Robin Hood Ballads in North America- Simeone

Robin Hood Ballads in North America- Simeone

 Robin Hood Ballads in North America by W. E. Simeone; Midwest Folklore; Vol. 7, No. 4 (Winter, 1957), pp. 197-201
 

[The Guy of Gisborne version has been titled by someone from the Brown Collection-- the original title was "Robin Hood and the Stranger" (see Davis, 1929). In its corrupted state it seems more like a version of Robin Hood and Little John.

The Pound/ Kirkland versions are from the same informant (Cummings) and are identical. It seems unlikely that the Kirklands would not know of Pound's earlier published version-- either from the informant or from general information about the ballads.

R. Matteson 2015]

ROBIN HOOD BALLADS IN NORTH AMERICA
BY W. E. SIMEONE
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, Illinois

If Robin Hood's fame on this continent depended upon the traditional ballad brought here from the British Isles, he would be a practically unknown hero who has been a long time dying. Although collectors now and then come up with a text of a Robin Hood ballad, the occasion is rare, and after a half century of diligent search, only a handful has been collected and printed. Considering the usual waywardness of transmission, it may be surprising that any of the Robin Hood ballads have survived among us. No one knows how many were brought here, certainly more than those that have survived to our time. Besides the one line of Robin Hood and the Bishop (143), [1] nine ballads have been recorded in about twice as many texts.[2] Among the nine, the lone text of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne (118) is in the worst condition. At the other end, the three texts of Robin Hood and Little John (125) are good and, if anything, superior to the British. In between, the others are not nearly so bad or so good, a safe observation, and the indifferent lot of them is a good exhibition of some of the changes wrought by transmission.
For great changes inevitably have been made in these ballads that survived an ocean crossing and somehow still survive feebly. Such changes, I think, may be best described according to Coffin's distinction between story and textual variation. Textual variation "involves those changes that do not affect the story, either as to plot or mood, but rather create the minor differences that distinguish the variants, and often the versions, of individual ballads."[3] Story variation "is that alteration of the actual plot or basic mood of the ballad." [4]

Story variation, to begin with, of a most destructive kind mutilated the famous ballad of Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne (118), its long narrative telling how Robin Hood meets Guy who wants to kill the outlaw, how the outlaw instead kills him, how Little John is rescued and the sheriff killed. This two part narrative is shrunk in the North Carolina version into a bald little tale of murder told in a crude rimed prose. In America, Robin Hood, an outlaw, meets a stranger who is looking for him. Immediately upon learning whom he has met, the stranger is killed. From this clipped production, everything in the old ballad story except the first fight is missing. Perhaps this is all Mr. Wilson, the informant, could remember, but the shrivelling of the narrative illustrates the pressure in story variation toward concentration upon a chief dramatic incident in the ballad. A retentive and understanding memory resisting such forces may have preserved the North Carolina ballad in a condition better than this, but one cannot be sure. As it is, all that is left is this two stanza relic having no merit at all.

A shrinking something like this occurred also in the Nova Scotia version of Robin Hood's Progress to Nottingham (139). Admittedly, there is not much of a story in the British text, though we are told where Robin Hood is going, and why, even if the reason is flimsy, he kills the men who anger him. The three stanzas of the Nova Scotia text tell us only that Robin Hood wounds and kills twenty four men. Except for the homicide and a refrain, nothing else is left. Seemingly neither vice nor virtue, a rather curious kind of change in the Virginia text of Robin Hood and the Tanner (126) altered the ballad's protagonist from Robin Hood to the Tanner. In the American version, the Tanner, not Robin Hood, provokes the fight. The change seems curious since one would expect that the far more famous Robin Hood would be remembered as the mover of the action. But the Tanner wins the fight, and the singer, remembering this, may have been prompted to make the Tanner the protagonist. In either text, the foes are reconciled, but the change does send the American ballad off in a new direction.

