The editorial work of Francis James Child was a wonder. When one considers, on the one hand, the jealousies with which manuscripts might be guarded, and on the other hand the reckless manner in which manuscripts were broadcast across the world, along with the difficulties and uncertainties of correspondence and the obstacles to travel and personal inspection of texts, one can only stand awestruck and humbly grateful before the patience, tenacity, perspicacity, and sheer doggedness with which Child worked manuscripts loose and scraped therefrom the contents for his new and more thorough survey of the English and Scottish Popular Ballads. Thanks to his patient perseverance, manuscript after manuscript, either in the original or in careful copy, came his way to be sifted for every last telling scrap of the ballad record. Despite his efforts, however, an occasional set of papers eluded him, either slipping past his ken or proving impossible to pin down. But in these latter days, scholars are taking steps to make overlooked or ill-appreciated manuscripts available in new editions. Emily Lyle has edited a two-volume edition of the manuscripts from the 1820s of Andrew Crawfurd, William Motherwell’s friend. She has also headed up the team editing the mid-nineteenth century Harris manuscript material, only partly seen by Child. In England Stephen Knight has edited the Forresters Manuscript of Robin Hood Ballads, a seventeenth-century manuscript unknown to Child. And of course a huge amount of material has been collected since Child, most notably perhaps the Greig-Duncan material from early twentieth century Aberdeen and the Carpenter material from Scotland, England, and the U.S., 1928-1987.
The book under review is an important addition to this effort to make significant manuscript materials available to contemporary scholars. Beginning about 1818, Robert Scott, pastor of Glenbuchat Parish in Aberdeenshire, collected more than sixty ballads, a great percentage of them ballads of which Child included versions in The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. The four notebooks of the manuscript passed from sight in the 1820s, reappearing only in 1949 when they were deposited in the library of Aberdeen University. There they languished further until David Buchan came to notice them when he was a graduate student. University restrictions on the use of the manuscript prevented Buchan from drawing on it for his doctoral work, but in 1965 he finally obtained permission to edit the notebooks for publication. Buchan did much of the work of identifying the individual ballads, situating them in oral and written ballad tradition and preparing annotations, as well as a doing much of the groundwork for an introduction. But his untimely death in 1994 left the edition unfinished. Buchan’s student James Moreira inherited the rather heavy mantle of the master, including the charge to complete the edition of this manuscript. Moreira has proved worthy of the charge. Here is a romantic ballad manuscript remarkably contextualized, with each individual item situated in tradition so that we know how it relates to the other relevant versions out there. The resultant volume documents the ballad repertoire of a community still capable of singing in the old oral way, but at the same time much exposed to the incursions of ballad print. This repertoire supplements the picture of Aberdeen balladry that Anna Brown presents, and provides a background for the picture of singing in Aberdeen a hundred years later, as that picture emerges from the Greig-Duncan collection. And the repertoire includes a number of texts that help fill in the history of particular ballads. The one thing missing--admittedly a substantial absence--is the identification of individual singers.
Generally speaking, the versions are comfortably full, often running to twenty-five or thirty stanzas or more. Plots are usually clear and characterized by the kind of narrative poignancy we associate with the very best of ballads. In these stories, love is often a hopeless tangle. Identities are hidden. Wandering maids are raped. Lovers are tested by false reports. And the arrogant learn too late the value of those who would be true to them. Only occasionally does good sense prevail and offer hope for a long life of devotion. Many of the great Scots ballads are here, sometimes in distinctive texts, including Mary Hamilton (Child 173), Rare Willie Drowned in Yarrow (Child 215), The Gay Goshawk (Child 96), Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58), Babylon (Child 14), Andrew Lammie (Child 233), and Rob Roy (Child 225). In addition, the collection includes several historical ballads and tragic love stories not anthologized by Child. And in the ballad Lady Mary, the manuscript apparently offers a variation of the popular broadside ballad The Lady’s Fall, but one that has been thoroughly reworked in oral circulation.
Moreira, building upon Buchan’s groundwork, has explicated the manuscript as completely as one might wish. It is hard to think of any question about this material that he has not faced up to and answered as well as it can be answered. Especially insightful is his demonstration of the ways in which “the collection is a remarkable reflection of the on-going tension between tradition and modernity that emerges in many areas of social and cultural life in the parish” (lxvii). Unfortunately, however, the book is not easy to use. It has, for instance tightly limited indexes and no complete table of contents. Each ballad is assigned a number corresponding to its place in one of the four notebooks, but these numbers are not printed at the head of each ballad. And the notes to the ballads are not cross-referenced by page to the texts to which they refer. Consequently, one must do a good deal of shuffling to find texts or pursue questions.
This is my only complaint, however. All those who love ballads have cause to be deeply grateful to James Moreira for his dedication in making this fascinating collection of classic ballads and broadsides available to readers and students. Let them be grateful, too, for the great Scots ballad tradition of which this collection is a part, and for the genius of David Buchan, who devoted his life to making that tradition better understood.
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[Review length: 1006 words • Review posted on January 28, 2008]