Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn

Subject: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 02:35 AM

With reference To Francis Collinson's collection from Kitty Anderson. Could any kind soul save me a lot of research time, and a wrestling match with an online dictionary and translate the refrain which is in Shetland Norn. I will admit I have not had time to trawl through Bronson as yet. The field recording is on the tobarandualchais website just put Norn in the search engine and scroll down. Thank you in advance.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 04:58 AM

It has been a while since I looked at this (more than a decade since I wrote my book on "King Orfeo"/"Sir Orfeo"), but the consensus seems to be that all the choruses are so zersungen that they are beyond recovery.

The Collinson text is in Bronson IV, pp. 455-456.

If you want to contact me privately, I'll give you the relevant chapter of Romancing the Ballad, but I'm not going to spread my own copyrighted work all over Mudcat, even if I don't get paid royalties on it. :-)

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 09:56 AM

Brilliant as ever Robert. Thank you. I'll tackle Bronson when the current heatwave breaks! No connection but we Brits have to grab the sunshine on the rare occasions it appears. Thanks again.
Nick

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 10:59 AM

I should add that there have been proposals to explain the choruses, they just have not convinced people.

The Collinson text is fragmentary; if we didn't have the other texts, we might not have recognized it as related to the "Orfeo" legend. And, like all four surviving versions, it does have some odd-but-understandable words in the verses. My book has a glossary for that part. Also a reconstruction of what the original text looked like, as best it can still be reconstructed.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 02:46 PM

Thank you again. It's a mistake I keep repeating in as much as I tend to take information at face value. Steve Roud has pulled me up on this bad habit, and you have shown me the same. I really should have occurred to me that the text of the refrain was more phonetic than poetical. Your book will be added to my library.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 03:35 PM

I should put in my own comment here, in response to Nick Dow's, to make sure I haven't given a false impression.

Romancing the Ballad isn't exactly about the ballad "King Orfeo." Its real purpose is to examine the relationship between ballads and medieval romances. There are a number of instances where a ballad tells a tale found earlier in a romance -- so "King Orfeo" tells the story of "Sir Orfeo." But, also, "Hind Horn" (Child #17) tells a version of an incident at the end of the very oldest Middle English romance, "King Horn." "Blancheflour and Jellyflorice" (Child 300) is a sort of version of the romance "Floris and Blanchefleur." "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" (Child 31) is "The Marriage of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall." (In that particular case, it hasn't even been shortened all that much.) There are others.

That the ballads and romances are related is not generally questioned, at least in the four cases I've cited. (There are more dubious cases.) But which is the original? Were the ballads expanded to make the romances, or were the plots of the romances cut down to make the ballads?

Typically the assumption has been that the romances are older, because the earliest copies of the romances are older. Usually much older -- e.g. the most significant copy of the romance of "Sir Orfeo" is usually dated to the fourteenth century (sometimes to c. 1330), whereas the earliest copy of "King Orfeo" is nineteenth century. But there were a few people who argued the other way, and no one offered actual proof.

I set out to supply that proof in Romancing the Ballad. I used the Orfeo pair because (a) "Sir Orfeo" is a really good romance, (b) it allowed the most definitive conclusion, and (c) the surviving copies of "King Horn" (the other case probably most susceptible to proof) are so messed up that scholars can't even agree on whether it's supposed to have two or three stresses per line!

To do this analysis, I had to try to produce the fullest possible version of "King Orfeo," to allow maximal comparison. So Romancing the Ballad involves a textual reconstruction, not properly a comparison.

It did allow quite unequivocal proof, in this case: the ballad not the original; it is derived from a romance, either "Sir Orfeo" or the fragmentary "King Orphius."

OK, you can all go back to actual music now. :-)

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 12 Jul 25 - 04:34 PM

Understood.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Vic Smith
Date: 14 Jul 25 - 11:42 AM

Just stumbled on this thread as I don't visit Mudcat all that often these days.....

I am doing to sing King Offeo at a local singaound in Lewes this evening and explain how John Stickle, who is a distant relative of mine came to sing it to Patrick Shouldham Shaw's tape recorder at Baltasound in Unst in the mid-1950s. Patrick explained this to me when I met him in 1969.
I sing the four verses that John Sickle sang then and augment them with the more complete version that I found in The Oxford Book Of Ballads. I only have the student version and it does not give the sources of the versions that it prints but I believe that OBB version comes from another distant Shetland relative, Dorothy Anderson.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 14 Jul 25 - 12:40 PM

Excellent Vic. As you may have guessed, this thread is about the Collinson book I am working upon. One book has turned into two. The second will deal with the Scots songs and my input will be confined to tune research. I'll get in touch with you when I have more details. Sing on!

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 14 Jul 25 - 01:25 PM

FWIW, the Stickle version is in Bronson, volume I, p. 275.

It is not unreasonable to believe that the other version with a tune, the one Collinson collected, is a combination of the Stickle tune (perhaps from tradition, but the same tradition) with some lyrics derived from Child or one of his sources.

I'm not saying Collinson did anything wrong (or Stickle, or anyone else). It's just that the Collinson version appears to have been fortified from print. To say it another way, it's the Stickle tune with words taken from Child or one of the printed sources for his version.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Richard Mellish
Date: 15 Jul 25 - 03:57 AM

Returning to the original enquiry: Robert said
> the consensus seems to be that all the choruses are so zersungen that they are beyond recovery.

