Romanceiro tradicional das Ilhas dos Açores: 1 Corvo e Flores (review)

The late Joanne Purcell spent much of 1969 and 1970 documenting the rich oral traditions of the Azores, and the first volume of her ballad research on the islands of Corvo and Flores has recently been published under the auspices of the Azorean Secretary of Education and Culture. Thirty-three texts are presented, generously cross-referenced with other variants collected from the Luso-Iberian ballad tradition. The volume also includes musical transcriptions and indices of informants, terminology, and first lines. Romanceiro tradicional das Ilhas dos Açores represents just a small sampling of the over one thousand variants of seventy ballads collected by Purcell during her field research in the nine islands of the Azores.

This research contributes richly to both Iberian and European ballad studies, as Purcell herself acknowledged: "Como os Açores são uma zona muito conservadora devido ao seu isolamento e localização na periferia da Europa, a minha colecção fornece elementos indispensáveis para um melhor conhecimento do romanceiro português, e de grande utilidade para os estudos comparativos do romanceiro pan-ibérico e pan-europeu" (p. 30). (Because the Azores are a very conservative zone, due to their isolation and location at the periphery of Europe, my collection will provide indispensable elements for a greater understanding of Portuguese balladry and will be greatly useful for comparative study of pan-Iberian and pan-European balladry.) Indeed, one sees in this small selection of Purcell's fieldwork Carolingian ballads ("Conde Claros ea Princesa," "Conde Claros Vestido de Frade"), historic ballads ("Morte do Príncipe D. Afonso," "Batalha de Lepanto"), classic ballads ("Florbela e Brancaflor"), captive ballads ("A Irmã Perdida," "O Cativo," "O Conde Arnaldos"), and a wide variety of domestic ballads of love, seduction, and betrayal.

The editors have used Joanne Purcell's 1970 article, "A Riqueza do Romanceiro e Outras Tradições Orais nas Ilhas dos Açores" (Atlântida 14: 223–52, 1970), as an introduction to the volume. In it, Purcell cogently writes of her fieldwork experience, the wide range of ballads she collected, and the other oral traditions she collected along with the ballads. These latter samples include some 450–500 traditional stories, told mostly by men, as well as tongue twisters, popular theatre performances, legends, riddles, and proverbs. Of particular interest to Purcell were her interviews with whale hunters, who used a terminology borrowed from nineteenth-century English-speaking whalers from New England.

In discussing her informants, Purcell notes that storytelling was far more popular among men, who had longer periods of time to perform narratives while on night fishing runs or on rainy days when they were not working. Women greatly preferred ballads, which they sang while involved in domestic activities ranging from washing dishes to weaving to kneading bread dough. Despite the conservative environment of the Azores that protected many of these oral traditions, Purcell recognized their fragility; she located one ninety-two-year-old informant the night before the woman was to leave for the United States. Modern culture and emigration were depleting the pool of informants thirty years ago, when Purcell was conducting her fieldwork. Today, we might reasonably assume the oral traditions have further deteriorated, leading us to await eagerly the publication of more of this valuable collection. With Joanne Purcell's death in 1984, however, we are dependent upon the goodwill and talents of those scholars who have survived her to publish these texts.

Joanne Purcell's collection of traditional ballads of the Azores represents the best in scholarly folklore works, not only in that it is a comprehensive and well-researched collection, but also in that several folklorists and other...