” (Child 100), “The Laird of Logie” (Child 182), “Glasgow Peggie” (Child 228), and “Blancheflour and Jellyflorice” (Child 300), to

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name just seven of many. In some instances, as in “The Fair Flower of Northumberland” (Child 9) and “The Keech i’ the Creel” (Child 281), the anticipated marriage turns out to be illusory, but that still does not matter.21 To this long list we may add the eight more mentioned earlier in which it does not appear to be a matter of young romantic love but rather straightforward sexual attraction between adults. Explicitly or implicitly, consensual sex is condoned in each of these. 22 And then there is the conundrum of “The Gypsy Laddie” (Child 200) in which alternative versions have different endings: in most variants the eloping lady defiantly maintains her impulsive repudiation of her social status and her life of luxury, whereas in a few she is successfully reclaimed by her husband while her gypsy accomplices are hanged. Romantic versions do out-score realistic ones, however. In short, we have a sizable group of forty-six ballads in which romantic love triumphs over convention and/or practical considerations. Because of the nigh-insolvable problems of dating these texts, we cannot be sure that they represent a post-medieval, Renaissance (or even later) view of premarital sex. But it does seem likely. Moreover, a minority of traditional ballad writers and their audiences were apparently willing to condone extramarital sex in certain circumstances. It would be interesting to know how many, if any, of these date from the sixteenth century or earlier. We do not know; but what we can say for sure is that the corpus of Child balladry contains a small number of items in which sexual activity is treated with something like the same license as appears in The Bishop Percy Folio Manuscript, Pills to Purge Melancholy, the Cavalier Drolleries, and certain seventeenth- and eighteenth-century broadsides, garlands, and songbooks.

NOTES 1 See, for example, Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990), especially pp. 148−52, 258−66 and 289−91, and Brian Longhurst and Danijela Bogdanovic, Popular Music and Society, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), especially pp. 118–28. 2 David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Sound recording on compact disc, Rykodisc RCD 10134. 3 Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (New York: Da Capo, 1996), pp. 19 and 156.

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Ed Cray, ed., The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs, 2nd ed. (Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992). 5 On the topic of code, see Middleton, Studying Popular Music, chapter 6, “‘From Me to You.’ Popular Music as Message,” pp. 172−246. 6 Patrick Spedding and Paul Watt, eds. Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, 4 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011 [actually 2012]). 7 E. David, Gregory, ed., Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, vol. 3 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011 [actually 2012]). 8 Thomas D’Urfey, ed., Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, 6 vols. (London: D’Urfey, 1719–20. Repr. New York: Folklore Library Publishers, 1959). 9 Thomas Ravenscroft, attrib. ed., Melismata: Musical Phansies, Fitting the Court, Cittie, and Countrey Humours (London: n.p., 1611). 10 “The Ballet Girl,” in The Fal-Lal Songster, a Real Tip-Top Budget of Amatory, Drinking and Laughable Songs, reprinted in Gregory, Bawdy Songbooks, 3:26−27. 11 “Let Shame Crown the Strumpet,” in The Flash Casket, a Very Curious Collection of Mouth-Watering Parodies, Funny Fakements, &c., reprinted in Gregory, Bawdy Songbooks, 3:125. 12 Undated broadsheet issued by Harkness of Preston; quoted in Roy Palmer, The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 215–16. 13 Henry Playford, ed., Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, 4 vols. (London: Playford, 1698–1706). 14 Joseph Ebsworth, ed., Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets. Merry Drollery Compleat. Westminster Drolleries (Boston, UK: Robert Roberts, 1875−1876). Originally published between 1661 and 1672. 15 William Chappell and Joseph Ebsworth, eds., Roxburghe Ballads, 8 vols (London: The Ballad Society, 1869–99 [actually 1901]), 8 (Pt 3):651−52. 16 John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, eds., Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, 3 Vols, and a Supplement of ‘Loose and Humerous Songs’ (London: Trubner, 1867–1868). 17 E. David Gregory and Rosaleen Gregory, “Jewels Left in the Dung-hills: Broadside and other Vernacular Ballads Rejected by Francis Child,” unpublished paper delivered at the annual conference of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ont., May 23rd−25th, 2002. 18 “The Maidens’ Song,” in Thomas Deloney, The Pleasant History of John Winchcombe, In his younger yeares called Jacke of Newberie, the famous and worthy Clothier of England (London: Young & Wright, 1633); reprinted in Child 9. 19 Laurence Price, “A Warning for Married Women, being an example of Mrs. Jane Reynolds (a West-country woman), born near Plymouth, who, having plighted her troth to a Seaman, was afterwards married to a Carpenter, and at last carried away by a Spirit, the manner how shall be presently recited.” Broadsheet published by Thackeray and Passenger, n.d. (reprinted as Child 243A). 4

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In neither of Child’s versions of “The Maid and the Palmer” is incest explicit, although promiscuity is. However, other versions of the ballad, such as “The Well Below the Valley,” make the sin of incest explicit. 21 The full list is: “Fair Flower of Northumberland” (Child 9), “Willie’s LykeWake” (Child 25), “Tam Lin” (Child 39), “Hind Etin” (Child 41), “Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship” (Child 46), “The Bent Sae Brown” (Child 71), “Brown Robin” (Child 97), “Brown Adam” (Child 98), “Johnie Scot” (Child 99), “Willie o Winsbury” (Child 100), “Willie o Douglas Dale” (Child 101), “Christopher White” (Child 107), “Tom Potts” (Child 109), “The Laird of Logie” (Child 182), “The False Lover Won Back” (Child 218), “Katharine Jaffray” (Child 221), “Eppie Morrie” (Child 223), “Lizzie Lindsay” (Child 226), “Bonny Lizie Baillie” (Child 227), “Glasgow Peggie” (Child 228), “Richie Story” (Child 232), “The Duke of Gordon’s Daughter” (Child 237), “Lady Elspat” (Child 247), “Auld Matrons” (Child 249), “Lang Johnny More” (Child 251), “The Kitchie Boy” (Child 252), “Thomas o Yonderdale” (Child 253), “Lord William, or, Lord Lundy” (Child 254), “The Earl of Mar’s Daughter” (Child 270), “The Beggar-Laddie” (Child 280), “The Keach I the Creel” (Child 281), “John of Hazelgreen” (Child 293), “Dugall Quin” (Child 294), “Young Peggy” (Child 298), “Blancheflour and Jellyfloric” (Child 300), “Young Bearwell” (Child 302), and “Young Ronald” (Child 304). 22 “Thomas Rymer” (Child 37), “Child Waters” (Child 63), “Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter” (Child 102), “Rose the Red and White Lily” (Child 103), “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” (Child 150), “The Baron of Brackley” (Child 203), “The Twa Knights” (Child 268 ), and “The Jolly Beggar” (Child 279). 20

Part IIb

The Traditional Ballad in Context Individual Ballads

Chapter 8

The Agnete Ballad of Denmark Cultural Tool or Protest Song? Lynda Taylor

I

T WAS LARRY SYNDERGAARD who first introduced me to the Danish supernatural ballad “Agnete og havmanden” (Agnete and the Merman), encouraging me to undertake a close analysis of the ballad which, in his words, was “long overdue.” It has since become a favorite, arguably the most fascinating of the supernatural ballads in the complexity and variety of its presentations of Agnete and her merman. It is possible to see Agnete as a woman desperate for love and independence, or as a malcontent; as naïve, or harsh; as one who learns to survive without her merman, or is forcibly taken back by him, or even killed. What is constant through all the versions is the struggle of a central female character to determine her own future. Cultural norms expressed in stories and ballads such as this reflect the values and attitudes of the community which produced them, and influence behavioral expectations of all who are, or wish to be, a member of the group. Ballads are arguably a part of a socialization process in their reflection, affirmation, and promotion of shared beliefs, values, and attitudes. But, looking from a different perspective, to what extent could the ballad also be a vehicle for a narrative supporting the efforts of women to be heard within the family and community? Is it possible that here we have a ballad which, to all intents and purposes, could have been used as a protest song, shared amongst the sisterhood and presented in a subversive way, giving Agnete the voice denied her by her community? This chapter sets out to analyze a range of Danish versions of the ballad. It can be found in Svend Grundtvig’s collection Danmarks gamle Folkeviser (DgF), where he provides nineteen versions of “Agnete og havmanden” (DgF 38A–T), distributed widely throughout Denmark. Versions are dated between mid- and late-nineteenth century (except Ax, 1902) but, since it belongs to the oral tradition, the ballad’s age cannot truly be known.

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Additionally, I shall endeavor to tease out meanings with reference to other nineteenth-century writers who, themselves, were influenced by the ballad. Adam Oehlenschläger, Jens Baggesen, and Hans Christian Andersen all wrote on the Agnete theme, and interest continued in 1842 with the composition of the music and score for an opera based on the Agnete story, Liden Kirsten. My particular focus will be on Ibsen’s play Fruen fra havet and Matthew Arnold’s interpretation, “The Forsaken Merman.” “Agnete og havmanden” relates the story of a young woman who seeks excitement, and so leaves her home to go to live with a merman. After several years she has borne him seven or eight children. The central conflict arises when she appears to become homesick, and so seeks permission to return to the church near her old home. The merman will allow her to visit on the condition that she returns (specifically for their children’s sake). Agnete meets her mother at the church, who enquires where she has been for the last eight years and what gifts the merman has given her in exchange for her honor. The merman then appears, exhorting her to return home, to think of her children who are missing her, at which Agnete renounces her former life and her children, preferring to remain above water. The ballad is reasonably stable, although variations in the narrative occur in three areas: 1) uncertainty, in some versions, regarding whether Agnete goes with the merman at the opening of the ballad of her own free will (H, M, Q); 2) the conditions which are applied by the merman regarding Agnete’s stay on earth (B, C, H, I, K, S); and 3) the ending.1 The multiplicity of versions and variants reflects a range of ballad singers with slightly different agendas. The differences of detail, expression, and ending suggest varying attitudes towards Agnete and her merman and the situation in which they find themselves. Compared with other Scandinavian supernatural ballads, the fortune of the protagonist here depends not so much on the ballad type as on the individual singer.2 The protagonist begins the ballad in a liminal geographical space, on a bridge or on the shore, between her earthly world and the watery home of the merman. Under water, she is open to suggestion and temptation, is vulnerable, rebellious, and on the point of leaving her own community. The varied presentations of Agnete occur as the singers consider different scenarios at the start of the ballad, suggesting varying degrees of sympathy. She is a young lady for whom independence is everything, who wants something more than her community offers and who naively plays a part in her own seduction. In one version (C) she is crying when we meet her; in three (H, M, Q) she refuses the merman’s advances; in Agnete H

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she is the contrary young woman who is forbidden by her mother to go down to the shore because of the predatory merman, but she goes anyway. In most versions, she “gjærne” (willingly) agrees to be the merman’s truelove, provided he will take her to the ocean depths so that her parents will not find out. A prose version of the legend-type of Agnete was published in 1818 and may give us insight into possible motives for a young girl’s elopement: Der boede engang to fattige Folk […] En Dag, da de havde sendte hende ned til stranden for at hente Sand, og hun stod der […] steg en havmand op af Vandet. Havmand […] sagde: “Følg med mig, Grethe! Saa vil jeg give dig saa meget Guld og Sølv, som du i Hjertet har kjært.” — “Det var ikke ilde,” gav hun til svar, “thi hjemme har vi ikke meget af det.”3 [There once lived two poor people […] One day, when they sent her down to the beach to get sand, and she stood there […] a merman rose out of the water. The merman […] said: “Come with me, Grethe! I will give you much gold and silver, which you hold dear in your heart.” — “That was not bad,” she gave in reply, “because at home we have not much of it.”]

We can see Grethe either as a Hansel and Gretel-type, lessening the burden on her impoverished parents by removing the need to support her— but, if we are less charitable, the opposite of this altruism is a viable reading, that she is so driven by greed (“Saa vil jeg give dig saa meget Guld og Sølv, som du i Hjertet har kjært” [my italics]), that she is happy to exchange poverty for life with this heathen. Both of these readings could be applied to the ballad, but there is no evidence to support the former. Agnete is used as a type to warn young girls of what might happen if they ignore the advice, control, and choice of their parents and pursue instead a passionate encounter with someone outside the community. In all versions, Agnete becomes unsettled by the ringing of church bells and seeks release from her compact with the merman in the form of permission to return to her former domain to attend church. Her accommodating husband4 complies with her request but reminds her of

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her responsibilities within their “marriage,” that she may go as long as she returns to her children. In 38B, C, H, I, K, and S other conditions are imposed: she must not take any gold (ensuring continued dependence on the merman); she must not let down her golden hair, which would symbolize a display of inappropriate behavior through a suggestion of unmarried status; she must not approach her mother in the church (she must maintain her independence from her family, not attempting to be reunited with them); and when the priest names “den høje” (the high God), she must not bow (she must renounce Christianity). By now she has realized that escape from parental control has not brought freedom: the control of the father has been replaced by that of the husband. The emotional core of the ballad lies in the relationship between Agnete and her merman in which we see a reflection of a marital relationship in the human world. The ballad singer reminds her audience of the lessons Agnete must learn. First, that constraints of the patriarchy are still in place: she must produce and look after children within a domestic space. Second, she must ask permission to leave that space; and third, she must obey rules put in place by the male head of the household. In some versions (C, E) he has power over her life and death. Nothing is different, except now she is alienated from society and the Church. Complex sympathies are expressed here. Images of the merman and Agnete—who is ready to reject her own children—vie with each other to attract or lose our sympathy in the course of the last six stanzas of Agnete A. The ballad’s use of the supernatural is a perfect vehicle for ambivalence of thought and consideration regarding the lack of rigid taxonomies of right or wrong. There is a sinister start when the sacred images turn their faces to the wall as the unholy creature enters the church to search for Agnete, but there is an attempt to balance this with his attractive personal features: “Det dæmoniske er på én gang det skræmmende og det dragende” (The demonic is at once frightening and alluring).5 The majority of versions recorded by Grundtvig came from women, who sing that the merman’s hair “var som det pureste Guld” (was like the purest gold), and his eyes “frydefuld” (joyous) at finding her (in A) and then “saa sorrigfuld” (so sorrowful) in grief at the loss of his companion. The merman in Agnete D wrings his hands in sorrow, tells of the grief of his children, and offers a vast amount of gold to entice Agnete back, but this is a sorrow that Agnete seems not to share as she returns to the values of human society and the Church. If culture, or civilization, is to exist, everyone within the group must abide by its rules. Agnete must reject all the trappings of her

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sinful lapse, including her children. Her disobedience of her husband is the first step towards her renunciation of evil and her final redemption. Thus there is an awareness of virtue in the ballad, a consciousness of what the human has had to give up to live in her underwater home, and of the choice Agnete must make if she is to return. We cannot know for certain how the “ballad audience” responded to this demon and to Agnete’s predicament, but we can make progress towards likely interpretations. We should beware the merman and his perfidious tears, but we can find evidence of a softening of attitudes in other nineteenth-century literature. By the Romantic period, attitudes towards types of wild men and creatures of nature that live outside society had begun to change. Hayden White, in his essay on readings of the Wild Man, looks at changes in perception in the nineteenth century, when the corrupt social world began to be seen as a falling away from a now idealized natural world, and the wild man image became the Noble Savage.6 Similarly, the merman as an antitype of corrupt society and representative of freedom may have attracted some sympathy. In H. C. Andersen’s tale of The Little Mermaid, there is far more of the human in the mermaid than in the human prince, who is unfeeling and lacks perception. Matthew Arnold’s interpretation of the Agnete ballad, “The Forsaken Merman” depicts the merman following his human wife to earth to try to persuade her to return to their home. 7 Through the medium of dramatic monologue, Arnold’s description of the merman’s underwater world is typified by color and energy, where lights “quiver and gleam,” sea-beasts feed, whales swim and sea-snakes “coil and twine, Dry their mail and bask in the brine.” His “red-gold throne in the heart of the sea” is enclosed by “a ceiling of amber, a pavement of pearl,” roaring waves, sweet airs, and glistening beaches. Power, purpose, beauty—and genuine sadness for the loss of wife and mother. The town, however—and, by implication, Margaret—is characterized by images of hardness, narrow-mindedness and cold: whitewalled, narrow paved streets, gravestones worn by rain, small leaded window panes, and the “little grey church.” As the church building is the axis of the ballad, the touchstone marker and defender of the rules of the community, it also forms a central motif throughout Arnold’s poem, emblematic of his critique of what he sees as an inadequacy of faith in Victorian times: a drab, repressive Christianity. Our perceptions are challenged as the supernatural being, traditionally amoral and alien, is here depicted as moral, faithful and loyal, while his wife, Margaret, is as cold as he is generous. The merman in this contemplative state is presented as a warmer

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character than the inhuman Margaret who does experience regret, but has not the will to do anything about it. She prefers cold redemption to love for her husband and children. She has faithlessly returned to a world which lacks life and energy and is insensitive to deep moral values, symbolized by her betrayal and her lack of care for their children. Humans have traditionally been considered rational beings whose plans and judgments were to be respected, while supernatural beings were devilish, tempting, beguiling, grooming humans to fulfill their own desires; but the sympathy which the ballad audience is on occasion invited to feel for the merman cuts across these traditional lines of thought. The audience is left unsettled and wary of this human woman who abandons her most basic instinct and role in respect to her children, denying any motherly feelings towards the family she is about to desert: “Lad længes” (Let them grieve), she says; rejecting them, we are not sure for what. Could there be a shift in sympathy to the merman when she abruptly declares: Haa ja! — Langt mindre paa den lille, der i Vuggen laa. (DgF 38A.20) [Ha yes! (I think) much less on the little one, that lay in the cradle.]

Interestingly, Grundtvig’s own redaction of “Agnete” tries to return the ballad to what he believed was the original concept, when he depicts an Agnete rendered blind by the merman and forced back to his home, unable even to see her own children.8 Sympathy? Or justice? Yet generally it is the supernatural beings who are inimical creatures whose demise would bring some satisfaction to a conventional audience; who would congratulate Agnete on her strength of mind and will-power. In her final act of renunciation of evil, she returns to the situation which opens the ballad: one of choice, now informed by experience and understanding. This is a ballad which demonstrates the power of Christianity (without any real reference to spirituality) and the possibility of a human victory over the supernatural. The victory is not without its cost, however. In those versions where Agnete remains in her earthly home (A, Dø, H, K, L, Q, R, S, T), pain is inflicted on the children and the merman. While the majority of the Danish Agnete ballads show her rejection of a heathen lifestyle, where she must renounce her former life in its entirety, including her children, there are others like Agnete C (where the merman kills her) which do not have a satisfactory ending for her. As has been said, a problem for the modern audience is that in some variants of

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the ballad we have more sympathy with the merman than with Agnete. If we shift our mind-set, however, to when the ballads were collected, we see a young lady who is specifically named—and with whom, therefore, we should have more fellow-feeling than the unnamed, heathen merman who takes advantage of her frailty. She is one of us and the merman is the Other. She returns to values remembered from her youth and, in particular, to the Church. A modern audience may have difficulty understanding how she can reject her children, yet perhaps she is following one of Christ’s commands in doing so, to put Christ before family (Luke 14:26). In fact, “Agnete og havmanden” could well have been regarded as a prodigal-son type of parable; the young person succumbs to temptation and is drawn away from her upright living with her family, but eventually recognizes the sinfulness of her life and returns to both family and Church, rejecting the sins and trappings of temptation and the heathen to do so (in all versions where she does not return with the merman). Version C sees Agnete paying the final penalty for her sin, this transgression of boundaries which has produced a multivalent threat to the integrity of herself, her community, her religion, and her family. In successive eras, the merman would become a trope for the Other, for something which attracted and tempted the individual away from what was regarded, perhaps by his elders, as the proper way to behave. The ballad’s message (read conventionally) is an ageold one and one that is not very different from that of other supernatural ballads like “Elveskud” and “Elvehøj” in that it suggests the “right” way to live by holding up an image of one who fails (in some versions), and who survives in others. The concepts of temptation and of choice are central to all versions of the Agnete ballad. She rejects the guidance of her family, which we assume has also been offered by the Church, for something far more thrilling—whether that be riches; the forces of modernity; freedom; a longing for the unknown; or the lure and excitement of the sea, which frequently symbolizes a desire to find one’s identity. Remaining on the land, being grounded in reality, lacks the thrills so often required by the young and which may have induced Agnete’s tears which open version C. The tears reflect the constraints felt by a young, poor nineteenth-century woman faced with a life of hard work, uncertain climate, little money or comfort, and living under the patronage of first father and employer, and then husband, with no clear means of expressing her individuality. Whether we see Agnete as a malcontent and rebel, or as one who has the spirit to escape to a better life if the possibility arises, the allegory continues

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as Agnete learns through experience that escape is futile. She returns to the protection of her family and spiritual beliefs, in that she—explicitly or implicitly—returns to the church, and not to her watery home, in nine out of nineteen versions.9 In the process, she rejects the promise of the exotic which, over eight years, has become an echo of the humdrum existence she was trying to avoid in the first place. We should at this point consider the possibility of an alternative reading of the ballad: could some singers (who were, after all, predominantly women), be indicating sympathy for the predicament of women, who had no voice of their own? We turn here to Henrik Ibsen’s interpretation of the story. Sigurd Hustvedt sees a wider context for Ibsen’s Agnete narrative: a nineteenth-century conflict between “the fascination of the sea and the more prosaic demands of earth, between idealistic romanticism and ethical realism.”10 All the informants that Grundtvig cites are nineteenth-century, after all. The concept of “idealistic romanticism” is hardly a concern of the ballad type, but the interface between freedom and constraint is indeed under examination. Agnete does not have a voice, and so chooses freedom with the merman, where it takes her a further seven or eight years to realize that a voice is still denied her. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a rise in the popularity amongst young people of the romantic idea of marrying for love, 11 and the diminution thereby of parental input and control—a situation reflected in the ballad, and the source of a conflict resolved only in hurt. An idea of what the images of the ballad suggested to these nineteenth-century audiences may be gleaned from Ibsen’s play Fruen fra havet (The Lady of the Sea),12 based on the Agnete ballad and written the year after Ibsen spent summer on the north coast of Jutland, though we should consider that his audiences and the ballad audiences may have had different outlooks. Ibsen directs his audience’s sympathies to the Agnete figure, here Ellida Wangel. Ellida has married a kind and understanding doctor, but for material support and not for love. Throughout Ibsen’s play, it is the human who is out of her “element” and who has a restless yearning for the sea and for its representative, a seaman (the Stranger), to whom she had been engaged some years before, and who promised to return for her. The central conflict is played out between the husband and the seaman, and symbolizes the struggle within Ellida for freedom. Dr. Wangel seems to understand its nature, and it is one which is fundamental to the merman in the ballad: an ability at once to repel and attract, which has transferred to his wife: “det grufulde igen med dig. Du både skræmmer