While the reversal of roles in Robin Hood and the Tanner (126) changed the ballad without omitting parts of it, at other times, in other ballads, interesting or important parts were dropped without serious damage to the story. In the Virginia text of Robin Hood Rescuing Will Stutly (141), for instance, Stutly's request that he be spared from the gallows to fight to death is missing. The loss of this scene, not essential to the chief business of the ballad for all of its dramatic effect, does alter the tone of the Virginia variant since it leaves Stutly a hapless victim awaiting his rescue. But the ballad, cut from thirty eight to twenty one stanzas, remains coherent and its narrative tight.

The loss of seventeen stanzas in the American version of Robin Hood Rescuing Will Stutly (141) represents one of the happier kinds of changes made in the American ballads. For in this ballad, a number of stanzas contributing nothing but length has been cut away. In one remarkable instance this kind of pruning created American texts superior to their British analogues. We have three texts of Robin Hood and Little John (125), the two from Nebraska and Tennessee very similar to each other and different from the Illinois text. All three are better than the British texts, chiefly because the cutting away of large blocks of superfluous stanzas has had the effect of tightening the narratives and quickening the tempos of American texts.

Kirkland, who recorded the Tennessee version,[5] argues that oral transmission is responsible for the fine revisions made in this country of the British ballad (125A)." I think he is right; the Tennessee variant is better. But Kirkland seems not to have known of the Nebraska text, which is nearly identical to his. Without disputing Kirkland's conclusion, I still would guess that two such twin-like texts may have come from a printed source. Even at that, the informants in Nebraska and Tennessee had remarkably precise memories owned by no other singer of Robin Hood ballads in America.[7] But this sort of revision, since it does not alter the plot or the basic mood of the ballad, more properly should be called textual variation. Such variation, not always as discriminating as it is in Robin Hood and Little John (125), naturally would cut away lines as well as stanzas, and with varying results. Lost lines, of course, could leave a stanza incomplete, as we can see in the Virginia text of Robin Hood and the Tanner (126)." But with an informant able and circumstances favorable, new stanzas could be made from the remembered lines of two or more old ones. Here, as an example, is the eleventh stanza of the Virginia text of Robin Hood's Death (120) along side the twelfth and half of the thirteenth stanza of its British analogue (120B):

11 Then he is avay to Kirklcy Hall,   
12 Then Little John to fair Kirkly
Its doors broke open wide, is gone,
And when he came to Robin Hood As fast as he can dree;
He knelt down by his side. But when he came to Kirkly-hall,
He broke locks two or three:
13 Until he came bold Robin to see,
Then he fell on his knee;

The stanza of the Virginia text appears to be a reconstruction. Such verbs as broke and came are constant in both versions; so are proper names like Kirkly and Robin. But all other words and phrases are altered, and Little John's name, along with redundant lines, is dropped in Virginia. In this reconstruction, the rhythms and the rhyme of the stanza must have helped a vagrant memory. At any rate, the sense of the compressed narrative remains intact, and I think the Virginia stanza is an improvement.

If names remain fairly constant in the stanzas from Robin Hood's Death (120), at least more so than other words, they do not resist change elsewhere. Personal names, when they are not forgotten, suffer mostly from interesting corruptions. In a Vermont text of The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood (132)," Robin Hood is Bold Robing Hood, Young Gamwell is Will Gamuel Gay, and in the Nova Scotia text of this same ballad, Young Gamwell is Gamble Gold. In the North Carolina text of Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires (140), Robin Hood turns up again as Bold Robing Hood. In the Illinois text of Robin Hood and Little John (125), Will Stutly is William Stellee, and in the New Brunswick text of Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon (129), Phoebus is Phoebe, Maxfield earl is Maxler, Young Gamwell is Youngham Well, and Goliahs is made more corrupt in G'liers.

