200 Maltese folk-songs

Abstract

The best collection 0£ Maltese folk-song texts is that published in Leipzig by Bertha Ilg and H. Stumme under the title Maltesische Volkslieder (1909). Since then no Maltese songs of any importance have been puhlished. It is known from Stumme's scholarly introduction that Ilg collected the songs between 1906 and 1907, after the publication of her two volumes of Maltese folk-tales Maltesische Marchen und Schwanke in 1906. We read that "in November, 1907, this collector took her new manuscript with her to Leipzig, where she went over it with Hans Stumme. At that time, after cancelling about · 100 not so pleasing numbers, we chose 400 numbers for printing, arranged them according to certain categories and agreed as well upon the orthography of the Maltese to he used… ". Bertha Ilg left Malta in 1912 and her work, although frequently quoted in scholarly circles, remained largely unknown in Malta where the subject of Maltese folk-songs was generally looked down upon by the educated classes. Between 1950 and 1958. I tried, with the help of Dr. W. Schlums, of Leipzig, to trace Ilg's activities in the folklore field after 1912. In 1959 at the International Congress of Folktale Research held at Kiel and Copenhagen in August of that year, Di. Kurt Schier, of Munchen, suggested to me that I could contact Ilg through the publisher Eugen Diederichs who had just published a volume of Indian Folktales which she had collected from among the Auracanian Indians of Argentina, where she was livings. In the course of correspondence exchanged with Frau Bertha Koessler-Ilg, as she now signs her name, I learned that between 1909 and her departure from Malta in 1912, she had collected an appreciable number of Maltese four-line stanzas, besides the 400 songs contained in the 1909 volume. Luckily, Ilg still possessed the original of the songs in Maltese, together with the Ms of other songs, complete with German translation in Stumme’s handwriting, that could not be included in the 1909 collection for lack of space. Frau Koessler-Ilg kindly sent me the Mss. and consented to my publishing the texts in Malta.