Ballads and Tunes Which Travel

DURING the last three years circumstances have led me to make a comparative study of the ballads of Europe. A definite picture has risen in my mind: a picture of a Europe, without voice in the written records, which sang the same or similar songs at about the same times and in much the same manners. The regional differences are evident, and they even coalesce to form four great principal ballad areas: the centre and north, the south-west, the south-east, and the eastern. These differences are highly significant, and in them we may find deep springs of nationality or culture; but they are regional differences of a common pattern. The uniformity of this pattern is often striking. Of about 400 old Scandinavian ballads examined I find that at least 183 appear in more than one Scandinavian country. Such numbers suffice to exclude the possibility of coincidence, and the possibility is reduced to zero when the texts are carefully confronted. Each of these 183 instances points to a single ballad as original. We have creation and borrowing in oral literature exactly as we have creation and borrowing in written literature; in the one case borrowing is from paper to paper, in the other from mouth to mouth. Doubtless the Scandinavian

Art · Ballad · Literature · Poetry · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philippine History and Culture

• William J. Entwistle's Research on Ballads and Epic

  Alan Deyermond, Alan D Deyermond•Hispanic Research Journal•2007

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