David Atkinson - The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts

ATKINSON, David. The Anglo-Scottish Ballad and its Imaginary Contexts. New edition [online]. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2014 (generated 05 mai 2019). Available on the Internet: . ISBN: 9782821876354.

The following abbreviations are used throughout for standard editions and reference works:

CSD: Concise Scots Dictionary, ed. Mairi Robinson (Edinburgh: Polygon at Edinburgh, 1999).
DSL: Dictionary of the Scots Language/Dictionar o the Scots Leid, available at http://www.dsl.ac.uk/dsl/ [DSL-DOST: Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue entries; DSL-SND: Scottish National Dictionary entries].
EDD: The English Dialect Dictionary, ed. Joseph Wright, 6 vols (London: Henry Frowde, 18981905).
ESPB: Francis James Child, ed., The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 188298).
ESTC: English Short Title Catalogue, available at http://estc.bl.uk
OED: Oxford English Dictionary, available at http://www.oed.com
Child numbers: refer to items in ESPB.
Roud numbers: refer to items in the Roud Folk Song Index and Broadside Index, available at http://vwml.org.uk/search/search-roud-indexes
Bodleian Library broadside ballads are available at http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

All web addresses cited, and Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the Select Bibliography, were accessed prior to publication on 12/13 February 2014 and were valid at that date.

1.1 Enos White and his wife, outside Crown Cottage, Axford, Hampshire. Provenance unknown. 2

5.1 Carpenter Collection, Photo 101, James Madison Carpenter sitting in his Austin Roadster. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 102

5.2 Carpenter Collection, MS p. 08356. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 106

5.3 Joseph Taylor, Lord Bateman, transcribed by Percy Grainger, Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 3.3 (no. 12) (1908), 19293. Courtesy of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. 114115

6.1 Carpenter Collection, MS p. 04267. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 143

7.1 Carpenter Collection, MS pp. 0438404387. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 156157

8.1 Carpenter Collection, MS pp. 0440304404. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA. 176

The imaginary in the title of this volume is quite deliberate. The ballad and its imagined contexts, with its echoes of Benedict Andersons imagined communities, Georgina Boyess imagined village, and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers invented traditions, might have evoked an oral, ballad-singing community of a kind that owes as much to the broad thrust of Romanticism as it does to a historical back-projection from (limited) evidence drawn from the folk song revivals of the twentieth century. The imaginary contexts of the title, in contrast, refer to the abstract ideas that are the necessary counterpart of any attempt to describe the ballad be it at the level of genre or of the individual literary/musical item in its social and historical context in terms either of ontology or of textual constitution.

Conceptually, there is a danger that the ballad as abstract idea might appear perilously close to the sort of conflationary, idealist notion of ballad editing that characterized publications of a much earlier period. Editions such as Thomas Percys Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Walter Scotts Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and William Motherwells Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern drew on and compounded different texts in order to achieve a comprehensive and complete, ideal version of each individual ballad. They have been much reviled for doing so, although as an exercise in best-text editing, duly described and documented, this could still be a defensible approach. However, it is certainly true that it falls foul of the ethnographic turn that ballad studies have taken since that time.

Both Scott and Motherwell came to reject their own editorial practices and instead to laud the discrete integrity, and poetic and musical value, of each separate ballad instance, or version. Subsequently, mediated by the practice of the Danish editor Svend Grundtvig, this insight provided the theoretical basis for Francis James Childs standard edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The type/version paradigm embodied therein represents the distinctive contribution of ballad studies to editing theory. In short, the ballad type is identified as the abstract sum of all actual and possible manifestations, or versions, of what is recognizably the same thing. The definition is notably circular but it does mostly work in practice because there turns out to be a high level of seemingly inherent stability in ballad narratives and melodies, which makes it possible, most of the time, to recognize quite intuitively which items belong together.

Since it is frequently possible to ascribe individual versions to individual sources, this type/version paradigm lends itself very neatly to the ethnographic orientation. In what has been rather grandly termed the post-Child era of scientific folklore, a premium attaches to the precise recording, attribution, and presentation of the collected item. And yet there is already a paradox here, because the type/version paradigm has also, almost uninvited, introduced an abstract dimension into the discussion. For the version cannot exist without inherent reference to the type and so while on the one hand the items uniqueness is being identified, on the other it is simultaneously being absorbed. Just as the version is a constituent part of the type, so the version itself derives from the type.