Possibly, Les!

For those who don't know, Nerd is the mudcat handle for Steve Winick, who wrote the Reynardine article kindly linked in by Brian...so, that's who I am!

On the Reynardine stuff...I din't have an axe to grind, particularly. But to publish in prominent academic journals these days, you need to show why your paper is both novel and theoretically interesting. This is particularly true if you are not yourself a prominent academic-- which I am not really now, and certainly wasn't then.

Novelty is generally not a problem outside academia, but for something to be "theoretically interesting" often amounts to proving a theoretical point. This looks a lot like axe-grinding to non-academics. So a good deal of that impression was probably added to the paper through my need to fill that requirement.

Also, even though many people here on Mudcat were willing to supply instances of Lloyd's "tinkering," what i was saying--that Bert tinkered with songs and didn't admit it sometimes--was still pretty radical in British academic folklore. In fact, one of the anonymous reviewers for the journal said that when he started reading the paper he was sure I was wrong, but was finally convinced by the end. In order to convince such folks, I had go very deeply into each piece of evidence to be sure no stone was unturned--which may feel like overkill to people whose attitude is "ok, I accept that Lloyd did this, but so what!"

My educated guesses on why Bert changed Reynardine, and why he let his changes be accepted as traditional, do appear in the paper, in the section called Negotiating Authenticity: A. L. Lloyd and the Mystery of "Reynardine" The analogy I use is not Tom Keating but The Brothers Grimm--a more directly applicable one, I think. As others have said, Keating wasn't creating the standards by which people evaluated and verified the authenticity of artworks on the one hand, and forging them on the other. If he had been, he would inevitably have put in his books on "how to evaluate Rembrandt's works" ideas which validated his forgeries. In doing that, he would have introduced flaws in the model by which Rembrandt's works were studied.

Lloyd basically was doing this. He was able to condition people to accept his rewritten pieces as genuine--by telling them "people in the industrial revolution felt this way," and then providing the songs which "proved" (and were proved by) his assertions. Interestingly, the effect academics are interested in isn't the creation of new songs, but the creation of theories and standards to validate what are essentially forgeries: THAT's what was damaging to folklore scholarship. People who listened to the revival recordings Lloyd influenced were also reading his books, hoping to be told by an academic folklorist what the songs meant--and they were getting potted theories that only fully held up if you accepted his forgeries as real. As (I think it was) Brian pointed out, this began very early in Lloyd's career, with The Singing Englishman, in which he had a whole theory about the peasants' revolt of the 1380s that included "The Cutty Wren"; at once claiming the song was far older than it probably is, and poorly describing the song's performance so as to make it all seem plausible. By the time of Folk Song In England, no-one would have believed the song was that old, which I think is one reason he left it out.

The people who absorbed all this circular thinking include generations of folklore and ethnomusicology students who studied with Lloyd, as well as revivalists like Brian who treat songs as more than just entertainment. So Lloyd's actions could in theory have had disastrous effects on our understanding of traditional song in England. Luckily he wasn't consistent, or calculating, or deliberate enough to have done that much damage. It wasn't what he was trying to do, after all.

To people like Dick Miles who say that his sins are outweighed by the good things he did...that's well and good, and I agree. But it's really irrelevant. The great American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf was never an academic--he was, in fact, a fire safety inspector. It so happens that his papers were great works of linguistic scholarship. But what if they had been deliberately misleading, and set our understanding of language and cognition back years. Would it be logical to argue: "well, maybe, but he saved a lot of lives as a fire safety inspector, so we can't blame him for those bad things he did?" In short, Bert's good effects on the world outweighed his bad ones, but I can still wish he hadn't had the bad effects.

In my paper, I try to be balanced here. I really do think Lloyd was a wonderful figure for twentieth-century folksong and folk music. I see his tinkering more as a form of mischievous play than as a crime. In fact, he often left a trail of breadcrumbs to the truth, that people like Dave Arthur and Roy Palmer and Keith Gregson and myself have been able to follow. One could even argue that the discipline has been strengthened through us being kept "on our toes" by Bert, years after he left us!