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Beaten or Burned at the Stake: Structural,
Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in
Ballads
Ingrid Åkesson
Her father struck her wondrous sore,
As also did her mother;
Her sisters also did her scorn,
But woe be to her brother.
Her brother struck her wondrous sore,
With cruel strokes and many,
He broke her back in the hall door,
For liking Andrew Lammie.
Violence of various kinds is a common theme in the European
corpora of ballads and other narrative songs: some examples are
historical or fictive battles, fighting between families, revenge, ritual
killings, rape, murder, and private rage and jealousy. Some of these
expressions of violence may be characterized as being based upon
individual, personal conflicts, or connected to accidents and disasters.
Other emanations of violence and abuse can more properly be
defined as structural violence, built into the social structures of a society;
in a trend-setting article Johan Galtung associated the phenomenon
with inequality, above all in the distribution of power, and the
intention to preserve the status quo.
1
Violent acts, whether physical or
mental in character, and emanating from phenomena such as
institutionalized elitism, ethnocentrism, classism, racism, sexism,
homophobia, and so forth, are today studied in relation to social
structures either in the present or in the past. A number of historians,
for example, have used literary sources in their studies of violence in
past centuries.
2
1
Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, 6.3
(1969), 167–91.
2
Cf. Jonas Liliequist, ‘“Pigans nej, det är hennes ja. Då hon säger mest nej, då vill hon
helst ha”: Om gränsen mellan frieri, förförelse och sexuellt tvång i 1600- och 1700-
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
5
In this article I shall focus on narrative songs containing motifs of
structural violence – that is, acts of violence emanating from certain
social and mental structures, not only from a violent individual. More
precisely, the article discusses abuse and violence connected to gender
power structures and ideas of family honour.
In a number of ballads women, and sometimes men, are the
subjects of conspicuous violence exercised by their own families as a
punishment for in some way having broken the social rules around
relationships between masculine and feminine, and also rules of
obedience. For example, they may have fallen in love with the wrong
person, or entered upon a premarital relationship. Sometimes the
punishment is based only on accusation and rumour. In addition, rules
around ethnicity, nationality, and class may play a part. I am going to
discuss some cases of gendered and family-related abuse and violence
in a number of ballads in the Scandinavian and English-Scottish
corpora. My examples are the Scandinavian ‘The Ordeal by Fire’ (TSB
B 29), ‘Sir Peder and his Sister’ (TSB B 20; SMB 46; DgF 109), and
‘King Valdemar and his Sister’ (TSB D 346; SMB 160), and the Anglo-
Scottish ‘Lady Maisry’ (Child 65) and ‘Andrew Lammie’ (Child 233),
the last partly quoted above as an epigraph.
3
These five ballads represent but a small selection of ballad
narratives that might be interpreted as including this kind of violence.
Besides commenting on these examples of gendered violence, I will
search for some ideological roots of these patterns in social history
and the history of ideas. The framework for the discussion is
constituted by a problematization of gender blindness and bias in the
Scandinavian ballad-type catalogue, as well as by a connection to the
conspicuous problem of honour-related violence in contemporary
talens Sverige’, Nätverket, 15 (2008), 106–16 http://publications.uu.se/journals/1651-
0593/1512.pdf.
3
TSB = Bengt R. Jonsson, Svale Solheim, and Eva Danielson (eds), The Types of the
Scandinavian Medieval Ballad (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv, 1978) [B = Legendary
Ballads, D = Ballads of Chivalry, E = Heroic Ballads]; SMB = Bengt R. Jonsson,
Sven-Bertil Jansson, and Margareta Jersild (eds), Sveriges Medeltida Ballader, 5 vols
(Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv/Almqvist & Wiksell, 1983–2001); DgF = Svend
Grundtvig, et al. (eds), Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, 12 vols (København: Samfundet til
den danske Literaturs Fremme, Universitets-Jubilæets danske Samfund, et al., 1853–
1976); Child = Francis James Child (ed.), The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols
(Bosoton: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882–98). The English titles given here for
Scandinavian ballads were constructed for the TSB catalogue and for an international
readership/audience; each ballad type has different titles in the different Scandinavian
languages and Danish and Swedish ballads are referenced in the respective national
ballad editions.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
6
Swedish society. This small study is part of a work in progress
focusing on gender power structures in older narrative songs in a
wider perspective.
