From a study of these first stanzas it is clear that the unit of composition is mainly the couplet. One cannot predict with certainty from the first couplet in the stanza what the second couplet will be. Five of these eight variants begin with the line “In Scotland I was born and bred”; one reads “In Scotland I was bred and born,” and another begins similarly, “In Scotland I was bred aden born.” The eighth begins “(In) London I was bred and born.” The second line is somewhat less predictable than the first. No. 1 has “In Scotland is my dwelling”; No. 9, “And England is my nation”; No. 12, “In Scotland I was dwelling”; No. 27, “In Scotland was ė my dwelling'”; No. 51, “In Scotland was my dwelling”; No. 94, “O, there it was my dwelling”; No. 127, “In London I was dwelling”; and No. 156, “(In) Scotland was my dwelling’, O.” In spite of this lack of complete fixity, the couplet holds together pretty well as being something that is varied, usually beginning with “In Scotland” and ending with “dwelling.”

The “In Scotland I was born and bred” couplet is usually followed by either “I courted there a pretty maid,” which rhymes roughly with “bred,” or its variant “And there I loved a pretty maid” or with “A young man on his death-bed lay,” which, of course, rhymes with another opening couplet, “‘Twas in the merry month of May.” The opening couplets “In Scotland I was born and bred” and “(In) London I was bred and born” are also followed by a couplet beginning with “I fell in love with a nice young girl,” a variant of “I courted there a pretty maid.” {169|170}

Although a singer may have arrived at a version that became habitual with him or her, probably by some form of “remembering” or memorization—but not memorization of a single already fixed text—somewhere along the line, couplets have moved from association with one other couplet to still another. The couplets, moreover, themselves are not stable. Of the eight “In Scotland” couplets, as we have seen, no two are exactly alike, although several are close.

When one proceeds to the second stanza, it becomes apparent that the eight versions differ in the pace of the narrative. Four of the second stanzas begin with some mention of courting. No. 27 has “I courted her for a month or two”; No. 94 has “I courted her in summer time”; Nos. 127 and 156 have “I courted her for seven long years.” It is noticeable that in No. 27 and No. 94, the courting has begun already in the third line of the first stanza. The second stanza of No. 12 commences at a different moment in the story: “He sent his servant to her house,” whereas in No. 1, Barbara already goes to the young man’s bedside. In No. 27 a striking deviation is that the narrator is the servant not the young man himself.

The first line is common to all the texts, except that the lady is Hasanaginica in some (12a, A, and B) and Alibegovica in others (C and D). The second line, sung together with the first in a couplet, San usnila, u snu se prenula, “She dreamed a dream and while dreaming she started up,” repeats {173|174} the first half of the first line and adds a new idea in the second half. This is a common method of line, or couplet, structure, which I have sometimes described as fitting three ideas into four metrical slots by repeating in the second line an idea introduced in the first. Text D has the same second line as 12a, although the lady is Alibegovica, not Hasanaginica. The second line in C, San usnila, pa se probudila, “She dreamed a dream, then awoke,” uses a different verb in the second half of the line, with essentially the same meaning, “she woke up.” Text B is defective in this line, U snu se prenula, “while dreaming she started up,” the scribe not bothering to repeat the first half of the line and writing down only the second half, which is the same as in 12a and D.

In Text A, lines two and three:

“intervene” between what are lines one and two in the other texts, with the result that line two of the other texts is line four of Text A, and it (San usnila, u snu se prepala, “She dreamed a dream, in her dreaming she took fright”) repeats the first half of line one but has still another verb in the second half. Lines two and three of Text A will be found in another position in the other texts. They are descriptive of the dream, and there are several places in which they might logically occur and, as a matter of fact, do occur.

In 12a, lines three and four go together in a couplet just as one and two did.

Bartók No. 12a is the only one of the five texts to use the verb (pro) budi ‘awoke’ (line three); the others use doziva ‘called to’. The person called in 12a, A (line five), B, and D is “daughter Melećhana”; in C it is Ajkunu đevojku ‘the maiden Ajkuna’.