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og drager” (that terror is in you again. You both repel and attract; Act 4). Ibsen’s remedy is to return to Ellida her full sense of freedom, but this can happen only when she is offered it by her husband: when she can choose it, rather than be forced into a course of action. There is little criticism of the Agnete figure here, and where there is, it comes from the mouths of the young and those of little understanding. But Per Schelde Jacobsen13 concludes that this is more than a play about freedom and choice. He argues that Ibsen used the ballad to interrogate conflicts arising between a conservative, unimaginative bourgeoisie and an urge (represented by the demon and the sea) to create, be dynamic, and to break out of the constraints of social mœurs and respond to a more energizing individualism. We see that also in the ballad, but here the ballad and play part company, in that Ibsen paints on a broader canvas, using a subplot to convey his satire. In addition, Ellida ultimately chooses freedom with responsibility, in that she elects to return to the marital bed, to her husband’s children, and the family home—freedom as a result of informed choice. By contrast, Agnete wants freedom without responsibility, rejecting first her own birth family and then the children she has raised with the merman. Ballads such as “Agnete og havmanden” have continued to appeal through this ability to speak to successive generations, each in turn bringing its own response. Agnete simply looks for escape and finds what she believes will be a different way of life, which turns out to be a reflection of her life with her family. Ultimately, excitement and individuality are sacrificed by Agnete as she realizes that perception and reality are very different. Ibsen’s Ellida has understood this, and is more fulfilled than Agnete. Chaucer’s Franklin reminds his audience of how precious freedom is to women: Love is a thing as any spirit free. Wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee, And nat to be constreyned as a thral. (“The Franklin’s Tale,” 767–69)

The Danish versions of the Agnete ballad tell of an unhappy young woman who lacks a voice and so must snatch at freedom. A key word in Ibsen’s play is “frivillig” (of one’s free will).14 In both Ibsen and the ballad we have a picture of a woman refusing to succumb to the narrow role ascribed to her by others. The rules of the patriarchal society are clear, and she is determined to flout them without thinking through

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the realities of her attempted escape. “Agnete og havmanden” features a young person moving from one of life’s stages to another, from the protection of family (threatened by the merman, by sexuality, by the Other, however we want to read it) to the state of marriage. The ballad is about choice, particularly uninformed, rash choice. When making decisions, Agnete rejects guidance, embracing temptation as a means of escape to something a little more exciting, until she finds that this new state is no better than the old, nothing but a carbon copy of the first. Even though she has taken the predictable path of marriage, home, children, the ballad comments on the irrationality of life. As the merman stops her ears and mouth—organs of reception, self-expression, and perception—we see Agnete losing the ability to see and rationalize her situation. The Agnete ballad would seem to have a moralizing function. The Nordic supernatural ballads as a whole warn of threats to the life and loyalties of young people whose heads are turned by the promise of wealth and power or who are lured from their families by a suggestion of the exotic or different. The ballads examine the consequences of breaking the rules of one’s community, of wrong choices made by emotional, irrational humans who would change their lifestyle on a whim, and the impact on themselves and their families, emotional and economic. I have said already that the ballad was probably used as a platform from which to remind (usually) young people of cultural expectations. Does the variety of endings to the ballad suggest singers changing the formula to experiment with different scenarios and outcomes for the sake of variety, or could there be another explanation? We must look beyond the words on the paper, the transcription of these ballads, and remember that they belong to an oral tradition. We should not overlook performance. What if the occasional woman singer used her own voice as a vehicle for the fifty per cent in the audience who had no voice? Could the Agnete ballad have been used to promote a different worldview, as a protest song, to promote solidarity and unity amongst the sisterhood? This was perhaps not the intention way back in time when the song was first heard, but “individual performances may be informed by ballad tradition, but they are neither stifled nor enslaved by it,”15 and by the nineteenth century new ideas were finding ground. Grundtvig’s headnotes for the Agnete ballad reveal that a very high proportion of the ballad’s singers were women, in rural communities which were relatively stable and little touched by changing social, political, and legal conditions. If we examine the biographies provided by Evald Tang Kristensen of his female informants,16 we find women like

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Kirsten Marie Pedersdatter, a cotter’s wife who lived in the same village for sixty-four years, only six miles away from where she was born; and Ane Marie Jensdatter, who had married a laborer, only ever moving three miles from her place of birth. Yet we also have the examples of singers like Johanna Gustafva Angel, from Ryssby in Småland (1791–1869) and Ingierd Gunnarsdotter, from Västergötland (1601–1686), both Swedish, whose versions of some ballads can without doubt be termed protofeminist. We do not know to what extent first-wave feminism could have impacted settlements outside the towns during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet what we should consider is whether women, while rejecting or being ignorant of formal feminist models, would have engaged in banter, satire and some resistance to their men. The performance element of the ballad enables a delivery and reception which vary according to ballad-singer, audience, and occasion, and whose function may shift between an act of resistance, a socialization “script,” and a good tune to accompany dance. If we are to look for any negative references to the menfolk, we must examine possible metaphorical meanings in the song, communicating social and cultural messages: the merman as a metaphor for male interference and removal of woman’s liberty, the constant onslaught of restrictions and oppositions. A difficulty to be faced by any woman ballad-singer who wanted to challenge patriarchy would be the public arena of the ballad, whether the village dance or as entertainment in the village hall or inn. At a time when women found it difficult to speak openly and critically, how could they express dissatisfaction with the status quo in the presence of men? There is a fine line between attracting attention and drawing censorship. In a consideration of female troubadours, Matilda Bruckner writes that, “while silence becomes the metaphor of a suppressed female other, women’s prise de parole signifies an act of empowerment, a self-empowerment that announces their entry into language and public spheres of social interaction, whether in oral or written exchanges.”17 Were women who wanted to change the discourse able to use it as a vehicle of resistance, as an act of empowerment or protest song—not overtly challenging the status quo, but encouraging solidarity and unity amongst the “sisterhood”? Could they suggest a resistance to commonly held values and attitudes by code, or through a non-vocalized portrayal of Agnete and the merman, through knowing looks, nods, winks, and raising of the eyebrows? Did they, in fact, achieve a dialog between female singer and female audience not picked up on by the men? “There is reason to think that men and women at times

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see, hear and report different things relating to the same event,”18 and so to what extent might there have been a deliberate attempt to convey attitudes and feelings amongst the women in the audience? Karen Rowe reflects that “in the history of folktale and fairy-tale, women as storytellers have woven or spun their yarns, speaking at one level to a total culture, but at another to a sisterhood of readers who will understand the hidden language.”19 Rather than provoke male negative response by an open suggestion in a song or ballad, encoding the message would enable communication of values in a less overt way. Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture explores evidence of women’s coded acts from female folk traditions in a variety of cultures.20 The folk needlework of poor Chilean women (p. vii), the funeral laments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish peasant women,21 and the traditional ballad,22 all provide evidence of women, subjected to harsh male culture and struggling to find a voice, who used their art as a vehicle for coded messages: “Such acts of coding—covert expressions of disturbing or subversive ideas—are a common phenomenon in the lives of women, who have so often been dominated, silenced, and marginalized by men” (Radner, p. vii). This coding ensures protection from the men on whom the women are dependent; they are not aware of the existence of women’s culture and so cannot access it. This challenge to the dominant culture provides a platform for the expression of experiences the women have in common. Seizing the initiative with the possibility of change, however remote, thus empowers them. By using the story of Agnete and the merman as a metaphor for her own experiences, the woman singer could transmit “a rhetoric of resistance to abuse and violence and an assertion of the validity of women’s experience.”23 The socialization function of the ballad, the process of internalizing values and attitudes, accounted for the fact that many young people did not question the patriarchal status quo or imagine that life could be any different: that, for example, one obeys one’s husband, whose rules are put in place to ensure the safety, conformity, and obedience of those in his family. In the Agnete ballad, we see that there appears to be no escape, just a removal from the rules of the father to those of the husband to whom one must apply for permission even to leave the home for only a few hours. We see a depiction of a husband who assumed every right to impose conditions on his wife, to be angry with her, to forcibly take her home and even kill her. The ballad is thus a warning: “The sending of messages by means of coded ballad performance provides a way for women to teach other women not only about the values of her culture, which are […]

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largely negative where women are concerned, but also about how to survive in the environment that prevails as a result of those values.”24 Those who did not question the patriarchal status quo or know that life could be different are challenged by a narrative where the central female character does just that. Those in tune with the message hear how to hoodwink the man and bring about an escape, and how to start a new life without the shackles of the old. Stories can only be changed if the community from which they come is willing to authorize that change,25 but if women not only do not have a voice in that community but also have never had access to women’s stories, they will not be sufficiently powerful to disrupt the dominant discourse. The balladeers provide some access to women’s stories but, as with other supernatural ballads like “Harpens kraft” or the Scottish “Tam Lin” and “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight,” the active heroine who defies family and convention to be with her fairy ultimately reverts to male protection and reaffirms the values from which she has tried to flee. We hear no cheering, no obvious delight as the sinner returns home. If the Agnete ballad is a type of the prodigal son story, there is no killing of the fatted calf here. The singer cannot “finish” the story: Agnete laughs at the merman at the close of most versions, but ultimately she must return to a patriarchal world of some sort. Of course, ballad singers were, for the most part, a conservative lot in expressing feeling, but could the community’s satisfaction at seeing the deviant one return home be muted because the voice denied to Agnete is a reflection of the voice denied to women in general? But there must be a caveat: the science is inexact. An oral tradition, anonymous singers, and manuscripts known to be incomplete cannot produce right and wrong answers. While we sometimes know who the informer is, exact provenance for all ballads cannot be certain, so ideas can be explored, albeit only tentatively. What is clear is that this ballad makes us consider issues from various perspectives; it acknowledges that people and the sympathies they attract are complex. The Agnete ballad speaks to different people in different ways, presenting us with an interesting ambivalence which forces us into interrogating what we assumed were accepted value systems—based on patriarchal norms. But surely the ballad began to go beyond its use as a cultural tool, to become in some hands (not all) a song of protest to be shared by those with a common bond, a vocalizing of the lack of choice and lack of voice for womenfolk, demanding a dialog about the ones who try to find their way out of the impasse. There is no clear answer; each successive society will bring its own presentation and its own response.

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NOTES Versions B, G, H, and O are not complete. An example: Grundtvig records over forty variants and versions of the “Elveskud” ballad (DgF 47) which, while embracing some variation in whether Oluf dances with the elf, are all stable with regard to the ending. 3 Thomas Bredsdorff, “Nogen skrev et sagn om ‘Agnete og havmanden’: Hvem, hvornår og hvorfor?” Fund og forskning i det Kongelige Biblioteks samlinger 30 (1991): 70. 4 Peter Meisling, Agnetes Latter: En folkevise-monografi (Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag, 1988) sees the merman as too compliant for the ballad tradition; however, Scandinavian stories relate how when a person is abducted by preternatural beings, ringing the church bells was believed to compel the abductor to free his captive and so our merman may have had no choice (Reimund Kvideland and Henning K. Sehmsdorf, eds., Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1991), p. 212). 5 Villy Sørensen, Digtere og dæmoner: Fortolkninger og vurderinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1959), p. 163. 6 Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea,” in The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism, edited by Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), p. 28. 7 Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, edited by Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 101–5. 8 Svend Hersleb Grundtvig, Danmarks folkeviser i udvalg (Copenhagen: Philipsen, 1882), pp. 208−12 (II:6). 9 The remaining ten versions are fragments (B, F, G, H), or she dies (C, E), or she is forcibly returned to her children (I, O, P). She returns home in response to her husband’s gift (or bribe) of gold in version N. 10 Sigurd Bernhard Hustvedt, “The Lady from the Sea,” in The Charles Mills Gayley Anniversary Papers, edited by W. M. Hart, B. P. Kurtz, and C. M. Gayley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1922), pp. 229–240. 11 Per Schelde Jacobsen and Barbara Fass Leavy, Ibsen’s Forsaken Merman: Folklore in the Late Plays (New York: New York University Press, 1988), p. 75. 12 Henrik Ibsen, Fruen fra havet (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1888). 13 Jacobsen and Leavy, Ibsen’s Forsaken Merman, pp. 100–101. 14 Ibsen, Fruen fra havet, vii, 80–01, for instance. 15 Stephen A. Mitchell, “Women’s Autobiographical Literature in the Swedish Baroque,” in Skandinavische Literaturen in der frühen Neutzeit, edited by Jürg Glauser and Barbara Sabel (Tübingen: Francke, 2002), pp. 274–75. 16 Timothy R. Tangherlini, ed. Danish Folktales, Legends, and Other Stories (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014), p. 139. 1 2

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Matilda Bruckner, “Fictions of the Female Voice: The Woman Troubadour,” Speculum 67 (1992): 867. 18 Erika Bourguignon, “Sex Bias, Ethnocentrism, and Myth Building in Anthropology: The Case of Universal Male Dominance,” Central Issues in Anthropology 5, no. 1 (1983): 62. 19 Karen Rowe, “To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale,” in Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion, and Paradigm, edited by Ruth B. Bottingheimer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 57. 20 Joan Newlon Radner, ed., Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 21 Angela Bourke, “More in Anger than Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry,” in Radner, Feminist Messages, pp. 160−82. 22 Polly Stewart, “Wishful Willful Wily Women: Lessons for Female Success in the Child Ballads,” in Radner, Feminist Messages, pp. 54−73. 23 Bourke, “More in Anger than Sorrow,” p. 175. 24 Stewart, “Wishful Willful Wily Women,” p. 69. 25 Pam Gilbert, “And They Lived Happily Ever After: Cultural Storylines and the Construction of Gender,” in Cultural Diversity in Classroom and Community, edited by Anne Haas Dyson and Celia Genishi (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994), p. 129. 17

Chapter 9

From Sir Eglamour to “Old Bangum” The Travels of a Ballad Hero Richard Firth Green

I

N THE FIRST GREAT PERIOD of English and Scottish ballad collecting, which runs roughly from Bishop Thomas Percy (who was born in 1729) to Robert Jamieson (who died in 1844), it seems generally to have been assumed that most traditional ballads, unless there were strong indications to the contrary, preserved medieval material. Of course some, like “The Bonny Earl of Murray” (Child 181), are clearly based on events that occurred after the end of the Middle Ages ( James Stewart, Earl of Murray, was murdered in 1592),1 and still others have an obviously postmedieval terminus a quo (“The Gypsy Laddie” (Child 200), for instance, cannot predate the arrival of the Roma in Scotland in the early seventeenth century), yet even where its subject matter is ostensibly medieval we cannot always assume with the Romantics that any given ballad is linked to the Middle Ages by a continuous oral tradition. Writing in 1838, the historian James Endell Tyler speaks of the “unquestionably ancient” origins of “King Henry the Fifth’s Conquest in France” (Child 164), suggesting, despite some rather obvious anachronisms, that it was “probably written and sung within a very few years of the expedition”;2 since, as F. J. Child pointed out, no copy of this ballad is earlier than the early eighteenth century,3 and since there is remarkably little variation among the numerous surviving versions, it seems far more likely that it was composed as a broadside by someone who was recalling a performance they had witnessed of Shakespeare’s Henry V.4 The inevitable reaction against the tendency to confer unwarranted antiquity on traditional ballads culminated in David Fowler’s Literary History of the Popular Ballad, which was based on the assumption that “a given ballad took the particular shape it has about the time it was written down,”5 and which at a stroke removed the venerable credentials of ballads like “Edward” (Child 13), or “The Twa Corbies” (Child 26), that we had long been accustomed to finding in anthologies of medieval verse.

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A few years ago I argued that Fowler’s thesis was far too radical and that there were a number of ballads derived from medieval romances and copied down from oral performance before their originals had been published in modern editions for which an extended period of oral transmission was the only credible explanation. 6 I was deliberately cautious in my response and restricted my major examples to four that seemed to me indisputable: “Hind Horn” (Child 17), “King Orfeo” (Child 19), “The Marriage of Sir Gawain” (Child 31), and “Thomas Rymer” (Child 37). 7 It now seems to me that I should have included a fifth, the ballad “Sir Lionel” (Child 18), which, as Child himself pointed out, bears a strong resemblance to an episode in the fourteenth-century tail-rhyme romance Sir Eglamour of Artois.8 The case for “Sir Lionel”’s being a direct descendant of this specific romance, however, is not quite as straightforward as with the others, for as I hope to show it also bears unmistakable traces of the presence of a second medieval romance, Bevis of Hampton, in its ancestry.9 Frances Richardson, who edited the poem for the Early English Text Society, knew of three complete medieval manuscripts (and one fragmentary one) of Sir Eglamour of Artois, as well as two later manuscripts (one sixteenth-century, the other, the famous seventeenthcentury Percy Folio Manuscript);10 a further sixteenth-century fragment has since turned up.11 To these seven manuscript copies should be added surviving fragments from at least five sixteenth-century printed editions, one of which comes from Scotland.12 Ronald Crane has written of such “small rudely printed quartos,” that they “were undoubtedly meant to sell cheaply and to circulate widely among a somewhat humble public,” and gives as a typical example a volume combining Undo your Door, Sir Eglamour, and Robert the Devil, which an Oxford bookseller called John Dorne sold for 3d in 1520.13 No doubt it was in some such form as this that the famous Captain Cox, the Coventry mason and ballad singer who helped entertain Queen Elizabeth I at Kenilworth in 1575, acquired his copy of “Syr Eglamoour,”14 and it is certainly not difficult to imagine the ballad entering the oral tradition from such a source. A later drollery rendering (derived from a comic ballad beginning, “Sir Eglamore that worthy knight / He took his sword and went to fight,” included in a 1615 satire called The melancholie knight by Samuel Rowlands) 15 was popular in the Restoration,16 but Bronson’s argument that all subsequent versions derive from this is frankly weak (Thomas Pettitt in fact calls it “demonstrably untrue”). 17 Given the popularity of Sir Eglamour of

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Artois in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there are far simpler ways of accounting for its passage into oral tradition. To the eyes of the medievalist Sir Eglamour of Artois is not perhaps one of the finest examples of Middle English romance, but it clearly had some appeal for early-modern audiences. Perhaps its unabashed celebration of a wealthy marriage as a viable option for aspirants to upward mobility appealed to an age that enjoyed potboilers like Thomas Deloney’s Jack o’ Newberry and Thomas o’ Reading, in which apprentices marry their masters’ widows on their way to civic opulence. The first half (which is all that need concern us here) relates the story of the impoverished knight Eglamour’s wooing of Cristabelle, the daughter of the Earl of Artois. The unenthusiastic earl sets Eglamour three tasks, each more daunting than the one before. In order to claim Cristabelle’s hand the hero must first kill a deer in a herd belonging to a giant, then kill a massive wild boar belonging to a second giant (who happens to be the first one’s brother), and finally kill a dragon. Killing the deer and the boar also involves Eglamour in having to fight their owners, but with the boar he is given the additional task of saving a princess called Organata, whom the giant threatens to carry off. This leads to romantic complications for the already-committed Eglamour which are only resolved when Organata marries the hero’s as yet unborn son, Degrebelle, many years later. The Percy Folio copy is the only one of the six versions known to Child in which the hero is called Sir Lionel—though this name may also be alluded to in the refrain of Child’s Version E: “Wind well, Lion, good hunter.” The only Scottish version (Version B) calls him Hugh the Graeme, but Child reasonably enough rejected this as a generic title for the ballad, since the story of the outlaw Hughie the Graeme and the theft of the bishop’s mare furnishes the subject of a quite different ballad (Child 191). However, a strong case might have been made for giving the ballad the title “Sir Ryalas,” since this name appears in Child’s Version C (together with Ryalash in version F)—a name that might possibly be explained as a corruption of the word Artois (Artas in Middle English). Since Child’s day, however, a great number of new variants of this ballad have been discovered, almost all of them in the United States (the main British exceptions are a North Wiltshire version called “Bold Sir Rylas,” 18 two from Herefordshire—one called “Brang ywell,” the other “Dilly Dove”19—and one unlocalized English version, “Tom and Harry Went to Plough,” in which the hero is not named).20 In America, by contrast, the hero of this ballad is usually called Bangum, though

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a number of other features, including the most common tune and the form of the refrain, connect it with versions from the English West Country. “Old Bangum” has been found in New England and as far west as Missouri and Arkansas, but the most productive area for hunters of this particular ballad has been the southern Appalachians. It is primarily with the American cousin of “Sir Lionel,” “Old Bangum,” that I will be concerned here.21 “Old Bangum” has survived in three main forms. 22 Type A has reduced the story to the single boar-slaying incident that lies at its heart and represents by far the commonest form of the ballad in North America. I give it here in a version recorded by Max Hunter on February 14, 1963, from the singing of Mrs. Donna Everett, of Huntsville, Arkansas: 1. Ole Bangum would a-hunting ride, Dillum-down-dillum; Ole Bangum would a-hunting ride, Dillum-down; Ole Bangum would a-hunting ride, Sword an’ pistol by his side. Dillum-down; dillum-down; Dillum-quock-quee. 2. There is a wild boar in this wood, He’ll eat your meat an’ suck your blood. 3. Oh, how shall I, this wild boar see? Blow a blast and he’ll come to thee. 4. Ole Bangum, blew both loud an’ shrill, An’ the wild boar heard on Temple Hill. 5. The wild boar came with such a rush, It tore down hickory, oak an’ ash 6. Ole Bangum drew his wooden knife, Swore that he would take his life 7. Ole Bangum, did you win or lose? He swore that he had won the shoes.23

Note that the events in this version take place on Temple Hill, a detail which, like the wooden knife and the winning of the shoes (both of which I shall return to later), is an American innovation.24 The U.S. Board on Geographic Names records eighty-one places called Temple Hill,25 but the name is most common in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia—any one of which presumably might represent the original source. Note also that its question-and-answer form implies that Bangum has an interlocutor, though the ballad never specifies exactly whom he is speaking to.

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The second, Type B, supplies us with the missing interlocutor, a lady (sometimes encountered sitting in a tree), and at the same time adds to the core boar-slaying incident the romantic motif of the winning of this lady’s hand. The following version was collected in 1939 from an Adelaide Hemingway in Washington D.C.—though Adelaide’s family had originally come from western Massachusetts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Old Bangham did a-hunting ride, Derrum, derrum, derrum, Old Bangham did a-hunting ride, Kimme qua, Old Bangum did a-hunting ride, Sword and pistol by his side, Derrum, kimme, quo qua. He rode unto the riverside, And there a pretty maid he spied, “Fair maid,” said he, “will you marry me?” “Oh no,” said she, “for we don’t agree,” “There lives a bear in yonder wood, He’ll grind your bones and suck your blood.” He rode unto the wild bear’s den, There lay the bones of a hundred men. Old Bangham and the wild bear fought, By set of sun the bear was naught. He rode unto the riverside, And there a pretty maid he spied, “Fair maid,” said he, “will you marry me?” “O yes,” said she, “for we now agree.”26

This form of the ballad is much less common in North America, but there are other examples from New England,27 and some from further afield.28 Note that in Adelaide Hemingway’s version the wild boar (no doubt reflecting the realities of the New England woods) has become a bear. The third, Type C is the least common. I know of only two complete versions, the better known of which was recorded in 1939 from the singing of Samuel Harmon of Maryville, Tennessee (though the Harmon family had been earlier displaced from Cades Cove by the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park);29 a second was collected (ca. 1970) from a relative of Harmon’s, Rena Hicks, some hundred miles from Cades Cove across the border into North Carolina.30 This type adds to the boarslaying and the love interest, the killing of the boar’s owner (who is here not a giant but an old witch). Harmon’s version begins “Abram Bailey he’d

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three sons / … And he is through the wildwood gone” (and in Hick’s version, this becomes “Abe and Bailey,” apparently a married couple); “Abram Bailey” may well be a corruption of Egrabell, the name of the father of three sons in the Percy Folio Manuscript version (which is itself an evident conflation of the original romance’s father and son, Eglamour and Degrabell). Interestingly, the hero in these versions is called not Bangum but Center.   1.   2.   3.   4.   5.   6.   7.   8.   9. 10. 11. 12.

