In the closing years of the last century David Buchan became one of the most cited scholars working in Anglophone ballad studies. This was because, in The Ballad and the Folk (1972), he became the first scholar to apply the oral-formulaic methods of Milman Parry and A. B. Lord to traditional English and Scottish ballads. As the title of the present book suggests, it is still this work with which his name is most associated. Buchan remained very active in the field until his early death in 1994, but with the exception of some anthologies of folk tradition in Scotland, his work was largely published in the form of articles and proceedings with a restricted circulation. These have now been collected and lightly edited by his colleague W. F. H. Nicolaisen and his student James Moreira. Together the thirty-three papers, on traditional ballads, tale roles, folk narratives, and the ethnology of the northeast of Scotland, form a book of more than 400 pages which, twenty years after his death, are highly readable and still offer important new insights.
The first section, on the traditional ballads, mostly includes papers from the period of The Ballad and the Folk, with the exception of an essay on folk medicine in the ballads, related to a collection of the papers of David Rorie which Buchan edited in the last years of his life. He draws attention to Rorie’s observation that the “gude greenwood” in Scottish balladry is connected with fertility, and particularly the birth of male children. This analysis of the figurative elements of balladry is a feature that Buchan himself explores in many of the papers printed here. This section also includes his essay on the battle of Harlaw in 1411, taking issue with Francis James Child for expecting transparency, or precise historical facts, in a ballad (Child 163). He shows it to be expressing, in a blurred way which was nevertheless closer to the actual pattern of events in the battle than any contemporary document, the response of Lowland Scotland to what it perceived as an assault by barbarian Highlanders, and therefore represents an important testimony. This section includes the first of three texts from the Glenbuchat manuscript included in the book (“The Maid of Coldingham,” Child 21; “Sir Hugh,” a version of “Hugh Spencer’s Feats in France,” Child 158; and “Hynde Chiel,” Child 256). Buchan was editing the manuscript at the time of his death, and it was finally published in 2007 by Moreira, who is Buchan’s former pupil.
The second section, on tale roles in traditional ballads, is the longest. Buchan’s methodology is based on that of Vladimir Propp, who based his Morphology of the Folktale on the Zaubermärchen or wonder tale. Buchan describes the wonder tale as “the most artistically complex [genre] of folk narrative and folk poetry” (247), and it is prominent in his 1984 collection of folk literature, Scottish Tradition. In his application of Propp to Scottish folktales he was able to take advantage of Heda Jason and Dmitri Segal’s untangling of the poor translation of Propp’s work, which had jumbled up “character,” “dramatis personae,” and “personage” indiscriminately. Buchan points out that Propp’s “arresting innovation” was to distinguish carefully between the abstract concept of the tale-role (“the interactive role served by a character in a narrative,” page 218) and the concrete fact of character. The tale-role raised the märchen and narrative ballad from the level of action and entertainment to fulfill psychological, cultural, and social functions: “the ballad genre . . . concerns itself essentially with relationships” (146). This holistic approach had already been anticipated by folklorists with reference to supernatural ballads, sometimes with dramatic results; as early as 1928, the American folklorist Lowry C. Wimberly ventured a guess that one of the very worldly protagonists of “Captain Wedderburn’s Courtship” (Child 46) would prove to be a supernatural being. Writing from Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Buchan takes evident satisfaction in revealing (214) that in 1965 MacEdward Leach had printed three such texts that had been collected in Labrador and Newfoundland. It is a pity that there are few references to the oral culture of the eastern seaboard of Canada in this collection, since this volume has been produced by Memorial University in St John’s, Newfoundland, where Buchan was professor of folklore.
The oral-formulaic approach to ballads, expressed by Buchan as “the tradition, literature and method of composition and transmission evolved in the conditions of non-literacy” (41) was challenged at the time by A. B. Friedman and others, and has been further undermined in recent years as a result of a greater awareness of the existence of a thriving culture of cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks which lay behind the oral culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Scotland. However, the scaffolding-like stemmas of structuralist analysis which appear at times in Buchan’s book, such as in the analysis of “Hugh Spencer’s Feats in France,” could well stand as models for the development of songs within a print-based culture too, and this collection remains of great topical and social importance for its studies of the expressive culture of Scotland from the Middle Ages to the 1990s.
The third section contains the analysis of several of the folk narratives which interested Buchan throughout his life. Emphasizing that widespread literacy came later to Scotland than to England, Buchan opens with a survey of folk tradition there before the union of the two countries’ crowns in 1603. This section contains a fully-documented study of the so-called Musician of Lughnasa, who disappears while exploring an underground passage or cave and never returns, since he has inadvertently disturbed the treasure of the beings who inhabit the place. However, most of the eight essays are concerned with modern legends and their relation to group identity. They include a general essay on the subject, but the most detailed is a sustained analysis of the Dog in a Chinese Restaurant legend using Edmund Leach’s anthropological methodology. Here Buchan emphasizes the popular cultural significance of the three earliest known instances being from a novel published in monthly parts (Thackeray’s Pendennis), a comic poem, and a 1932 Hitchcock film—in other words, from popular culture rather than oral tradition. There is a group of three papers on the Glasgow underworld, where Buchan suggests that in modern urban culture anecdotes function very much as legends did in earlier traditional communities (342). These papers show Buchan’s characteristic humor: in writing of petty criminals in Glasgow he notes that “names have been changed to protect the guilty” (330).
The final section of Buchan’s book is largely devoted to the social history and ethnology of northeast Scotland, an area which Buchan championed as a corrective to the overemphasis of the Scottish border resulting from the prestige of the work of Walter Scott. In the final section he shows convincingly that the folk play, and guising in particular, are found more widely there than has earlier been conceded (353-4). However, two of the most extensive pieces here, on the social history of various occupational groups, particularly farm servants, are concerned with traditional culture across the whole area of the lowlands.
David Buchan has an enviable style, both precise and colloquial, and this makes the book a pleasure to read. He uses Scots words (outwith, dreed, cateran) sparingly but effectively, and often uses a striking metaphor: “if one were to . . . attach all of balladry’s formulas and formulaic episodes to particular stories one would be left with a handful of pots and a mountain of shards” (28). With the possible exception of his literary paper “Galt’s Annals; Treatise and Fable” (1979) and “Ballads of Otherworld Beings” (1991), nothing substantial has been omitted, and the editors have used a light touch, only cutting obvious repetitions. This reader, a fervent admirer of Buchan’s work, has only two complaints. In “Traditional Patterns and the Religious Ballad,” the reader will have to turn to the original paper (published in Odense in 1985) to find the excellent discussion of “The Maid and the Palmer” (Child 21) which followed. Finally, with the exception of a list of ballads and tale-types, there is no index, a drawback in a volume as diverse and wide-ranging as this one.
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[Review length: 1379 words • Review posted on January 28, 2015]