4
The main questions considered in this article are:
What kind of society, and what kind of views on gender and power,
are reflected or represented in these ballads of violence within the
family? Where do we find the origins of the gender patterns of the
ballads, in which periods and which systems of thought? Why are
these ballads and these issues relevant to present-day society? How are
relations between gender, power, and violence presented in the
Scandinavian ballad-type catalogue?
My methodology involves a close re-reading of and re-listening to
the ballads from a perspective based on thoughts about gender power
relationships in the past and the present. The conceptual point of
departure for my study is that in the ‘ballad universe’ we find several
merging layers of ideas about gender and power, ranging from the Old
Testament and ancient philosophers in the Mediterranean area to the
law and praxis of later periods.
5
These ideas and conceptions belong
to deeply rooted, persistent, and more or less invisible structures that
had prevailed for centuries despite great changes in society. Scholarly
networks and research projects in Sweden in recent decades have
produced a number of publications in the fields of the history of
ideas, social history, and ethnology that focus on gender-related power
structures, especially in relation to violence and crime seen from the
victim’s perspective.
6
These studies have provided inspiration and
useful historical facts.
My re-reading of the ballads is in dialogue with the system of
classification and the headings used for groups of ballad narratives in
the influential catalogue The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad.
The catalogue was conceptualized in the 1950s and, besides being an
eminent and very useful piece of scholarly work, it also represents an
older folkloric tradition from which theories and problematizations of
4
Ingrid Åkesson, ‘Mord och hor i medeltidsballaderna – en fråga om könsmakt och
familjevåld’, Noterat, 21 (2014), 45–66 http://statensmusikverk.se/svensktvisarkiv/
files/2014/01/Noterat21_webversion.pdf. See also Ingrid Åkesson, ‘Whose Voice,
Whose Gaze?’ https://musikverket.se/artikel/negotiation-in-song/?lang=en.
5
Åkesson, ‘Mord och hor i medeltidsballaderna’.
6
Inger Lövkrona (ed.), Mord, misshandel och sexuella övergrepp: Historiska och kulturella
perspektiv på kön och våld (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001); Eva Bergenlöv, Marie
Lindstedt Cronberg, and Eva Österberg, Offer för brott: Våldtäkt, incest och barnamord i
Sveriges historia från reformationen till nutid (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2002); Eva
Österberg and Marie Lindstedt Cronberg (eds), Våldets mening: Makt, minne, myt (Lund:
Nordic Academic Press, 2004); Gabriella Nilsson and Inger Lövkrona, Våldets kön.
Kulturella föreställningar, funktioner och konsekvenser (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2015).
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
7
gender and power are absent. A detailed study of ballad variants may
shed new light on categories such as ‘courtship’, ‘seduction’, ‘miracle’,
or ‘murder’; it may also reveal patterns of dominance and
subordination. Yet another field of reference is current research on
honour-related violence against young women, and sometimes young
men, in contemporary Swedish society, to which I will return later.
7
Songs that have been performed for generations are, among other
things, presumed to be carriers of ethical norms and codes of
behaviour. Contributions to the conformity of social norms and to the
continuity of culture are, for example, mentioned among Merriam’s
much-discussed functions of music.
8
These norms might be valid in
the singer’s own lifetime, or they might represent lingering patterns of
values and concepts from earlier periods. I am thinking particularly of
norms concerning relationships between classes, the approach
towards clerical or secular power, attitudes towards family and
property, crime and violence, or the relationship between the feminine
and the masculine, and between gender and power.
Norms may also be implicitly negotiated and processed through
singing. Tullia Magrini draws attention to the importance of ballads as
a means for singers, especially women, to reflect upon their own
situation as well as their relation to the surrounding society.
9
The
individual singer has the possibility of presenting her/his own
approach to these norms in a performance by stressing certain motifs
or omitting others, by choosing a good, bad, or open ending to the
story, and so on.
