W. F. H Nicolaisen and James Moreira, eds. The Ballad and the Folklorist: The Collected Papers of David Buchan. (St. John’s, NL: 2013, Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Publications. Pp. 474, ISBN 978-0-88901-433-6.)

The renowned and sometimes controversial ballad scholar and folklorist, David Buchan (1939-1994), enjoyed a varied and distinguished academic career in Scotland and North America. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen in 1965 and, after fairly brief stints teaching at the University of Victoria in British Columbia and the University of Massachusetts, returned to Scotland in 1968 to take up an appointment at the University of Stirling. Eleven years later he was appointed head of the Department of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where he spent the remainder of his career as a teacher and researcher. In 1994 he became the first professor of Scottish Ethnology at the University of Aberdeen, but sadly died of cancer later that same year when only fifty-five years old. Despite his early demise, his published scholarly output comprised four books, over sixty articles, and more than thirty reviews. Although best known for his 1972 publication The Ballad and the Folk and the edited collection A Scottish Ballad Book that followed a year later, Buchan had already contributed important, original, and influential articles to scholarly journals from 1967 onwards, beginning with “The Maid, the Palmer and the Cruel Mother” and concluding with the posthumously published “Liedkontexte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts in Aberdeenshire” in 1995. Although a few of these articles are now available in full text through such online sources as Jstor, Ebsco, and ProQuest, most are not. A collected edition in print form is therefore most welcome, especially as some items were originally published in foreign-language journals and are not easily obtainable, even on interlibrary loan. The Ballad and the Folklorist contains thirty-three of the best of Buchan’s conference papers and articles. Contrary to the implication in its subtitle, the volume does not provide us with all Buchan’s collected papers, but rather less than half of his total output. Rather than presenting them in chronological order, the editors’ choices are divided among four categories: “Ballads: History, Collection, and Composition,” “Tale Role Papers,” “Folk Narrative,” and “Northeast Ethnology”. From these titles it will be evident that Buchan worked mainly in two distinct, if related, scholarly fields: ballad studies and ethnology. Depending on their own interests, readers of The Ballad and the Folklorist are likely to find most interesting the first 240 pages of the book on balladry, or the remaining 175 pages devoted to folk tales, legends, anecdotes, rhymes, plays, and the vernacular culture of north-east Scotland. The first section on the history, collection, and composition of ballads comprises nine articles, mostly written in the late 1960s and the 1970s. “History and Harlaw” was Buchan’s first defense of the historicity of certain Scottish traditional ballads, in this case “The Battle of Harlaw” (Child 163) and “Edom o’ Gordon” (Child 178). “Lady Isabel and the Whipping Boy” included his arguments for important links between the folk cultures of north-east Scotland and Scandinavia and the authenticity of Peter Buchan’s ballad collection. “Nicol, Scott and the Ballad Collectors” was a fine piece of detective work, establishing that Scottish versions of at least twenty-one Child ballads, scattered among the published collections of Buchan, Motherwell, Maidment, Sharpe, and Scott, were texts sung by radical cooper, grocer, and bookseller James Nicol. “British Balladry: Medieval Chronology and Relations” was Buchan’s attempt to solve the puzzle of the origins of the ballad tradition in England and Scotland. His conclusion, on the basis of admittedly slender data, was that “just possibly” the ballad genre in England emerged in the late thirteenth century, “probably” appeared by the late fourteenth century, and “definitely” was in existence by the fifteenth century. While recognizing that the …