Herder’s ideas clearly influenced the Brothers Grimm and their conception of the folk culture from which their folk tales had originated. They also built their collection on
360 Forster, Michael N. 2002. Johann Gottfried von Herder: Philosophical Writings. Cambridge University Press. p. 7.
361 Ibid.
transcriptions of tales taken directly from the storyteller, as Herder had done with his songs. Rather than base the collection on previously recorded tales or songs, they were engaged in fieldwork that involved interaction with the ‘Volk’, and were publishing material from this
Kultur des Volkes. Michaelis – Jena applauds the academic rigour in the work of the Brothers
Grimm, referring to it as a kind of ‘scientific method’.362 As discussed earlier in the thesis, Bendix argues that the work of the Grimms represented a transition from the Romantic fascination with the purity of the folk to the search for artefacts of an idealised human past. This search that was the basis of the work of the Grimms may account for the greater degree of rigour found in their collecting practices. That is not to suggest that the folklore scholarship of the Romantic period lacked rigour, but the approach of the Grimms required textual analysis, editing, and reconstruction that demanded some of the rigorous techniques of scholarship. The suggested ‘scientific method’ (or wissenschaft) differs from what was discussed in the previous section of this chapter, where American folk collecting was discussed as a distinctly unscientific practice, with data not necessarily used to form any ideas about culture. However, the collecting characteristics that Michaelis – Jena claims typify the ‘scientific method’ are also present in the work of collectors like John Lomax. Lomax did emphasise his informants for Cowboy Songs and drew attention to the
importance of the work for literary study. Wendell attests to this in his foreword to Cowboy
Songs, citing the collection’s importance for the scholarly study of folk poetry.363
Evidently this kind of ‘scientific method’ refers to the type of collecting which
involves fieldwork and acknowledging the contributions of informants. Despite this, Wilhelm Grimm in particular often manipulated his scientific data,
A master of simplicity with a perfect ear for the colloquial, he replaced indirect speech by dialogue, gave motivation to certain happenings, and when necessary pieced together variants, printed and oral ones, to make a better whole. He preserved the content of the original yet gave it a new expression.364
362 Michaelis – Jena, Ruth. 1971. ‘Oral Tradition and the Brothers Grimm’. Folklore. 82/4. p. 268. 363 Lomax, John A. 1910. Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York, MacMillan Press. 364
Much of the content of the folk tales was changed over the course of the seven editions, and the majority of extirpated material was sexual in nature, due to the young audience interested in the stories. Burke comments that, ‘in Germany at this time the middle classes quite literally spoke a different language from the craftsmen and peasants…’365 Burke also observes the editing techniques of the Grimms, ‘Translation was necessary, but it
necessarily involved distortions. Some stories were bowdlerised, because they would otherwise have shocked their new readers. Individual idiosyncrasies in the telling were smoothed out so that the collection had a uniform style.’366 The indulgence of editing was something that Child submitted to as well, but his collection differed from the Grimms in what it claimed to represent. The Brothers Grimm pointed out the varied European origins of their folk tales, and stressed that they were not intended to be part of a solely German collection.367 Child on the other hand claimed to be representing the ancient oral ballad tradition that he believed in, despite the origins of many of his ballads in printed collections and broadsides. This is an example of Child working within the disciplinary context of German philological and textual scholarship, but introducing the transformation of the popular ballad tradition to explain his work. Although Child carried out no fieldwork or transcribing, his research into ballad provenance, ballad variants, and close textual analysis is from the methods of the Grimms. As Bendix and others point out, this came from his time as a graduate student in Germany, and was also based on prominent scholars like Grundtvig. These practices determined how Child assembled his collection, but Child’s transformation was also the scope of his collection which encompassed the entire ballad tradition of England and Scotland.
Child’s collecting techniques differed dramatically from those of the Brothers Grimm, despite his fascination with their work. Harker’s criticism of Child points out his deference to his predecessors, and his reliance on the historical theories of the Grimms.368 Harker’s condemnation of Child’s views of history will be examined shortly, but the incongruity of having the Brothers Grimm as an inspiration can be seen in Child’s dismissal of fieldwork. He was interested exclusively in ballads that were composed before the popularisation of the printing press, since he believed print culture had effectively supplanted oral culture in
365
Burke, Peter. 1978. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Ashgate Publishing, Surrey. p. 44. 366 Ibid.