The second line of this couplet begins with Ustaj ‘arise’, in 12a, A, and B, followed by a vocative for the daughter. In D, the vocative is repeated in both halves of the line, Ćeri moja, mila Melećana, “My daughter, dear Melećana.” {174|175} Once again, Text C is different (as in Ajkuna đevojku). The text has no vocative but begins immediately with Čudan sam ti noćas san usnila, “Last night I dreamed a strange dream.”

The next couplet in 12a is:

This couplet is more or less the same in A, but it is amplified to three lines in D:

There is a balance in some lines of the poetry between Bog ‘God’, and ljudi ‘people’, in the traditional poetry, and that has lengthened the second line of the couplet, thus requiring a third line for its completion. Texts B and C omit the idea that the mother has fallen ill and take up, rather, the idea of her dying only in connection with the interpretation of the dream, which appears later in the other texts.

The next three new lines in 12a should be taken together because they introduce the lady’s dream:

Text D gives a three-line equivalent to the three lines above, and they are in the same sequence:

Text B has also a three-line equivalent to the 12a lines in question, also with slight variations: {175|176}

These lines, however, follow immediately on the Ustaj ‘arise’, line because the mother’s illness has been omitted; or rather, there is no mention of it. Text A has the two lines describing the dream but not the line introducing them, but they are placed immediately after the first line of the song, as we saw before, “interrupting” the first and second lines.

Text C does not give a description of the dream and keeps only the line Čudan sam ti noćas san usnila, “I had a strange dream last night,” adding Brže će ti majka umrijeti, “Your mother will soon die.” Text C telescopes the song, shortening it considerably.

Bartók No. 12a then gives the interpretation of the dream in four lines:

Text B has approximately these same lines of interpretation but introduces them with a vocative line: Šćeri moja, Melećhanu, “My daughter, Melećhana.” Text D gives only two lines of interpretation, corresponding to the first and the last lines of 12a:

Text C has only two of the four lines of interpretation found in 12a, namely:

Finally, Text A has only one line of interpretation, and it falls hard on the {176|177} heel of the mother’s illness: I tvoj će se oženiti babo, “And your father will marry again.”

We are left, then, with two problems instead of one, neither of which is adequately explained: first, the variations in some Old English poems that cannot be accounted for by scribal error, and second, the processes of transmission or even of composition, or both, of traditional ballads. These are separate problems. I find it easier to approach that of traditional ballads, where material for analysis is abundant and more varied than that of the comparatively small group of Old English poems involved, which would have been known to a restricted number of persons. I might add that one {177|178} need not confine one’s observations to British, Scottish, or American ballads but should include Danish, Swedish, German, or any other ballads of similar form and tradition, whatever the language or culture may be.

The solid “core” of traditional English ballad, the ballad tradition itself, is a different matter entirely. Here the case for memorial transmission is not open and shut; for the text of a ballad is not fixed, not even after it has been published, less so, of course, before. One is dealing with lines or couplets that may be used in more than one stanza and in more than one ballad, provided the meter and tune allow. The exact wording of such lines and couplets is not predictable, but they maintain a high degree of stability. The topoi of the ballads are too well known to need extended comment. Such lines as “She mounted her milk-white steed,” “he on his dapple gray,” and the like are useful with little change in a number of songs. These lines and couplets are like the lines and couplets of the formulaic style. On this level, the process of formation of stanza lines and probably their later re-creation seem at some {178|179} time to have been much like formulaic composition. Here we have, or have had, not memorial but “improvisational” transmission, that is, composition in performance.

It is paradoxical that, on the one hand, in the ballads we find oral traditional texts displaying a kind of textual stability sometimes characteristic of nontraditional “written” processes; on the other hand, in the nontraditional written texts of Old English Soul and Body and parts of Daniel and in Azarias, we find textual variation characteristic of oral traditional texts. If we remember that Old English written Christian poetry, even that translated from Latin, uses a formulaic technique of composition derived from oral traditional poetry, then we can conclude that Old English written Christian poetry derived its technique of variation in reproduction of text as well as its composition from oral traditional poetry. On reflection, it is not surprising, because reproduction of text is a kind of recomposition.

