An Analysis of "Long Lankin"
[From: Structure and Ideology in the Ballad: An Analysis of "Long Lankin" by Vic Gammon and Peter Stallybrass; Criticism,
Vol. 26, No. 1 (winter, 1984), pp. 1-20; Wayne State University Press.
[Not edited completely. See footnote 1, the reason is: Child prefers only traditional and not reconstructed material- it has nothing to do with reconstructing a "true" text. He does give an analysis of the plot that involves the "true" meaning of the texts. He also recognizes corrupt traditional texts. It is also possible that Brown's version (Child A) is a reconstruction by a talented singer.
R. Matteson 2015]
VIC GAMMON AND PETER STALLYBRASS
Structure and Ideology in the Ballad: An Analysis of "Long Lankin"
In dealing with the traditional ballad, critics have long been familiar with the idea that it is necessary to look at the plurality of texts rather than trying to construct a hypothetical "true" text out of that plurality. When Child published his great collection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, he deliberately rejected Sir Walter Scott's practice of constructing a ballad by collating different versions of it.[1]
More recently, the notion of the ballad "text" has itself undergone radical transformation, due to the influence of Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales.[2] Lord demonstrated that nonliterate singers in Jugoslavia did not simply memorize an existing text, but, working upon a known story, composed the "text" in the act of performance, drawing upon a repertoire of stock phrases and rhythms. In The Ballad and the Folk, David Buchan brilliantly develops Lord's approach in relation to the traditional ballad, concentrating upon Mrs. Brown of Falkland as typifying the "singer of tales" or oral improviser.[3] There are, undoubtedly, problems with Buchan's thesis: Mrs. Brown was literate, whereas the Jugoslavian singers were not; her father was a university professor, so she was scarcely one of the "folk"; the ballad, unlike the epics which Lord studied, is "short, stanzaic . . . and altogether a much more tightly structured form" and therefore, according to Flemming Andersen and Thomas Pettit, less suited to "the improvizational re-creation of the individual singer."4 We will ourselves cast some doubt on Mrs. Brown as strictly an oral performer.
But the argument between oral improvization and memorial transmission is in danger of obscuring the crucial point that a "single" story like "Lankin" has multiple versions and that a story's transformations, whether they are caused by improvization, literary influences, or forgetfulness, are significant. Even "lapses of memory"[5] are motivated: we need to examine which passages are forgotten and why they are. But the very concept of forgetfulness has the dangerous implication that there is a true text to forget. It is surprising how often sophisticated analyses of ballads imply just that. Look at the following statement, for instance:
In Child, the stonemason villain of 'Lamkin' is also known as Balankin, Lamerlinkin, Rankin, Lambkin, Lord Lankyn, Lord
Lonkin, Bauld Rankin, Lanckin, Lord Longkin, Balcanqual, Lantin . . .[6]
Alan Bold is insisting upon the plurality of the "Lamkin" ballads. Yet it seems, for practical purposes, unavoidable to privilege one ballad title ("Lamkin" here) as the unmarked form against which all the others appear as marked. (This is a problem for which we have found no solution. We use "Lankin" to designate both a group of ballads and the villain in one particular ballad.) More damagingly, though, Bold refers to "the stonemason villain." One does not need to read the ballads to see the problem: "Lord Lankyn," "Lord Lonkin," "Lord Longkin" are scarcely the names of stonemasons. And, indeed, on reading the ballads one discovers that only in some versions is Lankin a mason, whereas in others he is an aristocrat or he is only identified by his name. If we have to drop the notion that the villain's profession is a constant, does that mean that there is no category of "Lankin" ballads? Bold claims that ballads are schematic story-containers sturdy enough to retain their basic shape despite repeated usage by different people . . . The story was the stable element.[7]
So perhaps we can identify the story shared by all versions of "Lankin":
1) A lord leaves his wife and child.
2) Lankin, with the aid of a nurse, enters the lord's castle/house, and kills his wife and child.
3) Lankin and the nurse are punished.
Certainly, this is little more than a skeleton, and yet it already contains too much, for 1) and 3) are not explicitly present in all the versions classified as "Lankin" ballads by Child and Bronson.[8] But despite the diversity of the "Lankin" ballads, there has been no shortage of attempts to explain the "true" meaning of the tradition as a whole. Phillips [Barry], for instance, observing that in some versions the blood of the lady and/or the child is collected in a cup, argues that Lankin is a leper in search of an ancient cure.[9] MacEdward Leach, on the other hand, believes that "Lankin" is really about abduction by the fairies, whilst John DeWitt Niles builds a complex theory involving human sacrifice and posits an Ur-text concerned with diabolic pacts.[10] Of course, the meaning of any text is partially dependent upon what the reader or hearer brings to it and finds significant in it. But even if Barry, Leach or Niles were correct about the supposed origins of "Lankin," their theories would not begin to explain the transmission or improvization of the story in the twentieth century (during which the majority of Bronson's 37 "Lankin" texts were recorded). Are we to believe that a Scottish, English, or American singer performing "Lankin" in the recent past was really referring to leprosy?
