INTRODUCTION

1. His first article on the subject (Journal of American Folklore 1961, 113-115) was entitled “The Formulaic Improvisation Theory of Ballad Tradition—A Counterstatement” (Italics added).

2. For a careful survey of oral theory and of the response by scholars to the work of Parry and Lord, and especially to The Singer of Tales, see Foley 1988.

3. Emily Lyle (1975) has edited part of the Crawfurd manuscript, one of the most important early collections to come to light since Child.

4. For a complete discussion of these theories, not always positive, see Andersen 1985, 17-40.

5. Carol Edwards indicates that the Parry definition of a formula has generative implications. Edwards 1983, 161.

6. Indeed, it has been argued, e.g., by Gerould (1932, 125), that the ballad quatrain is in fact “a couplet with seven stresses to the line.” Certainly, at fourteen stresses, the ballad stanza is not significantly longer than the ten-stress South Slav epic couplet of which Lord spoke.

7. The word “theme” has a meaning in oral-formulaic criticism distinct from its set of meanings in general criticism. To keep the two domains of usage clear I will retain quotation marks whenever I take the term in the oral-formulaic sense first expounded by Lord.

8. Such stability also occurs in other, shorter genres of South-Slavic oral-formulaic poetry, such as laments and the brief Christian epics, though Lord does not discuss these examples in detail. See Foley 1983; 1988, 75-76.

9. The terminological distinction is only implicit in Lord, who uses the terms stable and fixed interchangeably but subdivides fixity into more and less, or into fixity and apparent fixity. Lord 1981 returns to this question.

10. The Andersen-Pettitt essay also criticizes briefly Anders’s Balladensänger und mündliche Komposition. In this criticism stability is again a sticking point (see especially p. 6). The present writer finds Anders’s book valuable for its demonstration of the scope of the formulaic system in Anglo-Scottish balladry.

11. See especially his discussion, 271, of the commonplace “The first step/first town.”

12. The recently published repertoire of Mary McQueen confirms that singers knew a variety of songs. See Lyle 1975.

13. The concept was first expounded by Whitman with reference to the Iliad (1958, Chapter 11). Niles (1973) discusses the “Chanson de geste,” and Lord (1986, 53-64) applies the concept to Avdo’s epic The Wedding of Smailagic Meho. Buchan’s application to the ballad is especially detailed (1972).

14. Actually, he is not entirely alone in stanza 8. The word they indicates that he has some retainers with him. But these retainers do not enter into the plot.

1. THE RADICAL AND THE TORY

1. Shaw (1980) provides a good description of the Scottish textile industry before 1830 as well as a helpful guide to sources.

2. The New Statistical Account credits Kilbarchan with seven parochial schools in addition to several private ones (380).

3. Information from Statistical Account and New Statistical Account.

4. Details concerning the Radical War of 1820 are derived, unless otherwise noted, from Ellis and Mac a’ Ghobhainn.

5. Goldie’s poems are given in Ellis and Mac a’ Ghobhain, 344-346. The ballads are Child 10H and 14C.

6. Two other important Scots singers, Mrs. Brown of Falkland and Mrs. Storie, are also referred to frequently by their maiden names, Anna Gordon and Mary Mcqueen, respectively.

7. For a fuller account of the editorial history of Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern see McCarthy 1987, 310-313.

2. THE MANUSCRIPTS AND THE SONGS

1. E.g., David Buchan, Bronson, present study. The information in the preceding paragraph comes from examination of the autograph Manuscript and of the Harvard copies of the Manuscript and the Notebook. The present author has not succeeded in examining the autograph Notebook.

2. The unascribed texts are “Lady Maisry” (Child 65C), Ms. p. 472, and “The Elfin Knight” (Child 2E), Ms. p. 492. The errors, discussed below, involve a confusion of names between Agnes Lyle and Agnes Laird.