Also subject to variation, of course, are place names, usually with the intention of renaming them for places known to the singer. I do not know that this is true of the change from "Nottingham gone" to "Nouttongain" in the North Carolina text of Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires (140). But it is true of the substitution of Dublin for London and Oregon for Aragon in the American text of Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon (129). For the same reason, I think, the line in the Virginia text of Robin Hood Rescuing Will Stutly (141), "And eke in prison lay," is changed to "In Aiken prison lay." With the introduction of "Americee" in the last line of a Vermont text of The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood (132), is the place from which Will Gamuel Gay apparently is banished, the American ballads become as native as they ever have. Mrs. Flanders writes that the line was practically spoken.

It is in the American text of Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon (129) that the most lavish textual variation, unhappily nearly all of it damaging, is on display. Barry, who prints it in British Ballads from Maine, collected it from a seventy four year old New Brunswick man with a long but imprecise memory, at least at the time of recitation. He had learned it from his father sixty years before, and without missing anything important and unimportant, he delivered forty six stanzas of the pseudochivalric ballad. Out of the man's memory came such corruptions as these: "show how deplex he was" from "How he perplexed was;" "we'll put on our mantles grace" from "We'll put on mothly gray;" "For my pledge it is not so" from "My liege, it must not be so;" "He closed the giant by the belt" from "He clove the giant to the belt;" "With grumbling sound of Robin Hood/ Would be redealt with all" from "And grumbling sore at Robin Hood/ To be dealt withall;" "That blows a fair dispose/ Between you and your bride" from "This stroke shall shew a full divorce/Betwixt thee and thy bride." Barry says that the absurdities of this particular ballad should not be charged to his informant. It is true that the British text is an absurdity, or nearly so, but it does not have the illiteracies of the American piece.

But even if this text, and all the others collected in North America, were of the quality of the three texts of Robin Hood and Little John (125), the ballad tradition here would be a feeble thing, facing, I believe, inevitable extinction. Most of the Robin Hood ballads have not survived at all, and those we have show that more often than not the ballads suffer in transmission. The ballads that have dropped from sight and those that will follow them have done so because of a complex of cultural factors. Outlaw heroes thrive here, of course, but we prefer native types, and we prefer other modes of telling their tales. Nevertheless, there is no danger that the hero will be forgotten. Since 1838, at least one book a year with Robin Hood as its hero has been published either here or in England. The literary use of the ballad hero shows no signs of slowing up. And his appearance on television is surely final proof that our native mythology has achieved status.

NOTES
1. Marguerite Olney, Curator of the Flanders Ballad Collection, Middlebury College, describes it as a one line recovery, "And as he walked the forest through."

2. Since Tristram P. Coffin gives the pertinent bibliographical information in The British Traditional Ballad in North America, Philadelphia, 1950, passim., I see no need of repeating it here. To it, one item needs to be added. Ballads Migrant in New England by Helen Hartness Flanders and Marguerite Olney (New York, 1953) includes additional variants of The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood (132) and of Robin Hood Rescuing Three Squires (140). Cf. pp. 67-72. Some of the American ballads have local names differing from those given in the Child collection, but I have used only Child's names and numbers.
3 Coffin, op. cit., p. 5.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. Edwin C. and Mary Neal Kirkland, "Popular Ballads Recorded in Knoxville, Tennessee," SFQ, II, 65-80.
6 Edwin Kirkland, "The Effect of Oral Tradition on 'Robin Hood and Little John'," SFQ, IV, 15-21.
7 Unless it is Aunt Molly Jackson. Cf. John Greenway, "Aunt Molly Jackson and Robin Hood,"JAF, 69 (1956), pp. 23-38. Greenway, who says that the woman learned them from Kittredge & Sargent, prints versions of Child 125, 138, 133(I), and 102.
8. In stanzas 5-6-12-14.
9 Vermont Folk-Songs & Ballads, Ed. by Helen Hartness Flanders and George Brown (Brattleboro, Vermont, 1931), pp. 217-18.
10 Ibid.