10
7
Paulina de los Reyes, Patriarkala enklaver eller ingenmansland? Våld, hot och kontroll mot
unga kvinnor i Sverige (Norrköping: Integrationsverkets skriftserie IV, 2003); Shahrzad
Mojab and Amir Hassanpour, ‘The Politics and Culture of “Honour Killing”: The
Murder of Fadime Sahindal’, Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal, Special Issue 1 (2003),
pp. 56–70; Minoo Alinia, ‘Den jämställda rasismen och de barbariska invandrarna:
“Hedersvåld”, kultur och skillnadens politik’, in Våldets topografier: Betraktelser över makt
och motstånd, ed. Carina Listerborn, Irene Molina, and Diana Mulinari (Stockholm:
Atlas, 2011), pp. 287–327.
8
Alan P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), p. 219.
9
Tullia Magrini, ‘Introduction: Studying Gender in Mediterranean Musical Cultures’,
in Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, ed. Tullia Magrini (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 1–32 (pp. 3 ff.).
10
Mary-Ann Constantine, and Gerald Porter, Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song:
From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 54; Åkesson,
Ingrid, ‘Re-creation, Re-shaping, and Renewal among Contemporary Swedish Folk
Singers: Attitudes toward “Tradition” in Vocal Folk Music Revitalization’, STM online,
9 (2006) http://musikforskning.se/stmonline/vol_9/akesson/index.php?menu=3.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
8
Whether or not the origin of the ballads in different parts of
Europe goes as far back as medieval times, in many of them the ethos
and general structure of the society of the ‘ballad universe’ reflect pre-
or early modern societies. We may find fragments of gender structures
(for example, concerning courtship, marriage, pregnancy, and
seduction versus sexual violence) originating in early modern times as
well as from later periods, or from very far back in time. These
different layers of norms subsequently merged over a long period,
when the songs were sung and were part of the singers’ and listeners’
mental baggage, or horizons of understanding. They have probably
also prompted reaction and reflection among the singers, especially as
their contemporary societies moved away from the oldest patriarchal
structures.
11
It is essential to point out that the ballad narratives are, of
course, not isolated; old layers of ideological content or ethos are also
to be found in literary traditions, in drama, or in hymns and other
religious literature, as well as in stories and other mainly oral
traditions, in popular or vernacular culture as well as in high culture.
Over a number of years several ballad scholars have commented
on gender issues in songs. The perspectives differ, from mere
descriptions, without analysis, of control- and violence-related motifs
such as blood-stained bridal sheets,
12
or parents commanding a
daughter to commit suicide as a consequence of pregnancy,
13
to more
problematizing perspectives. Ildiko Kríza opens up a new perspective
by discussing the value of virginity in a society.
14
Lynn Wollstadt asks
questions about gender and an individual’s power to make personal
decisions.
15
Pauline Greenhill has shed light on gender issues
11
Cf. Ann-Mari Häggman, Magdalena på Källebro: En studie i finlandssvensk vistradition med
utgångspunkt i visan om Maria Magdalena (Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i
Finland, 1992); Lövkrona, Mord, misshandel och sexuella övergrepp.
12
Beatriz Mariscal Hay, ‘A Question of Honor: The Gitanos of Andalucia and the
Romancero’, in Ballads and Diversity: Perspectives on Gender, Ethos, Power and Play, ed.
Isabelle Peere and Stefaan Top (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlischer Verlag Trier, 2004),
pp. 176–81.
13
Carlos Nogueira, ‘Portuguese Narrative Songs – Love and Death’, in Ballads and
Diversity: Perspectives on Gender, Ethos, Power and Play, ed. Isabelle Peere and Stefaan Top
(Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlischer Verlag Trier, 2004), pp. 190–98.
14
Ildikó Kríza, ‘Sin and Punishment in Folk Ballads’, in Folk Ballads, Ethics, Moral
Issues, ed. Gábor Barna and Ildikó Kríza (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001), pp. 51–
59.
15
Lynn Wollstadt, ‘“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: Positive Masculinity in Ballads
Sung by Scottish Women’, in The Flowering Thorn: International Ballad Studies, ed.
Thomas A. McKean (Logan, UT: Utah State University Press, 2003), pp. 67–75.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
9
problematized in cross-dressing ballads in a couple of essays.