3. E.g., Child 1882-1898, 5: 398; Bronson 1959-1972, 4: 523.

4. It is not the purpose of the present study to do a new edition of the ballads of Agnes Lyle to replace Child’s work. On the contrary, one of its purposes is to provide an entree into The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. To that end, texts are given as edited by Child. In referring to individual ballads the titles from Child are used whenever appropriate. When the Child title seems especially inappropriate for a particular text (e.g., 89: “Fause Foodrage”) an alternative title is used. In one case Child assigns a text to two different places in the canon. In that case (Child 15b-16f) the title which seems to fit Agnes Lyle’s text better has been used. In referring to characters within the ballads, names are spelled as in the text: the hero of Agnes Lyle’s text of “Little Musgrave,” for example, is Mossgrey. The ballad fragments are given in the unedited form in which they appear in the Notebook, sans punctuation, sans consistent spelling. Quotations from Motherwell’s notations, where reference is made to Child, are given in the edited form in which they appear in Child. Otherwise they are given in the form in which they appear in the Notebook or Manuscript.

5. Child 20H and 99F.

6. “The Gay Goshawk” is the fifth item in a memorandum of songs in the repertoire of Agnes Laird, running pages 26 to 30 in the Notebook. The first four items on the list consist each of a stanza or a half stanza and a brief plot summary. The fifth item consists of this whole text. The memo is dated 18 August, but the Manuscript states that the song was collected on 24 August. Probably Motherwell included only the first stanza when he compiled the list on 18 August, and added the remaining stanzas when he returned to the singer on 24 August.

7. Christie 1876-1881, 2: 224-225; Ord 1930, 31-32; Gardner and Chickering 1939, 163; MacColl 1965, 67; Bulletin of the Folksong Society of the Northeast [Greig 1963], I: 8.

8. See below, chapter 7.

9. For a complete discussion of tune relationships, see appendix.

10. The fragments also include pieces composed in four-beat quatrains, rhyming either a b c b or a a a b. But one piece, “The Fox Chase,” exhibits a considerably more complex metrical scheme. One could describe it as a quatrain of feminine rhyme, a b c b, the first line a tetrameter, the second and fourth trimeters, and the third a hexameter with internal rhyme. Or one could quibble with Motherwell’s transcription and describe it as a five-line stanza rhyming a b c c b.

3. THE WEAVER’S DAUGHTER SINGS

1. Emphasis on individual scenes, with little narrative transition between scenes, seems characteristic of oral tradition in general. One thinks, for example, of Homer, The Song of Roland, and even the Märchen.

2. This “Talliant” puzzled Motherwell, and puzzles the present writer too. Comparison with other texts suggests that the word is a corruption of Italian, but Italian could as easily be a rationalization of Talliant, and the meaning of the term may indeed be lost. Johnie with sword in hand, walking across the plain, seems to represent a reconstruction of a scene in which Johnie stroked his sword on the grass. The sword in the straw in this singer’s “Little Musgrave” may be a similar reconstruction. The last two lines of stanza 18 likewise appear to be a reconstruction, but the original meaning is unclear. Child suggests that the king’s champion actually leaps over Johnie’s head, and Johnie spits him with his sword while he is thus overhead (1882-1898, 2: 378).

3. Andersen identifies three commonplaces structured more or less according to this pattern: “She hadna pu’d a flower, a flower,” “He hadna been in fair England, a month but barely ane,” and “He hadna ridden a mile, a mile/They hadna sailed a league, a league.” The flower commonplace is built on progress through a task, gathering flowers, rather than through time or space. See fuller discussion of this formula family in Conclusion.

4. Confronted with such alliterative richness the reader is bound to think of Anglo-Saxon verse or verse of the Alliterative Revival. There does not seem, however, to be any direct connection beyond the most general aptness to alliterate in the genius of the English language, Old, Middle, and Modern. In ballad English the alliteration commonly falls on adjacent stresses within a half line. When the alliteration ties a whole line together, as in:

And when we come to Mary’s Kirk,

or

Ben and cam the bride’s brethren,

alliteration almost invariably falls on the last stress of the line, a rare place for alliteration in Anglo-Saxon and not common in alliterative Middle English.

5. Important discussions of acoustic patterns in oral tradition include Lord on South Slavic (1965, 55-57), Peabody on Greek (1975, chapter 5), Creed on Anglo-Saxon (1981), and Buchan on Scots (1972, Chapter 12).

