Editorial Policy: Texts and Translations

The ballad texts in Breton reproduce the spelling of individual collectors, and are thus markedly different from each other, since Breton orthography varies across time and across the dialect regions, and collectors had their own ways of noting down songs. The internal division of songs into couplets or verses, on the other hand, has in a very few cases been altered for ease of reading. We have opted for a minimalist approach to punctuation – these words were sung, not written, after all – and we have, for the same reasons, reduced the sometimes dense punctuation of many of the Breton texts. It should be noted here, too, that the songs on the accompanying CD are not always the same versions as the printed text, but variant versions of the same ballad, often collected considerably later. Each ballad text is accompanied by an analysis which provides further context for the song – and, where known, information about the circumstances of its collection. A short bibliography notes any further studies of the piece in order of relevance....

The Ballads

This section comprises a selection of thirty-five Breton ballads, presented in the original Breton with English translations. Each ballad text is followed by a short analysis giving, where possible, information on its provenance and exploring the literary and historical context of the events it describes. Reference is also made to other versions and occasionally to international parallels. The material covers a wide range of topics, from shipwrecks and murders to penitential journeys, the plague, scenes from war and encounters in love. It draws on themes from the European medieval literary tradition, the literature of other Celtic-speaking countries, and events from Breton history, particularly from the turbulent early modern period.

A Note on the Versions on the CD

Thanks to over a century’s worth of sound recordings we can now not only read, but listen to the gwerziou. A few of the songs in this edition are only known from 19th-century collections, and in their written form, but most have been collected and recorded many times since. Some of these continue to be regularly sung today, during social gatherings at ...

Introduction

The Introduction offers a comprehensive account of the Breton gwerz or narrative song tradition. It situates the discovery of the tradition in the context of a broader European Romantic revival of interest in popular culture, and introduces readers to the major collectors and collections of gwerziou from the early 19th century to the present day. It discusses the strengths and limitations of the corpus as it has come down us—what types of song may or may not have survived. It also examines the main generic characteristics of the Breton ballad form, comparing them briefly with narrative songs from France and the other Celtic-speaking countries. It then considers the songs’ relationship to history: what events are recorded/remembered in the songs, and how are they presented? The Introduction concludes by considering aspects of performance and the social contexts that have given these songs their cultural meaning and ensured their renewal and survival to the present day.