Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe

by Thomas A. DuBois

Focusing on particular characters, situations, or emotions―usually with little or no explicit plot―lyric song poses interpretive challenges to the listening audience. Without an overt plot, how does one understand what a song is about? Are there rules or norms for how to interpret them? Do these rules remain the same from culture to culture, or do they vary? By looking at the ways in which cultures in Northern Europe interpret lyric songs, Thomas A. DuBois illuminates both commonalities of interpretive practice and unique features of their musical traditions. DuBois draws on sets of lyric songs from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to explore the question of meaning in folklore, especially the role of traditional audiences in appraising and understanding nonnarrative songs. DuBois's examples range from the medieval and early modern periods to the late twentieth century. His nuanced study explicates folk practices of interpretation―a "native hermeneutics" existing alongside folk songs in North European oral tradition. He examines lyric songs―particularly formal laments―embedded with prose or poetic narratives; the ritual use of lyric as charms and laments in premodern Europe; the development of personalized meanings within hymns and devotional prayers of the high Middle Ages; Shakespeare's lyric songs and their demands on the audience; and the ways in which professional lyric singers encourage certain interpretations of their songs. The only study to examine a range of northern European lyric traditions as a unified group, Lyric, Meaning, and Audience in the Oral Tradition of Northern Europe will be of interest to scholars in medieval studies, literary studies, and folklore.

278 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2006

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oral-Formulaic theory has focused on epic poetry (Homer's epics, Beowulf, etc.) from its onset, often ignoring other genres of formalized oral communications. Lyrics do not relate a narrative; no plot drives the poem. Rather, the lyric directs the audience to descriptions, situations, characters and feelings. DuBois asks how are researchers to interpret a folk lyric poem when there is no narrative.

DuBois suggests that lyrics need to be interpreted in light of the cultural and aesthetic norms of the community in which it is composed and performed, rather than from the researcher's own frame of references. He states that the community has a normative tradition through which they interpret the meaning of a lyric poem. In his typology of interpretative strategies, he posits three axes of interpretations for lyric songs: 1) the situational axis, 2) the associative axis, and 3) the generic axis. Ethnographic work figures large in his methods – the researcher requires extratextual data to approach the interpretative frames of the community who holds the particular lyric.

From the situational axis interpretations comes from either narrativization or proverbialization. The audience understands the lyric because they know the specific story behind the lyric or they understand that the lyric applies to general situations that many people experience: love, death or marriage for example. With the associative axis, the audience and performer associates the lyric with a particular person, place or thing to interpret the lyric. The lyric may be associated with the speaker (personalization), directed towards another being, such as a deity (invocative), or may be ascribed to another (attributive). The last axis, the generic, asks the audience to interpret based on their knowledge of the lyric genre: typical content and context of performance provide the keys to the meaning.

While all of these axis may come into play with a particular lyric, DuBois claims (and demonstrates) that particular communities depend more on some axes than others. For example, the Irish traditions depend heavily on narrativizational end of the situational axis for interpretation of lyrics. I suggest photocopying the diagram of the interpretive typologies, so that the reader can easily refer to it during reading. This leads to my largest criticism of the book. The first chapter that provides the typology confused me due to the complexity of the ideas and there are no more helpful diagrams throughout the book for the reader to look at as I read. The theory only becomes clear after several chapters. He leans heavily on the ideas of John Miles Foley (Immanent Art) and a Receptionalist approach to folk lyrics but he keeps the audience sharply in focus. For DuBois, the audience member assumes a great responsibility for understanding the meaning of the lyric poem – she is expected to be competent in the interpretative tradition.

Chapter 2, “Pausing in Narrative’s March,” examines the lyric (laments in particular) when used a resting point in epic poetry and how positioning helps to determine interpretation. Chapter 3, “In Ritual and Wit: The Hermeneutics of the Invocational Lyric,” examines charms, shepherd’s calls and laments. Chapter 4, “Conversing with God,” investigates the medieval hymn tradition. Chapter 5, “Confronting Conventions: Reading Reception in Shakespeare's use of Lyric Song” looks at the lyric in Elizabethan society. Chapter 6, “Attribution and the Imagined Performer,” examines how performers present self in relation to the lyrics they perform and how this presentation affects interpretation. In Chapter 7, DuBois presents his field work with Mick Lyne, an Irish poet and singer. Here he examines how the poet and audience interpret and negotiate the meaning of Mick Lyne’s lyric poems.

Thomas DuBois’s typology provides an wonderful tool for not just examining the interpretation of lyric poetry, but also narrative folk poetry and other formalized oral communications. I recommend this book to those interested verbal art forms (whether oral, literate or computer mediated).