16
Boel
Lindberg considers a jocular ballad where a woman is tricked into
marrying a rogue, dressed up as a gentleman, from the perspective of
patriarchal power.
17
Éva Guillorel has studied rape and the concept of
honour in Breton narrative songs.
18
Alleged disobedience leading to violence within the family
Let us first consider some ballad narratives that end with the female
protagonist being burned at the stake by her own relatives. In the
Scandinavian ballad ‘The Ordeal by Fire’ (Swedish title ‘Eldprovet’,
Danish title ‘Ildprøven’), Inga, a young woman, is the victim of an
unfounded accusation of an illicit sexual relation that is said to have
resulted in pregnancy and child murder. The accusation is made by
jealous persons (or in some versions by her own fiancé). She assures
her father, Sir Peder, that these accusations are all lies constructed by
ill-wishers, but he does not listen to her and the fire is built and lit.
However, Inga escapes unscathed by a miraculous intervention and
enters a convent instead.
Another legendary ballad, including an incest motif, is ‘Sir Peder
and his Sister’; there is also a Danish version called ‘The Maid at the
Stake’. When Sir Peder fails to seduce his own sister, he accuses her
before their father of adultery and murder. The words of the brother
have more impact than those of the sister, and she is burned by her
own family. In this ballad, as well as in ‘The Ordeal by Fire’, the falsely
accused woman is saved by a miracle as the fire refuses to burn her.
One can imagine that the miraculous peripeteia in these two ballads
might have counteracted the otherwise harsh outcome of the story for
the singers and listeners alike. Both are classified in The Types of the
Scandinavian Medieval Ballads as legendary ballads, ‘The Ordeal by Fire’
under the heading ‘Miracles’ and ‘Sir Peder and his Sister’ under the
16
Pauline Greenhill, ‘“Neither a Man nor a Maid”: Sexuality and Gendered Meanings
in Cross-Dressing Ballads’, Journal of American Folklore, 108 (1995), 156–77; Pauline
Greenhill, ‘“The Handsome Cabin Boy”: Cross-Dressing Ballads, Sexualities, and
Gendered Meanings’, in: Undisciplined Women: Tradition and Culture in Canada, ed.
Pauline Greenhill and Diane Tye (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1997), pp. 113–30.
17
Boel Lindberg, ‘Patriarkatets höga visa: Balladen om Tiggargubbens brud’, in Gamla
visor, ballader och rap: Från muntlig förmedling till publicering på nätet, ed. Boel Lindberg
(Hedemora: Gidlund, 2013), pp. 94–143.
18
Éva Guillorel, ‘Chanson, honneur féminin et rapt de séduction: La place du
discours juridique dans les complaintes criminelles bretonnes (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles)’,
in Discours juridique et amours littéraires, ed. Jean-Pierre Dupouy and Gabriele
Vickermann-Ribémont (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013), pp. 215–37.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
10
heading ‘Anonymous martyrs’. The classification is thus built solely
around the Christian/legendary elements, with the result that the
gender power relations between the characters, as well as the violence
that is exercised, become invisible.
Burning at the stake also occurs, without miraculous intervention,
in the Scottish ballad ‘Lady Maisry’, where the conflict is similar to
that in ‘The Ordeal by Fire’. In most versions, all we are told is that
Lady Maisry has fallen in love with an Englishman, someone of the
wrong nationality; it is also sometimes implied that she is pregnant.
One of the versions, ‘Bonnie Susie Cleland’, was published by William
Motherwell in 1827:
There lived a lady in Scotland,
Hey my love and ho my joy;
There lived a lady in Scotland,
Who dearly loved me;
There lived a lady in Scotland,
An’ she’s fa’n in love wi’ an Englishman,
And Bonnie Susie Cleland is to be burnt in Dundee.
The father unto the daughter came,
Who dearly loved me
Saying, Will you forsake that Englishman?
And Bonnie Susie Cleland is to be burnt in Dundee.
If you will not that Englishman forsake,
Who dearly loved me
O I will burn you at a stake,
And Bonnie Susie Cleland is to be burnt in Dundee.
I will not that Englishman forsake,
Who dearly loved me
Though you should burn me at a stake,
And Bonnie Susie Cleland is to be burnt in Dundee.
