Interested to see the apparition of the (de)Bateable Lands in the context of
this thread, Rob, partly because it ties in with several twists including
that which I am trying to put over to Christopher about modes of thinking as
my own views on these matters are (to my mind) far better expressed in or by
an aptly named piece I posted a while back called 'A Question of Origins'
which has its corkscrewing roots in what may seem to be those Border Lands.

I'm quite happily suggesting the +superiority+ of poetry to discursive
analysis as a mode of thought here, being reverentially aware of the need to
NOT antagonise the implacable Muse and end up running like another Orestes
from the Furies to the Rational Arms of the State (to link to other threads
too)

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 08, 2002 4:52 AM
Subject: Re: authorships (2)


Christopher Walker writes:

> The extended Searle interested me because it helps to overcome the
> conceptual division between, on the one hand, anonymous folk poets (I
don't
> really believe in them; collaboration, of any sort, proceeds by
negotiation
> and complicity, I suspect) and 'inspired' and/or technically skilled
> _individuals_, on the other. Which is why I quoted Robin.

Curiously enough, in the course of reading Christopher's post, I was
thinking around this very issue when I found my name invoked.

[And as an aside, had this strange frisson of the affirmation of identity --
does anyone remember a sixties TV play called "The Man With No Passport"?
We can debate innocently the loss or erosion or transcendence of identity,
but there are places and times and situations when this is close to the
bone.]

"Anonymous" in the context of folk poetry elides (as Christopher points to
above, unless I misread him) two things -- certain traditions of poetry,
such as the ballad, as collaborations across time, and the intrusion or
existence of individuals whose names have been simply lost.  "Anonymous",
thus, points both to the collaborative process (or processes), and to
specific (material) losses of identity.

I'm thinking particularly of "Johnny Armstrong's Last Goodnight".  Childe
(169) prints three major variants of this ballad, in only one of which is
found the following stanza:

To seik het water beneth cauld yce,
    Surely it is a great folie;
I haif asked grace at a graceless face,
    But there is nane for my men and me.

This always struck me as in some ways the most powerful +single+ stanza of
the ballad.  But ...  Dunno ...  Finally, good as it was, it stuck out.

In the other two versions, we find:

But Jonne looke'd over his left shoulder,
    Good Lord, what a grevious look looked hee!
Saying, Asking grace of a graceless face --
    Why there is none for you nor me.

It finally occurred to me look at the source Chide gives for the C
version -- Allan Ramsay's _Evergreen_  (1724).  Bloody hell, I thought,
obvious i'nit?  That eighteenth century bookseller and poet +introduced+
(intruded?) the image of hot water beneath cold ice.

But he ALSO (shades of pre-romantic individualism) revises the final line of
the stanza to increase the focus on Johnny Armstrong -- no longer, as in the
earlier versions, is Armstrong turning to address his men, but it's now him
and Jimmy V heid tae heid.

I cite this as one of those exemplary moments where identity can be rescued
(and blame apportioned).

Who 'owns' Johnny Armstrong's Last Goodnight?  Some identity-lost
'individual' (or mates thegither) crafts the original from history and
traditional ballad tropes; the poem develops and accretes by a process of
collaboration across time; finally (for better or worse) Ramsay, a
recoverable individual and historic identity, gets into the game.

(Except -- shades of Wordsworth's marvellous boy [that's an oblique gesture
towards Kent, who shouldn't be ignored in this deconstruction of
semi-heteronyms] -- Ramsey's intrusion isn't 1720s EdinburghSpeak, but The
Ballad Tradition imagined by an eighteenth century Edinburgh chiel who
[attempts to] present [or conceal] himself as an anonymous early sixteenth
century ballad-monger, but finally leaves his fingerprints all over the
shop.)

Robin

(It strikes me that not everyone will know about Johnny Armstrong, other
than via John Arden's play.  Armstrong was an early sixteenth century Border
reiver who caused a fair bit of trouble in The Debatable Lands [that part of
Britain between England and Scotland which, at one time, shifted between the
two countries].  Problematic, that.  Armstrong was enticed to Edinburgh by
James V, under the promise of a pardon.  When Armstrong [and several of his
men] got there, and asked for his pardon, James (in typically regal idiom)
said, "String the boyo up, pronto."  This, as you might imagine, peeved
Armstrong something considerable.  Thus his ungracious remarks to James in
the ballad.

The "Last Goodnight" theme/tradition is predominantly later -- eighteenth
century rather than sixteenth century -- and I'm not sure that "Johnny
Armstrong's Last Goodnight" isn't the earliest to use this in the title.
But then, the title may have been added part-way through the process of
evolution of the ballad.

Last Goodnight ballads [predominantly, unlike JA, urban] usually have as
their speaker a criminal on the scaffold.

And of course, not all Last Goodnights were explicitly so called -- as in
f'rinstance, "The Night Before Larry Was Stretched" (the boys they all payed
him a visit).

R2.)