Although John Stickle regarded the fragment that he knew as a bit of nonsense, and the Shetlanders who retained a much more complete version into the 1800s had probably long lost all understanding of the refrains, Child nevertheless printed a plausible reconstruction, with advice from Grundtvig, who surely had some knowledge of older languages related to his native Danish. That reconstruction does not contribute much sense to the story, but no more do many ballad refrains that consist of perfectly intelligible words.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 15 Jul 25 - 08:01 AM

The website has both recordings. Worth a listen.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 15 Jul 25 - 08:38 AM

Richard Mellish wrote:

Although John Stickle regarded the fragment that he knew as a bit of nonsense, and the Shetlanders who retained a much more complete version into the 1800s had probably long lost all understanding of the refrains, Child nevertheless printed a plausible reconstruction, with advice from Grundtvig, who surely had some knowledge of older languages related to his native Danish.

Granted, as long as you'll allow that the Child/Grundtvig reconstruction was a reconstruction, not a certainty.

But my (mis-stated) point was your first point, that the informants (and, of course, the collectors) had lost the meaning, and that the refrain as a result was being corrupted.

My point is, Norn is a dead language that never really achieved a fixed or a written form. A few extracts from Glanville Price, editor, Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, p. 331 (the entry on Norn): "After [1469], the position of Norn seems to have declined rapidly. By the 17th c., most if not all Orkneymen and Shetlanders were probably bilingual," and Norn went downhill from there.

"Our knowledge of Norn stems chiefly from brief comments in the accounts of travelers or in general descriptions of the Northern Isles.... George Low... not only described the linguistic situation... on the outlying island of Foula during a visit to Shetland in 1774, but appended three specimens of Nron, the Lord's Prayer, a list of some 30 everyday words, and a 35-stanza ballad." That's basically all we have, and it was taken down by someone who did not know Norn. Comparing Low's material with the few other known words, "There thus seems to have been dialectal variation within Shetland. There is also slight evidence of linguistic divergence between Shetland and Orkney."

Thus while the Child/Gruntvig translation probably preserves the meaning, the actual original phonetic text behind the surviving versions cannot be constructed, because of the damage done to the text by oral transmission combined with the fact that we don't know enough about the (lost) source language.

On a side note, the discussion here isn't really of "King Orfeo," but rather of Collinson -- but if one wishes to study "King Orfeo," it's very important to read Emily Lyle's writings on "King Orpheus," published in her essay collection Fairies and Folk. For those who want to dig into the material behind what Lyle wrote, one should also see Rhiannon Purdie, Shorter Scottish Medieval Romances, which includes the surviving fragments of the "King Orpheus" romance. I am not convinced, as Purdie is, that "King Orpheus" (as opposed to "Sir Orfeo") is the ancestor of "King Orfeo," but it's good to look at both texts.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Vic Smith
Date: 16 Jul 25 - 11:22 AM

The response lines in John Stickle's version were translated to me on one of my visits to Shetland as "The wood (forest?) grows green early" and "The hart runs through the forest." so it cannot be said to have much to do with the ballad. Neither can they have much to do with that environment because a) there have never been deer on Shetland and b) there is nothing that resembles a wood or a forest only a few stunted trees at best. There are/were a few spruce, birch, rowan and alder but they were first planted in the early 20th century. The ballad has been collected as a story or song in various places where the Vikings had an presence or influence - Lapland, Shetland, The Faroes and even Iceland.

Richard Mellish wrote: "Although John Stickle regarded the fragment that he knew as a bit of nonsense....." Well, he did say that but also told Pat Shaw that his lovely comic song When I was a Little Boy was a bit of nonsense and that one truly was. Apart from the response lines, the ballad is that strange mix of English with some Norn words that the older people from the remote parts spoke to one another, though they would always speak in English to visitors like me. When an informant speaks to a song collector he will sometimes describe an odd piece different from the rest of their repertoire as "nonsense". A good example would be when Professor Ives from the U. of Michigan was recording songs from the retired logger in New Brunswick, Joe Estey. He sang some well known songs such as Martha the Watercress Girl and then asked if Ives would be interested in "this piece of nonsense" and then sang his magnificent version of Hind Horn.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Nick Dow
Date: 16 Jul 25 - 01:49 PM

It is amazing the different values we put on songs. Bill House sang his father's version of 'One night as I lay on my bed' and said I didn't think that much of it! A retired ploughman sang 'The nutting girl' to me and my wife and announced that he only sang it after the vicars wife had rewritten it.
Clive has asked me to find the original files for all Collinson's books with a view to republishing. If anybody has details of the original publisher that would be a start.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: King Orpheo Child 19 Shetland Norn
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 16 Jul 25 - 02:22 PM

Nick Dow wrote: If anybody has details of the original publisher that would be a start.

It probably isn't much help, but the LibraryThing book cataloging site has ISBNs for a number of the books, which can lead back to the publisher.

The Bagpipe: The History of a Musical Instrument -- 0710079133 | 9780710079138

The traditional and national music of Scotland -- 0710012136 | 9780710012135

Bagpipe, Fiddle and Harp -- 0946264481 | 9780946264483

Orchestration for the Theatre -- pre-ISBN