Debatable Land

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 354, 5 April 1946, Page 11

Debatable Land

BARITONE in a 3YA Studio presentation was billed to sing something described simply as "Border Ballad." I tuned in to see which of the enormous number of possibilities had been selected, and was informed with some gusto that all the Blue Bonnets were over the Border. There is no complaint against this; the "Blue Bonnets" is a genuine Border song, though perhaps hardly a ballad. The curious thing is that a barbaric upland inhabited by professional cattle-raiders should have produced so unique a concentration of folk song and that of so individual a charac-

ter. A life in which the amateur and informal warfare was endemic presumably bred an ethic composed of the simpler and more adventurous virtues, which might be reflected in a poetry which for all its beauty and delicacy is essentially primitive; but that does little to explain the unique quality of the art. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch could find no explanation of this but to suppose that in those parts lived a ballad-maker of genius, who left his imprint on all subsequent compositions. I have never been able to understand why Quiller-Couch did not go a step further and identify his mysterious master with Thomas the Rhymer, hero or narrator of several ballads, who possesses some sort of historical reality. But the whole theory is not especially convincing-the distribution of the ballads is too wide and the known dates are rather against it-and these

poems, seldom broadcast with any success, as the original music is mostly lost and that subsequently written an anachronism, remain something unique in English.