[. . .]
Her father he ca’d up the stake,
Hey my love and ho my joy,
Her father he ca’d up the stake,
Who dearly loved me
Her father he ca’d up the stake,
Her brother he the fire did make,
And Bonnie Susie Cleland was burnt in Dundee.
19
19
William Motherwell, Minstrelsy: Ancient and Modern (Glasgow: John Wylie, 1827), pp.
221–24 (see also Child 65 I). There is a beautiful performance by Scottish singer
Maureen Jelks at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2bVqhuDLSk.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
11
When Susie Cleland/Lady Maisry does not agree to leave her beloved,
she is burned at the stake. I omit a great part of the narrative here,
including her message to her fiancé asking for help in an ambiguous
way; in any case, it is clear that the father and the brother together
burn the daughter/sister and that her only proven crime is her
disobedience.
These ballads are examples of named individuals who are victims
of violence executed by other individuals within their family.
However, the reasons for the violence are not specific, uniquely
individual conflicts, but a patriarchal response to the female
characters’ alleged crimes against the rules of family and society. Sir
Peder punishes Inga, acting on an unproven accusation, not only in
his role as father but as a representative of the forces that maintain the
structure of society. It is so important to him to maintain that set of
rules that he refuses to listen to his daughter rather than her fiancé or
those other, probably male and high-born, persons who have accused
her in court. The incestuous brother in ‘Sir Peder and his Sister’ tries
to conceal his own attempted crime by accusing and murdering his
sister; in some versions it is he who lifts her bodily into the fire.
Susie Cleland/Lady Maisry is punished for her obstinacy, not
primarily as an individual case but as an offender against the rules who
has brought shame on her family. The violence in these ballads is not
only an expression of a father’s anger, but also an impersonal act of
control and maintenance of the family’s honour. The (falsely) accusing
brother likewise appears in many ballads and participates in the
family’s control over its female members. This kind of violence is very
often connected to concepts of honour and shame that are projected
on to women’s bodies, and it is a theme that is found in many ballads.
Historical social structures and layers of ideas
The ideas and conceptions expressed in traditional ballads provide a
spectrum of perspectives. We have to assume a conglomeration or
accumulation of ideas and world views derived from myths, the Old
Testament, ancient philosophy, medieval thought, and so on, in oral
as well as in literate cultures. Also, over the centuries of transmission
and variation, individual singers have had the opportunity to
emphasize motifs or narrative aspects of their own choice, by
additions, omissions, changes, and shifts of emphasis. Behind each
documented variant of a ballad we might find several layers of ideas
and perspectives.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
12
For example, in the ‘ballad universe’ we may discern merging layers
of (sometimes contradictory) ideas of gender and power. Many ballad
narratives express a gender power structure, which may be
representative of a society with general medieval or early modern
characteristics. Division of gender, the subordination of women, and
the concept of the male as the general norm are structures
fundamental to pre-Christian as well as Catholic, Protestant, and
Muslim societies.
20
Certain ideas go very far back in time, at least to
the early monotheistic cultures in the Near East, which are depicted in
the books of the Old Testament. In accordance with those laws, for
example, a husband was allowed to put his wife to a test if he
suspected her of infidelity, even without any proof. Unless she could
provide four witnesses, a woman had to bear the blame for having
been raped, even if she was not in a position to call for help (for
example, if she was working in the fields alone).
In Greek mythology, the goddess Athena had been born without a
mother from the forehead of Zeus, and ancient philosophers like
Aristotle claimed that a woman likewise played no constructive part in
the procreation of children but served only as a vessel, a container.
The majority of the Church Fathers, as well as the medieval
theologian Thomas Aquinas, adopted antiquity’s view of females as
biologically and mentally imperfect males. Thus the pattern of man-as-
norm and woman-as-deviation was reinforced for centuries in
Christian parts of the world. The (male) thinkers of the Church also
adhered to the belief that women were more closely bound up with
nature and sexuality than men, a notion that was founded partly on
the assertion in the Book of Genesis that woman was mainly
responsible for the Fall of Man (sic) and should be punished by
forever bringing forth her children in pain.