Abram Bailey he’d three sons, Blow your horn center And he is through the wildwood gone Just like a jovial hunter. And as he marched down the greenwood side, A pretty girl O there he spied As he was … There is a wild boar in this wood He slew the lord and his forty men, How can I this wild boar see? Wind up your horn and he’ll come to you, As you are … He’s wound his horn unto his mouth He blew East, North, West, and South As he was… The wild boar heard him unto his den He made the oak and ash then for to bend They fit three hours by the day And at length he this wild boar slay As he marched by the mouth of the wild boar’s den He saw the bones of five hundred men He meets the old witch wife on the bridge, Begone you rogue, you’ve killed my pig As you are … There is three things I crave of thee Your hawk, your hound, your gay lady, These three things you’ll not have of me Neither hawk nor hound nor gay lady For I am … He’s split the old witch to the chin, And on his way he went ag’in Just like …31

Type C, though its distribution is restricted in North America,32 has some fairly close English analogues.

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I should like to begin with the seemingly inconspicuous line “Begone you rogue, you’ve killed my pig,” for, in all three of these versions of Old Bangum, this is the only line that might be argued to preserve, though in the most attenuated form, an actual verbal echo of the medieval romance. One of the most striking scenes in Sir Eglamour of Artois occurs when the giant Marrase returns from burying his brother Arrake to find that Eglamour has killed his boar. We will imagine this beast with its tusks half-a-yard long (L355)33 and a hide so tough that no knife can cut into it (L491) as a fearsome antagonist, but to the grief-stricken giant he is a much-loved companion animal: Syr Eglamour, this nobill knyghte, Armed hym onone ryghte And to þe wallis went he; The bares hede garte he bere And sett it forthe appon a spere, At Marrase myght it see. The geaunt luked on þe baris hede: “Allas, my gud bare! ert þou dede? Mekill was trayste in the! Be þe laye þat I leue in, My littill spotted hoglyn, Dere boght þi dede sall be!” (L538−49)

The wonderful line, “my littill spotted hoglyn,” seems to have caught the imagination of later ballad singers.34 The corresponding scene is missing in the Percy Folio version, and only glanced at in the single surviving Scottish example,35 but two mid-nineteenth-century versions from Worcestershire (Child C and D), have Then out of the wood the wild woman flew: “Oh thou hast killed my pretty spotted pig!” (C11)

and, Then there came an old lady running out of the wood, Saying, “You have killed my pretty, my pretty spotted pig.” (D9)

While a version collected in North Wiltshire at the beginning of the First World War, has: Now since thou has killed my spotted pig There are three things I will have of thee …36

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In the versions of both Samuel Harmon and Buna Hicks the pig, while still a casus belli, has lost his spots, but they are retained in a version recorded from A. H. Pittser in Oklahoma (ca. 1960): Long come an old witch inquiring of her spotted pig, “If you kill me, I’ll make you dance a jig.”37

Other incidents in the ballad also seem to go back to Sir Eglamour of Artois and suggest that the ballad owes its general framework to this romance. These include the encounter with the pretty girl sitting in a tree (when the king of Sidon’s daughter Organata, whose hand has been promised to Eglamour, witnesses his fight with the boar’s owner, the giant Marrase, she does so perched, if not in a tree, at least atop the city walls [L598]), and the appearance of the witch woman at the end (as others have noted, she plays a similar role to the giant Marrase in Sir Eglamour). It is when we turn to the details of the battle itself, however, that we can detect the influence of a quite different romance, Bevis of Hampton. To judge by the number of its surviving medieval manuscripts (five complete and four fragmentary) and early printed texts (seventeen, between ca. 1500 and 1711—two of them from Scotland), Bevis was if anything even more popular than Sir Eglamour, but the two clearly shared a very similar early-modern afterlife.38 “Beuys of Hampton” even appears alongside “Syr Eglamoour” in the list of romances owned by the Elizabethan ballad singer, Captain Cox. Interestingly, fights with boars, dragons, and giants occur in both romances (though not in the same order nor under the same circumstances). Bevis’s slaying of the wild boar occurs early in his career, and though there are some obvious differences between the way the battle is framed in the ballad and the romance—the beast has no owner (neither giant nor witch woman), nor does killing it win for the hero a lady’s hand (though Bevis’s love, Josian, does witness his battle)—the details of the actual confrontation (the blowing of the horn to summon the boar, the discovery of the bones of a number of dead men, and the boar’s anthropophagous proclivities) are identical in both. Tho Beves in to the wode cam, His scheld aboute is nekke a nam And tide his hors to an hei thorn And blew a blast with is horn; Thre motes a blew al arowe, That the bor him scholde knowe. Tho he com to the bor is den,

“There is a wild boar in these woods Dillum down dillum There is a wild boar in these woods Dillum down There is a wild boar in these woods Who’ll eat your flesh and drink your blood.”

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A segh ther bones of dede men, The bor hadde slawe in the wode, Ieten here flesch and dronke her blode. ........................... Thus the bataile gan leste long Til the time of evesong, That Beves was so weri of foughte, That of is lif he ne roughte, And tho the bor was also, Awai fro Beves he gan go. 39

Kobby ky cuddle down killy quo cum. “Oh how shall I this Wild boar see?” “I’ll blow a blast and he’ll come to me.” ........................... They fought four hours in a day; At last the wild boar stole away. They traced the wild boar to his den, And found the bones of a thousand men.40

There is nothing of this in Sir Eglamour of Artois. The hero does blow his horn, but that is in the earlier scene with the deer, not in order to summon the boar (L283−91); he does find traces of the men the boar has killed, but it is their shining armor not their bones that catches his attention (L376−78); and Sir Eglamour’s boar, while it is certainly fierce, is no man-eater.41 It seems worth pointing out, lest these parallels be thought to be the product of mere romance convention, that when another popular Middle English hero, Guy of Warwick, kills a giant boar (which he chases halfway across Europe), none of these details is present either.42 The origin of the U.S. name “Bangum” (sometimes Bangham or Bingham) has never been satisfactorily explained (Gilchrist’s suggestion that it is related to the name Brangywell, the hero of a Herefordshire version of the ballad, is less than convincing),43 but recognition of these parallels make the possibility that it might actually derive from some form of B[evis of H]amton seem far less farfetched. As we should expect, the ballad has not only borrowed, but adapted and added to the motifs in its romance originals. There is no mention in Sir Eglamour of Artois of the hero’s being one of three sons, for instance, but in introducing this motif the ballad is merely making explicit an underlying folkloric logic: the hero has to prove himself in order to win the hand of a lady who is his social superior; therefore, he must be an impoverished younger son forced by circumstances to make his own way in the world.44 There are, however, two additions that appear in the American tradition which are evidently of considerable antiquity and are worth dwelling on a little longer. As we have seen, Donna Everett, of Huntsville, Arkansas, is far from being the only American singer to mention that Old Bangum killed the boar with a “wooden knife.” Kenneth Porter has suggested that this wooden knife is a survival of the Middle English wood-knife, defined by the OED as “a dagger or short sword … used by huntsmen for cutting

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up the game, or generally as a weapon.”45 The word wood-knife does not appear in any of the metrical romances (though it is used in Malory’s Morte Darthur), but, its appearance in the ballad of the “Boy and the Mantle” (Child 29) lends weight to Porter’s argument: this boy challenges Arthur’s court with a series of three chastity tests, the second of which is a boar’s head that “there was neuer a cucholds kniffe / carue itt that cold,” though he himself performs the decapitation with a “wood knife.”46 Although Eglamour and Bevis dispatch their boars with swords rather than knives,47 both (particularly Eglamour’s) have the feel of magical weapons. Bevis, it is true, acquires his famous sword Morgelai only after the battle with the boar, but Sir Eglamour’s is an earlier gift to the hero from Cristabelle: “And a gud swerd I sall gyff the, Was fonden in the Grekkes see [var: Sent Pole fond it in þe Grekes see [C266)] ........................ Þar es no helme of iryn ne stele Þat ne it will cleue in two.” (L265−70)

True to form, then, the “wooden knife” in “Old Bangum” seems to contribute to the sense of the uncanny in the ballad: like Grendel whom Beowulf must kill with his bare hands because he is apparently invulnerable to steel, we feel instinctively that this boar which has cost the lives of so many men is destined to succumb only to Bangum’s wooden knife. Phyllis Boyens sings a version, learnt from her father Nimrod Workman, which seems to underline this very point by making Bangum (here, “the Bottler”) the actual fabricator of the knife: “The bottler made him a wooden knife … Swore he’d put an end to the wild boar’s life.”48 One final U.S. ballad departure from the romance originals is even more interesting. The phrase, “to win one’s shoes” appears nowhere in either Sir Eglamour of Artois or Bevis of Hampton, but, like the wooden knife, it too is of great antiquity. This phrase does occur in other medieval romances— the Oxford English Dictionary supplies quotations from Sir Percevall and The Squire of Low Degree, and the Middle English Dictionary adds others from Thomas of Ercledoune and the Laud Troy Book, and, though the OED marks it as obsolete by 1500, it still survives in a mid-seventeenth-century version of Thomas of Ercledoune, called “Sir Thomas of Astledowne”: It is a hard thing for to tell, Of doughty deeds that have been done, Of sore fighting and battels fell, And how good Knight[s] have won their shoone. 49

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Like the commoner “to win one’s spurs,” this phrase evidently meant “to achieve renown by a victory.” However, it seems never to have been common, and we can only speculate on how it might have turned up in Arkansas after a three-hundred-year lacuna in the written record. In general, the ballad remembers that its hero was a great hunter (something the romances rather take for granted), and that his feat had won for him a lady’s hand (though in the romances the intervening steps had been far more complicated), but in detail, like the ballad names which confuse father and son (Eglamour and Degrebelle) to produce a third character (Egrabell), the plot cannibalizes motifs from at least two romance sources and weaves them into a single, quite distinct, story. Reduced to its very essence, however, the U.S. ballad narrative ends up doing quite different cultural work from both its romance progenitors and its British cousins. To say, as is frequently said of many ballads that have made their way across the Atlantic, that it has become more demotic in the process, is a truism. Certainly, the ballad has jettisoned all the aristocratic trappings of the medieval boar hunt, and replaced them with the workaday trials of the common man, but the transformation goes much deeper than this. Unlike the confident and upwardly mobile young knight in Sir Eglamour of Artois, a man who knows what he wants and what steps he must take to achieve it, Old Bangum finds himself wandering in a mysterious and threatening landscape littered with the bones of dead men, where one blast of his hunting horn can summon a terrifying opponent from the depths of the forest. It is this, I suggest, that forms, in Tristram Coffin’s memorable phrase, the “emotional core” of the ballad,50 and it is not difficult to see why it should have held a far stronger appeal for audiences in the New World than in the Old. Such, it must be said at once, has not been the dominant critical view of the ballad, including that of Coffin himself. “Old Bangum and the Boar,” he writes, “is the rather jovial offspring of a dignified romance” (p. 9), and he describes “the mood of the adventure” as being “mock serious” (p. 43). Bertrand Bronson, too, is quite prepared to allow a certain seriousness to the two earliest versions in Child (the Percy Folio version and a nineteenth-century Scots version), but declares unequivocally that “all other versions of the ballad which have been found, whether in England or in America, are farcical in varying degree.”51 There is a certain derivative quality to the way other commentators have characterized “Old Bangum”: “a semi-burlesque melodrama in homespun,” a “Crockett-like burlesque of the backwoods,” and a “burlesqued backwoods melodrama.”52

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This view may owe something to the fact that “Old Bangum” was often sung to children (G. L. Kittredge noted that two nineteenth-century presidents, James Madison and Zachary Taylor, recalled being hushed to sleep by their African-American nannies to the strains of “Bangum and the Boar”),53 but not everyone would agree. Dorothy Scarborough calls an African-American version sung to children “fearsome and sanguinary,”54 and Alan Lomax detects a certain “bogeyman” quality in a ballad that tells of “a brave man … [who] rides into a dark wood and conquers a fearsome, bloodthirsty beast.” 55 Indeed, Lomax believes the ballad may have held a special significance for the African-American child who “must often have felt that he was facing a monster when he stood up against his white owners.” Interestingly, an African-American tradition supplies us with one of the most menacing versions of the ballad: “Rach’s Spinning Song” from Virginia makes of the Old-Bangum figure a king who is actually killed by the boar, leaving his queen a widow and the land in mourning.56 The fact that “Old Bangum” was often sung to children, then, need not detract from its underlying seriousness, and we would do well to remember that generally speaking earlier generations were far less inclined than we are to shield the young from frightening images. When I made this point in an earlier version of this paper, delivered at Texas A & M University in the spring of 2013, I was delighted to receive striking confirmation of it from a member of the audience. Here is the relevant portion of the written corroboration my informant, Leonard A. Callaway II, was kind enough to supply me with later: My Grandfather, Father, and Uncles used to take me hunting with them DEEP in the Piney Woods of East Texas. As the sun would set on the night before our big adventures began the old uncles, my grandfather’s cousins, and their friends would sit on the porch of my Great Grandmother’s house, drink moonshine, … and tell stories after supper. … There was no TV, only AM radio, even in the early 80s, in my Great Grandmother’s home, so those evenings were spent listening to my uncles spin yarns, tell tall tales and, most importantly, sing. … It always began the same, with my Great Grandmother urging the men to “sing Bangum for these youngsters so they know to be careful and watch their step tomorrow.” It was always sung as a warning that Ol’ Bangum would/could charge out of his den and take your leg right off before you even realized he was there. A dangerous pig with blood on his breath and hate in his heart. Imagine lanterns hung in swampy cypress trees with

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moss hanging down and Aunts hiding in the shrubs making spooky noises—noises that I learned the other day were variations of the “quo qee” portions of the song. It was magical, scary, and just what a 10ish-year-old needed to scurry off to bed and leave the grow ups to play backgammon, or talk about the saw mill shutting down, or gripe about the Democrats.57

In the Middle Ages, when wild boars were common across Continental Europe, they were widely recognized as being fearsome opponents. Hunting manuals emphasize that “the boar chase involved extreme hazards even for experienced hunters” and “the hunter who succeeded in slaying the boar with the sword would be honored for his superior skill and bravery.”58 In England, however, they seem to have been rare, if not extinct, by the late Middle Ages, despite various attempts to reintroduce them for hunting purposes,59 and this may help to explain the lighter tone of later British versions of “Sir Lionel.” Nevertheless, in the Continental U.S. “wild hogs” (feral domestic pigs) have been recorded since the early colonial period, and in more recent times have interbred with wild boars introduced from Europe. 60 Even in the twenty-first century, with our modern rifles and means of communication, the hazardous readiness of wild hogs to challenge hunters is widely recognized,61 and contemporary legends of “Hogzilla” suggest a general perception, not only of their presence across large areas of the southeastern states but of their continued ability to menace rural populations. Closer to the origins of our ballad is a story told by John Oliver, the very first settler in Cades Cove (the community that was later to provide us with one of our best versions of “Old Bangum”). Oliver regaled his grandson with an incident that occurred on the eve of the Battle of Horseshoe Creek in 1814: He said that one of those wild Indians had killed a wild hog and skinned it and wrapped himself up in the skin of that wild hog so completely that his hands and feet was not easily detected and under that skin he had a dagger and a tomahawk. He would crawl along until he would get close enough to the man at the post, then he would throw off the skin and burst upon the sentinel without any alarm, he then killed the man and carried him off some distance and concealed him in the leaves, he then covered himself again in his hog skin and fixed for another man. This he done until he had killed three brave men, and no trace of them could be found.62

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Horseshoe Creek is in central Alabama, but John Oliver’s story suggests that wild hogs may well have constituted a menacing presence in the folklore of early nineteenth-century Tennessee. Bertrand H. Bronson had rightly insisted that ballads should never be studied independent of their tunes, but in this instance I should like use his own argument against him by citing two recordings of “Old Bangum.”63 The first was made by a professional folksinger, Logan English, for Folkways Records in 1957;64 the liner notes (by the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein) suggest that the “Old Bangum” ballad’s “present status as a comic burlesque … may have come about through stage influences,” and Logan English’s performance is accordingly up-tempo and jaunty, clearly inviting its audience to sing along. By contrast, a field recording of “Wild Hog in the Woods” made in Virginia as recently as 1978 of a woman called Eunice Yeatts McAlexander for the Blue Ridge Institute is measured, even brooding; it contains no trace of humor that I can detect.65 Perhaps this is a case where we should leave the last word to the tradition-bearers rather than the scholars; here is Lena Harmon of North Carolina: “Now that’s a song that Dad sung about the wild boar. … This wild boar was very ferocious. You could see his tusks in the sun a-shining, I can. And how he cut down those saplings and that bunch of brush ’nd stuff. And the dead men’s bones there was pretty horrible, frightening.”66 NOTES Edward D. Ives, The Bonny Earl of Murray: The Man, the Murder, the Ballad (Urbana and Chicago, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1997). 2 J. Endell Tyler, Henry of Monmouth: Or, Memoirs of the Life and Character of Henry the Fifth, as Prince of Wales and King of England (London: R. Bentley, 1838), 2:121. 3 Child, ESPB, 3:320. 4 The Roud Folksong Index (where this ballad is Item 251: https://www.vwml. org/roudnumber/251) records a number of broadside versions; it has also been recorded from oral performance on both sides of the Atlantic. 5 David C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968), p. 5. 6 “The Ballad and the Middle Ages,” in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 163−84. 7 I would still stand by this general conclusion, even though at the time I was unaware of the existence of a mid-seventeenth-century version of Thomas Rymer printed in a collection titled Sundry Strange Prophecies of Merlin, Bede, and Others 1

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(1652); see William Price Albrecht, The Loathly Lady in “Thomas of Erceldoune” (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), pp. 71−115. 8 Child, ESPB, 1:288. 9 The possibility that yet a third romance, Eger and Grime, contributed to an incident in the Percy Folio “Sir Lionel” is raised by Child (ESPB, 1:289), but since this incident (the cutting of the little finger from the hero’s right hand) does not occur in any of the later versions, I will not pursue it here. 10 Sir Eglamour of Artois, ed. Frances E. Richardson, EETS o.s. 256 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. ix–xiv. Since Richardson’s edition prints facing-page transcripts of the two earliest complete MSS (Lincoln Cathedral, MS. 91 and B.L. MS. Cotton Caligula A.II), I give its line-numbering with either L (for Lincoln) or C (for Cotton), as appropriate. 11 Lister Matheson, “A Fragment of Sir Elgamour of Artois,” English Language Notes 17 (1989): 165−68. 12 Sir Eglamour, ed. Richardson, pp. xiii–xiv. 13 Ronald Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1919), pp. 9−10. 14 Robert Langham, A Letter, ed. R. J. P. Kuin (Leiden: Brill, 1983), p. 53. 15 The melancholie knight. By S.R. (London: R.B[lower], 1615), pp. 27−29 [STC (2nd ed.): 2140]. 16 It was reprinted as a broadside in 1672, in John Playford’s Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion (1686), and finally in Thomas D’Urfey’s famous collection, Pills to Purge Melancholy (1719−1720). 17 Bronson, TTCB, 1:266; Thomas Pettitt, “‘Bold Sir Rylas’ and the Struggle for Ballad Form,” Lore and Language 3/6A (1982): 55. 18 Alfred Willams, Folk Songs of the Upper Thames (London: Duckworth, 1923), pp. 118−19. 19 Ella Mary Leather, The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire (Hereford: Jakeman & Carver, 1912), pp. 203−4. 20 Anne G. Gilchrist, “Songs from Frank Kidson’s MSS,” Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 3 (1936): 46−49. 21 The English branch has already been skillfully analyzed by Thomas Pettitt, “‘Bold Sir Rylas.’” 22 Tristram Coffin, The English Traditional Ballad in North America, revised ed. (Philadelphia, PA: American Folklore Society, 1963), pp. 42−43, offers a slightly different taxonomy. 23 Missouri State University, Max Hunter Folksong Collection, Cat. #1499 (MFH #692); https://maxhunter.missouristate.edu/songinformation. aspx?ID=1499. 24 Type A versions of “Old Bangum” which include all three features—Temple Hill (TH), the wooden knife (WK) and the winning of the shoes (WS)—are “Sir Lionel, B” in Arthur Kyle Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1929), pp. 128−29, and “Sir Lionel, AA” in

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Arthur Kyle Davis, More Traditional Ballads of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 73−74; both TH and WK occur in “Bangum and the Boar” (Missouri), in H. M. Belden, “Five Old-Country Ballads,” Journal of American Folklore 25 (1912): 75−76, and “Old Banghum” (Tennessee), in W. K. McNeil, Southern Folk Ballads, II (Little Rock: August House, 1988), pp. 157−58; both WK and WS occur in “Sir Lionel, F” in Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 131−32, and in “Ole Bangum” (Virginia), in Dorothy Scarborough, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1937), pp. 191−93; both TH and WS occur in “Sir Lionel, D” in Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 129−30; TH occurs in “Sir Lionel, B” in H. M. Belden, “Ballads and Songs,” University of Missouri Studies 15 (1940): 30; WK occurs in “Old Bangum and the Boar” in H. M. Belden, “OldCountry Ballads in Missouri, 1” Journal of American Folklore 19 (1906): 235, in “Sir Lionel, A” (North Carolina) and “Sir Lionel, B” (Virginia), in Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (New York: Putnam’s, 1917), p. 28, in “Sir Lionel, C & G” in Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 128−29 and 132, in “Old Bangum and the Boar” (Virginia) in Richard Chase, American Folk Tales and Songs (New York: New American Library, 1956), pp. 126−27, in “Jason and the Wild Boar,” in Kentucky Folklore Record 2 (1956): 57, in “Bangum Rode to the Riverside” (Virginia) in Ethel Moore and Chauncey O. Moore, Ballads and Folk Songs of the Southwest (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 29, and in “Sir Lionel, CC & DD” in Davis, More Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 76−78. 25 https://geonames.usgs.gov/. 26 John and Alan Lomax, Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 149−50. 27 Phillips Barry, Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, May Winslow Smith, British Ballads from Maine (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1929), pp. 434−35; Helen Hartness Flanders and Margaret Olney, Ballads Migrant in New England (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), pp. 60−61 (Vermont). 28 Belden, “Ballads and Songs,” p. 20 (version A); Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, pp. 125−26. 29 Mellinger Edward Henry, Folksongs from the Southern Highlands (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1938), pp. 1923; John D. Niles, “Cades Cove: A Study in Regional Song Culture,” in Ljudske Balade med Izročilom in Sodobnostjo; Ballads between Tradition and Modern Times, ed. Marjetka Golež (Ljubljana: ZRC Publishing, 1998), pp. 224−32. 30 Thomas G. Burton, Some Ballad Folks (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1981), pp. 62−63. 31 Bronson, TTCB, 18.2. 32 Two further versions include the witch woman but omit the pretty girl: one recorded from Rena Hicks’s aunt (by marriage) Buna Hicks (Burton, Some Ballad

