 sj |
||
|
||
Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad
|
|
|
Subject: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 01 Dec 01 - 12:45 AM "Gay Hijackers" gets over 100 replies and my search for this ballad merits only "Syd Rumpo" comments. Thought I'd try again. I've only been at this particular ballad for about 30 years. I thought I might get something useful here from someone who takes this sort of thing seriously. The only surviving words I know of are: "It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat. The mither beneath the mools heard that..." The surviving bit is from Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." The scholar Bronson believed it to be an invented bit by Emily, but I think it's more likely the real thing. Any serious ideas out there about this? |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: MMario Date: 01 Dec 01 - 08:09 AM Big Daddy - the "BS:" threads are just that. But you are asking for information that you haven't been able to find for 30 years. Would you prefer that a bunch of people sign onto your thread to say:"Nope, I don't know either" - because we *can* do that. We could do it every day if you really want. But it would turn a legitamate request for information into a BS: thread. There is a lot of knowledge tied up here at the MudCat - but we are not miracle workers either. My personalgut feeling is that if Bronson believed that this was invented by Bronte he probably had pretty good reason. After all, he *did* spend a lot of time working on such stuff. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,MCP Date: 01 Dec 01 - 08:22 AM I'm with MMario here - I did look at the thread. I looked up references to 'mool'. I checked via the Glossary in Child for the word, which appears in versions of Sheath and Knife and Earl Brand. I looked up some other versions of these too (those with the entire Child on disc can check that more exactly). Short of reading/listening to all the songs I have(not that I mind doing that in general) I decided there was no more I had to add at the moment. I'm also inclined to go along with MMario re Bronson's opinion, but I /will/ remember the request should I ever come across the words and post then. Mick |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Greyeyes Date: 01 Dec 01 - 10:46 AM I have checked James Orchard Halliwell's "Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial words" (London, 1847) and all the obscure words in Bronte's line seem to be genuine dialect, but they don't seem to make sense. "Bairnies" is presumably a derivation of bairn, still commonly used for baby in the north of England. "Grat" means wept,and is from Northumberland. "Mither" means muffled, and is from Northamptonshire. "Mools" means rumple or disorder and is also from Northamptonshire. So the line reads something like "It was far in the night and the babies wept. The smother beneath the rumple heard that..." . I think Bronte probably made it up, and it still sounds like Rambling Sid to me. If you do a Google search on "yorkshire dialect" there are a number of links to relevant societies and academic sites which it may be worth contacting if you want to look into the linguistic provenance further. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 01 Dec 01 - 10:49 AM Thank you, all. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 01 Dec 01 - 11:10 AM "Mools" is a problem. Yes, I always figured "it was late in the night, and the babies cried, the mother (I think) beneath the 'mools' (moors, earth, mound, maybe?) heard that..." I'm just waiting to find out what happens next. Does the dead mother come to comfort her bairnies? Does she sing them a lullaby from the grave? Maybe I'll join Emily and just fill in the blanks myself...Emily and her sisters apparently absorbed a lot of stories/folklore/possibly ballads from their Irish-born father, their Cornish aunt, and Haworth locals. I've always felt that "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" had more to do with traditional "fairy tale" themes than "Enlish Literature." |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,MCP Date: 01 Dec 01 - 12:27 PM According to my child glossary mools=mouls = mould/dust/ashes (of the dead)/earth of a grave: It was nae wonder his heart was sair, When he shooled[*] the mools on her yellow hair Sheath And Knife [*] =shoveled Mick |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: richardw Date: 01 Dec 01 - 12:40 PM Try contacting Mike Ballantyne through the BC Folklore website www.folklore.bc.ca He may be able to help you. Or, sign up to the Canadian Traditional music list, [cantrad], at coollist.com and post a request. There are a lot of focusied folks on this small list and some Brits who may be able to help. Richard Wright |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 01 Dec 01 - 01:25 PM Thanks, Mick & Richard. I appreciate the input. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Malcolm Douglas Date: 01 Dec 01 - 02:50 PM Your poor abandoned original thread is here: Help: Possible Yorkshire Ballad? One reason for encouraging people to stick with their original enquiry rather than starting new threads a day or so later is to avoid making life unnecessarily difficult for future enquirers.
