Balladry and Oral Poetry

Ballads are normally studied by folklorists in North America and by literary scholars in Britain, a situation which reflects balladry’s dual status. The ballads are folklore because folklore consists of ‘the material handed on by tradition, either by word of mouth or by custom and practice’. ¹ Again, they are poems, though poems of a distinctive kind because of their origin in the tradition of nonliterate societies. By origin, then, balladry is a genre of oral poetry. Recently the essential nature of oral poetry has been illuminated by Albert Lord, and his account of the oral method of composition is producing widespread repercussions in the study of both literature and folklore. His work provides the master-key to an understanding of material orally composed and transmitted by nonliterate people. As with most pioneering works, however, a penalty must be paid for the very radicalism of its insights: by showing how different the oral method of composition is from the literate, Lord has rendered much of our current terminology obsolete or ineffectual. Ambiguities now abound in the terms available for a discussion of oral material, because the denotative and connotative meaning of these terms are rooted in a literate context. Standard terms of literary criticism, such as ‘author’ and ‘original text’, and of folkloristic criticism, such as ‘transmission’, have vastly different meanings in oral and literate contexts.