Several of the ideas of hierarchy, power, and gender expressed and
codified in the Old Testament became rules and praxis in all three of
the monotheistic religions, which all originated in the Near East.
There are historical similarities between the different cultures of the
old civilizations around the Mediterranean, whether Christian,
20
Cf. Maud Eduards (ed.), Kön, makt, medborgarskap: Kvinnan i politiskt tänkande från
Platon till Engels (Stockholm: Liber, 1983); Yvonne Hirdman, ‘Genussystemet –
Reflexioner kring kvinnors socialaunderordning’, Kvinnovetenskaplig Tidskrift, 3 (1988),
49–63; Ann-Sofie Ohlander and Ulla-Britt Strömberg, Tusen svenska kvinnoår: Svensk
kvinnohistoria från vikingatid till nutid, 2nd edn (Stockholm: Prisma, 2002).
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
13
Muslim, Jewish, or other, concerning gender power structures, family
control of individuals, and concepts of honour and shame.
21
Ideas of gender and power changed over the course of time in
Europe. German law, which was influential in northern Europe,
meant that inheritance mainly followed paternal lines and that women
had to have a male guardian (father, husband, or brother), unless they
were widows, a structure that is reflected in many ballad narratives.
However, in Scandinavian law both maternal and paternal lines of
inheritance were valid; daughters as well as sons could inherit, but the
greater part of the property went to sons.
22
The historian Birgit
Sawyer describes how vernacular law and custom, which was based on
the sharing of land and other property, usually carried more weight
than the Christian idea of mutual agreement between man and woman
in marriage, which was introduced later.
23
Jonas Liliequist highlights
the point that the husband had a legal right to discipline his wife,
including the use of physical violence, from the medieval period
onwards, well into modern times.
24
Scholars in disciplines such as the history of ideas and gender
studies have analysed how elements from these (and other) traditions
of thought merged in pre- and early modern Europe and have
survived in different forms until the present time. The historian Eva
Österberg comments on how medievalists can sometimes ‘provide
new insights into the modern, not by using the past as a simple
opposite to the modern, but by showing how the present is a
complicated mixture of old and new’.
25
Current cross-disciplinary
research on violence in historical societies and in the present has
focused on the cultural and structural meaning of acts of violence
against individuals, as well as, among other things, on how these acts
can become a factor in the construction of masculinity.
21
For example, Eva Österberg, ‘Civilisationen, våldet och kvinnorna’, in Kvinnor och
våld: En mångtydig kulturhistoria, ed. Eva Österberg and Marie Lindstedt Cronberg
(Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2005), pp. 285–303.
22
Birgit Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj i det forn-och medeltida Skandinavien (Skara: Viktoria
bokförlag, 1992), p. 35.
23
Sawyer, Kvinnor och familj i det forn-och medeltida Skandinavien, pp. 44 ff.
24
Jonas Liliequist, ‘Mannens våld och välde inom äktenskapet: En studie av kulturella
stereotyper från reformationstiden till 1800-talets början’, in Mord, misshandel och
sexuella övergrepp: Historiska och kulturella perspektiv på kön och våld, ed. Inger Lövkrona
(Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2001), pp. 88–123.
25
Eva Österberg, ‘Våldets känslorum: Berättelser om makt och moral i det
förmoderna samhället’, in Våldets mening: Makt, minne, myt, ed. Eva Österberg and
Marie Lindstedt Cronberg (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2004), pp. 19–39 (p. 21)
(my translation).
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
14
Structural violence in connection with family patterns, marriage,
and women’s sexuality is a common theme in ballads from many parts
of the world. A culture defined by honour and shame exists not only
in the cultures around the Mediterranean but also in northern and
western Europe. Helga Kress, literary scholar, maintains that the
Icelandic sagas represent a literate, male-dominated, and often
misogynistic culture, but were adopted from an oral tradition of
storytelling in great part carried on by women.
26
Eva Österberg
characterizes the Nordic or Germanic cultures behind the Icelandic
sagas as:
an archetype for that kind of society where violence between
individuals and families has constituted a legitimate method for the
solving of conflicts. Male-dominated societies that were strongly
influenced by a culture of honour, renown, and shame. By sensitive
interpretations of the Icelandic texts, we might [. . .] gain new insights
into this type of culture in general – and about violence and the
representations of violence as general phenomena.