It is not my purpose here to analyze fully balladic formation and structure. Suffice it to say that to call it as a whole “memorial” is simplistic, because that implies fixed texts, and such are not to be found, except possibly at this latest hour when all singings stem from the written, fixed texts of the collections. What is more for our present purposes, to use balladic formation and structure as an analogue to explain the variations in Old English Soul and Body, Daniel, and Azarias is misguided. The two groups of poems are quite different in all ways, even, I admit, pace Jabbour, in the reasons for variations of text.

Jabbour has done a real service, however, in calling attention to the multiple manuscripts of Old English poetry; for they are often ignored and his isolating of those poems in which variation is clearly not fully accounted for by scribal error is very useful. Still, I am not at all sure of the reason for the variations.

Formulas and the formulaic style are aids in composition, or were so in their inception, and not “intended to facilitate recitation or memorization,” nor do they. If formulas made memorization easier, why are there so many formula substitutions among the variants? Indeed, they make word-for-word memorization more difficult because it is not easy to remember which of two or more similar formulas is used at any given place in a fixed original. The formulas are, I hazard to say, unnecessary and awkward in a purely “memorial” tradition.

Petersen’s evidence is corroborated by an incident recorded by Milman Parry in his unpublished journal “Ćor Huso” under the date of December 2, 1934. Parry tells of a poem dealing with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which he was reading into the dictaphone. He says, “The poem is written as most of the new poems are, in rhyme, and while the themes and phrases of the poetry show on the one hand a habitude of the old poetry, other verses clearly indicate the influence of the newspapers.” Parry describes how, as he was reading the verses of Gavrilo Princip’s speech before he fires the fatal shot, his assistant and scribe, Nikola Vujnović, himself a singer, recited the line that follows them. Parry says, “When I asked him to recite the poem from the beginning he was able to do so only for twelve verses, and then lost himself in making the rhymes … His explanation which, in its way, is doubtless true, was that it is very easy to forget poems that are rhymed.” This incident as well as the data from the computer studies cast doubt on theories urging the “memorial transmission” of some traditional ballads.

In regard to both the ballad and Old English poetry, we must return to the search for what is traditional and to methods of measuring the degree and the kind of traditional devices that the poetry shares. We need an understanding of a style that has remained fluid, subject to variation by a compositional process rather than by lapsus memoriae or by mere scribal error or incompetence.

Buchan notes that “English, the language of literacy for Scots, made ever-increasing inroads into the old formulaic style. Everywhere in the texts we can see the results of the new education: in words like ‘espied’ … and in lines such as ‘Lay gasping on the ground'” (231). The influence of the broadside is {185|186} evident in beginning lines with such detail as “Upon the eighteenth day of June.” Especially telling in the ballads that Buchan calls transitional is the “religiosity that now incongruously appears in the ballad texts [which] may be traced to the spread of devotional literature. Evangelical terminology accords ill with the ballad context” (241).

The modern period of northeast ballad tradition, according to Buchan, began about 1830. With the introduction of the printed ballad texts into the tradition comes the memorization of the ballads, the third stage of transmission. For his exemplar of this phase Buchan chose the ballads of Bell Robertson, who was also a writer of pious and spiritual poems. Among the several signs of the memorization of Robertson’s ballads is their incompleteness. He reports that only one-third of the eighty-four ballad pieces in her repertory could be called complete. Because she recited rather than sang her ballads, the lack of music to aid her memory may have helped to explain the fragmentary nature of her pieces. She often did not understand particular words in her text or believed that they could have been corrupt, but she insisted on giving what she had heard. “Not only was it a case of her memorizing texts sung by other singers but also of her learning by rote off the printed page” (251).

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, when ballad singing remains a continuing aspect of popular culture, whether performed before live audiences or brought to our ears by record albums or compact discs, it is helpful to look back to the tradition of the Scottish northeast. Of special importance for this volume is the information that the Anglo-Scottish tradition teaches us about comparative stability of text and matters of transmission and memorization, and it helps, moreover, to define when the term memorization is appropriate for the ballad.