Page "Ballad" Paragraph 11
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Scholars of ballads are often divided into two camps, the ‘ communalists ’ who, following the line established by the German scholar Johann Gottfried Herder ( 1744 – 1803 ) and the Brothers Grimm, argue that ballads arose by a combined communal effort and did not have a single author, and ‘ individualists ’, following the thinking of English collector Cecil Sharp, who assert that there was a single original author.
The communalist position tends to lead to the view that more recent, particularly printed broadside ballads, where we may even know the author, are a debased form of the genre.
The individualists position has tended to lead to the view that later changes in the words of ballads are corruptions of an original text.
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