27
Several authors also emphasize the misogynistic attitude of the Danish
historian Saxo; it is essential to acknowledge this, as his Gesta Danorum,
dating from around 1200, played an important part in creating the
image of the Nordic Middle Ages in later centuries.
Whether or not the Icelandic sagas reflect a specific historical
period, they indicate circumstances and phenomena that would have
been present in people’s minds when the sagas were created and
recited. The idea that fathers and brothers had the deciding power
over the marriages of their daughters and sisters, and that they could
respond drastically if a woman tried to follow her own wishes, was
prevalent in the worldview of storytellers, listeners, and collectors of
these tales. The same goes for the ballads. We cannot look for direct
connections between ballad texts, on the one hand, and medieval laws
and society, on the other. The ‘ballad universe’ is not equivalent to any
real historical society. However, authoritarian patterns of power and
gender, similar to those visible in the Icelandic sagas, also characterize
many expressions of the universe of the northern European ballads
and were probably present in the minds of singers, song-makers, and
listeners. Some scholars have described the social and mental frames
26
Helga Kress, ‘Vad en kvinna kväder: Kultur och kön på Island i fornnordisk
medeltid’, in Nordisk kvinnolitteraturhistoria, vol. 1, ed. Elisabeth Møller Jensen and
Anne-Marie Mai (Höganäs: Wiken, 1993), pp. 22–81.
27
Österberg, ‘Våldets känslorum’, pp. 21–22 (my translation).
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
15
of the narratives, where family structures dominate the lives and
emotions of the individuals, and commented that authority is
outwitted mainly in jocular songs.
28
Violence exercised by several family members
One common issue in ballads is the control of women’s sexuality by
their male relatives. The ballad ‘King Valdemar and his Sister’ is found
in the Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese, and Icelandic
repertoires. In The Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad it is listed
under the neutral heading ‘Revenge and punishment’, where most of
the other ballad narratives focus on revenge for earlier violence, which
is not a motif in this ballad. ‘King Valdemar and his Sister’ is one
example of narratives where women, as actors in a patriarchal system,
bring about violence towards other women. A queen, who is the
stepmother or sister-in-law of the king’s sister Kirsten, initiates her
punishment because she has given birth to a child without being
married. The queen makes her husband force Kirsten to dance for
hours, challenging her to prove that she is not weak after the recent
childbirth, a motif that is also found in ‘Fair Janet’ (Child 64).
In some ballad versions Kirsten succeeds in doing this, but
otherwise the queen either makes Kirsten dance to her death or else
makes her loosen her dress whereupon milk starts flowing from her
breasts (a motif that occurs frequently in ballads and stories as a proof
of childbirth). In those cases in which Kirsten has survived up to this
point, the king kills her with a knife or flogs her to death. However, in
some other versions Kirsten is pardoned by the king, or else the high-
born father of her child suddenly turns up; the story ends with the
marriage, and the queen is punished for having accused an innocent
woman. In this ballad, therefore, a woman is killed if she cannot
produce a husband, but pardoned if she can.
One ballad in which a whole family takes part in ill-treatment and
abuse is the Scottish ballad ‘Andrew Lammie’. Annie is a rich man’s
daughter and falls in love with Andrew Lammie, a trumpeter to the
lord of Fyvie. As a musician, he belongs to the servant class, so she is
not allowed to marry him. While Andrew is away for a while, Annie
dies. In a number of versions the causes of her death are vague,
ranging from lovesickness to ill-treatment. However, in the version
28
For example, Jens Anker Jørgensen, Jorden og slægten: En indføring i folkevisens univers
(Viborg: Fabula/Fremad, 1976); Sven-Bertil Jansson, Den levande balladen: Medeltida
ballad i svensk tradition (Stockholm: Prisma, 1999).
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
16
from Peter Buchan’s Gleanings of Scarce Old Ballads quoted in the
epigraph to this paper, she is beaten to death by her whole family:
Her father struck her wondrous sore,
As also did her mother;
Her sisters also did her scorn,
But woe be to her brother.
Her brother struck her wondrous sore,
With cruel strokes and many,
He broke her back in the hall door,
For liking Andrew Lammie.
