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A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Stephen D. Winick

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Lloyd's first version of the ballad, like Hughes's text, makes Reynardine more human than supernatural. The stranger has animal magnetism, but no other bestial quality. Lloyd does make one significant change from his sources, however: where Hughes's text has "my sweet Reynardine" (Hughes 1908, 33) and Campbell's "the fairy Reynardine" (Campbell [MacCathmhaoil] 1909, 11), Lloyd's has "the sly, bold Reynardine" (Lloyd 1956?); like the reference to teeth, this formulation is present only in revival versions of the song and therefore must have been added by Lloyd. "Sly" is an adjective generally used to describe foxes, and occurs frequently in folksongs about them, while "bold" is even more often used to characterise the fox in folksongs (see Williams 1923, 63; Kennedy 1975, 551; Holloway and Black 1979, 139). Lloyd's use of these adjectives in his version of "Reynardine" thus serves to strengthen the protagonist's resemblance to a fox, implying lycanthropy [14] rather than actually stating it. [15] So while Hughes's stanza has few supernatural elements, and Campbell's obviously has more, Lloyd's falls somewhere in between.

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When he revised the song sometime before 1966, Lloyd obviously decided to intensify this lycanthropic quality in order to make "Reynardine" more ambiguous. He found a perfect way to achieve this: by changing Campbell's line "his eyes did brightly shine" to his own "his teeth did brightly shine," he subtly enhanced the ballad's lycanthropic undercurrents (Lloyd 1966). At the same time, he introduced factors that work subtly against the idea of supernatural powers. From broadside texts, he imported the line "I'm seeking for concealment, all from the judge's men," giving Reynardine rather mundane concerns. Thus, he could be just a sly, bold outlaw and his teeth could be all shine and no bite. These changes can be seen as Lloyd's final steps in a progressive mediation between natural and supernatural readings, motivated by a desire to impart the sense of mystery that he craved.

Lloyd's sleeve note from the 1950s provides evidence that his romantic side did indeed consider mystery the most essential characteristic of "Reynardine." He compliments the song for "preserving the mystery" (Lloyd 1956?; italics added). Yet no extant text prior to Lloyd's has a particularly mysterious quality. [16] Given that Lloyd believed the song to be a product of the oral tradition, his wording hints that "the mystery" is an essential quality of the ballad, but that it had dropped out of the tradition by the time it was written down. By means of this linguistic subtlety Lloyd locates part of the song's authentic essence in the emotional and aesthetic trait of mystery. Since this mystery had been lost in other texts, Lloyd believed that authorial mediation was necessary to preserve the essence of the ballad. In this sense, his authorial interventions served, in his own mind, to create an emotionally authentic text.

A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad

Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Stephen D. Winick

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