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Folks, pp. 22−23), the other recorded from A. H. Pittser (who had previously lived in Indiana and Missouri) in Shamrock, Oklahoma (Moore and Moore, Ballads and Folk Songs of the Southwest, pp. 30−32). Subject to the usual warning label, the same may be said of the first two versions (from North Carolina), in John Jacob Niles’s Ballad Book (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), pp. 77−81. 33 Variant “His tusschus passsen a ʒerde lange” (C355). 34 Pettitt, “‘Bold Sir Rylas’,” p. 53, makes a similar point. 35 “Gin you have cut aff the head o my boar. / It’s your head shall be taen therefore” (Child B17). 36 Willams, Folk Songs of the Upper Thames, p. 119. 37 Moore and Moore, Ballads and Folk Songs, p. 31. 38 Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance, pp. 9−10 and 14. 39 Four Romances of England: King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, Athelston, ed. Graham Drake, Eve Salisbury, and Ronald B. Herzman (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), lines 771−802. 40 Belden, “Old-country Ballads in Missouri,” pp. 175−76. 41 The lines, “[Marrase] has hym [the boar] fed þis feftene ȝere / Crystyn men to slaa” (L485−86) seem to mean simply that his master has fed him up in order to kill Christians, not that he has actually fed him on his victims. 42 The Romance of Guy of Warwick, ed. J. Zupitza, 3 vols. EETS ES, 42, 49, and 59 (London: Trübner, 1883−1891), 2:358−60. The boar kills a hundred hounds (not men) and Guy blows his horn after killing the boar (not before). 43 Gilchrist, “Songs from Frank Kidson’s MSS,” p. 47; Gilchrist is wrong to claim that the hero’s name in the U.S. is always some version of Brangywell; other names for the hero include Center, Bottler, Lanktum, and Jason. 44 This logic is particularly clear in the Scottish version (Child B). 45 K. Porter, “Bangum the Boar Slayer and his Weapon,” Journal of American Folklore 54 (1941): 84−85. 46 Interestingly, while the hide of Eglamour’s slain boar proves too tough for ordinary knives (“Þar wolde no knyues in hym byte” [L491]), the king assumes Eglamour’s knife will do the job (“We trowe þat thyn be gud ynoghe” [L494]), and the hero duly cleaves him “to þe rygge bane” (L497). 47 However, when Eglamour uses this sword again in his battle with the giant, the episode concludes: “thorowe Goddis helpe and his knefe, / Thus hase þe geant loste his lyfe” (L331−32). 48 Nimrod Workman and Phyllis Boyens, Passin’ Thru the Garden, Vinyl LP ( June Appal Recordings: JA0001 [1974]), track 11. Niles, Ballad Book, has a version in which Rurey Bain slays the boar with “a silver blade / All tipped with a point of gold” (p. 81). 49 Albrecht, The Loathly Lady, p. 81 (lines 9−12). 50 Coffin, English Traditional Ballad, pp. 165−66. 51 Bronson, TTCB, 1:265.

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Davis, Traditional Ballads of Virginia, p. 125 (1929); Helen Hartness Flanders, Ancient Ballads Traditionally Sung in New England, 1 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), p. 226; McNeill, Southern Folk Ballads, 2:158 (1987). 53 G. L. Kittredge, “Ballads and Songs,” Journal of American Folklore 30 (1917): 291. 54 Scarborough, A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains, p. 193. 55 Alan Lomax, The Folk Songs of North America in the English Language (New York: Doubleday, 1960), p. 495. 56 Ruth Ann Musick, “Ballads and Folksongs from West Virginia, 2: Songs 8−26,” Journal of American Folklore 70 (1957): 344 (originally published in West Virginia Folklore 4 (1954): 18). Niles, Ballad Book, has a somewhat gnomic African American version, the three-stanza “Bangum and the Bo’” (p. 82). 57 Personal communication sent Friday, March 22, 2013. Apparently, “Ol’ Bangum” is here recalled as the name of the boar, rather than his slayer. 58 Marcelle Thiébaux, “The Mouth of the Boar as a Symbol in Medieval Literature,” Romance Philology 22 (1969): 281−82. 59 Umberto Albarella, “The Wild Boar,” in Extinctions and Invasions: A Social History of British Fauna, ed. Terry O’Connor and Naomi Sykes (Oxford: Windgatherer Press, 2010), pp. 63−66. 60 John J. Mayer, I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Wild Pigs in the United States: Their History, Comparative Morphology, and Current Status (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), pp. 6−71. 61 See Melody Golding, Hank Burdine, and John Folse, Panther Tract: Wild Boar Hunting in the Mississippi Delta (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), esp. Andrew Westerfield, “Lionel—A Child’s Story,” pp. 191−92. 62 Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove, the Life and Death of an Appalachian Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), p. 153. 63 In “The Interdependence of Ballad Tunes and Texts,” California Folklore Quarterly 3 (1944): 200−203, Bronson uses Sir Eglamour/Bangum as one of his examples. 64 Kentucky Folk Songs and Ballads Sung by Logan English, Vinyl LP (Folkways Records, FA 2136 [1957]), track 1; a clip is available at http://www. folkways.si.edu/logan-english/bangum-and-the-boar/american-folk/music/track/ smithsonian. 65 Virginia Traditions: Ballads from British Tradition, Vinyl LP (Blue Ridge Institute, BRI00002 [1978]), track 6; a clip is available at http://www.folkways. si.edu/eunice-yeatts-mcalexander/wild-hog-in-the-woods-bangum-and-the-boar/ american-folk-bluegrass-old-time/music/track/smithsonian. 66 Burton, Some Ballad Folks, p. 46. 52

Part III

The Afterlife of the Traditional Ballad

Chapter 10

Writing Romances for Amateur Singers A Nineteenth-Century Danish Example Hans Kuhn

A

MONG SCANDINAVIANS, DANES HAVE a reputation of easily breaking into song, or producing songs for special occasions, whether private or public, a bit like Italians among South Europeans; in the folkehøjskoler, the resident adult-education schools that are basically a Danish invention, common singing after meals is still standard practice even today. In the nineteenth century, the Danes declared the old ballads their national treasure and published them in Svend Grundtvig’s monumental edition that took about a century to complete. Many of them were not as old as it was claimed, at a time when Denmark was eager to show a cultural ancestry as venerable as Old Norse literature, but it is true that many of them were first written down in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—in manuscript collections, mostly compiled by ladies belonging to the Danish nobility. But ballads were not the only or even the principal kind of songs sung over the centuries. Denmark produced a series of hymn-writers whose texts are first-rate poetry: Thomas Kingo in the seventeenth, Hans Adolph Brorson in the eighteenth, and Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig and Bernhard Severin Ingemann in the nineteenth century; as well as authors of first-rate secular songs, such as Ambrosius Stub in the eighteenth century. The first collections of texts for community singing, apart from hymns, were the so-called club songs (klubbviser) of the late eighteenth century. In these clubs, mostly unmarried young men gathered to drink, discuss and sing the following: drinking songs; songs celebrating various things, including the royal house and the nation, women, and their own get-togethers; as well as songs borrowed from current plays. (The Royal Theatre was the central cultural institution in Copenhagen at that time.) The old ballads, for which melodies were published in 1815 for the first time, were mostly used as set pieces in plays, where a character would sing one to express his or her feelings or concerns.

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This changed in the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1840/1842 the composer Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse published a hundred old ballads with piano accompaniment, and this meant that they were taken up by the singing public (and by song-book publishers) on a large scale. At the same time, similar texts were being collected from oral tradition in the countryside. In the same period, the production of art songs written for voice with piano accompaniment grew tremendously; there were at least two dozen composers active in this field. Most of the songs used in the theater were not old ballads, but art songs created for the occasion; there was also a growing demand for such songs outside the theater and the concert-hall, for domestic music making. This had to do with the educated middle class becoming the culturally dominant layer of society during that time. Only a minority of people lived within easy reach of organized plays and concerts. People had to entertain themselves, and singing and piano playing were part of the normal education of middleclass girls. They would entertain family or guests with singing, which also gave them an opportunity to show that they had one of the essential qualifications expected in their future role as managers of a household which would normally include many children, a number of employed servants and, probably, unmarried or aged relatives. To satisfy this market, the songs and the piano accompaniment had to take into account the resources of amateur musicians. The melodies had to be comparatively simple—often they were reminiscent of folksong— and the piano part could not be technically too demanding : frequently it just amounted to arpeggioed chords, as in a guitar accompaniment. If one compares them with the accompaniment of, say, Franz Schubert’s, Robert Schumann’s or Hugo Wolf ’s Lieder, it is clear that these Danish songs were not designed for concert performance. I have examined the art-song output of one not particularly well-known composer, Joseph Glæser (1835−1891), who produced a fair bit of music for the theatre and also published, between the 1850s and 1880s, a sequence of “Romances and Songs” in twenty-two instalments, amounting to a total of about 120 songs. My purpose has been to see what kind of texts Glæser used and how they were translated into music. Some general remarks about the nature of the texts are called for. To start with, they are, with one exception, all original Danish poems. Among these, I include the numerous pieces by the Norwegian poet Johan Sebastian Welhaven, for he wrote in the kind of Norwegian which, in its written form, was more or less identical with Danish; the same is

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true of the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who had intimate connections with Denmark. Second, there were a few religious songs, but by and large, they were worldly texts. Hymns could be used at the short morning or evening devotions which it was not uncommon for the master of the house to hold with his household, but they did not figure as forms of entertainment. Thirdly, there are some texts from what the Danes call their Golden Age, the first half of the nineteenth century, with authors such as Adolph Wilhelm Schack von Staffeldt, Adam Oehlenschläger, Johan Ludvig Heiberg , and Hans Christian Andersen; but the vast majority of Glæser’s texts were written by contemporary authors and set to music when they appeared, or shortly afterwards. Composers of that period must have been eager readers of poetry; it commonly happened that one and the same poem was set to music half a dozen times within a few years of its first publication. There are a few narrative pieces in Glæser’s collection, but by and large they are lyrical, most of them nature songs, which implies an imagined location. Spring comes late to Scandinavia, and anybody who knows with what eagerness the warm and bright season is awaited will not be surprised that many poems celebrate its arrival. For my examples, I will confine myself, for practical reasons, to one-page songs with a limited amount of text. Here is a typical spring song, with no indication of textual authorship: Here is a literal translation, with the Danish word order preserved: 1. “The swallow rides summer into town / O! what a fast happening! / The sun itself, although hidden behind a cloud, / puts a smile on summer’s lips.” 2. “Through forest and over meadow / flows the sweetest odour. / The lark, from its flowery bed / rises, with song, through the air.” 3. “The stag dances with his doe / over violets blue, / the well-rounded forest pigeon / sits and stares at the scene.” 4. “Downy stands the young beech-tree / the birds’ splendid castle, / that’s where the thrush and the cuckoo live, / all those who like a good life.” 5. “Therefore I also want to live / under your delightful shade; / between your leaves my happy thought / flutters like the spring bird.” Spring revives and animates human beings, especially young people, and they identify with their fellow creatures, which are credited with

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Figure 10.1. Vaarsang (“Svalen rider Sommer i By”), composed by Joseph Glæser. (Photo reproduced by permission of Project Runeberg.)

the same human emotions. Five kinds of birds are mentioned in this song, among which the lark has a special position in Danish hearts; its song high above the fields is an endlessly recurring embodiment of Danish summer, and as a small but jubilant singer, it is the bird a human singer can identify with. Only one kind of tree is mentioned, the beech-tree, but that

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is even more emblematic of Denmark than the lark among birds. With fir-trees dominant in Norway and Sweden, and a variety of deciduous trees in North Germany (the oak being considered the “national tree” of Germany), the beech forests, although most of them have been replaced by agriculture, are still evoked regularly in Danish patriotic songs. And in Danish poetry, the humble violet is often greeted as the first flowering harbinger of spring. It may be surprising that such a joyous song is set in a minor key (Gm). This may also be part of the “folksong” concept, where the ancient ballads, although historically outside the major/minor scheme, were in the nineteenth century interpreted as mainly minor, with frequent changes into major; here major chords occur in the dominant (the D chord in bars 2, 4, 6, 7) and in the relative key of B (bars 5−6 are entirely based on B, including its dominant F and its sub-dominant E flat). We get neither harmonic nor metrical complications; the melody fits into a standard 8-bar pattern, with a clear break in the middle, where it comes to rest in the dominant key. The accompaniment, with its pointed notes, appoggiaturas and short staccato runs, conveys the animation of nature the text implies. Most consumers of this music would live in cities or towns—we’re speaking of a time when industrialization was proceeding rapidly—but it is striking that cities and towns hardly figure in these songs, except as a negative foil to the peace and beauty to be found in the countryside. Also socially, the forest is a haven especially for potential lovers. Here they can escape the strict supervision to which contacts between the sexes were subjected in middle-class society. “Come, let us flee!” is the beginning of a Glæser song published in 1864, where a young man invites his “Veninde” (female friend) to escape what he calls the “oppressive prison of the city, with its chains of hatred and its bars of yearning;”1 and the attraction of the forest is that there they can kiss in peace—which in most cases may have been wishful thinking rather than a practical option. Songs in community songbooks were also full of Danish nature, but there it is often localized to a particular region or particular places. By contrast, in Glæser’s Romances there are practically no place names. In one of the early songs, Esrom in North Zealand occurs. Before the Reformation Esrom was an important monastery, but the song mentions its past just briefly, otherwise praising its peaceful scenery: a large lake surrounded by woods. One song, with text by Henrik Hertz, is called Paa Strandvejen (On the Beach Road; 8/1, 1861), and any Danish singer would identify that beach road with the road leading north from Copenhagen along the eastern coast of Sjælland (Zealand). In it, a coachman describes a brisk

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ride at night-time, and in the last stanza he hopes that the wind he feels as he sits on his box will also kiss his sweetheart’s forehead and mouth. To show that not all of Glæser’s nature songs were confined to beech forests and water, here is another short song with text taken from a novel by Carl Bernhard (1798−1865) that had appeared in 1849. It consists mostly of enthusiastic exclamations, and the melody adapts itself to them.

Figure 10.2. Af Romanen (“To Venner”), composed by Joseph Glæser. (Photo courtesy of International Music Score Library Project; CC BY-SA 4.0 License.)

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It means: 1. “Splendid forest! Lovely peace! / Here I will build, here I will live! / Hear how charmingly the birds sing / while they happily swing on a branch. / Splendid forest! Lovely peace!” 2. “Fragrant meadow! Grain-rich field! / A bounty of riches poured forth from the ground; / hard work has been rewarded, and gladly we raise / high stacks of plentiful harvest. / Fragrant meadow! Grainrich field!” 3. “Mossgrown roof ! Rustic abode! / A hearth for peace and hope and faithfulness! / May friendly spirits always protect you, / may sorrow never approach loving homes! / Mossgrown roof ! Rustic abode!” This text has a definitely pre-Romantic flavor. During the Enlightenment, the economic benefits of nature were a central concern, and improvements to agriculture a big theme. This did not mean that the beauty and the therapeutic potential of nature were overlooked; idylls in a simple pastoral setting were much in vogue. Ultimately, the bucolic scenes of Theocritus and Vergil were the inspiration, and the sceneries remained fairly unspecific. But this song is an exception; in general, references to working are as rare as cityscapes in songs set by Glæser. The music for this song is notated in a curious way, starting in midbar, but it features again a rather march-like four-bar section ending on the dominant key of E major, which indeed also dominates bars 7 and 8, so that the words of the first two bars are added as a coda, which via subdominant and dominant leads back to the A major tonic. While community songbooks in the second half of the nineteenth century are full of topical songs referring to the two Slesvig Wars of 1848−1850 and 1864, the introduction of a Danish constitution in 1849 and the hopes and disappointments of Scandinavianism as a political movement, such themes are practically non-existent in the songs discussed here. Song 5 in Instalment 18, with text by an M.R. I have not been able to identify, looks like just another spring poem. It is entitled “At Leafing Time” and starts “The fresh wood has burst into leaves / and the doe softly sets her hoof / among fresh anemones.” 2 And so it goes on; but in the fourth stanza it says that to foreign eyes, the writer’s land of birth must look like a lovely bride; but such eyes, the fifth and last stanza claims, “do not see the fight, that once will be fought for life and for your honour near the blue waves. It will come, but the song of hope, which now spreads over Denmark’s fields, will rise around our field standard.”3 The song appeared

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in 1871, seven years after the loss of Slesvig-Holstein, and while some Danes hoped that there might arise an opportunity to win back the lost provinces (which happened, as far as the Danish-speaking parts were concerned, after the First World War), others feared that the new German Empire might overrun the rest of Denmark, too. There is one anonymous song (13/3, 1866) where a young cavalryman departing for war and his girl take turns farewelling each other, but there is nothing topical about it; he compares the man of action to sedentary languishing poets; she looks forward to crowning him with roses and myrtles when he returns, victorious, from his Ledingsfærd, a medieval term for a military expedition. It is quite unlike the war songs of the community songbooks. Love songs, in suitably decent forms, make up a large part of our collection; after all, the songs should be emotionally relevant both for the young ladies performing them and to the young men who might become their partners. Here, too, nature elements prevail; but their purpose is not so much to evoke a scene as to let the singer identify with these elements symbolically. Here is a song entitled Et Ønske (a wish), and the author is simply given as “a student”; his name was actually Michael Rosing (1830−1904), and he became later a teacher at Sorø Academy, an elite school in Zealand. This is what the student wishes for: 1. “O, if only I were the singing nightingale, / which laments alone in the forest, / and you were a rose in the hall of beeches / there under the drooping branches.” 2. “For, if you then closed your red petals / for the moon’s amorous glances, / I would provide, / in my song, the brightest dreams / for your soul to drink.” 3. “When the morning came, you would open bashfully / the blushing petals / and all day long you would ponder / on those dreams, so bright and happy.” 4. “Then I would again raise my amorous voice / and you would turn to me in surprise / and lean your head against my chest, / while your cheeks would burn redder [than before].”4 A critic might well object that roses are unlikely to grow in beech forests, but that is not the point. Flower and bird are instruments for identification, and in the second half of the last stanza, the bird/flower pretence is dropped. The moon is given the role of a potential rival to be kept out. Again, it is a minor-key song ; here it could be argued that it primarily expresses longing , and its opening with the chord of the

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Figure 10.3. Et Ønske (“O var jeg den syngende”), composed by Joseph Glæser. (Photo courtesy of International Music Score Library Project; CC BY-SA 4.0 License.)

dominant reinforces that. We have an upbeat to accommodate the iambic meter, and it shows the familiar pattern of a four-bar block ending on the dominant D major, with the subdominant C minor appearing in the second part. The 6/8 meter is the traditional “romance” rhythm in

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nineteenth-century Danish music, and the triplets into which the chords are dissolved stand for the felt urgency of emotion. This song is found later in some popular songbooks.5 There are also some sad songs about disappointments in love. In another song by Rosing, En Ventende, “A waiting person” (16/3, 1871), it is not clear whether the speaker is male or female. He or she waits on a hidden path where the lovers used to meet, and all nature seems to wait with him/her. The partner does not turn up until night falls and the roses are defoliated by the rain; now his or her youth and the time of dreaming are gone, and there is only eternal peace to wait for.6 The song immediately preceding sets a text by Bjørnson (1832−1910), a Norwegian whose texts could be read as Danish: A girl likes dancing, and maybe she hopes to provoke her non-dancing partner into activity, but when they meet behind the dance-hall afterwards, he bids her farewell for ever, “and she threw herself on the ground / and cried and cried; / she was going to lose the hope of her life, / but there was nobody who knew”7—a warning not to conceal one’s true feelings until it could be too late. We do not know how many marriages were outcomes of the romantic love expressed in these songs, but since the singers and unmarried listeners also had to face a future as families, it is not surprising to find some lullabies. One, by Bernhard Kokk (1827−1893; 4/1, 1864), strikes an unexpectedly modern note by starting with “Father’s Lullaby,” but what happens is that the father is describing the mother rocking the child’s cradle and singing, and the mother’s part is her song, the lullaby proper. Another domestic scene is pictured in a poem by H. P. Holst (1811−1893; 11/1, 1864): the wife says goodnight to her writing husband and admonishes him to be quiet as she is going to put their child to sleep. In another song (No. 4) in the same Instalment, by Henrik Hertz (1798−1870), the male speaker sees himself as an invisible protector of his sweetheart’s sleep, and hopes that his picture will appear as a comfort if she has nightmares— and that she will then firmly take his hand, “which I know you otherwise never dare.”8 A short one, by Carl Andersen (1828−1883; 15/1, 1870) sketches in the first verse a parallel image from nature, the swallow in her nest with a young bird; in the second, in strictly parallel wording, the human mother has her little boy in her arms, his eyes are blue as the bird’s feathers were blue, and “the sun is shining on it so beautifully.”9 While nature marked, in varying degree, the common locale of these songs as Denmark, longing for the warm south was also part of the mental make-up of nineteenth-century Danes. Italy was a travel goal not

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only of writers, but also artists and musicians, who often received generous traveling scholarships; there was a sizable Danish colony in Rome. So it is not surprising that we also find songs with a southern theme, as nature was more bountiful there, human life more sensual. In a poem entitled “In the Gondola,” H. H. Nyegaard (1824–?; 14/2, 1881) writes: “You beautiful woman of the South / O take me to your bosom,”10 and in the following song by the same author, a Moorish girl yearns for the night-time visits of her black lover. Longing for the south can also be associated with the departure of migrating birds from Denmark. I will therefore conclude with a song with text by Kristian Arentzen (1823−1899), where the singer dreams about a trip to the south as an escape from the many pressures of family life at home: 1. “If only I were a skipper with a shiny hat / and you were a woman free and unrestrained, / we would quickly say farewell / to the cold and the night of the North, / where in fashionable society, finicky and staid, / one is simply bored to tears.” 2. “We would hoist the sail high on the yard / and fly away on the blue waves / where everything is fresh and free. / The roaring sea, the whistling wind, / they would air out our young minds / and we would be free from vexation.” 3. “We would sail down to where the proud Sun / has raised its radiant royal seat, / to the South, where the grapes grow. / There we would embrace, and embrace again, / there we would pass life in sweet daydreaming, / Mary, believe me!” 4. “I am not a skipper with a shiny hat / and you are not a woman free and unrestrained, / therefore we will not say farewell / to the old gang and the old trouble, / O no! among an army of uncles and aunts / we will simply be bored to tears.” So, realism prevails in the end; but it is the privilege of youth to dream of freedom and warmth, as without those dreams, the step from single to family life might never be taken. The music is again the classic 6/8 of romance with its slow waltz rhythm animated by the pointed notes. It is structured as 2 × 6 bars and comes, as usual, to rest in the middle on the dominant key. Danish community songbooks of Glæser’s period were increasingly dominated by educators who had political, religious, or ethical axes to grind. They were to be used at social gatherings and in schools, where most

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Figure 10.4. Ved Havet (“Og var jeg en Skipper“), composed by Joseph Glæser. (Photo reproduced by permission of Project Runeberg.)

participants would not have been taught to sing or play the piano, so musically they were mostly undemanding. Some of Glæser’s songs did appear in general songbooks, too, but—as my examples above show—the majority of them were clearly a private, and predominantly youthful, counterpart to the public life and concerns dominating elsewhere.