Such Ur-meanings, we would suggest, must be discarded along with the concept of Ur-text. But if there is no essential meaning which connects the "Lankin" ballads, how can we account for the perceived similarities between them? Firstly, we would not totally reject Bold's claim that the story is stable. Most of the versions of "Lankin" contain the three sets of actions categorized above, and all contain at least one of those sets. Secondly, there are particular stanzas, formulae, semantic oppositions, or phonological repetitions which are shared by strands within the corpus of "Lankin" ballads. For instance, several versions contain stanzas in which the lady's child is pricked with a knife or pin, stanzas in which the lady tells the nurse to quiet the baby, and the foregrounding of the phonologically repeated " in" (e.g., "Lankin,' "pin," "basin," "in"). There are, then, fixed features both of narrative structure and of verbal texture. Any adequate analysis of the "Lankin" ballads must examine both the fixed features and the variables. It would be tempting to conceptualize the relation between fixed and variable features as a relation between structure and ideology. In such a view, the structural elements would remain constant in different cultures (Scotland, England, North America) and over long periods of time; the ideological elements, on the other hand, would be dependent upon the specificities of culture, the class- and gender-consciousness of the singer, the particular audience, and the context of performance.[11] This would be a way of formulating how a tradition of relatively fixed signifiers are incorporated into, worked upon, and interpreted within a specific historical conjuncture.
Unfortunately, there are major problems in opposing structure to ideology. For instance, the signifier of the "Lankin" villain is itself not fixed, as we have already observed. The ideological implications of the substitution of "Lord Lankyn" for "Lankin" are, perhaps, sufficiently evident. But even the different written notations of the phonologically identical "Lamkin" and "Lambkin" suggests the complex interrelation of structure and ideology. A folklore collector who hears "Lambkin" rather than "Lamkin" connects the villain, whether consciously or not, to the proverbially meekest of creatures. Similarly, the singer's transformations of the ballad reveal the ideological reworking of structure. The substitution of "Lantin" for "Lankin," for instance, erases the villain's connection to "kin." And even in the ballads where the villain is named "Lankin" (or a variant ending in "kin"), the meaning of kinship is dependent upon structural questions. In some versions, the lord has failed to fulfill a contract with Lankin (i.e., treated him as Other rather than as "brother"), so Lankin's revenge can be read as an extreme insistence upon communal obligations. But in those versions where Lankin appears to be unmotivated, he is the wanton destroyer of the lord's kin. In this paper, we will examine some variations in the "Lankin" ballads and then attempt to demonstrate the interdependence of structure and ideology in a particular text.
Motivation and "Coherence" in the "Lankin" Ballads
In a seminal article, Anne Gilchrist has distinguished two strands amongst texts of "Lankin:" the Scottish versions, in which Lankin is an unpaid mason, whose motive for revenge is thus explicit; and the Northumbrian versions, in which the motive for the killings is never made clear[12]. In Child's collections, 11 out of 23 seem to belong to the first type, but some of the remaining versions are of only a few stanzas, so we cannot say that they are definitely of the second type. Accepting Gilchrist's distinction, what then is the relation between the two strands? Gilchrist insists that the Scottish strand is closest to the Ur text and that the Northumbrian strand is a corruption of it, in which the motive has been lost. Niles, following Gilchrist, goes further and totally ignores the Northumbrian strand, claiming that his views are "based on those elements in the story which remain constant: that a master mason builds a fine castle, that he is cheated of his pay, that he nevertheless takes the lives of an innocent woman and child, and that his name is Lamkin or some derivative of it." This statement seems to be contradicted by Niles's later claim that "in their song one sees clearly how motivations belong to the ephemeral part of a tale, while plot structure tends to remain firm."[13] If the motivation is an "ephemeral part of a tale," may it not be added by the singer, as Niles himself suggests, to give an interpretation?
We can analyze the relation of motive to plot structure in 8 different versions of "Lankin" (the Penguin version [hereafter "Pn"] derived from Bronson 28, and the "A," "B," "D," "E," "F," "H," "I" Child texts).[14] Taking Gilchrist's distinction to begin with the "A," "B," "E," "H," and "I" texts belong to the Scottish strand, the "D," "F" and "Pn" texts belong to the Northumbrian strand. The most extreme contrast is between "Pn" and "I." We can divide the "I" text into 10 narrative units (defining narrative units as the parts of a text where an action takes place, a question is asked or a command given), and the "Pn" text into 14 units, but they share only 6 (the Lord leaving, the stilling of the baby, the nurse holding the basin, the descent of the lady, the meeting of Lankin and the lady, and the execution of Lankin and the nurse). They share the same main narrative agents (Long Lankin/Lanckin; the false nurse; "my lord"/Lord Murray), but the Lord is only mentioned in the first two stanzas of "I," whilst he is apparently the instrument of retribution at the end of "Pn." Moreover, the distribution of characters is strikingly dissimilar in the two texts, as is clear from a simple stanza-by stanza listing.
