VIII. Conclusions
"The Maid" and "The Hangman"
VIII- CONCLUSIONS
It was proposed in chapter I that certain theoretical questions might be illuminated in this study. To these questions We may now address ourselves.
1. The narrative core of "The Gallow's Tree" has been embedded in a great number of dramatic situations. In its oldest known setting, the popular tale attached to the legend of Admetus and his wife Alcestis, the victim was male and his life was in jeopardy unless someone could be found to substitute for him, a theme which exists independently; his father and mother refused to sacrifice themselves, but his wife was willing and was rewarded by being herself restored to life. The male sex of the victim"persisted in Hebrew narrative and in both prose and song attached to modifications of the substitution motif involving the surrender of only a portion of the rescuer's life (Megas, "Alkestis," p.262); the risking, not substituting of the rescuer's life (in "snakebite" and "drowning" versions); and the payment of ransom. A marked tendency to reverse the traditional sex, however, is observable in all but the first of these, and is characteristic of all Western "ransom" versions except "The Gallows Tree," in which such reversal is late and sporadic. Other aspects of the oldest narrative setting, the stipulation of the victim's manner of death by the Fates, death on the victim's wedding day, and the intervention of a faithful servant, are also to be found independently in oral tradition. The pattern is therefore one of continuous fragmentation and recombination, with some old traits persisting in combination with each other, others finding radically new associations. There is no evidence for a mythic or symbolic interpretation of these narrative settings, with the possible exceptions of the appeasement of the elements by a human sacrifice suggested by some Italian and German variants and a Serbian wedding custom that implies that with marriage responsibility for the individual's welfare is transferred from the natural family to the spouse. Refrains are rare and invariably secondary to previously established versions. Verbal traits tend to persist in variants adopting new narrative settings ("gold and fee" and "gold and silver" in "Gallows Tree" texts, "wait a while" and "I see. . .coming" in Scandinavian versions, "manda a dire" in Italian prison-rescue and shipboard-rescue variants).
2. The most stable feature of the tradition is a sequence of refusals, climaxed by a reversal. Change in the sex of the victim, the order of appearance of relatives and spouse or lover, and the circumstances of the refusal are fairly frequent and attributable to "complex demand" and individual idiosyncrasy. Such essentially rationalizing elements seldom show relationships between variants and types, although they may in some cases reveal unsuspected individual culture-contacts; more reliable for analysis of the tradition qua tradition are non-rational elements like the precise terms of rescue, the means of establishing communication between victim and potential rescuer, and the address to the persecutor ("wait a while," "turn the ship"). It may be said that similarities between variants and types have four possible causes:
a. Direct borrowing or imitation of one by the other.
b. Descent from a common source.
c. Spontaneous convergence arising from similar cultural contexts.
d. Spontaneous convergence arising from individual response to "complex demand."
The last two tend to be ideational or rationalizing in nature, as when rescue fails to be effected or when relatives respond favorably or explain the reason for their refusal, although both depend to a large extent upon the first two (i.e. continuity in the basic structure is a prerequisite for such developments). Cultural context is likely to be responsible for the acceptance of the "prison-ransom" theme in Britain and the "pirate-ransom" theme in Scandinavia, but cannot seriously be maintained to be the sole reason for the similarity in this respect between British and Slavic, Scandinavian and Mediterranean versions. Direct borrowing and descent from a common source, on the other hand, are determinable from precise verbal formulations such as "traveling," "yonder," "beneath," "gold and silver," "horse," "sword," "land," "ta set me free," ". . . is worth more to ma than you are." There is, however, seldom a perfect correspondence between such formulations and total situation in variants of the ballad; most texts show both ideational and verbal affiliations with more than one competing tradition, regardless of language barriers.
3. In the history of this ballad cycle, cultural context has undoubtedly €exerted some influence over the selection of ideational elements. Reversal of the sex of the victim and variation in the order of appearance of the relatives, occurring throughout the continuum of variants, appear to be historical phenomena independent of oikotyping. On the other hand, innovations like the removal of the scene of jeopardy to the deck of a ship or to the foot of the gallows can only be ascribed to oikotypal cultural preferences. So far as can be determined, mass media dissemination of an innovation has had no greater effect upon the ballad's tradition than has creative "unofficial" innovation.
4. Very seldom does a stable text-tune complex manifest itself. To the extent that it has been possible to identify the tunes to which versions outside the Anglo-American tradition are sung (German, Spanish, Polish), it can be said that textual relationships are not predicative of tune relationships. Closer study of the Anglo-American melodic tradition demonstrated that tune types tended to be distributed throughout the textual groupings. This is frequently attributable to "convergence" (e.g., the substitution of a mid-cadence on II or III for one on V); but there is evidence that just as new "ballad ideas" become associated with traditional verbal formulas, so do new tune modifications.
5. The basic idea of rescue from jeopardy by the payment of ransom has proved stable in all Western versions of the ballad cycle, although narrative settings, rhythmical structures, and rhyme schemes vary according to pre-established patterns in each language group. Nevertheless, the retention of verbal common-places is far more frequent than might be supposed. It can be safely asserted that the transmission of the ballad has been primarily through direct and close translation, modifications in narrative setting and stanzaic form being secondary. For example, the Northern development into ransom by pawning or selling differentiated properties may well have resulted from an earlier differentiation into coins representing the original "gold and silver" (Italian "lions," "falcons," "columns of gold," Greek vaptcx, ypbecx, German "Ross," "Schwert," "Goldfuchs").
Whether one is concerned with the ballad as a genre, the origin and history a particular ballad, or the social or psychological function of either, therefore, is not sufficient to consider the "ballad idea" in its broadest terms or to rely upon the interpretation of selected texts. It is in the distribution of its relatively minor and unobtrusive verbal formulas that the essence of an oral tradition resides. And what the tradition of "The Gallows Tree" "means" is more surely that it has a tradition, demonstrating its transcendence over all barriers imposed by language, geography, or social caste through the preservation of such verbal formulas, than it is the "meaning" that may be ascribed to such accidental properties as it may have attracted to itself in sundry places and times.