medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
> I think the 2 motifs you've described are only tangentially related to the
> concept of people being able to be re-animated from remnants of flesh.
> Ghosts typically hang around the site of the murder (if one was involved)
or
> their grave.
I agree it is not clear from the ballads - which are allusive and incomplete
in the extreme - whether they are dealing with a ghost or an animated
corpse. The danger of corruption from the kiss and the smelly breath sound
to me like corpse not ghost - but I could be wrong.
> First, I question whether one should assume that songs recorded in the
19th
> c. actually reflect the "ethos" of several hundred years earlier. These
> centuries involved a great deal of cultural change, with significant
> immigration from other cultures (such as Flemish). Second, I question
> whether English/Scots border ballads would accurately reflect the customs
> and beliefs of 14th c. Wales. Granted, poets got around, perhaps more than
> almost anyone, but I would not feel comfortable assuming that a 14 th c.
> Welsh poet shared the attitudes and beliefs expressed in Border ballads
> unless specific proof were available.
IIRC from when I did Eng. Lit in 1960, the opinion then was that the Border
Ballad literature contained motifs, plots and attitudes that were part of
'our' common Indo-European ("Aryan") heritage and predated even Celtic
culture. But scholarly opinion may have moved on. Folk literature is
notoriously protean.
Brenda
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