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NOTES 1 “Kom lad os flye! … et trykkende Fængsel / med dens Lænker af Had / og dens Gitter af Længsel” (Instalment 7, words by Christian Knud Frederik Molbech, 1821−1880). 2 I Løvspringstiden. “Udsprungen staaer den friske Skov / og Hinden sætter blødt sit Hov / blandt hvide Anemoner.” 3 “De seer ei Kampen, som skal staa / engang ved dine Bølger blaae / for Livet og din Ære: / Den komme vil, men Haabets Sang, / som nu gaaer over Danmarks Vang,/ skal om vort Banner være.” 4 1. “O var jeg den syngende Nattergal, / der klager i Skoven alene, / og var du en Rose i Bøgenes Sal / hist under de hængende Grene.” 2. “Thi lukked du der saa dit røde Blad / for Maanens forelskede Blikke, / de lyseste Drømme jeg i mit Qvad / da skjænked din Sjæl at drikke.” 3. “Naar Morgenen kom, du vel aabned saa / undseligt de rødmende Blade, / og hele Dagen du grundede paa / de Drømme saa lyse og glade.” 4. “Da hæved jeg atter min kjælne Røst, / forundret til mig du dig vendte, / og lænede Hovedet mod mit Bryst, / mens rødere Kinden dig brændte.” 5 For example, Danmarks Melodibog I (Copenhagen and Leipzig: Wilhelm Hansen Musik Forlag, 1895), nr. 233; Folkets Sangbog (Copenhagen: Wilhelm Hansen Musik Forlag, 1903), nr. 333. 6 “En Ventende … mens Regnens stærke Strømme slog Rosen itu … Jeg venter paa … Evighedens Fred.” 7 “Hun kasted sig ned, / hun græd og hun græd; / sit Livs Haab det skulde hun miste. / Men det var der Ingen, som vidste.” 8 “Hold fast min Haand − jeg veed, at Sligt / du ellers aldrig vover.” 9 “Solen skinner saa smukt derpaa.” 10 “Du skjønne Sydens Kvinde / O tag mig i Din favn.”

Chapter 11

The Secret Lives of Ballads Fan Fiction as Folk Space Sally Ann Schutz

I

N THE POST-CLASSICAL WORLD the ballad is among the oldest, yet least textually stable, of literary forms. A traditional ballad has no discernibly specific origin; it simply exists as part of the collective consciousness of the folk space it inhabits. Such space is in a constant state of creation, re-creation, alignment, and even obliteration. Ballads thrive in flux. Arguably, the most traditional version of a ballad happens in the very moment it is performed, but the parameters of that performance are dissolving even during the performance. While there is no shortage of ballad collections in print, a ballad has no definitive incarnation. This forms a liminal space—the space occupied by the balladeers, singly and as a group, and their creative process—between material objects of study and constant performative evolution, in which balladry perpetuates itself as a living art while simultaneously generating new forms. The Internet by virtue of its own limitless generative form becomes the logical nexus for not only balladry itself, but for future ballad scholarship as well. There are many avenues on the Internet for semi-conventional ballad performance—several channels on YouTube are specifically dedicated to traditional ballads, and feature recordings of live performances—but there are other textual modes available and in use for the transmission of ballads and these alternative modes of ballad transmission provide an opportunity to question the concept of a traditional ballad performance and examine the aspects of the ballad that constitute tradition. Is it the performance itself that establishes the bona fides of tradition? If so, what makes the performance traditional? I contend that it is the very process of ballad transmission and the perpetuation of individual ballads that constitute the traditional ballad, and that digital media actually provides continuity to that traditional process. My intent is to use ballad fan fiction from a popular fan-fiction website to illustrate the ongoing re-creation—

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through the medium of Internet folk spaces—of the circumstances under which traditional ballads traveled and evolved in largely oral cultures. These Internet folk spaces encompass what were once physical spaces for people to congregate and share their stories and songs, but are now metaphysical and digital spaces—personal mental spaces and collective digital spaces—held by whomever is involved in the tradition-making process. To begin I will discuss the creation of Internet folk spaces with a focus on the space occupied—not physically, but metaphysically and digitally—by fan fiction communities. Why do these spaces exist and what do they accomplish for the people inhabiting them? Next, I will explore how balladry and fan fiction interact using a work from the site An Archive of Our Own—“Down Among the Weeds” by Luzula. 1 How does a genre that in its foundational form is largely oral and performative translate to this new medium? Is the fan fiction community perpetuating ballad tradition or generating a new tradition? Ultimately, I argue that fan fiction authors and the fan fiction community, while using a very different medium of transmission—fictional prose narrative rather than live musical performance—perpetuate the cultural reproduction of the ballad as a traditional product. The Internet opens a vista of unprecedented global intimacy while simultaneously promulgating a profound alienation. Such a large portion of our lives takes place in front of a screen rather than face-to-face that we must seek community to affirm our social humanity. Folk spaces are virtual communities in which people come together seeking a familiar and communal connection in an increasingly disjointed society. In Tradition and the Twenty-First Century Trevor J. Blank and Robert Glenn Howard explain, “unquestionably, the digital age continues to facilitate a hybridization of folk and mass culture into a shared, collaborative, and simulative space online in which emic notions of tradition are in a constant state of flux.”2 The existential crisis of the Internet Age—the search for human connection in the midst of the abstract is perhaps resolved by the combination of old forms and new ideas. Internet folk spaces are the result of that collective search for existential authenticity which Regina Bendix describes as generated “from the probing comparison between self and Other” that “arises out of a profound human longing.”3 Bendix’s particular project aims to prove that authenticity as a folkloristic concept is discursively obstructive—in other words it creates a counterproductive, and short-sighted binary consisting of the authentic and categorizing everything else as inauthentic. However,

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she allows that while it is not the desired object that validates the search for authenticity, the “process of searching itself … yields existential meaning.”4 It is the desire for and journey toward community that necessitates Internet folk space. The search for authenticity is part of the intersection between the Internet and traditional oral forms such as balladry; the search represents the motivation for the process of cultural reproduction and continues the process of tradition. How does fan fiction function as a folk space? Fan fiction has much more in common with oral performance than it does with conventional print authorship. Authors do not have to fictionalize their audience as Walter Ong would have it—readers are an integral and acknowledged part of the creative process—their feedback helps to form what is a highly fluid product. Fan fiction authors perform what John Hartley calls “a new interpretation” of the “‘bardic’ function” wherein the “top-down approach to storytelling … focus[ing ] on a centralized ‘institutional’ form of production,” 5 gives way to a “diffused system” based on “‘amateur, DIY or consumer-created content.”6 Hartley perceives a challenge in understanding how the diffused system “might work to propagate coherent sense across social boundaries, among different demographics and throughout social hierarchies.”7 The answer to this challenge lies with an understanding of the diffused system as cultural reproduction. In the opening chapter of the anthology Tradition in the Twentyfirst Century, Elliott Oring makes a case for “a fundamentally different conceptualization of what constitutes tradition.”8 He advocates a shift in emphasis from tradition as product to tradition as process—specifically the process of cultural reproduction. If we focus on the process of tradition and view it as cultural reproduction, then fan fiction takes a finite textual product and reimagines it through the values of the folk space inhabited by the particular fandom or fandoms it represents—generating a tradition product from a material object. It is here that Oring and I differ. In his discussion of creativity and tradition he asserts that the creative process cannot conjoin with the tradition process—that doing so would “largely ignore continuity and stability.”9 I contend that traditional folkloristic texts are inherently unstable—in the case of ballads change and adaptation are an intrinsic part of the process of reproduction. Oring asks specifically, “would the creative refashioning of a ballad or folktale constitute the operation of tradition or an operation performed on a traditional expression?”10 Fan-fiction writers choose which aspects of the material object to recreate for their highly interactive audience—the

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diffused system—and then incorporate the audience reaction into their responses to reviews, and even into their next story or a subsequent entry in an ongoing episodic story. Ballad singers practice a tradition that “alter[s] with every singer, the more popular [ballads] appearing in innumerable versions and variants, some of which are less good than others, but all—theoretically, at least—of equal authority.”11 While ballad fan-fiction writers generally do not use the actual ballad form, they perpetuate ballad and oral tradition through the reproduction of both the ballad and simultaneously oral culture itself. The creative alterations and personalization are part of the process itself. This interactive, and ultimately traditional, process is a constant in fan fiction and provides not only an answer to Oring’s question about process, but also to Hartley’s challenge for coherence; while the individual writer acts as the bard, the collaborative nature of the process ensures that the audience is an inherent part of the process of cultural reproduction taking place. In other words, the preponderance of feedback from the individuals who choose to people the fan-fiction folk space ensures that the fan fiction process is always a tradition process rather than individual or merely creative, and the diffused system actually serves as the foundation for a more accurate representation of the popular consciousness. In his role as editor of the volume Oral Tradition in Literature, John Miles Foley proposes another “new concept of tradition,” and if used in conjunction with Oring’s tradition as the process of cultural reproduction it serves as a foundation for understanding fan fiction as tradition process and product. Foley discusses the concept of oral tradition and in particular situating texts in an oral traditional context.12 Foley discusses poetry, but where he looks at the “symbiosis of poet and tradition,” we can apply simply the storyteller and tradition and come to the same conclusion: “[o]ne senses quite clearly … the peculiar applicability of Yeats’ phrase, ‘the poet both finger and clay’.”13 Fan fiction arranges itself around its subject matter; it is driven by the original narrative. Rather than form, which makes up a large component of the inquiry into oral tradition, fan fiction follows the contextual function. Ballad fan fiction (like conventional ballad performance) is a link to the culture from which it derives and even maintains the anonymity of the individual author through the convention of pseudonyms—thereby allowing the ballad to evolve without the permanent imposition of an individual agenda. Who are the folk inhabiting and creating within the fan-fiction space? Individuals involved in fan fiction enter the fictional world of an

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originary text and never want to leave it. They devote themselves to enriching, enlarging, and personalizing the world of the text and from that work done in conjunction with other fans—as audience, collaborators, and editors—they form a communal space, a folk space that has multiple functions. The fan-fiction folk space exists digitally where once a physical space of meeting would bring people with common cause and culture together, but at the same time acts in an abstract sense as the metaphysical space wherein the tradition process is constantly performed both singly and as a group. In the introduction to Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse discuss digital spaces as a substitute for the physical space and interaction: Rather than inhabiting a space and then moving out when a new space comes open, the spaces are continuously inhabited, with fans moving in and out of the spaces as their inclination and technological limitations dictate. … Fans have migrated to new spaces as the new spaces have become available.14

Fan-fiction folk spaces always exist because they do not depend upon physical proximity. Spaces intersect and diverge whenever fans identify themselves as part of multiple fandoms, while a case could be made for fandom itself being an overall space. When fan-fiction writers produce a story they create an entry into an established community. They consciously position themselves within that space, and add their stories and ideas to the collective ethos of that fandom while simultaneously adding their own experiences in other fandoms and even Real Life—known as RL—to the evolving conventions of that space. They are people from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and geographical areas. The only commonality they all share is the desire to inhabit the same performative space. They form intense bonds through passionate interchange and mutual devotion to the material text and the process of personalizing and enlarging it—all without perhaps even living on the same continent. In the foundational work Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong discusses work in print as a form of permanency. He contends that “[t]he printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality”;15 but while we still read printed text on the screen we do not attach the same weight to it. We no longer expect the bulk of our knowledge to come from physical books, or indeed any other material object—our initial research into any subject, whether formal or informal, is done digitally.

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As Foley expounds in his later research, our mental processes are rewiring to attach less permanency to anything we learn as we are once again living in a world defined by what we see and hear, collectively. Simon J. Bronner adds, “people think of Internet information as simulated or virtual. … unlike touch, which can be used to verify physical evidence, sight identifies and is known to be manipulable.”16 The popular imagination is more consciously fluid than at any time in recent human history. Creativity fuses with near instantaneous response and an intrinsically visual medium to produce a virtually oral culture. Authors of fan fiction write with an awareness of the transient nature of their work: the website housing the work may become defunct, the work may be removed from the site, or the author might delete it for personal or even professional reasons. Most importantly, they write for an audience they are already intimately involved with, or from whom they are seeking intimacy. Ong asserts that “writing and print isolate,”17 but fan fiction—a form based on the digitally written and printed word—depends upon collaboration rather than isolation. The textual discourse is simultaneously an oral discourse. Fan fiction writers consciously create and perform their identities as they interact with each other in their digital space. They must learn the social cues and procedures within the community and the mechanics of navigating that community. According to Blank and Howard “today increasing numbers of connections use modern technology to transcend geographic, ethnic, and class differences and imagine a better future: a future in which these differences unify humans instead of divide them.”18 The connection they describe is the basic human need for acknowledgment and meaningful interaction, again the search for authentic experience that achieves its aim through the journey itself. The fan-fiction space allows an egalitarian experience, and accords even those who may be part of a subordinated group in RL to find a voice and an audience. Fans choose as much or as little anonymity as is desired; even lurkers (those who voraciously read the stories but do not write or comment) contribute to the viewer count, and therefore maintain a presence in the community, without typing a word. A physically isolated person can find a community, or even several communities, among groups they may never encounter in RL, and at that point perhaps even the term RL becomes as problematic as authenticity. What effect does this particular folk space have on ballads? The sphere that fan fiction inhabits on the Internet behaves in strikingly similar

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ways to the cultural space in which balladry thrives. In How to Read an Oral Poem Foley advises “we can profit substantially by recognizing the uncanny similarity between much oral poetry and the Internet … both depend on links rather than items, on connections rather than spatialized, warehousable objects.”19 The inherently ephemeral nature of much of the content found on the Internet means that what begins as a printed text and, according to Ong, “is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form,”20 loses its fixed nature and transforms into communal property. It is shaped and reshaped by individual consumers until it is socially fluid, reimagined in infinite ways, retaining only the vaguest connection to what was originally a finite text with a beginning and a definite ending. Fan fiction, like the ballad, represents text permanently in transition. This limitless space lends itself to a blurring of esthetic boundaries. The similarities between fan fiction and traditional balladry are not coincidental. They emerge out of a need to collectively recreate and perform the songs and stories we find culturally and emotionally relevant, the meaningful search for authenticity resulting in the tradition process, the need for cultural reproduction performed as an avenue of human connection. Abigail Derecho describes fan fiction as “archontic literature,” a term she takes from Derrida and applies to fan fiction, citing Derrida’s claim that “the archive augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas.”21 Derecho translates this concept to fan fiction by pointing out that all archontic literature, including fan fiction, “permits virtualities to become actualized.”22 Furthermore, where “print culture allowed anywhere from a handful to a few hundred possibilities within texts to be actualized by fan fiction writers[,] the Internet has enabled thousands of potentialities within single texts to be actualized and circulated.”23 Fan fiction enables the realization of potentialities within texts, but at the same time it indicates ways in which the text is relevant within popular culture by engaging in cultural reproduction. An Archive of Our Own (AO3) is a fan fiction site hosted by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting and preserving fan work. AO3 is the type of space envisioned by Derecho in which texts are expanded and transformed by a community of fans engaged in transformative practice. They not only perform cultural reproduction as a process, they actively create a tradition process through their constant textual engagement and iterative performance. The same text is used repeatedly in new narratives while performing the same cultural function. There is a solid representation

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on AO3 of the traditional-ballad fandom. It is a small but invested fandom that illustrates the transformative and generative force of ballads as a genre. These folk actualize the potentialities available within the ballads that inspire them. The most popular ballad fandom engages versions of Child Ballad 39, “Tam Lin.” While Child did not altogether succeed in his aim of having “at [his] command every valuable copy of every known ballad,”24 he did manage to present fifteen versions of “Tam Lin” (ESPB, 1:452−83), with Scandinavian ballads, Cretan, Albanian, and Italian fairytales, and several other narratives.25 Throughout the different Child versions there is a common narrative although the details can vary widely. I will provide a brief synopsis of the narrative here and indicate a number of variant details). The main female protagonist is usually known as Janet or Margaret, while the male is Tam Lin, or some such name. The ballad often begins with a warning to maidens to avoid the woods of Carterhaugh (or some variaton like Chester or Charter wood), followed by a description of Janet’s traveling there. She plucks a rose—Tam Lin warns her against this, but she insists that the woods are hers or her father’s (or states that she is her father’s heir). In most versions they engage in sex; several (such as version D) imply rape: He took her by the milk-white hand, And by the grass green sleeve, And laid her low down on the flowers, At her he asked no leave. The lady blushed, and sourly frowned, And she did think great shame (D: 7−8)

Janet returns home, pregnant, and when she begins to show, someone (usually an old, gray knight, but sometimes a relative) makes this public, and she returns to the woods to seek out Tam Lin (though in some versions she searches for abortifacient herbs, but never goes through with ending the pregnancy). Tam Lin tells her that he is a human, kept by the Queen of the Fairies, and that Janet can win his freedom if she intercepts the Queen’s entourage on Halloween, pulls him from his horse, and holds onto him no matter what form he is forced to take. He becomes in succession such things as a snake, a lion, and a hot coal, but Janet does not loosen her grip until he finally turns back into “a mother-naked man” (B: 33). They escape together, but usually only after some such memorable rejoinder from the Queen as:

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“O had I known at early morn Tomlin would from me gone, I would have taken out his heart of flesh Put in a heart of stone.” (D: 4)

Janet and Tam Lin return to her family home, which is where the traditional ballad narrative usually leaves them. Fan-fiction writers seek to realize the potentiality of the many loose ends inherent within traditional ballads. For “Tam Lin” specifically this often means exploring what happens to the main characters after Janet redeems Tam Lin from the Queen of the Fairies. This can vary widely depending on which version is the foundation text. For instance, stories based on versions that include rape and/or discussions of abortion tend to focus on the emotional tension between the characters, answering what happens next? Obviously, Janet and Tam Lin have to live with their past and some of the stories on AO3’s ballad community engage in intense psychological drama. One story that engages with the aftermath of Janet’s rape is Luzula’s “Down Among the Weeds.” Luzula interprets the rape as a symbolic act to appease a curse laid upon Tam Lin by the Queen of the Fairies. Tam Lin is compelled to rape any of his kinswomen who enter Caterhaugh Woods— making it a form of rape for him as well. Tam Lin is the incestuous rapistin-chief of the forest for three hundred years before he begins to appear to his distant kinswoman, Janet, in her dreams. She comes to him willingly, and when she returns home finds herself pregnant. She once more enters the woods and successfully challenges the Fairy Queen for possession of Tam Lin. One element of the foundational ballad that Luzula preserves is the initial exchange between Tam Lin and Janet. When the lovers finally meet outside of the dream world Tam Lin questions Janet: “‘What makes you break the rose? What makes you come to Carterhaugh without the leave of me?’” The author clarifies that “[t]he words were formal, like a ritual.” Janet responds in kind: “‘I’ll come and go all as I please, and not ask leave of any,’ Janet said in reply, completing the ritual.”26 The dialog directly reflects the traditional ballad: most of the Child versions begin with Janet plucking the rose and defying Tam Lin’s declared authority. Luzula shows this as an acknowledgment of the source material; the use of older lyrics connects Luzula’s creative reproduction with the original, illustrating an element of overt continuity with the ballad form.

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Luzula’s story is categorized as a gift for another writer—Snow. It is an assignment stemming from an open challenge for the community to write stories on a Child ballad chosen by Snow. This is evidence of the communal and self-perpetuating nature of the ballad fan-fiction community. Luzula transforms the original ballad specifically to suit her audience’s needs. This is an intrinsic quality of ballad performance, in which no performance is exactly the same. It is always the variation that makes that all-important collaborative connection between ballad singer and audience. Luzula responds to each of the comments on her story. These vary, but the majority comment on her resolution of the complication of Tam Lin as rapist. She explains that the process “took me some time (and beta feedback) … to work out the consent issues” (comments). A beta is one of a group of devoted editors in fandom (most popular fan-fiction writers have one and many are betas themselves). The presence of a beta further illustrates the existence of communal authorship in fan fiction mirroring that quality in traditional balladry. How closely does the ballad fan-fiction author identify with the conventional ballad singer? What Luzula produces is not a ballad; however, her work has performative qualities. She changes the foundational text to meet the tastes of her audience and fulfills Hartley’s bardic function by “locat[ing] self-made and personally published media … within a much longer historical context of popular narration.”27 Hartley indicates that “the function of the ‘bardic function’ is to textualize the world meaningfully for a given language community.”28 While she is not performing ballads in a conventional way, Luzula is functioning as Hartley’s bard, and creating deeper meaning from an old text for her community, and with the implied assistance of the collective within the folk space. Luzula’s story is an act of creative cultural reproduction, part of the tradition process perpetuating “Tam Lin” and fan fiction itself. Ballad fan fiction is comprised of entire teams of people offering criticism, suggestion, prompts, and inspiration to realize the potential of ballad stories in folk spaces. They are generally members of multiple fandoms, but they co-opt ballads and realize their potential for expansion. Ballads serve as foundational texts for many expanded art forms; they generate books, movies, stage plays, and even radio shows. The factor that distinguishes fan fiction based on ballads is the communal aspect of creation, and the immediate and infinite potential of the fan-fiction folk space as a venue for tradition, or cultural reproduction, with the stories themselves as the traditional product.

