Scottish Tradition Rle Folklore

Scottish folk literature is characterised by a wide range of creative expression: story, song, play and proverb. This anthology, first published in 1984, provides an authoritative introduction to Scottish folk literature, and is unique in that it deals with all the genres intrinsic to Scottish tradition. Its selected texts offer an unusual and diverse enjoyment to the reader, including such forms as wonder tales or Märhcen, classical ballads, riddles, jocular tales, lyric and comic and occupational folksongs, rhymes, historical and supernatural legends, and guisers’ plays. The texts chosen cover the main regional traditions of Lowland Scotland, from Galloway to the Shetlands, and span a number of centuries, through both pre- and post-industrial periods, from a sailor’s worksong of the sixteenth century to modern urban legends just recently recorded. The book is arranged in four sections, on Folk Narrative, Folksong, Folksay, and Folk Drama, each with an introduction and a bibliographical essay setting the material in context and indicating some of its international links. Folk literature itself is brought into firm focus by discussion and generic example, and the anthology as a whole illuminates substantial areas of Scottish social and cultural life.

The ballad is an enduring and universal literary genre. In this book, first published in 1972, David Buchan is concerned to establish the nature of a ballad and of the people who produced it through a study of the regional tradition of the Northeast of Scotland, the most fertile ballad area in Britain. His account of this tradition has two parallel aims, one specifically literary – to investigate the ballad as oral literature – and one broadly ethnographic – to set the regional tradition in its social context. Dr Buchan applies the interesting and important work which has recently been done on oral tradition in Europe on the relationship of the ballad to society to his study of this particular part of Scotland. He examines a nonliterate society to discover what factors besides nonliteracy helped foster its ballad tradition. He analyses the processes of composition and transmission in the oral ballad, and considers the changes which removed nonliteracy, altered social patterns, and seriously affected the ballad tradition. By demonstrating how people who could neither read nor write were able to compose literature of a high order, David Buchan provides a convincing explanation of the ballad’s perennial appeal and an answer to the ‘ballad enigma’. His book is also a valuable study in social history of this culturally distinct region, the Northeast of Scotland.

The popular appeal of the ballad is perennial, and few literary genres give so much pleasure to so many kinds of people. This anthology, first published in 1973, is drawn from the richest ballad tradition in Britain, that of the Northeast of Scotland. It provides a fresh and original choice of songs that ranges from the old ballads like ‘Gil Brenton’ and ‘Willie’s Lady’ to the bothy ballads like ‘The Tarves Rant’. The collection illustrates the development of a tradition over the centuries from the oral stage down to the modern, and exemplifies the methods of composition and transmission, the kinds of ballad-story, and the types of ballad-text found in the various stages of a ballad tradition. It illustrates the variety of subject matter, and indicates lines of relationship with other genres of Folklore Studies. A substantial section, containing what are widely acknowledged as the best of all British ballads, the oral ballads of Anna Brown, demonstrates clearly that the ballads are not merely simple or crude poems; in their oral form, they are narrative songs of some complexity and sophistication. This anthology is complementary to Dr Buchan’s The Ballad and the Folk.

The popular appeal of the ballad is perennial, and few literary genres give so much pleasure to so many kinds of people. This anthology, first published in 1973, is drawn from the richest ballad tradition in Britain, that of the Northeast of Scotland. It provides a fresh and original choice of songs that ranges from the old ballads like ‘Gil Brenton’ and ‘Willie’s Lady’ to the bothy ballads like ‘The Tarves Rant’. The collection illustrates the development of a tradition over the centuries from the oral stage down to the modern, and exemplifies the methods of composition and transmission, the kinds of ballad-story, and the types of ballad-text found in the various stages of a ballad tradition. It illustrates the variety of subject matter, and indicates lines of relationship with other genres of Folklore Studies. A substantial section, containing what are widely acknowledged as the best of all British ballads, the oral ballads of Anna Brown, demonstrates clearly that the ballads are not merely simple or crude poems; in their oral form, they are narrative songs of some complexity and sophistication. This anthology is complementary to Dr Buchan’s The Ballad and the Folk.

This collection of Newfoundland folk narratives, first published in 1996, grew out of extensive fieldwork in folk culture in the province. The intention was to collect as broad a spectrum of traditional material as possible, and Folktales of Newfoundland is notable not only for the number and quality of its narratives, but also for the format in which they are presented. A special transcription system conveys to the reader the accents and rhythms of each performance, and the endnote to each tale features an analysis of the narrator’s language. In addition, Newfoundland has preserved many aspects of English and Irish folk tradition, some of which are no longer active in the countries of their origin. Working from the premise that traditions virtually unknown in England might still survive in active form in Newfoundland, the researchers set out to discover if this was in fact the case.

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival in the mid-twentieth century and has now entered a professionalised and public space. Devolution in the UK and the surge of political debate surrounding the independence referendum in Scotland in 2014 led to a greater scrutiny of regional and national identities within the UK, set within the wider context of cultural globalisation. This volume brings together a range of authors that sets out to explore the increasingly plural and complex notions of Scotland, as performed in and through traditional music. Traditional music has played an increasingly prominent role in the public life of Scotland, mirrored in other Anglo-American traditions. This collection principally explores this movement from historically text-bound musical authenticity towards more transient sonic identities that are blurring established musical genres and the meaning of what constitutes ‘traditional’ music today. The volume therefore provides a cohesive set of perspectives on how traditional music performs Scottishness at this crucial moment in the public life of an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom.