‘EFFUSIONS OF NATURE’ – ‘SAMENKÖRNER DER NATION’: THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN PERCY'S RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY AND HERDER'S VOLKSLIEDER*

Abstract

In the eighteenth century the ballad, which until then had been a popular genre, was presented in ballad collections as ‘ancient song’. The aim was to establish the ballad as part of a national literary canon intended to contribute to a sense of national identity. This article will compare two of the most influential English and German ballad collections of the eighteenth century, Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Johann Gottfried Herder's Volkslieder (1778–9). Even though both Percy and Herder endorsed and developed the idea that the native ancient ballad was an expression of nature and an artless art, there are significant differences in their approach. In the Reliques, Percy regarded the act of archiving and therefore the authorisation of the popular genre within high culture as being linked to the authenticity of manuscript media. In contrast, Herder emphasised the ballad's tune (‘Ton’) and thus an emotional truthfulness of the genre and dynamic qualities he also subsumed as vitality (‘Lebendigkeit’). Herder's representation of not only the ballad genre itself, but also of its transmission in terms of a natural process meant that the editorial refining of older specimens in order to include them in ballad collections could be understood as an intrinsic development of the genre. This eventually shaped differing politics of memory in Germany regarding the ballad genre and resulted in a higher cultural and political significance of literary ballads and literary ballad collections in Germany.