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Internet folk spaces also have the potential to initiate and accelerate the tradition process. The fan fiction space is an optimal avenue for traditionalizing even finished copyrighted texts, albeit not always with author approval. Fan fiction writers add their own conventions to the chosen text of their fandom and it becomes part of their own tradition process. As a fandom ages, the bulk of the stories take on a repetitive mode: the community writes for each other in forms intrinsic to the group. Favorite pairings create sub-communities as do preferred characterizations of figures central to the foundational narrative. The folk space encompasses a global community and for the most popular fandoms that can mean a community that never sleeps and never stops the process of cultural reproduction. Arguably, a novel, film, or song created just a few years ago can thereby become traditional through a process that for the traditional ballad took decades and even centuries to work itself out. Traditional ballads are not static and neither is the process of tradition. Creative cultural reproduction is not only possible, but highly beneficial to the preservation of traditional products. The form evolves without necessarily interrupting the function. The conventional forms of ballads still exist—they are preserved through live-streaming and recorded performances by professional and amateur performers; however, alternative folk spaces such as the fan-fiction community are uniquely suited to ensure the continuing relevance of traditional products such as ballads through their own mirroring of oral communities while simultaneously recreating traditional products from contemporary texts. NOTES Luzula, “Down Among the Weeds,” An Archive of Our Own, The Organization for Transformative Works, December 18, 2013, https://archiveo fourown.org/works/10887425. 2 “Living Traditions in a Modern World,” in Trevor J. Blank and Robert Glenn Howard, editors, Tradition in the Twenty-First Century: Locating the Role of the Past in the Present (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2013), p. 17. 3 Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), p. 17. 4 Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, p. 17. 5 John Hartley, The Uses of Digital Literacy (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009, repr. 2011), p. 82. 6 Hartley, Uses of Digital Literacy, p. 4. 7 Hartley, Uses of Digital Literacy, p. 84. 1

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Elliott Oring, “Living Traditions in a Modern World,” in Blank and Howard, p. 25. 9 Oring, “Living Traditions in a Modern World,” p. 28. 10 Oring, “Living Traditions in a Modern World,” p. 28. 11 Albert F. Friedman, ed., The Viking Book of Folk Ballads of the EnglishSpeaking World (1956; repr. New York: Viking Press, 1982), p. x. 12 John Miles Foley, Oral Tradition in Literature: Interpretation in Context (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1986), p. 9. 13 Foley, Oral Tradition in Literature, p. 8. 14 “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Karen Helekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), p. 16. 15 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word; 30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 130. 16 Simon J. Bronner, Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), p. 407. 17 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 73. 18 Blank and Howard, “Living Traditions in a Modern World,” p. 10. 19 John Miles Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 220. 20 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 130. 21 Quoted in Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction” (Helekson and Busse, p. 64). 22 Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” p. 74. 23 Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” p. 74. 24 G. L. Kittredge, “Biography of Francis James Child,” in ESPB, 1:xi 25 Bronson prints two further versions: TTCB, 39.1&4. 26 Luzula, “Down Among the Weeds.” 27 Hartley, Uses of Digital Literacy, p. 72. 28 Hartley, Uses of Digital Literacy, p. 80. 8

Chapter 12

A Game of Crows Poe, Plagiarism, and the Ballad Tradition Jennifer Goodman Wollock

E

DGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE Raven,” first published January 29, 1845, remains one of the most familiar of American poems, read by schoolchildren and university students alike and often ranked by scholars among the author’s most characteristic poetic achievements. Yet it also remains, like the bird at its center, enigmatic, cryptic, and opaque. The raven stalks into the speaker’s study window with its single word, “Nevermore,” and refuses to leave—but also refuses to explain its message. This essay, by retracing the raven’s flight, will open up a new line of interpretation; for literary ravens are not by nature solitary—they travel in flocks. But the companions of Poe’s raven are not often recognized as such. Poe’s poem, most often viewed as a solitary masterpiece of American inspiration, is critically isolated from its most obvious analogues.1 Yet by maintaining that isolation its readers miss what may well be a central theme of the piece. Poe himself reconstructed the genesis of his poem, designed to “suit at once the popular and the critical taste” in his best-known essay, “The Philosophy of Composition” (Graham’s Magazine, April 1846). He depicts himself as starting from a set of principles that determine the poem’s length (close to a hundred lines), principal effect (the refrain, a single word, “Nevermore,” to be spoken by a non-human voice [the Raven]), tone (melancholy) and theme, centered on the most beautiful and melancholy subject imaginable, the death of a beautiful woman. While Poe “pretends to no originality” in his meter or rhythm, he sees it as his “first object” in versification: for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing. The fact is, that originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention that [sic] negation.2

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In the course of his essay, which has been received with justifiable skepticism, Poe mentions no specific sources for “The Raven.” Many sources have been suggested. Some of these suggestions are contemporary and obvious: the uncommon meter of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” of 1844, or the raven from Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge—works that Poe reviewed in some detail. Poe hailed Barrett as the greatest female poet of her day, while condemning her technique and “pedantic study of false models.”3 Others identify analogues in the distant past, considering Odin’s ravens and various classical parallels,4 as well as earlier nineteenthcentury verse. Some of these suggestions have validity; a poet draws inspiration from many influences. Yet one key source seems to remain undetected. To find the perch from which Poe’s raven took its flight in January 1845, readers need to revisit the English and Scottish ballad tradition, where “The Three Ravens” (Child 26) and its Scots cousin, “The Twa Corbies” were already well established as paradigms of the genre. These two popular songs, in which scavenger birds, long associated with battle, discuss the fate of a fallen knight, may go back to a medieval original. (Bronson cites J. A. Fuller-Maitland’s idea that the fifteenth-century “Corpus Christi Carol” underlies the “Three Ravens.”5) The English ballad, the elegiac and comparatively more optimistic “Three Ravens,” first appeared in Thomas Ravenscroft’s Melismata of 1611.6 There a knight lies dead in a grassy field, defended by his hawks and hounds, and mourned, kissed, buried, and joined in death by his beloved, represented in the song as a pregnant doe. The grimmer Scots version was recorded by Sir Walter Scott (1771−1832) in the third volume of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (first published 1802−1803, reprinted in 1833−1834); a variant was discussed by William Motherwell in his Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern of 1827). Here the two crows of the title find themselves in a more promising situation, for the dead knight who lies behind the old foul ditch has already been forgotten by his closest companions. Many a one for him makes mane But nane sall ken where he is gane. Oer his white banes, when they are bare The wind sall blaw for evermair. (Child 26:5)

In this bleak universe, the knight is not only stripped of his flesh, but of his human and animal companions and left to the elements—in particular, to the ceaseless winds. (This might call to mind Dante’s First Circle of Hell, where the souls of the lustful blow forever in the wind; but the

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“Twa Corbies” have nothing to say of the knight’s soul. They know only of his bones.) The ballad retains some of the mystery and dark wisdom of the ancient birds that speak with King Arthur’s messengers in the medieval Welsh tale of “Culhwch and Olwen.”7 In these two superb ballads, two visions of life confront one another. In “The Three Ravens” there is a God, and the knight’s immediate family accompanies him to the grave, and beyond. Loving protectors continue to care for him after death. The ballad concludes: “God send euery gentleman / Such haukes, such hounds, and such a leman.” “The Twa Corbies,” first printed by Scott in 1803, responds by picturing the corpse lying forsaken. His hawks, hounds, and beloved have all found consolation elsewhere. Only the wind blows over his bones. There is no mention of a God, a prayer, or a true lover. In “The Raven,” Poe is not concerned with knights, or their bones, but with his speaker’s own losses, and with the fragile state of his psyche. His grief for “lost Lenore” is interrupted by the raven that knocks at his window, disturbs his study of “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,” and refuses to exit the scene. Its only message is the enigmatic word “Nevermore.” But, in this reading, “Nevermore” turns out to be a significant clue. Readers do not often connect Poe (1809−1849) with either Scott or the ballad tradition: we tend to keep them in separate pigeonholes. Yet in Poe’s day the rediscovery of the ballad was a preoccupation of poets and scholars across Britain, throughout Europe, and in Boston, where Francis James Child (1825−1896) would collect his English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Poe greatly admired the verse (though not the prose) of a fellow New Yorker, Henry William Herbert (1807−1858), author of a series of “American historical ballads,” who published his defense of the traditional English ballad in 1844.8 Ballads were at the forefront of most poets’ consciousness throughout the nineteenth century, whether they liked them or not. The “ballad muse” served as their collaborator and inspiration, as well as a competitor for their audiences’ attention. Poe was a singer from an early age, “having both a musical and cultivated voice,” according to James Galt, who supervised the recalcitrant seven-year-old Poe when he was sent to school in Irvine, Scotland for a short time in 1815.9 For this sensibility, Emerson would dismiss Poe as “a jingle man,” and Poe, for his part, would belittle the Boston literati for what he saw as a lack of poetic authenticity, repeatedly accusing Longfellow, in particular, of plagiarism, and reviewing their works on a regular basis with considerable asperity.10

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In this context, the attentive reader can see in Poe’s “Raven” a sophisticated response to the ballads, the internationally acclaimed raven ballad family in particular. “The Raven” addresses the experience of a poet with high literary aspirations as he faces the stream of oral transmission. It is highly plausible that Poe knew both the idealistic English “Three Ravens,” then in the widest circulation (thanks, among others, to Joseph Ritson (1752−1803)—a lively model for any critic at that time—who reprinted it in his Ancient Songs, 1790) and the darker “Twa Corbies” popularized by Scott.11 Poe’s single raven takes his place in the line of descent, a mathematical progression from three, to two, to one solitary bird, the latest in the chain. It is, however, the bird’s message that shows how the American poem responds to the Scots song. The “Twa Corbies” ends with the word “evermair”—“evermore” in American English. Poe picks up the rhyme in “Nevermore.” The archaic word “quoth” also imparts the air of an ancient ballad (as it does in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner,” or Wordsworth’s adaptation of Sir John Clanvowe’s, “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale,” then attributed to Chaucer). The DNA of this poem is showing. By rhyming his own poem with “The Twa Corbies,” Poe fastens it to the chain.12 While Poe uses Barrett Browning’s meter (the infectious Finnish Kalevala meter (trochaic tetrameter acatalectic) later to be adopted by Longfellow in “Hiawatha”) the final line of each stanza reverts to the seven-syllable ballad pattern.13 This is not, however, solely a question of ravens and their trajectories. By linking his poem to the ravens and crows of ballad lore, Poe is saying something specific about the experience of the ballad audience, and about poets as builders of human memory. He is commenting on the tenacity of the genre, its grip on the human brain. The ability of traditional folk song to hold a place in the hearer’s memory has been much discussed by literary scholars and psychologists interested in human cognition. The continuing power of this phenomenon was brought to life, for me, by a student who, the morning after hearing a particular ballad, complained that he could not get the chorus out of his head. Ballads are built to survive the centuries by latching on to new singers. The best ballads replicate themselves through the potent combination of melody, prosody, and language, working together. When the raven knocks, comes in, repeats his “Nevermore,” and refuses to leave, he is, in this reading, a personification of the ballad, “The Twa Corbies.” The speaker in his study is the poet, who, having come upon

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it in some “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” cannot shut that despairing song out of his brain. Poe’s meta-theme in “The Raven” is the psychological impact of poetic tradition, specifically oral tradition. Poe, like his protagonist, is far more likely to have found the “Twa Corbies” in the pages of a “quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—specifically, the third volume of Scott’s Minstrelsy—than to have heard it sung; 14 but if any poet can claim a vivid aural imagination, it is Poe. In a way this is another version of the “tradition and the individual talent”/“burden of the past”/“anxiety of influence” topos, but Poe’s focus penetrates deeper still.15 Poe’s poem represents the ballad, through the raven, as a living influence, neither an inert burden nor a psychological affliction (or hallucination) of the poet himself. Poe’s raven, “bird or demon,” is a presence that comes into the room (the brain represented, as in medieval and Renaissance literature, as a room, a “palace of memory”)16 and dominates it, never to leave. It does suggest a kind of demonic possession. The message of death, abandonment, loss of affection, and remembrance, the eternal loneliness of the discarded knight’s bare bones that Scott’s variant of “The Twa Corbies” conveys, fastens itself upon the speaker’s mind with claws of steel. The ballad brings on a permanent state of despair. All the natural human hopes—of love, loyalty, and memory enduring beyond the grave—reflected in the English version, are stripped away in the Scots version. Unburied bones, bare and anonymous, are the knight’s only monument. The same pitiless vision envelops Poe’s “Raven,” as the speaker loses all hope of reunion with his beloved. More than that, with its rhythms, repetitions, and refrains, supremely vocal, whether read aloud or not,17 the ballad sticks in the mind.18 That hopeless vision of life and death as futile, grim, and transitory, never goes away.19 The fact that Poe’s speaker is himself a bereaved lover further connects “The Raven” with the earlier English ballad; for in “The Three Ravens,” the knight’s “leman” (Middle English “beloved”) mourns her lost beloved to the point of heartbreak and death; and she does die of love.20 But, in some respects, the speaker of Poe’s “Raven” remains in the position of those who “make mane” for the lost knight in “The Twa Corbies” but never find out where he has gone. Lenore is “lost.” Death and the destiny of body and soul remain an enigma, an unsolved mystery. For the crows and for us in the audience, the knight’s fate is no mystery, but a matter of dramatic irony. This approach to “The Raven” links it firmly with two of Poe’s main preoccupations of 1845−1846: his series of attacks on his Bostonian rival

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Longfellow, and his advocacy for an international copyright law (not to be established until 1891).21 Poe had fired the first salvo in his one-sided feud with Longfellow on January 13, 1845. Here, in his initial review of Longfellow’s anthology, The Waif, Poe charged him with representing the traditional Scots ballad of “Bonnie George Campbell” (Child 210) from Motherwell’s Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern as his own translation from “The Good George Campbell” of the German O. L. B. Wolff, which indeed it was—Wolff having translated the ballad from the Scots original without attribution.22 Poe could have encountered versions of both the “Twa Corbies” and the “Three Ravens” in Motherwell, as well as in Sir Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, an even more famous anthology, and perhaps even in popular oral transmission. Although the lines “O’er his white banes, when they are bare/ The wind sall blaw for evermair,” are only found in Scott’s version, he certainly knew the Motherwell volume as well, because it figures in his energetic attacks on Longfellow. So, at the very moment in the spring of 1845 that Poe is rising to literary fame on the wings of his “Raven,” we find him plunging into a new series of strident attacks on Longfellow as a plagiarist. What is happening here? The coincidence of these two literary enterprises is susceptible to more than one interpretation, depending on the reader’s view of Poe’s consciousness of the thematic and verbal links between his poem and the “Twa Corbies.” The ongoing “Longfellow War” and his known views on plagiarism would at a first glance seem to deter Poe from announcing to the world that he is drawing on a known anthology of traditional ballads as a source of his own poem.23 This seems altogether too comparable to what he is blaming Longfellow for having done. Perhaps on the principle that “the best defense is a good offense,” Poe redoubled his efforts to direct attention toward his Bostonian rival, “The Professor,” attacking him again in the updated version of his 1844 lecture on “Poets and Poetry of America” on February 28 at the New York Historical Society, and in a series of articles continuing through the summer of 1846.24 And, it would seem, he succeeded. Poe seems to have trapped himself between the idea of copyright— the poem as intellectual property—and the oral tradition, the ballad as collective cultural inheritance. Or has he? His personal experience of the economics of literature, in which a literary elite wins fame and sometimes fortune, while drawing for inspiration and often exact verbal models on the work of struggling writers like himself, not to mention anonymous folk poets stretching back into antiquity, fuels his war on “plagiarism.”

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In many ways his excitement calls to memory that combative stickler Joseph Ritson, a literary critic famous in his own day as a champion of the authentic tradition of ancient balladry, but also noted for his strict, legally inspired, concept of authorial rights. Poe resembled Ritson in another way, as an outsider attempting to claw his way into the intellectual establishment. At the end of the eighteenth century Ritson had first brought himself to the attention of the literary elite by, essentially, biting them in the ankle. Ritson’s bitter attacks on the principles and editorial practices of beloved stars of the literary firmament like Bishop Thomas Percy (1729−1811) (of Reliques fame), and the amiable professor and poet laureate Thomas Warton (1728−1790), won him not only enmity, but also immediate attention and eventual, though often grudging, respect. 25 Poe’s stance as a critic and gadfly of the literary establishment—in particular the northeastern, Abolitionist establishment—reflects a similar sense of the critic as outsider looking in, hankering for admission to a closed circle. The literary context of 1845 suggests another interpretation: Poe is playing an elaborate, high-stakes literary game of hide-and-seek with the Bostonians. On April 5, 1845, he published a conciliatory rejoinder to “Outis” (who Kenneth Silverman believes must be Poe writing under that pseudonym against himself, to keep the debate in play) in which he proposes a new theory of “unconscious plagiarism” that exonerates Longfellow and his “most eminent” fellow poets, Poe included, from “moral delinquency.” This supports the supposition that both interpretations may well be valid.26 Poe’s argument is a reductio ad absurdum: he anticipates Harold Bloom in suggesting that all authors are plagiarists.27 As in Poe’s celebrated detective story, “The Purloined Letter”28 (also published in 1845)—“perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination,” Poe remarked—the object of the quest is hiding in plain sight. As Silverman notes, the detective Dupin and the minister who steals the queen’s letter “are brothers under the skin … ; both write verses and purloin letters. Indeed this story of the theft of language ends with a classical quotation concerning the fatal competition between the brothers Atreus and Thyestes” (p. 229). Poe’s handling of the mystery in his story is curiously reminiscent of his war with Longfellow, whom he had indeed accused of “purloining” material from him and from others, including William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy, Ancient and Modern.29 The tale can be read as a not-too-veiled comment on the problem of plagiarism, the letter as intellectual property, and the ethics of the author. Thus the “many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore” of

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“The Raven” is functionally analogous to the “trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard” of the story,30 (p. 112) where the “purloined letter” in disguise is visible to any chance visitor. The “unprincipled man of genius” described by Poe must in this interpretation be none other than Longfellow, in whose work Poe had recognized “a moral taint” (p. 114).31 Dupin’s taunting quotation from Crébillon’s Atrée, the message he leaves for his adversary, “Un project si funeste,/Si ce n’est digne d’Atreus, est digne de Thyeste,” (“A plan so morbid, if it is not worthy of Atreus, is worthy of Thyestes,”) recalls the original Greek myth. Atreus’s infamous banquet, in which he served his brother Thyestes’s sons to their father in revenge for Thyestes’s seduction of Atreus’s wife, matches the literary cannibalism that Poe has detected in Longfellow’s work: Thyestes curses and later kills Atreus, with the help of Aegisthus, Thyestes’s son by his own daughter, whom Atreus had sent to assassinate Thyestes himself. Poe’s allusion to these warring brothers evokes the incest, fratricide, and treachery among authors that enraged Poe the critic. Poe’s complete project of 1845 combines poetry, scholarship, literary criticism, and the short story, disparate genres too often evaluated separately, to create a multidimensional study of its central problem.32

Poe and the Ballads The notion that Poe’s raven was inspired by the raven ballads was broached in the second half of the nineteenth century, when scholarship across the board was much more focused on the ballad tradition than it is now. Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833−1908), the poet, stockbroker, and anthologist whose work helped to establish the American literary canon, brought it up in 1884, only to dismiss the idea out of hand. His trivialization reflects the biases that prevented Stedman’s generation from solving Poe’s riddle. Stedman’s expression, “cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets” betrays his own stereotyped view of ballads and the Middle Ages, not to mention the romantic medievalism of Poe’s youth.33 Stedman seeks to distance the heroic, independent American author Poe from both nineteenth-century medievalism and gothic influences. There are no actual turrets or heralds in either “The Three Ravens” or “The Twa Corbies.” The only possibly medieval element in either song is the knight, with his shield in Ravenscroft, without it in Scott’s version. The birds of the earlier songs sit on trees in a naturalistic manner; but “turret” is a much funnier-sounding word. Nor do they caw, except in one significant instance—the American comic (minstrel-show, according

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to George Lyman Kittredge) member of the family, “Willy McGee McGaw.”34 Stedman was keen to defend Poe’s “Raven” as an independent, serious American literary work of high art, unconnected with any European, medieval, gothic, or, heaven forfend, popular comic song. (His dismissal of any connection with Barnaby Rudge’s talkative comic raven, Grip—a bird based on a Dickens family pet—is more justified.)35 In fact, Poe’s interest in balladry aligns with his early appreciation of German romanticism, in all probability sparked by his professor at the University of Virginia, the “accomplished German” George Blaettermann.36 Blaettermann’s influence, according to James A. Harrison, “is perceptible all through Poe’s humorous, imaginative work.” 37 Poe’s familiarity with German, most likely acquired at that time, has been well established by Gustav Gruener (1904).38 Whatever his command of the German language, Poe’s preface to his 1831 Poems, an earlier version of “The Philosophy of Composition,”39 reveals his interest in German esthetic philosophers, as does his “Exordium to Critical Notices” (1842); 40 all the more so as the Germans of the Jena school (Winkelmann, Novalis, Schelling, and the two Schlegels), with “their magnificent critiques raisonnées,” as he put it, offered the American writer what Poe saw as a more articulate, more thorough, and more profound alternative to the usual British models (like Samuel Johnson, Hugh Blair, and Lord Kames). Poe’s review of Mrs. (Felicia Dorothea) Hemans (1793−1835) confirms his knowledge of Gottfried August Bürger’s celebrated ballad “Lenore” of 1773—a new German poem drawn from folk models, which put into practice the theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744−1803), the philosopher who awoke an international appreciation of folksong in the second half of the eighteenth century. “Lenore” was a new ballad combining widespread European folk themes, from the “wild hunt,” and the “dance of death” with the return of the lost beloved (here the dead male lover, and soldier in the army of Frederick II of Prussia) to his beloved Lenore’s window by night, only to take that rash woman who dared to question the ways of providence on a wild ride (as in the Erl-king) that ends at his grave, where she also dies. The principles guiding poetic design articulated in Poe’s preface and practiced throughout his work often evoke Herder, Bürger, and the ballad by name or form, as in “Ulalume, a Ballad.” The “lost Lenore” of “The Raven” (as of Poe’s earlier “Lenore” first published in Boston in 1843 in James Russell Lowell’s new periodical Pioneer) is a forgotten literary allusion marking Poe’s train of thought.41

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It seems probable that Poe came across the raven ballads, if he did not know them earlier, during his research into Longfellow’s source for “George Campbell” as part of his review of The Waif. This was not an easy ballad to pin down, as Child’s notes make clear. Poe could well have had expert advice and bibliographic assistance from his friend, the antiquarian bookseller William Gowans, “a well-read Scotsman who ran a sizeable bookstore farther downtown,” a fellow resident of the boarding house at 137 Waverly Place in Greenwich Village (today housing real estate offices), where Poe and his family took up residence in 1837. Gowans, who later offered sympathetic reminiscences of Poe and his family life,42 could hardly have been unfamiliar with Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which first appeared in 1802−1803. The Middle Ages continued to preoccupy creative artists, scholars, and philosophers, but the overt enthusiasm and antiquarian expertise of Scott were no longer a surefire entrée to literary acclaim. The critics had moved on. The only safe method for the upcoming poet was to balance medieval interests with modernistic techniques, as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Charles Williams, and Geoffrey Hill would all do. The backlash against the ballads even extended to those most indebted to their influence. (Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, as loyal English subjects, scorned Burns’s national rallying cry “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled” for a lack of true artistry, though it is not clear whether they were more repelled by its radical sentiments, its broad Scots, or other technical deficiencies.)

