ABSTRACT
David Buchan reformulated the longstanding explanations in ballad scholarship of orality, creation, and folk identity by applying to the ballad the theories of oral composition in Balkan epic formulated by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. According to Buchan, the structure and “language of tradition” in Scottish ballad texts reveal in them a special method of composition in which “the oral poet re-creates each story at each performance, during each performance.” “The story’s the thing,” says Buchan with a glance to Wilgus. Much like Child, Buchan sees that “ballads descended in the social scale.” The tradition together with remnants of its oral method have come down in a mixed and misunderstood state to the modern literate world from an originating oral stage. Insisting upon intrinsic differences between “the oral mind” and “the literate mind,” Buchan reaches for a definition of the folk and an authentic ballad community in the Percy, Scott, Motherwell manner. The original Parry-Lord theory resonates with Homeric implications. Buchan’s application of it continues to pull the thread in ballad scholarship of an ideal past community with implications for a present national identity. Buchan has published prolifically on orality and literacy in Scottish and European balladry. William Bernard McCarthy’s The Ballad Matrix: Personality, Milieu, and the Oral Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) follows from Buchan’s work. The essays in The Ballad and Oral Literature, edited by Joseph Harris (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), also show the continuing interest in the oral aspects of ballad tradition.
D.D.
