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The biblical books of Exodus and Judges each contain a long narrative song with striking analogies, performative as well as structural, to the Scots ballads that William Motherwell writes about in his 1827 Minstrelsy Ancient and Modern. The second of these songs, the “Song of Deborah,” also shares a motif with two Scots ballads in particular, the motif of the bereft ladies. This motif may be described as the introduction at the end of the song, for ironic effect, of ladies not implicated in the main action of the plot who rather wait in vain for the return of their husbands, unaware that they have already perished. This motif proves to be rare in the oral tradition of Europe and Asia Minor. But apparently it has entered the popular imagination of United States Americans, as is demonstrated by the common use of the probably inaccurate term widow's walk to describe a vernacular architectural feature originally found on some New England homes, and by the choice of the motif to conclude a vernacular poem published on the internet.
The Pan-Hispanic oral ballad tradition provides us with precious examples of how traditional narratives - romances - many with roots in medieval times, continue to provide the communities where they are remembered with relevant commentaries on social issues. Amongst the romances most frequently collected from the modern oral tradition, both in the Iberian Peninsula and the Latin American countries, the romance of Delgadina offers us a testimony of how a recurring social problem such as incest is dealt with according to the particular view points of the communities where this and other ballads serve as a vehicle for the transmission of values. In this paper I discuss the various solutions proposed by Delgadina and other traditional ballads to this recurring social problem.
The Lithuanian “baladeacutes” should be held to be narrative lyrics. Because of a strong lyrical trend in Lithuanian folk poetry, very often they seem to be cases between folksongs and folkballads. An attempt to explain the untragic nature of part of Lithuanian ballad-sujets is done in the article. The cause could be not only the lyrical mood of folk singers or the lack of epic as well as dramatic traditions in Lithuanian singing folklore, but on the great part the answer may be found in the medium those foreign sujets got in. In the oldest strata of Lithuanian ballads the role of mythology is of great importance, the archaic conception of death and love. It is the avoidance of rude cruelty in Lithuanian ballads that causes the absence of certain parts; the structure of sujet becomes obscure, and the inner logic of sujet is ruled out. Dramatical manner of performance is present only sometimes, but not always in Lithuanian ballads. The expression of the individual; traditional occasions to perform ballads; some poetical artificies of Lithuanian ballads; suppositional meaning of some ballads motifs; the classification of Lithuanian ballads as well as their origin is also reviewed shortly in the article.
The value of virginity and the value of wealth are two types of human attitudes in Medieval Age, reflected in folk ballads. Both make conflicts among people and appear in folklore. 1. In the ballad the girl who offers her virginity to deliver the condemned to death is furious, when she realises that her offer was in vain. 2. In the ballad of the heartless mother, in case of danger, the mother leaves the children alone in the woods and runs away with her money. The specific meaning of ballad text originates from textual context, explained by actions in tragic attitutde and by catharctic emotions at the end. Moral issues in ballads are close to the Christian rules, they are understandable in cultural, historical and textual contexts. In ballads the lonely persons stand in the focus of action and the hero/heroine are responsible for their own sin. By strong passion a hero can cause sin. The ethical norms of society are against those who are not obedient.
F. J. Child argued that it is “mainy through women everywhere” that the ballads are preserved and yet to him, as to Percy, Herder, Motherwell or Grundtvig before, women are only the mediators of an older male form of literature (heroic ballads, minstrel song, etc). The essential maternal feminity of orality is part of the German Romantic myth of origin. The 'Volk'/people had to be (kept) anonymous in order to produce 'VOLKSballaden'/popular ballads. What has come down to us in writing are very often ballads sung by women, recorded by men and presented as the 'manly', powerful, genuine ballads of the people. By arguing for women everywhere being the chief preservers of traditional ballad poetry, F. J. Child paved the way for seeking out these women locally.
The article analyses two Russian ballads in which the hero and plot are close to those of epic songs. Human destiny is a central notion of the ballads; its portrayal is compared to the way destiny is shown in rites and epic songs. The portrayal of time characteristic of the epic song (historic present) acquires new function in the ballad where circular time is replaced by the portrayal of linear, irreversible human fate.
The origin of many traditional Afrikaans ballads can be traced to Medieval German and Dutch songs. They arrived at the Cape from the Netherlands and were gradually adapted. Towards the end of the 19th century a number of these ballads appeared for the first time in printed form. However, the majority of traditional Afrikaans ballads originated locally and represent the typical cultural milieu of Afrikaans speaking people. The three examples used in this article are all traditional ballads which originated in South Africa. The first short ballad tells a love story, the second one gives a humorous account of a wedding in the countryside and the third ballad originated in the Anglo-Boer War and relates the incident of the capture of a British naval canon by the Boers. The importance of these ballads in today's society is, on the one hand, reflected by re-utilisation, especially for entertainment purposes and, on the other hand, by the application for the purposes of studying historical events which are of current importance.
Although in Amzulescu's "Catalogue of the Narrative Subjects and Variants" (1983) The Unfaithful Wife is rightly registered as a "family ballad", type 134 (291), with three sub-types, I will refer here to an epic or bravery song thematically belonging to the family ballad, but registered as a heroic epic song. The type 205 (286), Ghit ă Cătănut ă, knows hundreds of variants published in collections and magazines, or stored on tapes in the Archive of the "Constantin Brăiloiu" Institute of Ethnography and Folklore. Structural analysis of the poem led Amzulescu (1981) to the conclusion that this is a heroic ballad, the main character of which is a brave man who fights his enemy and wins, punishing at last his young wife who did not help him in a crucial, provoked or unprovoked episode of the struggle. The inter-play of the cultural, archaic context and the social, performing context shows how the singers, in different cultural and emotional contexts, slightly but firmly moved the emphasis either on the ethic or the heroic meaning of the story. As the ballad is mainly sung by men, and the traditional occasions of performing it were the wedding party (feast) or men gatherings, most of the versions of the ballad Ghia Catanut show a strongly male oriented attitude. The cruelty with which the young wife and her mother are punished stands, sometimes, against the moral values of the modern times.
In this contribution we will take a close look at the ethical norms in the ballads of the haiduk cycle, still alive in the field. We will examine the most popular ballads' motives, looking at them at the different levels: the enemy's respect of courage, the mother's behaviour in the different situations, the respect of his mother and respect of the milk that she breastfed him etc. On the basis of the ballad motive of the sinful haiduk conscious sin and the moral codex oblige even the mother to put an especially hard curse, on her child, including the maledictas. The departure from the moral norms is so great that even her love could not find any excuse for the sinful haiduk ('aramija'), especially when the sin is incest. The next motive is the motive of treason and the moral norms.
As we study the pentatonic characteristics in the melodies of ballads of different cultures we may encounter some similarities in the melodies of Idil-Ural and Erzincan Central Town ballads of which people share a common background in the past. Some ballads from Erzincan region are similar from the view of pentatonic form to Idil-Ural region. But, we can notice that there are differences in the pentatonic scale of the two regions.
