Introduction to the Project

The medieval ballad is a genre as international as folktale, riddle, proverb, and charm and thus has always demanded comparative analysis from one region, language, or cultural context to another. It is strongly represented in numerous countries and language groups and engenders consistent, broad scholarly interest in various areas of cultural studies, as the two large international bibliographies by O. Holzapfel (Bibliographie zur mittelalterlichen skandinavischen Volksballade [1975]) and W. E. Richmond (Ballad Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography [1989]) illustrate and as does the large number of folklore societies, departments, and organizations worldwide, listed under “Dissemination,” below. The Scandinavian manifestation of the genre is unique in both size and quality of extant material, comparable only to the Spanish manifestation of it. As Samuel G. Armistead stated in a talk at the International Medieval Congress at Western Michigan University in 2005, the two traditions share other features as well:

“Both have kept their ballad traditions longer than other European peoples. Until some thirty years ago, there were a few elderly Swedish singers who had their texts from direct oral tradition, some in Sweden itself and others in Swedish communities in Finland . . . Many Hispanic ballad traditions are now gravely endangered . . . but ballads can still be abundantly collected in many areas of Spain and Spanish America, and the same can be said for some regions of Portugal and Brazil. Finally, both Scandinavia (the Faroe Islands) and some Hispanic communities have retained, down to the 20th and even to the 21st century, the archaic custom of singing ballads to accompany a traditional dance.”

Despite the importance of the Scandinavian ballads in themselves and in comparison to other traditions, they have always had limited international exposure, largely because so few scholars know the Scandinavian languages well enough to explore them. There is ample reason to provide a resource that will help to widen the exposure of this compendious material that is so content-rich (see Appendix A for a selection). Seen from every angle—as a repository of legend and motifs, as a reflection of early modern society, as a coherent, but also highly varied structural poetic framework, as a compendium of musical information—the ballads in this collection could be an inexhaustible source of inquiry. But the collection lies outside the reach of all but a small group of researchers, and its language peculiarities that have interested Scandinavian philologists have contributed to a general neglect of the material even by many students of more modern Scandinavian literature. The resources scholars and students might turn to for information about the topic are limited as well. Encyclopedias, literary handbooks, and anthologies in English, German, French, and Italian contain very little representation and discussion of the genre and concentrate, when they consider the Scandinavian tradition at all, on the example of the Danish ballad, leaving the ballad in Sweden (and Norway, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, for that matter) virtually untouched. In Handbuch des Volksliedes (1975), for example, an article entitled “Die dänische Folkevise und ihre Beziehungen zum deutschen Volkslied” [The Danish Ballads and their Relationship to German Folk-Song] subordinates the Danish ballad tradition to the German and does not mention the rest of the Scandinavian ballad tradition at all. Similarly, in the 1989 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the entry under “Danish literature” states that after the Christianization of Denmark, Latin became the dominant literary language and remained so until the Reformation, thereby implying

“at der mellem runerne og renæssancen ingen litteratur findes på modersmålet, og folkeviserne nævnes ikke med et ord” (that between the runes and the Renaissance, no literature can be found in the mother tongue, and the ballads are not mentioned with a single word).

While the treatment of the ballad in literary histories is generally good outside Scandinavia, a paucity of research in the international community and a wealth of ignorance about the high quality of the Scandinavian ballad are conspiring to jeopardize the future of this venerable tradition. Accordingly, ACMRS (The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies www.acmrs.org) and Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance (http://www.itergateway.org/) with the cooperation of the Svenskt visarkiv (Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research http://www.visarkiv.se) in Stockholm, intend to produce on-line versions and English translations of all known medieval Swedish ballads in order to disseminate them internationally and encourage their study in the scholarly world outside Scandinavia.

This project will make accessible world-wide a major Scandinavian cultural resource and will significantly augment the existing digital resource projects now underway in Sweden (Project Runeberg, a digital library of classical Scandinavian literature, at Linköping University that is supported by lay volunteers on the internet and that does not include ballads) as well as in Denmark (Dansk Folkevisekultur 1550-1700 [Danish Ballad Culture, 1550-1700]), and Norway (the Norwegian Documentation Project focusing on the digitalization of Norwegian literature at Norway's four universities), both of which are restricted in scope to the original languages. It will also nicely complement the “Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews” website, a multimedia archive of ballads and other oral literature in Judeo-Spanish collected from 1957 to 1993 by Samuel G. Armistead, Joseph H. Silverman, and Israel J. Katz (http://www.sephardifolklit.org/flsj) . See letter from Armistead in Appendix H regarding the digitized SMB). The proposed project will make the recently completed, standard edition of the Swedish ballads (Sveriges medeltida ballader) available on-line in a reliable text database established on consistent editorial principles, which will greatly facilitate scholarly analysis. The accompanying English translations, both in literal and literary form, will greatly facilitate that scholarly analysis for those not familiar with Swedish and will especially support comparative analysis of themes, motifs, variations, and verse forms among the Scandinavian, Spanish, English, and other traditions. The translations will also make the digitized SMB useful in the classroom. A scholar teaching a course, for example, on the early modern English broadside ballad can direct students to the on-line SMB to demonstrate to them both the medieval roots of the genre and its pan-European dissemination. In addition, musical performances of forty-one of the ballads have already been recorded for the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research, and these will be uploaded and linked to the relevant ballads to make poetry and music come alive for users of the digitized SMB (go to http://cf.itergateway.org/swedishballadsmusic/ to listen to all the recordings). And intricate analyses of the music and the musical/poetic patterns of the corpus will augment the utility of the project, especially for musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and students of traditional folk music. Finally, as part of the Iter online library, the project will also be linked to Iter’s comprehensive, constantly updated bibliography, which grows by some 60,000 items overall each year. It currently contains 1,070,000 items. Every item relevant to the Scandinavian ballad tradition will automatically become part of the project’s bibliography. All these features will give the project impact well beyond the Scandinavian community and scholars interested primarily in Scandinavia.

The audience for the project in fact should be relatively large and diverse as a few points suggest. Syndergaard’s English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads: An Analytical Guide and Bibliography (1995), for example, testifies both to the large number of Scandinavian ballads translated into English from the 19th century to the end of the 20th and to the existence of an English-speaking audience for those translations. Meetings such as the annual Conference of the International Ballad Commission as well as sessions devoted to ballads at conferences do so likewise as does the existence of such organizations as the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research (ISCLR) and the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISNFR). As an additional rough indicator of how many people may make use of the digitized SMB, here are the statistics for usage of the NEH-funded, online “Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews” project for the first six months of 2005.

Finally, the audience for the project would extend meaningfully into the classroom in Scandinavian, folklore, and comparative literature courses. For the first time, the full range of the Swedish ballad corpus with all its variants and (again for the first time) with its rich musical tradition would become readily available for instructors and students in a number of disciplines.