4. THE WEAVER’S DAUGHTER NODS

1. Long applies the terms to types of singers or makers rather than to stances. The point of using the word stance is to suggest that a given singer at different times or with regard to different songs may take different stances, that is, may belong to different types.

2. Similarly, it would not be too surprising if Mrs. Brown sang “The Lass of Roch Royal” more from memory than from oral recreation (See introduction). The presence of one or two memorized pieces in her repertoire would not disqualify her for status as an oral-formulaic singer, since her repertoire as a whole is closely unified in oral style, theme, and sensibility. The presence of such a piece would only indicate that she too, probably unconsciously, could take more than one stance toward ballads.

The word memorize is used here for lack of a better. This learning of a heard text, albeit a fixed text, should not be identified with that learning of a read text which is usually referred to by the word memorize. Cf. Lord 1961, 5, 36; 1981, passim.

3. I.e., 1-9, 10-21; or 1-9, 10-16, 17-21. Other logical divisions are also possible.

4. Possibly “Eastmure King” ought to be included, though the imagery is not nearly so dense in this ballad.

5. “The Wee Wee Man,” collected the same day, likewise belongs with these fragments: it is a “walking out” piece like the last five fragments, and the text is more or less fixed.

5. THE WEAVER’S DAUGHTER SOARS

1. On “Edward,” see Taylor 1931; and Bronson 1969, 1-17. On “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” see Long 1971. On the riddle or wit-combat ballads, see Toelken 1966; Coffin, 1983; and Buchan 1985. “Our Goodman” has not inspired scholarship of similar stature.

2. North American ballad collections reflect this dual aspect of the “Babylon” tradition: The first sub-tradition, in which the anagnorisis hinges upon a name, is found, though rarely, in the Appalachian region, while the second, though usually with two, not three brothers, is found in New England and north to Newfoundland. In the Scandinavian tradition the anagnorisis occurs when the killer (or more usually, killers, who are usually but not always brothers) shows up at the father’s house and tries to bribe someone with the silk clothing of the daughters. The Bergman film The Virgin Spring follows this tradition of the story.

3. Or, according to which he has envisioned his vision.

4. Cf. p. 103, where she explicitly discusses combing in a different version of “Braes o’ Yarrow”. Andersen says of Rogers’s ideas on combing (which he had read in an earlier version): “Some of her observations are very much in line with the general interpretation suggested here” (Andersen 1985, 115).

6. LOVE AND DEATH

1. In a note (3, p. 244) Renwick adds a fourth category, the “idiomatic” or obscene, but excuses himself from discussing it because early collectors neglected such material and there is not any sizeable selection from pre-twentieth-century sources. Would that Motherwell had not put off printing the Paisley Garland.

2. Of course the tradition from which these songs come is, by contemporary standards sexist. Recognition of that sexism seems to be part of Renwick’s point in using the terms masculine and feminine. The signifying traits, whether masculine or feminine, are exhibited by male as well as female characters, both in the Renwick sample and in the Lyle repertoire.

3. Social disparity: “Cruel Mother,” “Fair Janet,” “Earl Richard”(?), “Little Musgrave,” “Eastmure King,” “Johnie Scot,” “Baffled Knight”(?), “Mary Hamilton,” “Gypsy Laddie,” “Lord William,” and “Bonny Baby Livingston.” Love for intrinsic reasons: “Twa Sisters,” “Sheath and Knife,” “Hind Horn,” “Fair Janet,” “Eastmure King,” “Johnie Scot,” “Jamie Douglas,” “Braes o’ Yarrow,” “Bonny Baby Livingston,” and “Lord William.” In some sense, context figures in all the pieces, but this seems to be because it is impossible to tell a story in which characters have no context.

4. Rogers (48-50) points out yet another function of games: they serve to bring out the great qualities of a hero and to win him the heroine. The joust in “Johnie Scot” serves this function, though it is more serious than most games.

5. Thus, like Fair Annet, Mary Hamilton puts the rightful wife to shame by the splendor of her dress, a parallel emphasized in Child’s G and I texts, which include variants of the following stanza:

Cf. Andersen 1985, 252. Rogers’s description of Tove (DgF 121), “a combination of the wronged sweetheart who outshines the bride, and the royal favorite who, by flaunting the tangible proof of her advantage, arouses the ire of the legitimate wife” (78), seems equally apt for Mary Hamilton.

