Help: Faux Scots Ballads?

Subject: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: michaelr
Date: 13 Sep 02 - 07:55 PM

In the liner notes to her song "Nine Stone Rig" (from "Fashionably Late", Rounder) Linda Thompson writes: "I based this song on a couple of verses from a `faux' Scottish ballad, Barthram's Dirge, written by Robert Surtees who gave it to Sir Walter Scott as a traditional song for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border."

Can anyone supply the story on this? Was Sir Walter hoaxed, or what? And what the heck is a Nine Stone Rig?

I'd appreciate the info. Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: Help: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: greg stephens
Date: 13 Sep 02 - 08:13 PM

I'm sorry, I dont know the song, but Nine Stone Rig is a stone circle(or rather a fragmnt of a stone circle) not far from Edinburgh.

Subject: RE: Help: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: masato sakurai
Date: 13 Sep 02 - 09:04 PM

Fashionably Late - Liner Notes by LINDA THOMPSON.

Here's Text with notes of "Barthram's Dirge" from The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, where, on Nine Stone Rig, Scott wrote: "the mention of the Nine-Stane Burn, and Nine-Stane Rig, seems to refer to those places in the vicinity of Hermitage Castle, which is countenanced by the mentioning our Lady's Chapel."

The story of the "fraud" was told in Note on Letter of Mr. Surtees to Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck, p. 64 in Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody by Andrew Lang:

No literary forgeries were ever much better done than the sham ballads which Surtees of Mainsforth imposed on Sir Walter Scott. The poems were spirited and good of their kind; and though we wonder now that some of them could take in an expert, it is by no means assured that we are even to-day acquainted with the whole of Surtees' frauds. Why a man otherwise honourable, kindly, charitable, and learned, exercised his ingenuity so cruelly upon a trusting correspondent and a staunch friend, it is hardly possible to guess. The biographers of Surtees maintain that he wanted to try his skill on Scott, then only known to him by correspondence; and that, having succeeded, he was afraid to risk Scott's friendship by a confession. This is plausible; and if good may come out of evil, we may remember that two picturesque parts of "Marmion" are due to one confessed and another certain supercherie of Surtees. It cannot be said in his defence that he had no conception of the mischief of literary frauds; in more than one passage of his correspondence he mentions Ritson's detestation of these practices. "To literary imposition, as tending to obscure the path of inquiry, Ritson gave no quarter," says this arch literary impostor. [...]

English Poetry II: From Collins to Fitzgerald (The Harvard Classics) (1909-14) contains this ballad under Robert Surtees (1779-1834).

~Masato

Subject: RE: Help: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: masato sakurai
Date: 13 Sep 02 - 10:34 PM

Photo of Nine Stone Rig

Subject: RE: Help: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: michaelr
Date: 14 Sep 02 - 01:57 PM

Thanks so much, Greg and Masato!

Michael

Subject: Lyr Add: BARTHRAM'S DIRGE
From: masato sakurai
Date: 15 Sep 02 - 08:01 AM

From Sir Walter Scott's The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border:

BARTHRAM'S DIRGE

The following beautiful fragment was taken down by Mr. Surtees, from the recitation of Anne Douglas, an old woman who weeded in his garden. It is imperfect, and the words within brackets were inserted by my correspondent, to supply such stanzas as the chantress's memory left defective. The hero of the ditty, if the reciter be correct, was shot to death by nine brothers, whose sister he had seduced, but was afterwards buried, at her request, near their usual place of meeting; which may account for his being laid, not in holy ground, but beside the burn. The name of Barthram, or Bertram, would argue a Northumbrian origin, and there is, or was, a Headless Cross, among many so named, near Elsdon in Northumberland. But the mention of the Nine-Stane Burn, and Nine-Stane Rig, seems to refer to those places in the vicinity of Hermitage Castle, which is countenanced by the mentioning our Lady's Chapel. Perhaps the hero may have been an Englishman, and the lady a native of Scotland, which renders the catastrophe even more probable. The style of the ballad is rather Scottish than Northumbrian. They certainly did bury in former days near the Nine-Stane Burn; for the Editor remembers finding a small monumental cross, with initials, lying among the heather. It was so small, that, with the assistance of another gentleman, he easily placed it upright.

BARTHRAM'S DIRGE

They shot him dead at the Nine-Stane Rig,
Beside the Headless Cross,
And they left him lying in his blood,
Upon the moor and moss.

* * * * *

They made a bier of the broken bough,
The sauch and the aspin gray,
And they bore him to the Lady Chapel,
And waked him there all day.

A lady came to that lonely bower,
And threw her robes aside,
She tore her ling (long) yellow hair,
And knelt at Barthram's side.

She bathed him in the Lady-Well,
His wounds so deep and sair,
And she plaited a garland for his breast,
And a garland for his hair.

They rowed him in a lily-sheet,
And bare him to his earth,
[And the Gray Friars sung the dead man's mass,
As they pass'd the Chapel Garth.]

They buried him at [the mirk] midnight,
[When dew fell cold and still,
When the aspen gray forgot to play,
And the mist clung to the hill.]

They dug his grave but a bare foot deep,
By the edge of the Ninestone Burn,
And they covered him [O'er with the heather forever,]
The moss and the [Lady] fern.

A Gray Friar staid upon his grave,
And sang till the morning tide,
And a friar shall sing for Barthram's soul,
While the headless Cross shall bide.
........................................

There're a few minor differences in capitalization, spelling and punctuation from the words in the Thomas Herderson edition (George G. Harrap, 1931, pp. 217-218) or the Harvard Classics edition linked to above.

~Masato

Subject: RE: Help: Faux Scots Ballads?
From: belfast
Date: 15 Sep 02 - 12:42 PM

It would seem that ever since James MacPherson "discovered" the poems of Ossian sometime in the 18th century there have always been some some wily Scots who found there was great craic to be had (and maybe a few shillings to be made) by inventing and forging stuff to fool the rest of us. Not that I'm complaining; the Paddies have never been behind the door when it comes to creative reinterpretation of reality.