(Following David Buchan's notation, H=Hero, S=Heroine, S(2)=Other Woman [Maid], V=Villain [Lankin], V(2)=Second Villain
[Nurse].)[15]
Penguin "I"
H & S H+V
H & S H+V+V(2)
H & S S+V(2)
H & S s+v
H & S s+v
V V+V(2)
V+V(2) S+V(2)
V+V(2) (V)+V(2) (+S)
V+V(2)
S+V(2)
S+V(2)
V+V(2) (+S)
S+V(2)
V+V(2) (+S)
V+V(2) (+S)
V
V(2)
V+V(2)
S+V(2)
S (+V(2))
(S)+V(2)
s+v
s
S(2)+H
S(2)+H
V+V(2)
The first 15 stanzas of "Pn" deal with the same narrative that occupies only 4 stanzas in "I." We may note a significant difference of emphasis here: in "Pn," the drama is consistently held back, so that the confrontation between Lankin and the lady comes only in the 16th stanza of "Pn," whereas it comes in the 5th stanza of "I." In other words, 3/4 of "Pn" deals with what precedes that confrontation, whilst 2/3 of "I" deals with what happens after that confrontation. More than this, "I" has a concern for motive which is totally absent in "Pn." Unlike "Pn," the nurse in "I" is given a reason for being "fause," in that she claims that the lady "was never guid to me." In "I," there is also a possible suggestion of class conflict in that the nurse refuses to hold the basin for the lady's blood ["tho'] she's come o high kine." In "Pn," though, no motive for either Lankin or the nurse is even hinted at.
We may turn now to the relation between the "I" and the "A" texts ("A" having often been taken as the most complete text. In "A" (Mrs. Brown's version), we notice an even greater emphasis upon motivation. Whereas "I" has only one stanza on Lankin as unpaid mason, "A" has four. Moreover, in "A" there is an explicit plot be tween Lankin and the nurse, a plot found in none of the other versions. Indeed, "A" is unique in the lengths to which it goes to supply motive. In general, the ballads which consider motive tend to deal with Lankin's in a single stanza, although the nurse's is sometimes treated in more detail. In "D," for instance, as in "A" and "I," the nurse says of the lady "she was never good to me," but the nurse is also given the following stanza:
She's none of my comrades,
She's none of my kin;
Ram in the knife, Bold Rankin,
and gar the blood rin.
We may suggest, then, that we are not dealing simply with a division between texts with and without the motif of the unpaid mason, but with a division between texts with and without an interest in motive at all. The "A" text seems to be a striking example of the literary mind at work on oral culture, filling in the "gaps" of the narrative with the kind of social-psychological explanation that is so striking a feature of the realist novel.
What is manifest in the Penguin text (and in many of the Child texts, including those which mention the wronged mason) is precisely lack of clarity in the novelistic sense. But motive is not the only area of obscurity in the ballad texts. There is sometimes obscurity even as to the basic narrative outlines: what happens? In "Pn," for instance, the baby is "pricked" and his blood is collected in a basin: but is he killed? There is no mention of his death as such, and the maiden says only "Twas the false nurse and Lankin that killed your lady." More striking is the lack of clarity over the lady's fate. Undoubtedly, we know of her death by the end of the ballad, but the text is silent about how she is killed. In "Pn" her descent from her room is followed by this stanza:
Here's blood in the kitchen. Here's blood in the hall,
Here's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall.
But we do not find this stanza in Cecil Sharp's text, of which Penguin is given as a reprint.[16] Why, then, have the editors added it from an other version? Is it not so as to emphasize the murder itself, which in Sister Emma's version ("Pn") remains absence? A curious feature of Sister Emma's version (which makes it so different from Mrs. Brown's) is the contrast between the clarity of the details and the lack of clarity of the "main" event. We know about the bolting of the house, the pricking of the baby, the mantles of the lady, but of what happens after Lankin has caught the lady in his arms we know nothing.
Should we, then, attempt to supply the "deficiencies" of the text? This is the endeavour suggested by Niles, for example. "By the time of Percy and Herd," he writes, "the story already had lost several of its earlier features, features without which the central crime either stands poorly motivated or is downright incomprehensible."[17] Niles is, of course, using an implicit norm of psychological coherence. Now undoubtedly that is one kind of coherence, one which is at least partly to be found in Mrs. Brown's version ("A"). But if there is any coherence in "Pn" it is certainly not of a psychological kind.
"Long Lankin ("Pn"):
1. Said my lord to my lady, as he mounted his horse:
"Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss."
2. Said my lord to my lady, as he rode away:
"Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the hay.
3. "Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned,
And leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in."
4. So he kissed his fair lady and he rode away,
And he was in fair London before the break of day.
4. The doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned,
Except one little window where Long Lankin crept in.
5. Where s the lord of this house?" said Long Lankin.
"He's away in fair London/' said the false nurse to him.
6. "Where's the little heir of this house?" said Long Lankin.
"He's asleep in his cradle/' said the false nurse to him.
7. "We'll prick him, we'll prick him all over with a pin,
And that'll make my lady to come down to him."
8. So he pricked him, he pricked him all over with a pin.
And the nurse held the basin for the blood to flow in.
9. "O nurse, how you slumber. O nurse, how you sleep.
You leave my little son Johnson to cry and to weep.
"O nurse, how you slumber. O nurse how you snore.
You leave my little son Johnson to cry and to roar."