Lost Lenore In fact Poe’s enterprise of 1845 reveals, to the discerning eye, clear connections with his earlier literary interests and statements of his “philosophy of composition.” An unsigned Atlantic Monthly review noted as early as 1896 that the “Lost Lenore” of the poem was itself a forgotten literary allusion, in all probability dating back to Poe’s exposure to German Romanticism at the University of Virginia.43 As noted above, the ballad “Lenore,” the best-known poem of the German Romantic poet Gottfried August Bürger (1748−1794), was a response to Herder’s 1773 manifesto in praise of native folk song traditions, Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, and was published in the following year. “In dramatic force and

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in its vivid realization of the weird and supernatural [it] remains without a rival” (according to an unsigned article in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, IV:812). “Lenore” brought Bürger fame in Germany and beyond.44 Sir Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas père both began their literary careers by translating it. It enjoyed startling success as the first ground-breaking German romantic poem: even before Goethe’s Werther, Bürger’s “Lenore” spread the romantic mode across Europe. In Bürger’s “Lenore,” that wild and unhappy poet, in many respects a kindred spirit to Poe’s narrator in “The Raven,” fuses plot material and themes from “Sweet William’s Ghost” (Child 77), with possible echoes from two other related ballad families, represented in English by “The Unquiet Grave” (Child 78) and “The Wife of Usher’s Well” (Child 79), also dealing with the return of a beloved from the grave. Bürger, then a student, took up his pen to answer Herder and Goethe’s manifesto calling for a national strain in German poetry. Under the potent influence of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poesie and MacPherson’s poems attributed to Ossian, Bürger attempted to combine folk and literary features in a new poetry that would command a broad audience and help to shape national identity.45 Poe voiced similar aspirations in his preface to his Poems of 1831, “Letter to Mr.———.” This, Poe’s earliest published critical essay, first outlines his concept of poetry, adopted from Coleridge, as “opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object pleasure, not truth.” 46 Here poetry differs from romance “by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure … to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.”47 This notion resurfaces in Poe’s two critical reviews of Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems of 1841.48 Both reviews emphasize Poe’s scorn for didactic poetry, the belief that a poem’s chief goal must be the moral improvement of its readers. “His conception of the aims of poesy is all wrong; and this we shall prove at some future date—to our own satisfaction, at least.” Poe had already paid homage to Bürger’s “Lenore” by using “Lenore” as the title of a ballad of his own in 1843.49 The plot lines of these two “Lenore” poems are different: Poe’s poem is a response to Bürger’s rather than a translation or adaptation. In Bürger’s poem, Lenore is the young woman whose anxiety to learn the fate of her beloved William seems to be answered when he returns to her by night. She does not realize that he comes as a revenant from the grave. William carries her off on a wild ride across country to the graveyard where he is buried. There, revealing himself

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as a ghost, he reproves her immoderate grief, which has brought a fearful punishment upon her. Lenore dies on the spot, enforcing the moral that “God is not to be questioned,” while the dead dance around and Lenore’s soul is recommended to heaven—to the consternation of later theologians.50 Poe’s “Lenore,” by contrast, is innocent of any possible blasphemy. In it, Poe comes to Lenore’s defence. The narrator of his “Lenore” confronts her surviving fiancé, Guy de Vere (not a character in Bürger at all), demanding that he weep for the innocent, dead lady. The poem (or perhaps the lover) goes on to rejoice in her spirit’s release from its earthly tormentors: “Let no bell toll!—lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, / Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damnèd Earth.” Without reproducing Bürger’s story, Poe builds on his theme and that of the underlying group of ballads, the problem of untimely bereavement and appropriate mourning for the dead. Rejecting Bürger’s punishment of the original Lenore, Poe too forbids excessive mourning—but for different reasons. In a complex argument strongly influenced by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Paul Hurh sees “The Raven,” as well as such works as “Berenice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” as literally dramatizations of the Jena critical project, the version of Kant’s idealist critical philosophy formulated by Fichte and his followers at the University of Jena.51 Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” which purports to explain the composition of “The Raven” as a scientific process based on rational critical choices, is for Hurh not so much a hoax as it is Poe’s idealized version of the productive process as formulated by the Jena school. Hurh rightly shows the ex post facto nature of Poe’s supposed explanation, paralleled in the poem by the predetermined question-and-answer structure of the “Nevermore” refrain itself, which results in a “dialog” that is in reality a monologue.52 Through Poe’s proto-structuralist idealization, the “Philosophy of Composition” and its author become fictionalized, and this fictionalized author, too, has much in common with the narrator of “The Raven.” In fact, Poe worked on the poem for years, and frequently solicited help from friends, one of whom, Colonel Du Solle, reported that “[Poe] had more than once remarked that he had never found so much difficulty with a poem and was inclined to give up the whole thing and throw away the manuscript.” The bird of the poem is reported by another witness to have been originally an owl—a trace of which remains in the poem in the bust of Pallas Athena—then (according to Poe himself in “Philosophy of Composition”), a parrot—for the creature had to be irrational, yet able to talk, and only later a raven.

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The “Philosophy of Composition” “explanation” has the additional benefit, for Poe, of eliding any question of sources, which the originality of construction (in the Jena theory) renders irrelevant. By this means Poe avoids any question of “plagiarism,” while any actual use of folk sources or participation in a chain of ballad transmission is transferred in fictionalized form to the narrator, within the poem, pondering his “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore.” Truly this is a fascinating reflection of the famous dispute between J. G. Herder, representing the primary importance of traditional language, anthropology and folklore, and Kant, turning away from them after 1784 in favor of critical idealism.53 Poe’s use of Kantian critical philosophy as an escape mechanism conceals the Herderian experience of writing “The Raven”—that long struggle—behind a barrier of abstract design. This ascent into the realms of pure reason fortifies the poet against any social, literary, or critical consequences of his series of thematically linked publications of the year 1845. Nevertheless, it is the theme of the original “Lenore”— the death of a beautiful and loving young woman, in consort with Poe’s fears for his own ailing wife Virginia, who would die in 1847—that gave rise to this poem. The late-arriving raven brought in its own poetic topoi, including the “nevermore,” which Poe honed into a balladic device to drive home the message. The “thing in itself ” is the complex series of attacks and retreats that constitute Poe’s 1845 “Raven” project, his “game of crows.”54 NOTES 1 For example, cf. William Carlos Williams’s depiction of Poe as the quintessential American: “His greatness is in that he turned his back and faced inland, to originality, with the identical gesture of a Boone.” George Arms, “American Poetry,” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 25. 2 Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka, edited by W. H. Auden (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1950), p. 427. 3 A puzzled Barrett remarked, “You would have thought it had been written by a friend and foe, each stark mad with love and hate, and writing the alternate passages.” Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 255, 491. Cf. Francis P. Dedmond, “Poe and the Brownings,” American Transcendentalist Quarterly n.s. 1 (1987): 116. Poe would dedicate his November 1845 volume, The Raven and Other Poems (New York: Wiley and Putnam), to Elizabeth Barrett.

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Both discussed by John F. Adams, “Classical Raven Lore and Poe’s ‘Raven,’” Poe Studies 5 (1972): 50−57. 5 Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Singing Tradition of Child’s Popular Ballads (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), p. 90. 6 Iona and Peter Opie, The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 21−22. 7 The Mabinogi, trans. Patrick K. Ford (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 147−48. These creatures, beginning with the Blackbird of Cilgwri, have much more to say for themselves than Poe’s Raven. Lady Charlotte Guest’s translations of the Mabinogion began appearing in London in 1838. 8 See David W. Judd in Henry W. Herbert, Life and Writings of Frank Forester (Henry W. Herbert), ed. David W. Judd (New York: Judd, 1882) 2:53; Henry W. Herbert, “The Ballad Poetry of England,” Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book 29 (1844): 262−65. 9 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), pp. 18, 30; see also Terence Allan Hoagwood, From Song to Print: Romantic Pseudo-Songs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Maureen McLane, Minstrelsy, Balladeering, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10 Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles; The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1963). 11 For Joseph Ritson’s career and importance as a champion of scholarly editorial standards, see Bertrand Harris Bronson, Joseph Ritson, Scholar at Arms (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1938). 12 Elizabeth Barrett’s “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” also contains the word “evermore,” as has been noted, but it does not occur in the same key position as in the ballad. 13 Longfellow was reported by the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath to have encountered the Kalevala on an 1842 trip to Germany. (On Freiligrath see Frederic Ewen, A Half-Century of Greatness: The Creative Imagination of Europe, 1848–1884, ed. Jeffrey Wollock (New York: New York University Press, 2007), pp. 346−53.) Elias Lönnrot first published his version of the Finnish epic in 1835, but “Finnish runes” and their meter had already been much discussed earlier in the century, with John Bowring’s article (“On the Runes of Finland,” Westminster Review 14 (1827): 1−25) being the best-known account of the subject in English. Their trochaic rhythm is notoriously one of the most distinctive and infectious meters in poetry. 14 William Motherwell’s Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern (Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827) reproduces a later version of the ballad that omits the final “evermair,” and covers Poe’s tracks to some degree. Poe never mentions the more famous Scott anthology, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, but Motherwell discusses and commends it. 4

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T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” The Egoist 6 (1919), no. 4, pp. 54–55 and no. 5, pp. 72–73. Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) all reflect on different aspects of this problem. 16 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) on early memory theories and their role in literature. 17 Poe’s own reading of “The Raven,” geared to terrify its audience, is described by Susan Archer Weiss in her “Last Days of Edgar Allen Poe,” The Independent 56, no. 2892 (May 5, 1904), p. 713. 18 Charles Alonso Smith, Repetition and Parallelism in English Verse: A Study in the Technique of Poetry (New York and New Orleans: University Publishing Co., 1894); Laury Magnus, The Track of the Repetend: Syntactic and Lexical Repetition in Modern Poetry (New York: AMS Press, 1989); Valentine Cunningham, Victorian Poetry Now (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 53. 19 On the persistence of certain tunes and rhythms in the memory, the socalled “earworm” phenomenon, see also Mark Twain, “A Literary Nightmare,” Atlantic Monthly (1876): 167−69, and Robert McCloskey, “Pie and Punch and You-know-whats,” in Centerburg Tales (New York: Viking, 1951), pp. 154−91. On Poe and Twain see Alan Gribben, “‘That Pair of Spiritual Derelicts’: The Poe-Twain Relationship,” Poe Studies 18 (1985): 17−20. I thank my esteemed colleague Jerome Loving for pointing out Twain’s particular fondness for Poe. On the connection with plagiarism, see Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 20 See among other works Jacques Ferrand, Treatise on Lovesickness (Paris, 1610), trans. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989) and Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1638), both of which well represent the medical tradition of love (erotic melancholy and related phenomena) as a dangerous disease. See also Mary Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and Its Commentaries (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). For death as associated with bereavement see Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, and Wolfgang Stroebe, “Health Outcomes of Bereavement,” The Lancet 370 (2007): 1960–73. 21 Poe declared in a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (August 27, 1842), “Without an international copyright law, American authors might as well cut their throats.” See Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, p. 5; Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 247−49. Poe had attended the Booksellers’ Dinner in New York (March 30, 1837), where William L. Stone called for the encouragement of an American national literature and Poe offered a toast to “The Monthlies of Gotham—Their Distinguished Editors, and Their Vigorous Collaborators.” (Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 4−5; Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, p. 130.) 22 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 235−36; Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 132−89. Longfellow responded in a letter of 19 February 1845, where he 15

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demonstrated his innocence and objected to Poe’s “very discourteous language.” See Graham’s Magazine 27 (1845): 240. Poe had falsely accused Hawthorne of plagiarizing him in 1838 ( Jerry A. Herndon, “The Masque of the Red Death: A Note on Hawthorne’s Influence,” in Masques, Mysteries, and Mastodons: A Poe Miscellany, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher (Baltimore, MD: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 2006), pp. 38−44). 23 Nelson F. Adkins, “‘Chapter on American Cribbage,’ Poe and Plagiarism,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 42 (1948): 169−210. 24 Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 132−89. 25 Bronson, Joseph Ritson. 26 Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 179−81. 27 Marilyn Randall, Pragmatic Plagiarism: Authorship, Profit, and Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 26. 28 “The Purloined Letter,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. W. H. Auden (New York: Modern Library, 1950). 29 Poe actually used the word “purloined” in accusing Longfellow of plagiarism. As Roberta Sharp explains, “Sidney Moss points out that on 30 March 1844, Poe wrote Lowell a letter protesting having been accused by the Foreign Quarterly Review of imitating Tennyson, whose first published book was entitled Poems by Two Brothers (1827). Furthermore, according to [Sidney P.] Moss, the same article praised Longfellow as the exception to the pattern of plagiarism and imitation European critics found in American writers” (Roberta Sharp, “Poe’s Duplicitous Dupin,” in Masques, Mysteries and Mastodons: A Poe Miscellany, edited by Benjamin Franklin Fisher (Baltimore, MD: Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, 2006), pp. 63−76). See Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 157−58; see also Poe, Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York, 1984), p. 678, for the hit at Longfellow, which follows. Such remarks undoubtedly incensed Poe, who had accused Longfellow in 1840 of plagiarizing Tennyson in a way “too palpable to be mistaken, and which belongs to the most barbarous class of literary robbery: that class in which, while the words of the wronged author are avoided, his most intangible, and therefore his least defensible and least reclaimable property is purloined” (quoted by Moss, p. 138). 30 Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka, p. 112. 31 Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, p. 157. 32 The insistence by Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Barbara Johnson, and other critics that the mystery of “The Purloined Letter” centers on the king’s impotence sheds more light on the psychology of critics, than it does on Poe. In Poe the king and queen are ancillary figures, red herrings that draw the critical ego off the scent. These European, Freudian solutions also reflect the kind of algebraic thinking, “solving for x where x can be any variable” that Dupin deplores in his critique of police procedure. Poe’s is a story about poets: it is their behavior to one another that is of central importance. In contrast consider Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” (inspired by “The Purloined Letter” and modeled on it).

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In that story the king plays a much more active role, and is supplanted by a “far better man” of his former mistress’s choice. Even so the king in Doyle has a presence in the story that is denied to the king in Poe. See John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988) and Richard Hull, “‘The Purloined Letter’: Poe’s Detective Story vs. Panoptic Foucauldian Theory,” Style 24(2) (1990): 201−14. 33 E. C. Stedman, “Comment on “The Raven”: “As for the gruesome bird, he is unlike all the other ravens of his clan, from the “twa corbies” and “three ravens” of the balladists to Barnaby’s rumpled “Grip.” Here is no semblance of the cawing rook that haunts ancestral turrets and treads the field of heraldry …” (The Raven (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884), p. 12). Mark Twain expresses the same discomfort with the Middle Ages and nineteenth-century medievalism, notably in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but also in his many stories of Tom Sawyer, a great reader of Sir Walter Scott. 34 John Jacob Niles noted that this version of “The Three Ravens” was still widely sung by men’s glee clubs in his day. Niles published his Ballad Book (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin) in 1960, but “this piece of nonsense was sung in my family, for the purpose of creating humor, when I was a boy” (p. 103), which would take it at least as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century. 35 This line of anti-chivalric comedy can be traced back beyond Cervantes’s Don Quixote into the Middle Ages, and reasserts itself in Mark Twain’s doubleedged A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court of 1889, as well as Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) and its Broadway offspring, Spamalot (2004). 36 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 28−29. 37 In a personal letter to Gustav Gruener, cited in the latter’s “Poe’s Knowledge of German,” Modern Philology 2(1) (1904b): 127−28. Prof. James Albert Harrison (1848−1911), who taught English, French and German literature at the University of Virginia, edited the 17-volume Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe from original sources and manuscripts. See also Gruener, “Notes on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffmann upon Edgar Allen Poe,” PMLA 19 (1904): 1−25, and Charles W. Kent, “Poe’s Student Days at the University of Virginia,” in The Unveiling of the Bust of Edgar Allan Poe in the library of the University of Virginia (Poe Memorial) (Lynchburg, VA: J. P. Bell, [1901]), p. 21. 38 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, p. 120, contra, infers that Poe probably did not know that language, citing two instances of apparent misspelling or misreadings. A similar case had been made by Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century, 1942), p. 250 and before him George E. Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), p. 96. But the argument is defective both materially and formally, and falls apart on closer scrutiny of the sources. The more serious, but at the same time amusing, gaffe, Poe’s “Suard and André” for “Suard and others,” is a mistranslation from August Wilhelm Schlegel’s essay “Alterthümer der französischen Buhne,” (“Antiquities of the French Stage”). But the error, which

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arises from the fact that andre was a standard German spelling for andere [“others”] at that time, was first made (as both Quinn and Woodberry point out) not by Poe, but by John Black, in his 1815 translation of Schlegel’s Lectures of Dramatic Art and Literature, Lecture XVII (London, Edinburgh and Dublin: Baldwin and Company, 1815). The translator of Schlegel, one would think, had a tolerable knowledge of German, but quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, sometimes even Homer is caught napping. The error was repeated by William Hazlitt in his essay on Schlegel on the drama in the Edinburgh Review, 26 (1816), but since there are other extracts from Schlegel’s essay in Poe’s article, his source must have been Black’s translation. From this and much other evidence Quinn (following Woodberry) argued that Poe had a habit of “quoting from secondary sources as if they were primary”—which can hardly be denied. But then, how does this reflect “how little German Poe knew,” if Poe never even looked at the German text? Without that—or an extensive knowledge of late eighteenth-century French theatrical bibliography—“Suard and André” does not stand out as an obvious error. The arguments of Gruener, a German-speaker himself (“Poe’s Knowledge of German”), and of Palmer Cobb, “Poe’s Knowledge of the German Language and Literature,” in The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allen Poe (Chapel Hill, NC: The University Press, 1908), pp. 20−30) in favor of Poe’s knowledge of German, are more convincing; but Schlegel’s undoubted influence on Poe (Margaret Alterton, “Origins of Poe’s Critical Theory,” University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, vol.II, no.3 (1925), esp. pp. 68−76; Paul Hurh, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Berkeley, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 60−67) does not imply that he read him in the original. 39 Silverman’s comments (Edgar A. Poe, pp. 69−70) on Poe’s literary sources in this early volume of poems, and on Poe’s rejection of second-hand thought while borrowing directly from Coleridge, are instructive in the context of the present discussion. 40 Originally published as “Review of New Books” in Graham’s Magazine 20 (1842): 68−69, as a response to Cornelius Mathews. Poe’s interest in and affinities with German idealistic philosophy and romantic criticism is discussed at length by Margaret Alterton; cf. Hurh, American Terror, and Pasquale Jannaccone, “The Aesthetics of Edgar Poe,” translated by Peter Mitilineos, Poe Studies 7(1) (1974): 1−13. 41 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 201−3 tentatively suggests a different source: “the choice of the heroine’s name perhaps evidences such displacement in Poe himself, resounding as it does with one of the middle names of William Henry Leonard, who often seems linked in Poe’s mind with lost and grieved-for women.” 42 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, p. 130. 43 Atlantic Monthly 78 (1896), pp. 551−54. 44 Peter Boerner, “Bürger’s Ballad Lenore in Germany, France and England,” in Sensus Communis: Contemporary Trends in Comparative Literature, edited

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by János Riesz, Henry Remak, Peter Boerner, and Bernhard Scholz (Tübingen: Günther Narr, 1986), pp. 305−11. 45 Gottfried August Bürger, Gedichte, edited by August Sauer, 2 vols. (Berlin and Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1884). 46 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 69−70. It begins “Dear B—” and is also cited as “Letter to B—,” perhaps Bliss, Poe’s publisher. Coleridge contrasts poetry and science in almost identical words in his Biographia Literaria. 47 Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography, pp. 175−77. 48 Graham’s Magazine, 20 (1842), pp. 189−90; ibid., 20 (1842), pp. 248–51. See Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles, pp. 146–51. 49 Silverman, Edgar A. Poe, pp. 201−3; Poe’s “Lenore” is notable for its use of the classic ballad meter: it is written in iambic “fourteeners,” the meter made famous (or notorious) in American literary annals by Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom of 1662. 50 William Alfred Little, Gottfried August Bürger (New York: Twayne, 1974), pp. 102−7. 51 Hurh, American Terror, pp. 60−67 (cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).) 52 Hurh, American Terror, pp. 64−66. 53 John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 54 Susan Archer Weiss, “Reminiscences of Edgar A. Poe,” The Independent, Aug. 25, 1904, pp. 446−47; cf. “Poe’s ‘Raven’” (anonymous letter), NY Times, Sept. 3, 1904. For Colonel Du Solle’s remark, see Susan Archer Weiss, “Reminiscences of Edgar A. Poe,” The Independent, May 5, 1904, p. 1013.

Notes on the Contributors

Richard Firth Green has taught at several universities in Canada and at the Ohio State University in Columbus, where he is an Academy Professor (having retired from teaching in 2016). He has published three monographs and numerous articles on medieval literature and cultural history; his latest book is Elf Queens and Holy Friars (2016). E. David Gregory is Professor Emeritus at Athabasca University, Canada, where he served as Dean of Arts. A former editor of Canadian Folk Music and president of the Folklore Studies Association of Canada, he is the author of numerous articles and four books (including Victorian Songhunterss and The Late Victorian Folksong Revival); his current project is a biography of Lucy Broadwood. Sarah Harlan-Haughey is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maine. Author of The Ecology of The English Outlaw and articles on Old Norse, Old English, and Middle English literature, she is an ecocritic and folklorist. Her current book projects explore late medieval outlaw material and Lawman’s necropastoral poetics. Shaun F. D. Hughes is Professor of English at Purdue University. He publishes mostly on Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic and has guest-edited issues of Modern Fiction Studies on Postcolonial topics and most recently on Tolkien (2004). His latest publication is “Hallgrímur Pétursson and the Icelandic Baroque,” JEGP (2018). Hans Kuhn, originally from Switzerland, was Professor of Germanic Languages at the Australian National University from 1965-1990 and has been a Visiting Fellow since. In recent decades, he has worked much in the borderline area of text and music, publishing a book on Danish patriotic songs, Defining a Nation in Song (1990), and regularly attending conferences on ballads and folktales. James Massengale is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA. A member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music, he has published extensively

242   Notes on the Contributors

on Swedish poets Bellman and Dalin, most recently as music commentator for Dalin’s works, including Samlade skrifter av Olof von Dalin: II:2, Kommentar till Poesi (2018). James Moreira has a doctorate in Folklore from Memorial University and teaches Anthropology and Community Studies at the University of Maine at Machias. He has published articles on Canadian, Scottish, and Norwegian balladry, and has edited (with David Buchan) The Glenbuchat Ballads (2007) and (with W. F. H. Nicolaisen) The Ballad and the Folklorist: The Collected Papers of David Buchan (2013). Tom Pettitt is an affiliate Professor at the Cultural Sciences Institute, University of Southern Denmark, studying early European vernacular culture, its relationships to canonical literature and theatre history, and its persistence as folklore. His papers on ballads, folk drama, legends, wondertales, and the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ are accessible at or via https:// southerndenmark.academia.edu/ThomasPettitt. Sally Ann Schutz is a PhD candidate at Texas A&M University. Her current research focuses on intersections of border theory and Southern Studies via Texas folkways. Her next publication is forthcoming in the June 2019 edition of Revue LISA, “Grey-Washing Jim Crow: The Cultural Colonization of African-American Folk Music.” Sandra Ballif Straubhaar is a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.  Her research and teaching areas include the Nordic and Anglophone ballad traditions; transgressive women in Old Norse literature; medievalist national romanticism; normative aspects of Nordic children’s literature; and the European folk tale. Lynda Taylor is an Independent Scholar based in the north of England; she received her doctorate from the University of Leeds, and has taught throughout her career in Manchester. Now retired, she pursues her interest in northern European ballads of the supernatural and eighteenthcentury female utopian fiction. Jennifer Goodman Wollock is Professor of English at Texas A&M University. In addition to ballads, her many research interests include chivalric literature and culture, Chaucer, the Bible, Arthurian literature, Robin Hood, Sir Walter Scott, Malory, early Yiddish language and literature, and the ecological role of heritage languages. Her most recent book is Rethinking Chivalry and Courtly Love (2011).

