Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1979, Page 89

The Case of »Hernilds kvæði'
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folk artist described by Sharp and Gerould — unconscious and
randomly creative. On the contrary, the changes that he
wrought in »Hermundur illi« were purposeful, springing from
a desire to depict its characters without ambiguity and to
present the story in a more straightforward moral climate.
Moreover, in composing the text of his new ballad he did not
depend stanza-by-stanza on his source but often preferred to
compose his own stanzas independently. Indeed, it is very
difficult to distinguish the creativity of this Faroese ballad man
from that of a literary artist reworking a piece from another
era. If the artistic products of an unlettered folk tradition are
different from those of a literary tradition, it is not because
of the relative »unconsciousness« or »self-consciousness« of the
artists. It is because of the differing conditions under which
these works of art are produced and enjoyed, the differing
esthetic rules governing their formulation and the differing
constraints obtaining in the communities which receive them.
NOTES
1 Gordon Hall Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford: The Claren-
don Press, 1932; rptd. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 187.
The two quotations in this passage are from Cccil James Sharp, English
Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (London: Simpkin & Co., 1907), pp. 17, 21
and p. 24. The idea that traditional narrators are usually seen by folk-
lorists as creative only in the sense that they recombine components of a
traditional, finite stock has been criticized by Robert A. Georges in »The
Kaleidoscopic Model of Narrating: A Characterization and a Critique,«
Journal of American Folklore, 92 (1979), 164—171.
2 W. Edson Richmond, »‘Den utrue egtemann’: A Norwegian Ballad
and Formulaic Composition,« Norveg, 10 (1963), 62. In this article Rich-
mond applies the theory, but not the methodology, of oral-formulaic com-
position, formulated by Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord.
3 Ibid., p. 60.
4 See note 1.
5 Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim and Eva Danielson, eds., in colla-
boration with Mortan Nolsøe and W. Edson Richmond, The Types of the
Scandinavian Medieval Ballad: A Descriptive Catalogue, The Institute for
Comparative Research in Human Culture in Oslo, ser. B, vol 59 (Oslo,
Bergen, Tromsø: Universitetsforlaget, 1978), pp. 235 and 216.