Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1979, Page 67

Ballad Composition in Faroese Heroic
Tradition:
The Case of »Hernilds kvæði«
Patricia Conroy.
The phenomenon of ballad variation has long fascinated
ballad collectors and scholars. Today, most students of Anglo-
American and Scandinavian ballad traditions ascribe to the
Sharp and Gerould theory of communal re-creation, which
posits that it is the very nature of oral ballad texts to change.
Gerould proposes that there are two ways in which variation
may occur:
Often, as has been suggested, singers must have forgotten
musical or verbal phrases, and have repaired the gaps as
best they could — sometimes admirably and sometimes to
the detriment of the ballad. There is reason to believe, how-
ever, that other singers have been unable to resist the im-
pulse to make alterations even though their memories have
been extremely accurate. An old man in Somerset, whom
Sharp knew, reproduced words with extraordinary fidelity
but varied ‘every phrase of his tune in the course of a bal-
lad.’ It was Sharp’s judgement that such musical changes as
those made by this man were ‘notning less than inspired in-
vention.’ They were obviously introduced because his imagi-
nation set him to playing with his themes precisely as the
schooled composer develops his material, turning it this way