Index

Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum 81 Andersen, Hans Christian, “The Little Mermaid” 160, 163 Arnold, Matthew, “The Forsaken Merman” 160, 163 Arwidsson, Adolf Ivar, Svenska fornsånger 6, 11, 13, 15, 24n17, 25nn25–26 Baggesen, Jens, “Agnete fra Holmegaard” 160 Ballads and related forms: British Isles: “Andrew Lammie” 150, 152; “Auld Matrons” 155n21; “Babylon” 121n56; “Baffled Knight, The” 119n37, 130; “Baron of Brackley, The” 149, 155n22; “Baron o’ Leys, The” 148–49; “BeggarLaddie, The” 155n21; “Bent Sae Brown, The” 100, 111, 155n21; “Blancheflour and Jellyflorice” 152, 155n21; “Bonnie Annie” 152; “Bonnie George Campbell” 226; “Bonny Baby Livingston” 130; “Bonny Birdy, The” 130, 134, 148; “Bonny Earl of Murray, The” 175; “Bonny Lizie Baillie” 155n21; “Boy and the Mantle, The” 148–49, 184; “Braes o Yarrow, The” 122n57, 134, 150;

“Broom of Cowdenknowes, The” 147–48; “Broomfield Hill, The” 134; “Broughty Wa’s” 152; “Brown Adam” 155n21; “Brown Robin” 155n21; “Brown Robyn’s Confession” 148–49; “Burd Ellen and Young Tamblane” 148; “Burd Isabel and Earl Patrick” 134, 152; “Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship” 155n21; “Child Waters” 129, 134, 149, 155n22; “Christopher White” 155n21; “Clerk Colvill” 100, 107, 148; “Clerk Saunders” 134, 150–52; “Clerk’s Twa Sons o Owsenford, The” 150; “Coble o Cargill, The” 149; “Crow and Pie” 121n55, 146; “Cruel Brother, The” 150; “Cruel Mother, The” 99, 101–103, 120n42, 148–49; “Daemon Lover” 147–48; “Death of Parcy Reed, The” 134, 136n24; “Dugall Quin” 155n21; “Duke of Gordon’s Daughter, The” 155n21; “Earl Bothwell” 148; “Earl Brand” 100, 112–13, 134; “Earl of Aboyne, The” 148; “Earl of Mar’s Daughter, The” 133, 155n21; “Earl Rothes” 148; “Edward” 127–28, 134, 175; “Fair Annie” 129, 134; “Fair Flower of Northumberland” 144, 153, 155n21; “Fair Janet” 152; “False

244  Index

Lover Won Back, The” 155n21; “Fause Foodrage” 129, 134; “Gay Goshawk, The” 131, 134, 137n29; “Gest of Robin Hode, The” 134, 136n24; “Gil Brenton” 109–10, 144; “Glasgerion” 148; “Glasgow Peggie” 152, 155n21; “Gypsy Laddie, The” 148, 153, 175; “Hind Etin” 152, 155n21; “Hind Horn” 176; “Hobie Noble” 134; “Hughie the Graeme” 177; “Hunting of the Cheviot, The” 134, 136n24; “Jamie Douglas” 129, 134; “Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead” 128–29, 134; “John of Hazelgreen” 155n21; “John Thomson and the Turk” 148; “Johnie Scot” 152, 155n21; “Johnny Cock” 128, 134; “Jolly Beggar, The” 149, 155n22; “Katharine Jaffray” 155n21; “Keach I’ the Creel, The” 153, 155n21; “King Henry the Fifth’s Conquest in France” 175; “King Henry” 128, 134; “King’s Disguise and Friendship with Robin Hood, The” viii n1, 134; “King’s Dochter Lady Jean, The” 121n55, 148; “Kitchie Boy, The” 155n21; “Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter, The” 130, 147–48; “Knight’s Ghost, The” 134; “Lady Diamond” 150; “Lady Elspat” 155n21; “Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight” 100, 109, 171; “Lady Isabel” 150; “Lady Maisry / Susie Cleland” 150, 152; “Laird of Logie, The” 152, 155n21;“Lass of Roch Royal, The” 152; “Leesome Brand” 99–100, 104–5, 148–49; “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard” 130, 134, 148; “Lizzie Lindsay” 155n21; “Lizzie Wan” 148–49; “Lord Ingram and

Chiel Wyet” 132, 134, 137 n28; “Lord Randal” 121n50, 127, 134; “Lord Saltoun and Auchanachie” 150; “Lord Thomas and Fair Annet” 134; “Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret” 134; “Lord Thomas Stuart” 134; “Lord William”/“Lord Lundy” 155n21; “Maid and the Palmer, The” 148, 149, 155n20; “Marriage of Sir Gawain, The” 131–32, 134, 176; “Mary Hamilton” 148; “Mother’s Malison, The” 107, 130, 50; “New-Slain Knight, The” 134; “Old Robin of Portingale” 148; “Our Goodman” 116n8, 148–49; “Outlaw Murray, The” 134; “Prince Robert” 150; “Queen Eleanor’s Confession” 148; “Rantin Laddie, The” 150; “Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow” 152; “Redesdale and Wise William” 134; “Richie Story” 155n21; “Rob Roy” 147; “Robin Hood and Maid Marian” 149, 155n22; “Rose the Red and White Lily” 149, 155n22; “Sheath and Knife” 105, 120n48, 130–31, 134, 148–49; “Sir Aldingar” 129, 134; “Sir Lionel” 128, 134, 176–78, 187, 189nn9, 24 (also “Sir Ryalas” 177; “Bold Sir Rylas” 177; “Brangywell” 77, 83, 191n43; “Dilly Dove” 177; “Tom and Harry Went to Plough” 177); “Suffolk Miracle, The” 152; “Sweet William’s Ghost” 231; “Tam Lin” 110, 130, 134, 152, 155n21, 171, 216–18; “Thomas o Yonderdale” 155n21; “Thomas Rymer” 107, 147, 155n22, 176, 188n7; “Three Ravens, The”/“Twa Corbies, The” 131, 134, 140, 175, 222–28,

Index  245

237nn33–34; “Tom Potts” 155n21; “Twa Brothers, The” 127, 134; “Twa Knights, The” 149, 155n22; “Twa Magicians, The” 134, 147; “Unquiet Grave, The” 231; “Walter Lesly” 147; “Wee Wee Man, The” 134; “WestCountry Damosel’s Complaint, The” 152; “White Fisher, The” 148–49; “Whummil Bore, The” 148; “Wife of Usher’s Well, The” 231; “Willie and Earl Richard’s Daughter” 120n47, 149, 155n22; “Willie and Lady Maisrie” 150; “Willie o Douglas Dale” 120n47, 155n21; “Willie o Winsbury” 152, 155n21; “Willie’s Fatal Visit” 152; “Willie’s Lady” 119n35; “Willie’s Lyke-Wake” 155n21; “Wylie Wife of the Hie Toun Hie, The” 147; “Young Allan” 131, 134; “Young Andrew” 148; “Young Bearwell” 155n21; “Young Beichan” 127, 134; “Young Hunting” 107, 131, 134, 148, 152; “Young Johnstone” 134, 152; “Young Peggy” 155n21; “Young Ronald” 155n21 (songs) “Accommodating Abbess, The” 140; “Ballet Girl, The” 140–41; “Black-Ey’d Sal and the Juicy Orange” 140; “Blowing’s Lament, The” 142; “Bury New Loom, The” 143–44; “Come Wanton Wenches” 146; “Conger Nell and the Clerkenwell Porkman” 142; “Dick Hellfinch, the Link-Boy” 142; “John Long and his I Know What” 139; “Knowing Bill, the Costermonger” 142; “Lasses’ Arses O, The” 140; “Let Shame Crown the Strumpet” 142–43; “Little Go, The” 142; “Love in a Watch Box” 142; “Lye

Alone” 146; “Maid and a Younge Man, A” 146; “Maidens’ Song” (Deloney) 147; “Mayden Head, A” 146; “Moll Slobbercock” 140; “Off a Puritane” 146; “Primrose Girl, The” 140; “St. Giles Flashman, The” 142; “Walking in Meadow Gren” 145; “Wanton Wenches of Wiltshire, The” 144–46; “Wry-mouthed Bob and his Jolly Red Knob” 140 (popular songs) “Sixty Minute Man” (Dominoes) 139; “Suffragette City” (Bowie) 139; “Work with Me, Annie” (Ballard) 139; Denmark: “Adelbrand” 97; “Agnete og Havmanden” 159–71, 172nn4, 9; “Angelfyr og Helmer Kamp” 57–58; “Aslag Tordsøn og skøn Valborg” 96; “Barnemordersken” 97, 99–101; “Bolde Herr Nilaus’ Løn” 97, 99, 102–4; “Bortførelsen” 96; “Broder myrder Søster” 97, 121n49; “Den favre liden Fugl” 96; “Den listige Kæreste” 96–97, 122n57; “Elsker dræbt af Broder” 96–97; “Elvehøj” 96, 106, 121n49, 165; “Elveskud” 96, 100, 105–6, 121n51, 165, 172n2; “Flores og Margrete” 21, 27n56, 28n59; “Folke Algotsøn” 96, 117n14; “Frieriet” 96–97, 121n49; “Gøde og Hillelille” 97, 121n49; “Grev Tue Henriksøn” 121n49; “Grimilds Hævn” 96; “Gunderaads Bejlen” 96; “Hagen Kongens Søn” 96; “Harpens Kraft” 171; “Herr Hjælmer” 96–97, 122n57; “Herr Magnuses Dødsridt” 95, 97; “Herr Østmand” 120n38; “Herr Peder og Mettelille” 96, 121n49; “Herr Tønne af Alsø” 96, 121n49;

246  Index

“Holger Danske og Burmand” 97; “Hor og Mord” 96–97; “Hustru og Mands Moder” 96, 119n35; “Hustru og Slegfred” 96, 119n35; “I Rosenslund” 95–97, 119n37; “Iver og Erland” 97, 121n49; “Jesusbarnet” 8; “Jomfruen i Bjærget” 96; “Jomfruen i Fugleham” 96–97; “Jomfruen i Hindeham” 96; “Jomfruen i Linden” 96–97, 121n49; “Jomfruen og Dværgekongen” 96; “Kærestens Død” 96; “Knud af Borg” 97; “Kong Diderik i Birtingsland” 96; “Kongesønnens Runer” 121n49; “Kvindemorderen” 100, 107–9, 121nn53–54; “Mødet i Skov” 95–96, 121n49; “Nattergalen” 14, 96–97; “Niels Paaskesøn og Lave Brok” 97, 117n14; “Ørnen sidder paa højen Hald” 95–97; “Peder Gudmandsøn og Dværgene” 96, 121n49; “Raadengaard og Ørnen” 96–97, 117n14; “Redselille og Medelvold” 97, 100, 103–4; “Ribold og Guldborg” 96–97, 100, 111–12; “Ridder fælder Jomfruens syv Brødre” 96–97, 100, 110–11, 122n58; “Ridder gæster Jomfru” 96; “Ridderens Runeslag” 96; “Rige Ridder giftes” 96; “Skjøn Anna” 14–15; “Sønnens Sorg” 120n38; “Stolt Elselille” 97, 121n49; “Stolt Margrete” 121n49; “Svanelil Eriksøn” 97, 121n49; “Tistram og Isold” 96–97; “Ungen Ranild” 25n23; “Utro Ridder” 15; “Varulven” 96–97, 120n38 (parlour songs) “Afsked” (Glæser) 202; “En Ventende” (Glæser) 204, 207n6; “Et Ønske” (Glæser) 202–4; “Faderens og Moderens Vuggesang” (Glæser) 204;

“Godnat” (Glæser) 204; “Han tvær over Bænkene hang” (Glæser) 204, 207n7; “Herlige Skov” (Glæser) 200–201; “I Gondolen” (Glæser 205; “I Løvspringstiden” (Glæser) 201–202, 207nn2–3; “Kom lad os flye” (Glæser) 199, 207n1; “Maurerpigen synger” (Glæser) 206; “O var jeg en Skipper” (Glæser) 205; “Paa Strandvejen” (Glæser) 199–200; “Svalen eier en Rede fiin” (Glæser) 204, 207n9; “Svalen rider Sommer i By” (Glæser) 197–90; “Ved Nattelid ” (Glæser) 204, 209 (types) Ballader 8, 24n13; Efterklangsviser 12–13, 25n22, 25n34, 26n37; Efterslæt, 13, 26n37; Historiske Viser 8, 12, 93; Kæmpeviser 7, 11–12, 25n26, 93; 117n14; Legendeviser 8, 93, 117n11; Ridderviser 12, 93–94, 98, 100, 102, 114, 117n14, 119n31; Romantser 8, 24n13; Skæmteviser 12–13, 17–18, 93, 116n8; Trylleviser 7, 12, 27n56, 93–94, 98, 100–101, 117n14, 119n31 Faroe Islands: “Arngríms sinir” 57–58, 60, 63–65, 68; “Kappin Angantýr” 57–58; “Sigmunds Kvæði Eldra” 88n29; “Sjúrðar kvæði” 51n33; “Trøllini í Hornalondum” 30–31, 48nn14–15 Iceland: vaeði um sankti Hallvarð 83 (poems) Guðrúnarkviða 86 n10; Hervarakviða 56; “Hjálmar’s Death Song” 57, 60, 67; Hlöðskviða 56, 67; Hyndluljóð 57, 59; Helgakviða Hundingsbana 86 n10 (rímur) Áns rímur bogsveigis 35–41, 45–46, 51n38, 52nn40–41, 50, 52, 53nn58, 65–66, 68–69; Eyvindar ríma 51n30; Illuga

Index  247

rímur eldhúsgoða 33; Móðars rímur 33; Þorgeirs rímur Stjakarhöfða 29, 31–46, 50n29, 51n38, 52 n48, 53 63; Völsunga rímur 51n33 Sweden: “Den förtrollade Prinsessan” 14; “Den Hedniska Konungsdottern i Blomstergården” 14; “Den Öfvergifne” 15; “Det Hemliga Mötet” 15; “Duvans sång” 24n14; “Elisif Nunna i Risberga Kloster” 15; “Florens Benediktsson och fru Margareta,” 27n57; “Gothlands Visan” 15 ; “Harald och Unge Thor” 16; “Herr Boo” 15; “Herr Heimer och Margreta” 14; “Johannes” 15; “Jungfrun vid Källan” 16; “Kämpen Hake” 16; “Konung Carl XII’s Fältmarsch” 16; “Konung Kristian IV’s anfall i Sverige” 16; “Konungabarnen” 14–15; “Liten Karin” 24n14; “Magdelena” 24n14; “Om Brunkebergs slag” 15; “Oväntad Bröllopsgäst” 14; “Resan till Österlandet” 24n14; “Riddaren Bryning” 14; “Riddaren och Hertigens Dotter” 16; “Sanct Göran” 24n14; “Skön Anna” 14–15; “Slaget vid Helsingborg” 16; “Slaget vid Narva” 16; “Slaget vid Stångebro” 16; “Slottet i Österrik” 14; “Staffans visa” 24n14; “Stenen i grönan dal” 15, 24n14; “Susanna i Babylon” 16; “Svennens Svek” 16; “Thord Bondes mord” 15; “Underbar syn” 24n14; “Vedergällningen” 15; “Wäktare-Varning” 15 (authored) “Hönsgummans Visa” (Carelius) 8, 15, 24n14; “Göta Kiämpa-Wisa” (Dahlstierna) 24n20, 27n58; “Konungen och

Herr Peder” (Dahlstierna) 8, 14; “Kom låt oß nu dricka wårt goda Thé” (Dalin) 4–5; “Malcom Sinclair” (Odel) 8, 14 (types) Historiska Visor 11; Kämpavisor 9, 11, 20, 24n20; Legendvisor 8, 17; Skämtvisor 20, 24n16, 25n32 United States: “Old Bangum” 177–88, 188n24, 192nn56–57 (also “Abram Bailey” 179–80; “Rach’s Spinning Song” 186; “Wild Hog in the Woods” 188, 192n65); “Willy McGee McGaw” 228–29 Beowulf 50n26, 93, 184 Boke of Saint Albans 125 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” 222, 224, 234n12 Buchan, Peter, Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland 111, 120n46 Burns, Robert, “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled” 230 Bürger, Gottfried August, “Lenore” 229–32 Cassiodorus, History of the Goths 79 Chaucer, Geoffrey, “The Franklin’s Tale” 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “Ancient Mariner, The” 224; Biographia Literaria 224, 239n45 “Corpus Christi Carol, The” 222 Crébillon, Prosper Jolyot, Atrée et Thyeste 228 D’Urfey, Thomas, Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy 140, 144, 153, 189n16 Dante Alighieri, Inferno 222 Deloney, Thomas, Jacke of Newbury 147, 177; “The Maidens’ Song”

248  Index

146, 154n18; Thomas of Reading 177 Dickens, Charles, Barnaby Rudge 222, 229 Ebsworth, Joseph, Choyce Drollery: Songs and Sonnets 144 Eddas, The 9, 57, 75, 93 Fal-Lal Songster, The 141 Flash Casket, A Very Curious Collection of Mouth-Watering Parodies, The 142 Frederick II, De Arte Venandi cum Avibus 125–26 Geijer, Erik Gustaf & Arvid August Afzelius, Svenska folk-visor från forntiden 6–12, 24nn17, 22, 25nn23, 24 Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hibernica 78 Gjøe, Mette, Tragica 6, 24n13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Sorrows of Young Werther 231 Grindadráp ceremony 76, 85 Hartmann, Johan Peter Emilius, Liden Kirsten 160 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian 230 Historia Norwegiae 79–80 Ibsen, Henrik, Fruen fra havet 160, 166–67 Icelandic sagas: Egils Saga 79, 87n22; Eiríks saga rauða 77–79, 81, 85; Elis saga ok Rósamundu 52n48; Eyrbygg ja saga 76; Færeyinga Saga 87n29; Flóamanna saga 49n21; Flateyjarbók 31, 49n18; Fóstbrœðra saga 74; Friðþjófs

saga frækna 80; Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar 32, 49n24, 74–75; Gull-Þóris saga 76; Gunnars saga Keldugnúpsfífls 34, 43–44; Halfdanar saga Eysteinssonar 80, 88n40; Harðar saga Grímkelssonar 49n21, 50n25; Hávarðar saga Ísfirðings 86n16; Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs 56–63, 68, 69n17, 70n19; Hjálmpérs saga ok Olvis 88n40; Jómsvíkinga saga 48n17; Jóns saga baptista II 81; Kjalnesinga saga 34, 43–44, 49n22; Kormáks saga 76–77, 80; Örvar-Odds saga 56–58, 61, 69n17, 80, 88n40; Ólafs saga Tryggvason 31, 49n18, 80; Vatnsdæla saga 44, 54n70, 80; Víga-Glúms saga 76; Völsunga saga 67–68 (types) fornaldarsögur 48, 55–56, 59, 66–68, 69n18, 80–81; Íslendinga sögur 79; riddarasögur 68n2 Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum 78–79 Kalevala, The 224, 234n13 Konungs skuggsjá 78 Landnámabok 80 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, Ballads and Other Poems 231; “George Campbell” 230; “Hiawatha” 224; Waif, The 226, 230 Luzula, “Down Among the Weeds” 210, 217–18 Mabinogion, “Culhwch and Olwen” 223 Magnus, Olaus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus 79 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte Darthur 184

Index  249

Medieval Romances: Bevis of Hampton 176, 182–84; Guy of Warwick 183, 191n42; Laud Troy Book 184; Robert the Devil 176; Sir Eglamour of Artois 176–77, 180–85, 189n10, 191n46–47; Sir Percevall 184; Squire of Low Degree, The 184; Thomas of Ercledoune 1834 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick 78 Motherwell, William, Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern 105, 222, 226–27, 234n14 Nibelungenlied 67 Oehlenschläger, Adam, “Agnete” 159 Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus 78 Paston Letters 94 Percy Folio Manuscript 92, 116 n8, 146, 153, 176–77, 179–81, 185, 189n9 Percy, Thomas, Reliques of Ancient English Poesie 227, 231

Playford, Henry, Wit and Mirth,or Pills to Purge Melancholy 144, 189n16 Poe, Edgar Allan, “Berenice” 232; “Exordium to Critical Notices” 229; “Fall of the House of Usher, The” 232; “Lenore” 229, 231–32, 239n48; “Letter to Mr.———” 231; “Ligeia” 232;“Morella” 232; “Philosophy of Composition, The” 229–30, 232–33; Poems (1831) 231; “Poets and Poetry

of America” 226; “Purloined Letter, The” 227–28, 236nn28, 31; “Raven, The” 222–25, 228–29, 232–33, 235n17; “Ulalume 229 Rauðöð (folktale) 84

Ravenscroft, Thomas, Melismata 140, 222 Ritson, Joseph, Ancient Songs 224, 227, 234n11 Roman de la Rose 99 Rowlands, Samuel, The Melancholie Knight 176 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, “Alterthümer der französischen Buhne” 237n37

Scott, Sir Walter, Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border 222–26, 228, 230, 234n14, 237n32 Shakespeare, William, Henry V 175; The Tempest 118n19 Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál 53n68 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, et al., Poems by Two Brothers 236n28

Twain, Mark, “A Literary Nightmare” 235n19

Vedel A. S. & P. Syv, Et Hundrede udvalde Danske Viser 6–7, 24n12 Wolff, O. L. B., “The Good George Campbell” 226

Wordsworth, William, “The Cuckoo and the Nightingale” 224