11. "I've tried him with an apple, I've tried him with a pear.
Come down, my fair lady, and rock him in your chair.
12. 'I ve tried him with milk and I've tried him with pap.
Come down, my fair lady, and rock him in your lap."
14. "How durst I go down in the dead of the night
Where there's no fire a-kindled and no candle alight?"
15. "You have three silver mantles as bright as the sun
Come down, my fair lady, all by the light of one."
16. My lady came down, she was thinking no harm.
Long Lankin stood ready to catch her in his arm.
17. Here s blood in the kitchen. Here's blood in the hall.
Here's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall.
18. And maiden looked out from the turret so high,
And she saw her master from London riding by.
19. "O master, O master, don't lay the blame on me,
Twas the false nurse and Lankin that killed your lady."
20. Long Lankin was hung on a gibbet so high
And the false nurse was burnt in a fire close by.
We may approach the question of the coherence of the Penguin text through a consideration of structure. At the narrative level, there are two basic sequences: (1) the lord rides away/the lord returns; (2) Long Lankin enters, kills, and is hung. (1) frames (2), but it also precipitates the conclusion of (2)—i.e., the execution of Lankin. The ballad may also be divided into five segments:
(a) st. 1-4; Lord and Lady; leave-taking of lord and warning.
(b) st. 5-9; Lankin and the Nurse; entry of Lankin, pricking of baby.
(c) st. 10-16; Lady and Nurse, Lady and Lankin (st. 16); the bringing down of the lady.
(d) st. 18-19; Maid and Lord; Maid looks out for Lord, informs him, and excuses herself.
(e) st. 20; Lankin and Nurse; execution of Lankin and false Nurse.
It may be noted that each successive segment is related to its antecedent except for (d). The first stanza of (b) (stanza 5)—"The doors were all bolted . . —is a variant of stanza 3 in (a)—"Let the doors be all bolted . . Stanza 8 relates the pricking of the baby to the ploy to "make my lady to come down," which becomes the repeated motif of (c)—"Come down" in stanzas 12, 13, and 15, and "came down" in stanza 16. Segment (e)—the final stanza of the ballad—is prefigured by the last line of (d)—"Twas the false nurse and Lankin that killed your lady." Between (c) and (d), though, there is no evident link, and, if we were to read this like a novel, the impression would undoubtedly be of a hiatus in the text. This is "filled in" in "Pn" with the stanza "Here's blood . . (stanza 17), which completes Lankin's deed. But apart from that "hiatus," the narrative structure is clear, even when the narrative itself is not.
We may now move to a more detailed examination of the linguistic elements from which the text is constructed. If we start with large units of repetition (stanzas or whole lines) we may note that, if we leave aside stanza 4, stanzas 1-13 are a series of six "coupled" stanzas.
1 Said my lord to my lady . . .
2 Said my lord to my lady . . .
3 Let the doors be all bolted . . .
5 The doors were all bolted . . .
6 Where's the lord of this house?
7 Where's the little heir of this house?
8 We'll prick him, we'll prick him . . .
9 So he pricked him, he pricked him . . .
10 O nurse how you slumber . . .
11 O nurse how you slumber . . .
12 I've tried him with an apple . . .
13 I've tried him with milk . . .
Stanza 4 stands apart from this series of coupled stanzas, although it is closely related to stanza 2 ("as he rode away" (2)/"and he rode away" (4)) and to stanza 6 ("And he was in fair London" (4)/"He's away in fair London" (6)). The structural separation of stanza 4 emphasizes its narrative significance: the entry of Lankin is here made possible by the departure of the lord. After stanza 4, there is an increasing "clotting" of the text, ranging from the level of narrative movement to the level of phonology. At the phonological level it can be seen that variations of the "pinned"/"in" rhyme of stanza 3 are used in stanzas 5-9. At the level of structural units, stanzas 11 and 13 repeat stanzas 10 and 12 with only minor verbal changes. But the movement forward of the narrative is prefigured in stanza 14 at the semantic level. All the strategies to "make my lady come down" are answered by the lady's "How durst 1 go down" and when the nurse has met that objection in stanza 15, the narrative moves on to the "central" scene: "My lady came down . ."
After stanza 13, there is no repetition of large units, and the three stanzas of dialogue are balanced by three narrative stanzas. There is, indeed, a progressive movement in the text as a whole firstly towards extended dialogue (culminating in the lady's and the nurse's repetitions [10 and 11; 12 and 13]), and then towards rapid completion of the narrative, with the descent of the lady, her death, the lord's return, and the execution of Lankin and the nurse taking up only four stanzas. But although the action opens out, the final stanza uses various techniques of repetition which gives it closural force. Firstly, we may note the use of narrative stanzas with the same kind of grammatical parallelism to complete all but one (d) of the narrative segments:
4. "So he kissed his fair lady . . .
And he was in fair London . .
9. "So he pricked him . . .
And the nurse held the basin . .
16. "My lady came down . . .
Long Lankin stood ready . .
20. "Long Lankin was hung . . .
And the false nurse was burnt . .
In segment (d), which consists of only two stanzas, the first stanza, which contains the crucial narrative point of the lord's return, has the same grammatical form:
18. "Her maiden looked out . . .
