(thanks Masato for the reprint info. I've added it to the Child entry in the General section of the Basic Folk Library). _________________________________________________________

Thanks folks, this seems to be developing into a really lovely thread. I'm encouraged to continue to look at Child's contribution in what I hope is a fairly objective manner.

Child was neither a collector (he didn't collect anything) nor a populariser (his books were small circulation and far too expensive) but he was a scholar. In fact, he was a professor of Mathematics at Harvard (am I correct in thinking that in the US many of the lecturers are called professors rather than just the heads of departments?). In addition to this, he had done quite a lot of work on English Poetry (though this doesn't seem to have made very much impact in the academic world) and demonstrated himself to be a serious literary scholar.

The idea of categorising folk songs (let's say just ballads in this case) as essentially families of songs has proved extremely useful, and the large amount of work doing the initial classification is clearly very worthwhile. One wouldn't criticise Child for missing out a few songs, except that this was done on the ideological grounds (ones which changed somewhat with each new edition of his book) of what was or was not a ballad. Child's restrictive definition has, I think, done some harm to subsequent scholarship as, also, has his tendency to regard "the ballads" as literature rather than songs (and thus to entirely ignore the contribution of the music). Fortunately, the latter problem was reversible basically because Child wasn't a collector.

McGrath asks "Were there Child equivalents in other countries". There certainly were, and this is a convenient point for looking more closely at Child's main collaborator.

Svend Grundtvig, a Danish scholar, began publishing his national collection of Danish ballads Danmarks gamle folkevisor in 1853. Child discovered Grundtvig's work around 1860 and his 3rd edition was completely re-organised so as to imitate Grundtvig's formal structure. Child recognised that Grundtvig was the superior scholar and, in fact, paid him quite a lot of money to work on the 3rd edition.

Grundtvig, it appears, may well have been essentially responsible for the basis of Child's classification system, and Child even changed the text of one song to fit in with Grundtvig's ideas. The image develops of Grundtvig effectively supervising Child in the production of the 1882-1898 edition of "The Ballads". A (brief) acknowledgement of Grundtvig's help appears in the advertisement of Child's 3rd edition. (source: Hustvedt, Sigurd "Ballad Books and Ballad Men", 1930).

As SeanM has said, Child's efforts to make the Percy MS (and many others) available are seriously amazing. He spent a great deal of time and energy, not to mention his own money in the pursuit of manuscript sources, and with the one aim of making them available to other scholars. As others have said too, he certainly wasn't afraid of hard work. I'd like to know more about Grundtvig's influence on Child, though, especially since Hustvedt seems to feel that it was so great. I wonder what other information there is on this man?