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Breton Ballads by Mary-Ann Constantine Review by: Isabelle Peere Folk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1997), pp. 381-382 Published by: English Folk Dance + Song Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4522597 . Accessed: 12/06/2014 13:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . English Folk Dance + Song Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Folk Music Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.73.17 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 13:21:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Breton Balladsby Mary-Ann Constantine

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Breton Ballads by Mary-Ann ConstantineReview by: Isabelle PeereFolk Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1997), pp. 381-382Published by: English Folk Dance + Song SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4522597 .

Accessed: 12/06/2014 13:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

English Folk Dance + Song Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to FolkMusic Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.17 on Thu, 12 Jun 2014 13:21:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Breton Balladsby Mary-Ann Constantine

Reviews- Books 381

BRETON BALLADS. By Mary-Ann Constantine. Aberystwyth: CMCS (Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies) Publications. 1996. ISBN 0 9527478 0 4. x + 269 pp. 2 Maps. Appendix. Bibliog. Index. /18. Availablefrom CMCS Publications, Depart- ment of Welsh, Old College, King Street, Aberystwyth, Dyfed, Wales SY23 2AX.

The 1995 International Ballad Conference was hosted in Brittany and prolonged by an international symposium on Brittany and the discovery of oral literature in Europe in honour of the centenary of Theodore Hersart de la Villemarque's death. This anniversary not only gave occasion for an expert assessment of the author's long- controverted traditional ballad collection from Brittany, Barzaz-Breiz, it also drew international attention to the gwerziou, Brittany's as yet little-known oral ballad tradition.

Mary-Ann Constantine's Breton Ballads provides ballad scholarship with an insight- ful and illustrative introduction to this 'body of traditional narrative poetry in the Breton language, roughly corresponding to the Child corpus of English and Scottish "classical" ballads' (p. 1). This is not to discount her contribution to Breton scholarship in the first place for 'the gwerziou until recently have been almost entirely eclipsed by their more famous literary reflection, de la Villemarque's Barzaz-Breiz' (p. 1).

Constantine, in fact, offers more than a selection of unedited gwerziou in her own close English translation; those unfamiliar with Breton balladry and culture will appreciate her survey of the socio-cultural background of ballad collecting and singing up until the First World War (covering the issues of language, identity, religion, politics and literacy, and not forgetting the written influences of broadsheets, or the official literatures of state and church). In an enlightening critical presentation of past and modern views on the tradition she subtly exposes the relative extent to which conscious as well as unconscious conceptions have overshadowed the real nature of the oral tradition. Her discussion of this delicate issue is but one example of her penetrating comparative perspective on the Breton material:

the borders between deliberate deception and creative reconstruction are often hazy, and most of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forgeries, from Ossian onwards, are clearly a complex mixture of the aesthetic and the political, the innocent and the deliberate forging of the past (p. 7).

Nevertheless, her sympathetic decoding of the romantic pursuit of Brittany's Celtic past in the gwerziou puts the record straight as 'in fact only three or four ballads have so far yielded narrative elements which can specifically be paralleled in Celtic material' (p. 65).

The two crucial and most original chapters are each devoted to a ballad case study ('Love and Leprosy: The Gwerz of lannik Kokard' and 'Infanticide and Penance: The Gwerz of Mari Kelenn'). They look at their narratives as both poetry and history, that is, as 'a subtle representation of the lived experiences of people whose experiences have gone largely unrecorded' (p. 2). While the depth and scope of Constantine's source criticism is impressive, one feels disappointed with her textual analyses and merely literal interpretations of these poetic representations of lived experiences. Not- withstanding her questionable choice to privilege attention to the variable rather than the structural elements of a ballad plot, her rich data certainly offers the possibility of observing the inherent and varying ambiguities of versions next to the factually based and most resistant plot elements of family and place names. Likewise, the 'series of widening contexts', which Constantine ingeniously and minutely re-creates, is

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Page 3: Breton Balladsby Mary-Ann Constantine

382 Reviews- Books

suggestive of even more than her proposition that the latter type's two extant nine- teenth-century versions suggest 'the religious atmosphere of the Breton Counter- Reformation' (p. 174). Interesting as these are, such findings still fall short of her 'most persistent concern with changing interpretations' (p. 3) and the statement that 'the emphasis (fashionably but inevitably) must fall less on discovering an "original" meaning than on interpretation, on the perceptions and expectations of the audience' (p. 208).

The book's last chapter curiously prolongs its initial discussion in further investigat- ing nineteenth-century collectors' projected views, which ultimately suggests a study of literary history more than a literary analysis, and one which is more concerned with collectors than with singers and audiences, and with the ballads' transcription rather than their meanings. As such, Breton Ballads has all the merits of an introduction to the tradition; its carefully assembled contextual as well as textual data still offers the potential for further interpretation.

ISABELLE PEERE, Facultes Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels

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