Noah in British and American Folksong

Extract

This paper began as the somewhat casual assembly of songs about Noah as a consequence of a much more extended survey of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type 825, The Devil in the Ark, and other folk expansions of the Flood story. Close work with the songs has shown a totally unexpected result far beyond that of the theme chosen. A book has evolved which promises to provide a new, or at least intensified, method for attacking the long-neglected problem of classification and analysis of the non-narrative folk song.

The centre of interest is some forty English and American folk-song entities, a few of them narrative, but the great bulk lyrical, with all the inferable fluidity of that adjective. Such a thematic approach also has discovered some fifteen or more literary versions, including such names as Chesterton, Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, and the Freemason tradition, and an equal number of non-English songs: Sorbian and Ukrainian, German and Swedish, French, Latin, and a sixteenth-century macaronic poem.