6. But see stanzas from Child 64A and E, below, in which Janet dresses much like Mary.

7. A more conventional use of the magic music motif occurs at the beginning of “Gypsy Laddie,” when the gypsies sing so sweetly to the Lady of Cassilis that “they coost their glamourye owre her.”

8. See, for example, Andersen’s discussion of “Playin at the ba” (119 ff.); “Sat drinking at the wine” (124 ff.); “When he came to fair Ellen’s gates” (221 ff.); “He hadna ridden/sailed” (259 ff.); as well as the discussion later in the present chapter, of “The first town he came to” in “Johnie Scot.”

9. This formula is discussed more fully in the conclusion.

10. In “The Gay Goshawk” (Child 96) she only appears dead. Andersen discusses an alternate formula, “The first step she stepped.” This formula “typically is associated with progression step by step into the water” (266) and has a fairly distinct supra-narrative function of signalling imminent danger or death, usually for the one stepping.

7. POLITICS AND PERFIDY

1. The non-tragic ballads in the repertoire include four melodramas with happy endings: “Hind Horn,” “Johnie Scot,” “Geordie,” and “Lord William.” The two fixed-text pieces, the farcical “The Baffled Knight” and the plotless “The Wee Wee Man” should probably be classed with the four comic broadside pieces: “The Broken Token,” “The Basket of Eggs,” “The Beggar Laddie,” and “The Duke’s Hunt.”

2. A final example of summons by letter, that in “Bonnie Baby Livingston,” uses none of the elements or associated commonplaces of the “King’s Letter Theme.”

3. See especially the B, D, and F texts; but cf. the Peter Buchan text (Child 17H), stanza 2:

4. The ballads reflect 19th c. Scottish society, in which a maid was a servant, not 16th c. Franco-Scottish society, in which a maid-in-waiting was a gentlewoman.

CONCLUSION

1. The classic example of an analogical term is healthy. The ancients point out that one may say a man is healthy, and likewise say that his urine is healthy, to which the modems would add that his diet too is healthy. The word does not mean exactly the same thing in each case, but there is relationship between the health of the man, the health of his diet, and the health of his urine which is reflected in the use of the same word in analogous senses for all three phenomena. (Use of the word analogical here must not be confused with uses of the word analogy elsewhere in oral studies. See Foley 1986, 25, 30.)

2. The next level after phoneme would seem to be morpheme. But, formulas always involve more than one element; the level which regularly involves two or more morphemes is the level of phrase. The figure on the morphemic level which corresponds to alliteration on the phonemic level is anaphora, a very common figure in the ballad: “Rise up, rise up,” “What news, what news?” etc.

3. Sometimes these may really be quarter-line formulas, as in the first line of the next example (“Licht down, licht down, Earl Richard,” she says). The vocative “Earl Richard” (“Earl Marshall,” etc.) and the inquit “she says” (“he says,” “they said,” etc.) occur independently in tradition, and must be considered, on some level, as representing separate formula families. But such quarter-line formulas are a bit like split hairs: though they exist, they merit no more than a footnote in the over-all scheme of things.

4. For a fuller discussion of this much-vexed term “theme” and the varying, often tradition-specific ways in which scholars have sought to define it, see Foley 1988, 37-38, 42, 49, 53, 68-69, 72-74, 100-102, 105.

5. In addition to the examples below, see also Anders (1974), who provides literally hundreds of examples of lines and stanzas with complex formulaic interrelationships.

6. See introduction.

7. Even in Mrs. Brown’s repertoire, however, there is some difference in structural complexity between the couplet and the quatrain ballads. “Some of the couplet texts, then, have a less sophisticated integration of units in the stanzaic structure and have a weaker overall concentration on the three interacting characters, but in general the couplet ballads exhibit the same architectonic characteristics as the quatrain ballads” (Buchan, 1972, 142).

8. It is also possible that the Northeast is more exact in rhyming than the Southwest.

9. Lord 1981 provides a detailed discussion of this issue with reference to the short epic, to “themes,” and to lyric.

10. Mrs. Brown’s “The Lass of Roch Royal” may be an example.