That Scandinavian ballads are somewhat similar to Scottish ballads is one of the standard beliefs of ballad study. Yet another is that ballads diffuse across geographic and linguistic frontiers. This thesis seeks to examine these tenets in terms of examples from the Faroe Islands and from Scotland. The Faroe Islands are chosen for geographic and linguistic reasons. Although they are a dependency of Denmark, they lie geographically much closer to Scotland. Since they shared a West Scandinavian language with the Scottish islands of Shetland and Orkney for almost a thousand years these islands are considered as a possible cultural bridge between the Scottish and Faroese ballad communities. The organisation of material is in terms of the history of a shared culture and language with examples of surviving Norn ballad texts from the Shetland Islands and possible parallels in Scotland and Scandinavia; a brief overview of continued contact after the political separation of 1468-69; a comparative history of ballad collection; a summary of ballads deemed to be parallel and a deeper examination of selected ballad pairs. Since the extensive Faroese ballad corpus is little known in Scotland, considerable attention is also given to the different types of Faroese ballads and their function in tradition.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:650918 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Fischer, Frances J. |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22215 |
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