And she saw her master. . .
This grammatical parallelism is to be found only between these stanzas, and thus operates as a foregrounding device. Moreover, each of these stanzas demonstrates other kinds of parallelism between the two lines. Thus in 4, we find fair lady/fair London (verbal repetition and alliteration); in 9, the words before the caesura in the two lines form a half-rhyme (him/basin); in 16 lady and Lankin (which have the same position in their respective lines) alliterate and in both lines the verb is followed by an adverb (down/ready); in 18 there is the semantic parallelism of looked out/saw. The final stanza establishes its closural force partly by the extent of the parallelism between the two lines, which is greater than in any of the above examples. In the ballad as a whole, then, large scale repetition is used as a generating principle, whilst grammatical parallelism, phonological repetition between the two lines (and, in the final stanza, within each line) and the use of narrative instead of dialogue have the effect of closural devices.
If we move now to the typology of characters, we may say that the main actants are as follows: Lord, Lady, Lankin, and Nurse. In this text, no doubt is ever shed upon the lord's reputation, and so we must assume a simple good/bad division: on the one hand the lord and the lady and on the other hand Lankin and the nurse. This contrast is explicit not in the naming of the lord/Lankin but in the characteristic epithets applied to the two principal women: fair lady/false nurse. But if the lord and the lady are "good," they cannot be said to be equivalent as principles of order. Order is implicitly patriarchal order here: the lord's departure signals the beginning of terror; his return signals the restoration of law in the execution of Lankin and the nurse. And if the lord's rule is characterized by security, the lady's rule is characterized by insecurity. The lord is part of the active world (he mounts his horse, he rides away, he gives orders for the securing of his property); the lady is shown as passive (she sleeps, she is frightened of the dark, and her one action—descending the stairs—leads to disaster). The justification for the lord's rule is written into the very structure of the ballad: his presence has as its invariable corollary in all the texts the absence of Lankin. There is no actual confrontation between Lankin and the lord, which may raise for some readers the question: how is Lankin caught and brought to execution? The answer, surely, is: mythically. The end of the ballad, in other words, shifts levels, from a world of practical possibilities (Lankin creeps in because a window is not shut) to a world of magical reversals (Lankin is hung due to the simple fact of the lord's return). That the shift is not obtrusive is characteristic of the workings of ideology to draw essentialist conclusions from an empirical situation. The lord's absence is a source of danger for the length of his absence (possibly true within a specific culture); the lord's return is synonymous with the absolute vanquishing of evil (questionable within any culture).
We may proceed now from the good (lord, lady)/evil (Lankin, nurse) distinction which is made above to note that this opposition is complicated by another pairing at odds with it: male (lord, Lankin)/ female (lady, nurse). The two male figures change places (the lord departs, Lankin enters), whereas the lady and the nurse stay in the house. At the same time, in "Pn" the failure to secure the house is not attributed to any specific agent, so that the blame attaches generally to nurse and lady alike. They are the two variables through which the static opposition of absolutes (good/evil) can be mediated.
One way, then, of looking at "Long Lankin" is as a conflict between order and disorder, culture and nature. This conflict manifests itself in the ballad in a series of binary oppositions:
Culture Nature
Lord Long Lankin
(Castle) Moss/Hay
In the narrative it is the removal of the lord (principle of order) that allows Long Lankin (principle of disorder) to enter from the moss and hay (disordered nature) upsetting the pevailing order of the castle. The two male characters represent strong order and strong disorder, whereas the two females appear as weaker representations of the primary opposition: the fair lady represents order but is insufficient to withstand disorder; the false nurse is the treacherous element of disorder-within-culture but is insufficient to bring chaos without the alliance with the disorder-from-nature principle, Long Lankin. A new order is established with the return of the lord and the execution of Lankin and the nurse. The ballad is therefore, among other things, an essay in the ideology of patriarchal society: women are weak (whether fair or false); men are strong (whether evil or good). The theme of the entry of disorder through the absence of the male principle of order is not uncommon in traditional ballads. In "Little Musgrove and Lady Barnard" (Child 81) it is the absence of the lord which permits adultery to take place between the two characters of the title, and it is his return that leads to a bloody vengeance. But here it is the lady herself who is the traitor to order, and it is she who "cast an eye" on Musgrave and encouraged him, thus breaking patriarchal norms. But the ballad is morally ambiguous: disorder is destroyed yet Lord Barnard himself regrets his act:
"Why did you not offer to stay my hand,
When you saw me wax so wood."
Barnard retrospectively encourages any sympathy the reader or listener might have had for the two lovers. The ambiguity of the ballad is caused by the fact that two value systems are at work: one normative and patriarchal, the other romantic.[18] There is a similar narrative structure to the ballad "Brown Adam" (Child 98). Here it is Brown Adam's absence while hunting, that allows the advances of the "fu fa'se knight" to Adam's lady and it is Adam's return that puts an end to them. But unlike the lord in "Long Lankin," Brown Adam is a banished man who "biggit a bowr i' the good green wood" (i.e. he creates order-within-nature). The knight who comes to tempt Adam's lady, with a "a gay gold ring," "a purse of gold," and ultimately "his lang lang bran" is the representation of disorder-from-culture. "Brown Adam" therefore represents an inversion of the narrative structure we find in "Long Lankin."[19]
So far we have been exploring culture and nature in terms of their oppositions, but we may also consider how the actual vocabulary of "Long Lankin" mediates between the two terms. We may begin by noting an interesting feature of the text: the repetition of in (16 times in "Pn" as compared with only 13 in the longer version by Mrs. Brown) and the phonologically related pin/pinned. Now pin and pinned are set in opposition in the text. The Lord leaves, commanding that the door be bolted and the windows pinned, and it is the failure of this order to be correctly carried out that enables Lankin to creep in. This pinning, then, is for the sake of security: it ensures the inviolateness of the house, closing off the area of domestic harmony. This harmony is shattered by two penetrations: the penetration of Lankin into the house and the penetration of the pin into the baby. We are presented, then, with two opposing functions of "pinning": the one to ensure safety, the other to destroy that safety; the one to preserve one's blood (i.e. one's kin), the other to shed blood. But if the shed ding of the baby's blood is a clear issue the same cannot be said for the lady's death. Indeed, the climax of the ballad is conspicuous by its absence, an absence which, as we have already noted, led the Penguin editors to insert the stanza "Here's blood in the kitchen . . ." What, in fact, happens to the lady? We don't know, at least not until stanza 19 when she is reported as having been killed. But the nearest we come to seeing the deed is in the line: "Long Lankin stood ready to capture her in his arm." Since the violence to the baby is presented in such detail, why is it not presented here? And, further, we may ask why it is that Lankin's revenge is directed specifically against the lady, when, in a patriarchal society, the male heir may seem a fitter object for vengeance.
If now we concentrate upon the action rather than the actors, we may suggest a hypothesis to explain the hiatus in the text. As we have already noted, one of the oppositions set up by the text is male/female. But this opposition is complicated by the opposing roles of the two male and the two female figures. The opposition of the two male figures, however, may be seen in the light of their enactment of opposing sexual roles. The lord is associated with the pinning that creates safety, with the house, with the tower from which the maiden sees him—in short with the phallus as symbol of patriarchal authority. That phallus is also associated with the presence of the "little son Johnson," and thus with the founding of society. But that society might be seen as depending on the violation of the home, on the entry through "one little window," on the act of sexual violation. The phallus then is also the destroyer, and the pin which threatens all established order and which literally sheds blood.
The ballad thus mediates between two opposed views of sexuality. For the phallus is seen both as the symbol of patriarchal authority, the pin that holds the circle of culture together, and as the symbol of the destructive "natural" urges that destroy domestic stability (the irruption of the world of moss and hay). At this level, then, we can reinterpret the construction of the opposition lord/Lankin as a way of exploring/mystifying the patriarchal role. For the father has to unlock the door, to enter the house, to draw blood in order that he may be come the owner of the house, the protector of property which in cludes both wife and child. By separating out these two aspects of sexuality and attributing them to different characters, the text purifies the patriarch. He is cleansed of all moral ambiguity in the figure of the lord, all blame being attached to Long Lankin, a figure who comes in from the wilds.
The equation is Culture or Nature but never both; either the lord or Long Lankin. But the equation is complicated by the presence of the two women, both placed within the bolted house, and yet both with ambiguous roles. The failure to secure the house may psychologically be attributed to a conspiracy between nurse and Lankin, but at the narrative level, it is simply an unattributed failure which is linked equally with nurse and lady. The nurse's mediating role seems clear: she is both the nurse who should rock the child and the betrayer of culture to the forces of nature. But the lady's role is more ambiguous. Undoubtedly, she is fair, which at one level is in opposition to the nurse's false. But fair is not necessarily an ethical concept (hence the common phrase, "fair but false"). In part, the lady is fair simply be cause she is the lord's prized possession, doubly protected by being securely locked within a room within a locked house. If she is attainable, it is only by her own "consent." As we saw a splitting of the atriarchal principle into protector/assailant, so now we have a split ting of female sexuality into accomplice/victim, both in the division of nurse/lady, and in the "self-division" of the lady herself. For if the lady is "fair" (i.e. morally pure), she is also "fair" (i.e. desired). Hence, the descent of the lady, sufficiently motivated as it is within the narrative, can be seen as over-determined. For her descent is not forced but chosen. ("My lady came down, she was thinking no harm"), and seems to imply, at the narrative level, acquiescence to Lankin, even though any moral consciousness of the event is explicitly negated ("she was thinking no harm"). The lady, then, can appear as part of the "purified" world of culture at the same time as she functions as accomplice to the world of nature.
The lady, like the lord, is cleared of any blame. Culture (good) is separated from nature (bad). But culture can only be "purified" by the suppression of the founding "crime": the "ravishing" of a daughter from the paternal home. The text is a working upon the self contradictory demands of patriarchy. For the demand is to uphold the patriarchal household even though that very household is founded upon the dissolution of another patriarchal household. The text resolves the problem through the splitting that we have examined (lord/Lankin; lady/nurse; lady/lady), and by suppressing what happens between Lankin and the lady. The resolution, though, can only take place through the removal of the ambiguous figure of the lady, and so the problem is resolved by the removal of the problem itself. We are left with a patriarch without anyone to exercise patriarchy
over.
Such a reading demands, of course, that we abandon psychological categorization of the actants. In this reading, indeed, the lord, although in the narrative categorized as husband, functions essentially as father/protector to wife and child alike. In relation to the lord, Lankin assumes an Oedipal struggle. The father being absent, his authority dead, the son can enter. But on the principle of splitting outlined above, father/son constitute an implicit unity: the father had to be a son, and act as a son, before he could become father. But when already father, the sexual function can be sloughed off.
It may be objected that the above analysis is largely speculative. To this, we may reply that it is founded upon the ambivalences within the text, and upon the actual linguistic texture. We began, it may be remembered, with the curious opposition of pinned/pin. Could this not, though, be mere coincidence? We would argue that in ballads, as in all discourse, there are no mere coincidences. The repetition of a word, and its phonological and semantic shifts, is one of the elements which goes towards the production of meaning. The choice of this word rather than that is always significant, is, indeed, the basis of all
signification. The above analysis, then, is aimed at this particular text, and not at a general "meaning" of all the Lankin texts. Nevertheless, we may note in the Child "D" text the same conjuncture of securing the house/violating the baby, but it is manifested here through the opposition bolted/bolt:
For the doors shall be bolted,
And the windows pindee
She rammed the silver bolt up the baby's nose,
Till the blood it came trinkling down the baby's fine clothes.[20]
In both "Pn" and "D," lexical repetition (pinned/pin; bolted/bolt) elides seeming opposites: the protection of the house and the assault upon the child.
Having analyzed the interrelation of structure and ideology in a particular text, we may now return to our starting point: the variations in the "Lankin" ballads. In Mrs. Brown's version (Child "A"), for instance, we noticed that motivation assumes an importance that is absent in "Pn." But could we not think of Mrs. Brown's version as simply retaining the meanings of "Pn" whilst adding new meanings? The "A" text could then be defined as "Pn" (the "basic" story) plus the attribution of motivation to Lankin and the nurse. There are two objections to this. Firstly, Mrs. Brown does not mention "pinning" the doors and her Lankin's attack upon the child is with "a sharp knife." In other words, unlike the singers of "Pn" and "D," Mrs. Brown does not connect the securing of the house with the violation of the baby. Secondly, by foregrounding motivation, Mrs. Brown suggests an alternative reading of the basic story; indeed, she transforms it. The oppositions between Culture and Nature which we analyzed in "Pn" are displaced in "A" by class antagonisms (Lamkin builds Lord Wearie's castle "but payment got he nane"; the nurse resents the lady "for she neer was good to me"). "Pn" projects an inexplicable invasion from the world of "moss" and "hay", "A" inscribes the historical contradictions of social stratification.
We can, perhaps, describe the relation between "Pn" and "A" in terms of their different "semantic horizons," to borrow Fredric Jameson's phrase. Jameson suggests that we should interpret texts within three distinct frameworks: the horizon of punctual events (i.e. the placing of the text within the chronicle-like sequence of history); the horizon of society, conceived as the "constitutive tension and struggle between social classes"; the horizon of history "in its vastest sense of. . . the succession and destiny of the various human social formations."[21] Jameson posits these horizons as levels of interpretation, but we would suggest that texts intervene or are inserted at particular levels. "A," for instance, intervenes primarily at the level of the second horizon, articulating the conflicts between artisan and aristocrat, nurse and lady. "Pn," on the other hand, is predominantly concerned with the third horizon or with what Paul Bouissac calls "the principle or principles that are so fundamental for the holding together of the regulative system that they cannot be formulated."[22]
This is not to deny important similarities between "A" and "Pn." In Mrs. Brown's version, Lankin takes his revenge upon the lady and the child rather than upon the lord. As in "Pn" endogamy is subverted not by the marrying in of the outsider (the class outsider in "A"; the metaphysical outsider in "Pn") but by the destruction of the "inside" (through the violation of the house's, the lady's and the child's boundaries). Whereas "Pn," though, plays with the "deep" structure of endogamy (in its extreme form, incest) and exogamy (in its extreme form, parricide or matricide), "A" constructs endogamy as the token of class privilege by which the male aristocrat asserts his property rights over ladies "o noble kin" as much as over castles. In other words, "A" displaces class conflict from its "proper" object (the lord) onto the lady, just as the malcontent in Elizabethan tragedies slides from attacking court corruption to railing against the court lady, or the "angry young man" of the 1950s in Britain (e.g., Jimmy Porter in Osborne's Look Back in Anger) transforms his class subjection into misogynistic onslaughts against middle-class women. Even the same element in the two ballads, then, may produce different meanings because of its changed narrative context.
But meaning, of course, is not dependent upon narrative structure alone. If our study has concentrated upon text to the exclusion of performer and the social and material context of performance, this is partly for lack of sources.[23] As a result, we have perhaps over stressed form without recognizing how it is transformed by addresser and adressee. Thus, we have argued that "Long Lankin" is, among other things, an essay in the ideology of patriarchal ideology. But is it not important to note that the singer was a woman, Sister Emma? Indeed, categorizing all the singers of "Lankin" in Child and Bronson according to gender, we arrive at the interesting result that, excluding unknown singers, more than three-quarters of the performers were women. This should come as no surprise. In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey noted that ballads were "handed downe from mother to daughter ... So my nurse has the history from the conquest down to Carl. I in ballad."[24] Mrs. Brown, the singer of "A," learned some of her ballads from her mother, some from a maid, but most from an aunt who had in turn learned them from "nurses and old women."[25] A more complete analysis of the "Lankin" ballads would need to examine the ways in which women's control of the form might challenge patriarchal assumptions inscribed in the tradition.[26]
In conclusion, we may briefly turn to the question of "Long Lankin's" reception. Advocating a "psychoanalytic semiotics," Alan Dundes argues that "folklore is not only projective material, but it allows if not encourages projection on the part of the participants in the act of communicating folklore." In the ballads, of course, the line between listener (the "participant") and performer (the "transmitter" of the "projective material") is not sharply drawn: Mrs. Brown listened to "Lankin" before she sang her version. We can use a singer's variations, then, as a means of analysing a ballad's reception. Every performance is an implicit critique of a previous performance. The interpretation of even a single set of signifiers, though, is never fixed.
We argued that "Pn" structurally privileges the lord's perspective. But this does not preclude subversive readings. Mrs. Brown's version of the "Lankin" story suggested a more sympathetic interpretation of the villain, and it is possible to read even "Pn" as a partially repressed fantasy of class revenge, negated only in the imaginary resolution of the lord's return. The nurse's perspective, though, is probably of greater social significance, at least within a "realist" theory of identification. (We noted above the importance of nurses in the transmission of ballads.) Read as a nurse's wish-fulfillment, "Long Lankin" projects the hostility of the mother-substitute employee against the whining child and the complaining mother ("You leave my little son Johnson to cry and to weep"). The nurse's resentment would, then, be projected into the primary figure of Lankin, thus minimizing the nurse's own function in the murders. And the burning of the nurse at the end of the ballad can be read as a censorship mechanism by which the nurse addresser/addressee represses her identification with the fictional nurse.
But it would take another paper to demonstrate how the polyvalent contexts of performance affect the complex interconnections between structure and ideology. We have attempted here to analyze the conscious or unconscious presuppositions, the "obviousnesses," which are inscribed in verbal texture and narrative structure and to suggest a more adequate approach to the ballad than the fruitless quest for ultimate origins and lost motives.
Notes
1. Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York: Dover, 1965).
2. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960).
3. David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
4. Flemming G. Anderson and Thomas Pettit, "Mrs. Brown of Falkland: A Singer of Tales?", Journal of American Folklore, 92 (1979), 1.
5. Andersen and Pettit, "Mrs. Brown," p. 18.
6. Alan Bold. The Ballad (London: Methuen, 1979), p. 84.
7. Bold, The Ballad, p. 15.
8. Child, Ballads, II, 320-42; Bertrand Harris Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), II, 428-45.
9. See Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, "Two Maine Texts of Lamkin," Journal of American Folklore, 52 (1939), 72-74.
10. MacEdward Leach, The Ballad Book (New York: Harper, 1955), p. 228; John DeWitt Niles, "Lamkin: The Motivation of Horror," Journal of American Folklore, 90 (1977), 49-67.
11. On the importance of relating verbal texture, story, and context, see Alan Dundes, "Texture, Text, and Context," Southern Folkore Quarterly, 28 (1964), 251-65.
12. Anne G. Gilchrist, "Lambkin: A Study in Evolution," journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1 (1932), 1-17.
13. Niles, "Lamkin," pp. 58, 66.
14. "Long Lankin" in The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, ed.
R. Vaughan Williams and A. L. Lloyd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), pp. 60-61.
15. Buchan, The Ballad, p. xii.
16. Cecil Sharp's Collection of English Folk Songs, ed. Maud Karpeles (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), I, 116-117. See also Bronson, Tunes, II, p. 443.
17. Niles, "Lamkin," p. 50.
18. Child, Ballads, II, 242-60. Quotation from p. 245.
19. Child, Ballads, II, 373-76.
20. Child, Ballads, II, 326.
21. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981), p. 75.
22. Paul Bouissac, "The Profanation of the Sacred in Circus Clown Performances," Working Paper delivered at "Symposium on Theater and Ritual" (August 23-September 1, 1982), p. 6.
23. For a study which deals with the context of folklore collection, see Vic Gammon, "Folk Song Collecting in Sussex and Surrey, 1843-1914," History Workshop Journal, 10 (1980), 61-89.
24. Bold, The Ballad, p. 40.
25. Buchan, The Ballad, pp. 63-64.
26. For a wider ranging analysis of sexual ideology in the ballad, see Vic Gammon "Song, Sex and Society in England, 1600-1850," Folk Music Journal, 4 (1982), 208-45.
27. Alan Dundes, "Projection in Folklore: A Plea for Psychoanalytic Semiotics," Modern Language Notes, 91 (1976), 1532.