Untitled - Memorial University's Digital Archives - Memorial ...

This study of worldview in a ballad culture still "identifies" more than it "interprets."
Its research is devoted to a single portion of the genre's territory: Newfoundland; yet, the
"identification" of the functioning and relevance of this regional classical ballad corpus
within its cultural environment uncovers structural relationships which, as Roger deV.
Renwick suggests, might underlie all culturallraditions:
People change, their environmenls change, their expressive forms and
contents change; but meanings in a folk's lore remain remarkably stable,
as do the structure and behavior of the interrelationships among the three
subsystems of people, environment, and lore. t
The mapping of these Slnlctures for Newfoundland thus launches a platfoml onlO the deep
waters of European balladry IOwards the far goal of defining the articulating relationship of
Genre and Culture.
The thematic angle of this investigation is a means towards this end, but a chosen one.
Death not only pervades balladry; it is at the crux of human culture, and as sllch opens a
wider view on these realities than any. Essentially, the organized system of values and
structures making up Culture is a challenge of immortality as well as a defensive array
against death.2 Modern ethnOlogical and psycho-medical research corroborates Freud's
and Van Gennep's early findings on the effects of bereavement on the individual and
colleclive psyche, showing that communal ritual behaviour engaged in funeral celebration
helps resolve the personal as well as social disruption caused by death. Philippe Aries's
master study, L'homme devan! fa mort 3 , gives the most substantial testimony to the key
that evolving cultural attitudes toward death provides to the understanding of Western
tradition. Folklore study brings its own expertise to the decoding of cultural expressions
of this salient concern. The evidence that gravestones and witness narratives can be read as
metaphors for the relationships which the living keep with the dead encourages the
hypothesis that the classical ballads and other folk expressions, likewise, carry cultural
views, values and designs.
To opt for a contextual approach to expressive phenomena is not to assume
environmental and cultural determinants for the worldview which they carry, but, as David
1 Roger deY, Rellwiek, English Folk. Poelry: Slructure and Meaning (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania P, 19RO) 7.
2Edgar Morin, L'homme ella mort (Paris: Seuil. 1970) 21.
3This is the full two-volume French edition (Paris: Seuil, 1977) of Ihe original lVestern
Al/jlUdes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the PrCUnI, tnlllS. Patricia M. Ranum
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974).