Content provided in partnership with
A. L. Lloyd and Reynardine: authenticity and authorship in the afterlife of a British broadside ballad
Folklore, Dec, 2004 by Stephen D. Winick
This tension between scholar and romantic may sound fanciful, but it has not been uncommon in the history of folklore. The brothers Grimm displayed a similar tension: they collected folktales from the lips of peasant informants, but edited the products extensively to produce emotionally satisfying texts. Bendix suggests that the Grimms divided authenticity in two: the "external authenticity" of the peasant's words and the "internal authenticity" of the tale's aesthetic and emotional content (Bendix 1997, 54). It was to increase the latter, to "restore [the tales] to their original beauty" or, in other words, to preserve what they believed to be essential qualities that had been eliminated from the oral versions they collected, that the Grimms edited their tales (Bendix 1997, 54).
- Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »
In another important regard, however, the Grimms and Lloyd differed. As I have already indicated, Lloyd did not collect "Reynardine" orally. Thus his song, while filled with the romantic's internal authenticity, was almost completely devoid of the scholar's external authenticity. One of the most fascinating aspects of Lloyd's "Reynardine," then, is the fact that he probably lied about it. If he did indeed tell Stephen Sedley that he had collected "Reynardine" from Tom Cook, then Lloyd was once again trying to renegotiate the song's authenticity.
As I suggested earlier, Lloyd the scholar inherited notions of authenticity from Child and other nineteenth-century scholars. To Lloyd the scholar, then, the text that had the least mark of authorial intervention, that was a creation of spontaneous nature rather than professional authorship, was the most authentic. If internal, emotional authenticity required that he should compose the ballad himself, external scholarly authenticity required him to deny authorship. And so he did ... at least some of the time.
To his credit, Lloyd recognised that his editing embodied what Bendix calls "the practical paradoxes of the search for authenticity" (Bendix 1997, 54); in the sleeve notes to The Bird in the Bush, he quoted his mentor and collaborator Ralph Vaughan Williams: "the practice of re-writing a folk-song is abominable, and I wouldn't trust anyone but myself to do it" (Discography, Lloyd, Briggs and Armstrong 1966).
Conclusion
Rather than affirming or denying the authenticity of "Reynardine" based on Lloyd's authorial mediations, the foregoing analysis is an attempt to understand the negotiations of authenticity in which Lloyd himself engaged. Every stage of Lloyd's interaction with "Reynardine," from deciding that the ballad was worthy of being revived, to cobbling together his first text from poems by Campbell and Hughes in the 1950s, to emending that text by adding broadside stanzas in the 1960s, to interpreting the resulting songs in his sleeve notes, and perhaps on to claiming to have collected the song orally, formed part of this negotiation. Authenticity, of one type or another, was central to Lloyd's whole project.
Find Research Guides for:
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »