I suppose the In Our Time programmes caught my interest partly because I had been reading A L Lloyd who seems to have been claiming all sorts of ancient origins (far longer back than the 12th century) for a ballad generally known as Lady Isabel and the Elfin Knight. He asked 'How may English ballads are based, wholly or in part, on such venerable and far-travelled stuff?' He did not seem to have his Marxist in the mould of historian A L Morton head on at this point. Also they caught my attention because of general discussion on this site.


And when I read the question above about 'folkore' as opposed to the elite, I personally related it to debates within the folksong community (where I guess I am really an outside observer) about the origins of 'folk songs', as opposed to 'folklore' generally. Were they written by the 'lower orders'/'working class'/'folk' or by the educated and literary? (Yes, what does 'folk' mean is the question?)

Even if we limit 'folk songs' to those songs collected by Victorian and Edwardian collectors, there are lively disagreements about whether these mostly originated in written broadsheets or ballads or whether, for example, they originated with the non-literate lower orders but got used in broadsheets while the non-literate oral tradition of the lower orders continued alongside uses or time-lines for those songs based on broadsheets.


As far as I can make out, Child, a great and highly-respected collector and scholar of ballads took the view that they originated in some pre-literate but not primitive age but not among the lower orders, who mostly despoiled them in passing them down when the originators had moved on to other things.

There is a range of opinion on the topic, but it seems to be divorced from discussion of other 'stuff' eg old tales such as Tristan.

I don't really know what to think, to be honest, but the discussions are interesting and enjoyable when not splenetic.

Anne might not know about this sort of dispute, but it might help to fill in the background for her in respect of this site and the discussions that sometimes arise.

I have found what Anne says interesting, so thanks for these contributions. But if she had to suggest say just two books on this oral/formulaic thing, what would they be?

The question of 'memory' is interesting, if another divergence. I studied Psychology once and they have various theories and quite a bit of research into it. It's amazing what people can memorise given the right strategies even in terms just of lists of playing cards. Psychologists and linguists both have theories of schemas which might be relevant. Some people think memory is to an extent actually 'reconstructive' not just reading off of stuff stored in the brain. There is also some research on musical improvisation, which seems in part to draw upon rehearsed 'routines'. I don't know much about this except that it exists and occasionally gets discussed on Radio 4. All this might explain prodigious feats of memory involved in learning and then re-telling lengthy sagas. I do find the idea credible, especially if you take into account some sort of apprenticeship for the story teller. I'm guessing that some of the 'oral-formulaic' theories may be similar to these psychological ideas in some ways.

We read bits of Grendel at Uni and it is quite different from modern poetry; it doesn't rhyme and is very alliterative, so if you claim that folk songs come from sources like that there has to be a time when the old wine of the stories gets poured into the new bottle of the ballad form.

Enough rambling from me.