367 Grimm, Jakob, and Grimm, Wilhelm. 1812. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. 368
Britain, and that genuine popular ballads must have an oral root. To this end he consulted numerous ballad collections, researched in libraries, and maintained a number of European correspondents from whom he received transcriptions of songs. At no point during his collecting work did Child transcribe music heard from the contemporary ‘folk’, and as Filene notes Child saw no purpose in transcribing from informants if no new songs had been created, which largely excluded America from his work.369 Despite this preference, there are similarities between Child’s work and his predecessors. Like the Grimms, Herder, and
Motherwell370, Child’s collecting had a distinctly scholarly method, with due reference to previous research, a great deal of accompanying and explanatory notes, and extensive bibliographic references. McCarthy refers to qualities of Motherwell’s that are true for the German collectors and Child too,
The fruit of Motherwell’s collecting and editing was his anthology of Scottish Ballads, Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern. The Minstrelsy is distinguished by: 1. An introduction exhibiting unexpected insight into the oral process in ballad
composition. 2. Texts remarkable for their fidelity to the oral tradition. 3. An appendix which includes thirty three ballad tunes, not idealised but matched to the specific stanzas to which they were sung. 4. Sound scholarship throughout.371
The period in which these European and American collectors were working was marked by folk music collecting being a literary field, and the preserve of the educated Gentleman,
…these gentlemen did not go out into the highways and byways...to find the objects with which they were so fascinated. Like genteel collectors of rural
artefacts today, these editor – collectors relied to a great extent on middlemen, or pickers as they are now called in the antique trade.372
369
Filene, Benjamin. 2000. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. University of North Carolina Press. p. 11.
370
For a study of the collecting techniques of William Motherwell see: McCarthy, William B. 1987. ‘William Motherwell as Field Collector’. Folk Music Journal. 5/3.
371 McCarthy, William B. 1987. ‘William Motherwell as Field Collector’. Folk Music Journal. 5/3. pp. 295 – 296. 372
McCarthy’s use of ‘editor – collectors’ indicates another important trait that ties Child to this collecting tradition: editing. Michaelis – Jena referred to the editing of Wilhelm Grimm and the way he ‘pieced together variants, printed and oral ones, to make a better whole’373; Motherwell’s Minstrelsy was based on the same process of assembling a piece from all available variants, ‘the great contribution that an editor can make is to take versions with significant variants and from them print a better composite, a more complete and more ‘correct’ than any previous text.’374 Child followed this editing heritage, and his English and
Scottish Popular Ballads is constructed from as many recorded versions of songs as could be
found in previous collections. Harker quotes him saying,
…the rule has been to select the most authentic copies, and to reprint them as they stand in the collections, restoring readings that had been changed without grounds, and noting all deviations from the originals, whether those of previous editors or of this edition, in the margin. Interpolations acknowledged by the editors have generally been dropped. In two instances only have previous texts been superseded or greatly improved.375
This process of working from previous collections assembled by contemporaries or earlier workers distinguishes this as a literary subject, much like the history of Shakespeare
scholarship based on additions, subtractions, and revisions by scholars over many years. It is clear that Child was collecting within this tradition of ‘editor – collectors’ who paid a great deal of attention to the conventions of folk scholarship and aimed to produce
comprehensive reference works, some with a broad appeal. The contexts of Herder’s Romantic pursuit of the voice of the folk, and perhaps more importantly, the literary and philological scholarship of the Grimms, determined the practices of Child. His scholarly treatment of texts and his research into the texts, coupled with his editing to guarantee authenticity, are part of the beginnings of the folklore discipline in the work of the Grimms.
373 Michaelis – Jena, Ruth. 1971. ‘Oral Tradition and the Brothers Grimm’. Folklore. 82/4. p. 267. 374 McCarthy, William B. 1987. ‘William Motherwell as Field Collector’. Folk Music Journal. 5/3. p. 301. 375