One page 234, we finally get to the point.

It's on that page that author Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou finally asks, "Have we established that there was such a thing as medieval English folksong?" Having plowed through 234 pages up until then, I had never realized that that was what she was trying to determine. Maybe she had said so somewhere above, but if so, she did so so fleetingly that I must have nodded off while reading that sentence.

What Boklund-Lagopoulou actually did for most of those hundreds of pages was try to fit various folk-like pieces into a Procrustean bed of characters/themes such as "Sender/Helper," "Object," "Subject/Receiver," and "Adversary." And, like those whom Procrustes took in, most of the things she studies can, at best, be forced into her pattern -- because folk songs are not written according to a literary formula come up with by batty professors! The whole exercise was quite irritating to me -- as you can probably tell. All she really needed to do was to listen to some folk songs in order to find her answer....

I don't want to deny Boklund-Lagopoulou's learning. She clearly knows a lot about Middle English literature, and there is much in here that is interesting in that regard. The book is not a bad read at all, other than its organizing obsession. Problem is, because it's using an irrelevant method, it can hardly hope to reach a conclusion.

Boklund-Lagopoulou in the end concludes that, yes, there were medieval folk songs. To which we can say, "Duh." Has anyone ever found a non-literate or minimally literate society that didn't have folk songs? Those songs may have been lost, because they weren't written down, but what else are people going to do with their time? Sit around and discuss the structural elements of the medieval romances that they can't read? I suppose you could argue that Boklund-Lagopoulou's method provides some additional evidence. But that evidence is buried in a great mass of material that -- as a folk song scholar -- I found completely irrelevant. I would be genuinely interested in how a medievalist with no folklore background would respond to this book. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would trust a medievalist who went so far out of his way to avoid popular literature as to have no folklore background.... ( )