Why I am comfortable with the concept that what we read today as the
Odyssey including the Trojan War was mythologized over the centuries is, because of the hours of research I did during the 1960s while I was still living in Kentucky on Traditional Folk Music and as a result what I learned about the oral tradition.
I had a friend who made me a lovely Mountain Dulcimer – they are narrow lap four string instruments - plucked or strummed using a feather quill rather than a large, often standing instrument, beaten as the European Dulcimer. Of course I could not leave well enough alone and so after learning to play some of the old music I became curious as to where, when, how etc.
One of the early and most revered collectors of early Ballads – was Francis James Child; I have a copy of his 10 books where he describes who he interviewed and what texts he found, including the many, many, many changes to each of the Ballads, some still sung, mostly in Southern Appalachia.
Professor Child was born in 1825, graduated from Harvard in1846 having majored in Literature. This man is not a rural, friend-to-man, taking notes – he is a scholar - a two-year leave of absence from his duties as an English instructor at Harvard he studies at Berlin and Göttingen, where he earns his Doctor of Philosophy, after he obtained an advanced degree in Math from Columbia. His models and whom he had on his desk a copy of their faces were the Grimm Brothers.
His private passion for the study of poetry, ballads, folklore and music became central after he edited a series of British Poets. His research published as
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads included every obtainable version of existent and extinct Ballad tracing back to early versions in Italy, Greece, northern Europe and northern Africa. He includes in his manuscript a full discussion of related songs or stories in the ‘popular’ literature of all nations.
Some of his books are on-line - however, after comparing what Google is showing, whole swaths of text are missing and page numbers do not match the information on the same page number of these books.
Back to Child - Securing trustworthy texts was paramount. He achieved a coup with many attempts before gaining permission to research and publish the folio of Percy MS. an earlier researched account of some Ballads. He formed a library at the University on Folk-lore amassing 7000 volumes
A popular ballad that most of us know today is Barbara Allan –
Bonny Barbara Allan has 92 versions, here is one version written as an
anonymous poem and another on
Bartleby as an anonymous poem and Percy’s earlier researched version as the
Cruelty of Barbara Allan – the ballad is referred to by Samuel Pepys in 1666.
I can easily get lost in all of this but the reason I want to share is; Professor Child’s research led him to the conclusion that, “long- repeated tradition have always departed considerably from their original - Oral recollection was a possession left to the uneducated - Once in the hands of the professional, the ballad singer, minstrel whose sole object is to please the audience before him, will alter, omit, or add, without scruple, and nothing is more common than to find different ballads blended together.”
“…last of all comes the modern editor, whose so-called improvements are more to be feared than the mischance’s of a thousand years. A very old ballad will often be found to have resolved itself in the course of what may be called its propagation into several distinct shapes, and each of these again to have received distinct modifications”
He goes on to extol how Ballads and oral poetry were at times lengthened or shortened or compounded with stanzas from several sources or, made unfaithful as they tried to fit the story into the Northern European’s view of Heroes or adjusted to accommodate the European, English, Scottish view of the Moore’s [Muslims] e.g. the ‘brown girl’ is most often a Moore. He does suggest the crusades brought together an interchange of stories and songs.
But folks - here is the real kicker –
”Ballads are at their best when the transmission has been purely through the mouths of unlearned people, when they have come down by domestic tradition, through knitters and weavers.” And what is Penelope –
A weaver! – no wonder there are some scholars who think the Odyssey was a story told by a woman rather than Homer, the man, the educated writer.
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