pedestrienne

Reading this book has helped me with my sight-reading of Scots dialect immensely. And it gave me a new perspective on the practice of ballad-singing. Muir's thesis is that ballads tap into the group emotional unconscious (she calls it the "underworld of feeling") and that the rise of self-consciousness and Christianity in England and Scotland changed ballads and caused their singing to die out. I sort of blanked on the last couple chapters because she was just giving more examples and evidence of this thesis, but I did learn about some new and tasty ballads that I'd like to hear. Even one that she calls too sentimental - but it has a verse about someone's organs and blood boiling! I think the introductory chapter "Singing and Listening to Oral Poetry" is a must for people learning ballads.

Some quotes:

"We should note here that whatever a Ballad-singer added to a story could not be copyright. Such an arrangement would have been alien to oral tradition. Every time a ballad was sung it inevitably changed a little, according to the gifts or lack of gifts in the singer, and the changes went into the common stock. The tenor of the story remained the same; the details varied, the rhymes varied, the tune often varied: the common stock of episodes was freely drawn upon. No singer attempted to use fine words and phrases; his inner tact was devoted to setting forth an old story in familiar language in a traditional way, using traditional expressions which belonged to everyone, not to himself. It is a sign of degeneration in a ballad when the Ballad-singer becomes a 'performer', showing off his abilities and obtruding his personality upon the song, very often introducing matter which is merely garrulous." (121)

"Clearly the raising or lowering of tension in this ballad matters more than the particular form in which the flow of feeling is embodied, just as the force of passionate feeling in the story matters more than the particular person in whom it is embodied. The singer apparently keeps in mind the direction the flow of feeling should take; provided he makes it rise or fall in the appropriate places, he is free to improvise. The main outline of the story is given him; that is traditional, not to be changed, and what he improvises must not contradict it. One might say that he is given a geographically determined landscape, with its configuration of heights and valleys. Yet as he guide the flow of feeling, he can invent at will various features on the way, though he cannot change the lie of the land, and in the last verse he must bring the listeners down to the level. Once on the level, the ballad stops, like a river that has reached the sea. If this is not art, I do not know what is." (158)

"The protagonists in an early Ballad, forceful or not, are shaped by the art of the story-teller into functions of the action. Their feelings drive the story on to its climax, and in so far as personal feelings explode in action they are important, but outside the limits of the story they are of no interest. Even the forceful characters, like the 'auld queen' in 'Gil Brenton', or the Wife of Usher's Well, do not stop to consider the purpose or nature of their feelings before going into action. If they had been asked: do you accept responsibility for your actions? they might have said: yes, of course, but the question would have surprised them exceedingly: they might have found difficulty in understanding it. The current of strong feeling in early ballads naturally carries people along in an 'of course' mood, but no pause for reflection." (180)