29
Violence is exercised not only by fathers or male relatives; in this
kind of authoritarian society and family pattern different members of
the family cooperate in maintaining gender power structures. As in
some of the ballads discussed above, here it is a brother who actually
kills the sister. Brothers often have a crucial role in fictional as well as
factual family violence as guardians of their sisters’ sexuality. On the
surface level, the story of Annie and Andrew seems to tell of an
individual conflict, but in the background we have a glimpse of a
society in which a young woman can be beaten to death by her own
relatives for reasons of shame and honour, and without consequences
for the killers.
One reason for discussing this topic is the lamentable relevance of
these ballad narratives today in Swedish society (as well as in other
European countries). Many cases of so-called honour-related violence
have attracted attention in the media and general discourse over recent
decades; in most cases the violence has been directed towards young
women from immigrant families, usually exercised by their brothers,
fathers, or other male relatives, sometimes with help from female
family members.
30
Sisters and daughters, and the boyfriends/fiancés
of their own choice, have been attacked and murdered by male
relatives in an organized way, and for the same reasons as those
portrayed in the ballads, namely family control of women’s lives and
sexuality. The killing of fiancés or lovers, the male breakers of rules, is
a motif that also occurs in Child ballads such as ‘Clerk Saunders’
(Child 69), ‘Lady Diamond’ (Child 269), and their Scandinavian
29
Peter Buchan, Gleanings of Scarce Old Ballads (Aberdeen: D. Wyllie & Son, 1891
[1825]), pp. 98–105 (see also Child 233 C).
30
Cf. de los Reyes, Patriarkala enklaver eller ingenmansland?; Mojab and Hassanpour,
‘The Politics and Culture of “Honour Killing”’; Alinia, ‘Den jämställda rasismen och
de barbariska invandrarna’.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
17
equivalents. Old ballads are thus relevant today; a great number of
ballad narratives besides the few I have studied here contain examples
of the kind of subordination and abuse that are found in European
history as well as in present-day societies.
* * *
Song scholars are aware of the fact that ballad types and categories are
conceptualized by scholars, editors, and archivists, not by singers. The
Types of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballad is one example of the sorting
and classification that is necessary for ballad research. As in the case
of other older products of categorization, however, current discussion
may benefit from a rethinking from new perspectives. The
relationship between gender and power is one such perspective. I have
mentioned above some examples of gender power issues made
invisible in the catalogue’s system of concepts through placing
narratives characterized by what we today would regard as honour-
related violence under headings connected only to the elements of
miracle. Furthermore, sub-headings such as ‘Conflict or fight between
suitor and maiden’s family’ or ‘Bride rescued from unwanted marriage’
are placed under the neutral heading ‘Erotic complications lead to
conflict’ (TSB E 64–112). None of these headings reflect patterns of
domination and subordination, although power structures are evident
in the narratives. Under the heading ‘Violent or unwanted courtship’
(TSB D 145–193) are gathered a number of ballad narratives where
the boundary between seduction (which might be placed under the
heading ‘courtship’) and rape (which in contemporary scholarship is
regarded as a matter of abuse and violence) is unclear.
In this paper I have discussed examples of ballad narratives in the
Scandinavian and Anglo-Scottish corpora, focusing on structural and
gendered violence in the context of the family and of certain notions
projected on to the family and the surrounding society. These notions
principally concern honour, shame, control, obedience, and (female)
sexuality. The issue of structural, honour-related violence is examined
in relation to the history of ideas as well as the social history of
Europe. I have sketched a framework within which ideas are
accumulated and amalgamated from early myths, ancient
philosophers, and the monotheistic religions, through pre- and early
modern times and up to the present day. In addition, I have related
these ballad narratives to recent cases of so-called honour-related
violence in northern Europe.
Structural, Gendered, and Honour-Related Violence in Ballads
18
With this small study I wish to contribute to the (rather slowly)
emerging field problematizing gender and power in song scholarship.
There are several possible ways of studying social issues in ballads and
other songs from the perspectives of gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity,
and other social categorizations. Such studies may shed light on
aspects of ballads that are still relevant in contemporary society but
that have not yet been discussed to any great degree.
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