That said, and now that work has eased a little and I have time to reply, I suspect that your best chance of getting somewhere with this lies not in the field of traditional music but in those of folktale studies and literary criticism. You can be fairly sure that some student of the Brontes has at some time adressed this question; probably they have got nowhere with it, but it is an avenue which you should explore if you have not already done so: start with the biggest academic study of Wuthering Heights that you can find, and work through the bibliography. Small pieces in learned periodicals are often the best source of information about the minutiae of literary works; as time goes on it becomes harder and harder for higher-degree students to find something to write about that hasn't been done to death, and wee questions like this are an absolute godsend for them if there is an answer to be found. You should also consult Stith Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, and Katherine Briggs' Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language. I strongly suspect that you will find nothing in the way of a putative ballad on the subject; very probably, there never was one. What you may very well find is a range of folktales containing this motif (which I take to be something on the lines of dead mother responds to her children's distress), somewhere amongst which might perhaps be a recognisable relative of a story which may have inspired Miss Bronte's little fragment. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,Magaret Date: 01 Dec 01 - 03:15 PM This is in Child, volume 5, page 203 of the Dover edition. He says it "has not unnaturally been taken for a relic of a traditional Scottish ballad... It is, in factm a stanza from the Danish ballad 'Moderen under Mulde'. translated by Jamieson, and given in the notes to the fourth canto of Scott's Lady of the Lake." So it is a traditional ballad, only not in English. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 01 Dec 01 - 03:49 PM Now that's getting somewhere! Malcolm, I'm sorry about the breach of Mudcat etiquette. I didn't think my initial thread was going anywhere but downhill fast. I stand corrected, and in the future will hang in there. Somehow I managed to miss the Child reference. I gave my 5 volume set to a band member as an extended loan about seven years ago. The loan appears to be extended indefinitely. Sometimes a "puzzle" like this is rather like a jigsaw or crossword puzzle. You can stare at it forever and not see what it is you are looking for. Then along comes someone who takes one gander and sees the missing piece, letter, word, whatever. Thank you one and all for your help. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Malcolm Douglas Date: 01 Dec 01 - 05:10 PM Thankyou, Magaret. I somehow got the erroneous impression that Child had been consulted, so I didn't look at "Fragments". There was quite the vogue for translating ballads in and out of each others' languages in those days; indeed, a translation of Our Goodman (Child 274 B in this case) by Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer, published in 1798/90, actually gave rise to a series of traditional songs in France and doubtless other countries.
I can't help with a Danish text (or with the translation in Scott just at present, but that shouldn't be hard to find in a library), but there are two Norwegian sets at the Norwegian Universities Documentation Project: Den vonde stjukmori
|
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Malcolm Douglas Date: 01 Dec 01 - 05:22 PM In fact they have 79 variants of Den vonde stjukmori, but only two refer to Moderen under Mulde in their notes. I wish, sometimes, that I understood Norwegian; I am assuming for the moment that this is The Wicked Stepmother, but I can't find a definition of stjukmori anywhere... |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,MCP Date: 01 Dec 01 - 05:54 PM How easy to miss the obvious! I'd assumed that if Bronson thought it was invented then it couldn't be in Child, whereas a quick look for Wuthering Heights in the index would have got it immediately. I shall retire to a darkened room and sip brandy till the pain eases. Well done Margaret. Mick |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,Austin Pollard Date: 01 Dec 01 - 07:39 PM Well it looks like fairly straightforward dialect to *me* (born 15 miles from Haworth) It was far in the night, and the bairnies grat. The mither beneath the mools heard that bairnies = informal form of Bairns, childer, babies grat = greet, cried mither = mother mools = moulds, earth i.e. even a dead mother can hear the children cry. In the locality, though, we would say 'skrike', not greet - that's from further north. There again, much of yorkshire/lancashire dialect is Danish/Norse in origin (see above posts) so ... Med Venlige Hilsen ;O) Austin
|
