Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1979, Page 69

The Case of »Hernilds kvæði
77
compose their ballad stories each time they sing them by means
of a stock of metrical phrases, commonplace stanzas and tradi-
tional themes.2 However, the picture that Richmond paints of
the workings of oral ballad tradition is an unconvincing one:
.... there is no doubt that both today and in the past
singers have memorized texts and have suffered lapses in
memory, and these lapses have resulted in the creation of
ballad versions and variants which for various reasons have
since been perpetuated in oral tradition. But. . . .in addition
... .wherever and whenever ballads are widely sung there
exists a traditional manner of singing the story to which
the singer feels more attachment than he does to the exact
words and phrases which he originally heard. Moreover, by
reliance upon the stock words and phrases which are part
of this tradition, it is possible for him to reconstruct any
ballad which he has heard without necessarily echoing a
single expression from the text which was communicated
to him.3
According to Richmond there are two change-producing pro-
cesses concurrently at work in Norwegian ballad tradition —
communal re-creation and formulaic composition. Ballad vari-
ants reflecting random minor changes were produced by the
former, and those with more profound changes were the pro-
duct of the latter. Unfortunately, this explanation raises far
more questions than it seeks to answer: if there were two
modes of performance, as Richmond suggests, then under what
circumstances and where and when was each of these modes
employed?
Although Richmond’s explanation for the profound diffe-
rences between variant texts of »Den utrue egtemann« seems
somewhat unsatisfactory, his idea that texts such as these have
much to tell us about the workings of oral tradition is none-
theless a good one. Certainly, as he submits, they call into
question Sharp and Gerould’s description of the ballad singer as
a person who tinkers with and repairs ballad texts as best as