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,Boab Date: 02 Dec 01 - 03:42 AM I would not try to suggest that there has been some confusion among contributors as far as dialect or language is concerned--but there seems at least to be a lack of realisation of the widespread use of many of the terms under discussion. I pass on a couple of quotes from the "Railwayman Poet", Alexander Anderson of Kirkconnel, Dumfrieshire, Scotland [Born 1845, died 1909]who wrote in a dialect which I can vouch is almost universally extant in South Ayrshire and northern Dumfrieshire to the present day. "Bairnies Cuddle Doon"---"The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht, wi' muckle faucht and din--o' try an' sleep ye waukrife rogues, yer faither's comin' in!" And from a sequel ""The Last to Cuddle Doon"----"An' John, that was my ain gudeman, He sleeps the mools amang-----" On his gravestone at the Kirkbrae in Kirkconnel can be read the inscription-"We have our day, we have our say, then quit the scene for ithers, And cuddle doon amang the mools, Where mankind a' are brithers," |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,Boab Date: 02 Dec 01 - 04:02 AM Just BTW---interested folks can find a copy of Alexander Anderson's "Cuddle Doon" at the Zimmer-zine site under "non-contemporary poetry" |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 02 Dec 01 - 03:13 PM Good stuff, Boab. Thanks. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 02 Dec 01 - 03:26 PM I'm lost without my "Child!" Wasn't there a reference in Child about ballad #32 (King Henry) being of Danish origin? Something about "King Underwave's daughter? If so, and this became "King Henry" which was known in England prior to 1790; then couldn't the Danish "Moderen Under Mulde" be a precursor to an English ballad? |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Geoff the Duck Date: 02 Dec 01 - 05:07 PM I think I should point out that Mither is a Yorkshire dialect word which refers to complaining or whingeing. It's usage is usually Stop your mithering or so-and-so is always mithering about the weather.... Quack! GtD. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Geoff the Duck Date: 02 Dec 01 - 05:32 PM Can I take this moment to apologise to the Mudcat Apostrophe Police........ Buggered if I know where the stray apostrophe came from inIts - I don't recall typing it - I think that the mudcat trolls sometimes cast spells to befuddle our postings as they fly down the HTML Highway to Wibbly Wobbly Webland!!!!! Oh Well. Quack!!!! GtD. |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Willa Date: 02 Dec 01 - 05:46 PM "Bairnies Cuddle Doon"---"The bairnies cuddle doon at nicht, wi' muckle faucht and din--o' try an' sleep ye waukrife rogues, yer faither's comin' in!" Like Boab, I was reminded of this; I have it on a Judy Dunlop CD (My Arms Are a CradleHTDCD 106). I also agree with GTD's definition of mither (long i as in sigh), but my interpretation (as a Yorkshire lass)would have been the same as Austin's. Interesting thread, Big Daddy! |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: MMario Date: 02 Dec 01 - 08:45 PM Big Daddy - I just wanted to pop back and apoligize for the tone of my initial post. On re-reading it appears to me to be a bit (or perhaps more then a bit) sharp and sarcastic, and you can be sure I *am* sorry for that. But, I am VERY glad that you are getting some information. In addition, I am learning more myself, as well. A good outcome all round |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 03 Dec 01 - 12:10 AM Thanks MMario. Richard W, you'll be interested to know I got a prompt reply from Mike Ballantyne. He emailed: Dear Jay, I sent your query to our Editor, who is Scottish, and the following information is based upon his answer to me. The fragment is supposedly the opening of the Scottish ballad, 'The Ghaist's Warning.' We can't find the song referred to so we still have to confirm this. As for the Motif, E323.1.2. would appear to be an appropriate number, at least until we confirm the rest of the ballad's content. We will stay glued to this on your behalf...Murray Shoolbraid (our editor) is at |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: Willa Date: 03 Dec 01 - 06:47 PM I always thought that Heathcliffe was of Romany/Gipsy/Traveller origin, but can't remember whether this was stated in the book. 'Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (Peter Kennedy) includes songs of the Travellers, the glossary for which the glossary includes 'mither' = mother and 'mulla' = ghost, 'moolin' = killing, 'mulla'= corpse, ghost |
|
Subject: RE: Help: Seeking old Yorkshire ballad From: GUEST,BigDaddy Date: 03 Dec 01 - 11:08 PM Heathcliff's origins remain a mystery. It was hinted at in the novel that he might be of "Gypsy" birth, but it's never made known. It was hinted in the 1970 film version that he was the illegitimate son of Mr. Earnshaw, but this was an invention of the films' writers, not Emily Bronte. I'm certain that if Emily ever had access to any sort of Gypsy dialect, she would not have hesitated to incorporate it into her novel. The dialect of the song fragment however, is easily ascribed to conventional, though perhaps archaic local dialect. See Boab's post for just how far-reaching (considering time and place) certain words of dialect could be. Thanks, Willa. |
| Share Thread: |