[2] The monograph was released just after the 1995 International Ballad Conference in Brittany, in honor of the centenary of the death of Théodore Claude Henri, vicomte Hersart de la Villemarqué.

[4] The introduction provides insight into the ongoing controversy over the status of Breton folk songs, and introduces the main concern of the book: the always-shifting understanding, interpretations, and meanings of the ballads.

His supposedly chronological organization of texts created a timeline of Breton history, and promoted the idea that the ballads were uncorrupted remnants of a pure and simple Celtic past—after he had removed any Gallicisms.

[6] Constantine discusses the subsequent controversy over the collection, which started in the late 1860s with accusations of falsifications, and came to the fore in 1872 when Luzel publicly took Villemarqué to task over the editorial liberties he took with his source material.

[7] (The ultimate denunciation of his work came from Breton writer Francis Gourvil (1889-1984), who argued that the entire Barzaz Breiz oeuvre was a forgery, though the discovery of his notebooks led Donatien Laurent (1935-2020) to partially defended Villemarqué.

In the typical 19th-c view of the ballad tradition, the songs were lumped together as if they came from an undifferentiated mass of commoners, a community voice whose assumed simplicity and honesty predetermined the interpretation of the poetry.

To explain the need for editorial emendation he must, like Sir Walter Scott, assume that language has degraded and the modern scholar needs to restore it to an original status.

The gwerz Mari Kelenn, by contrast, exists in only two 19th-c versions; it is the story of a young woman who is abused by her father and bears him seven children, all of whom she kills.

Still, she said, "Breton Ballads has all the merits of an introduction to the tradition; its carefully assembled contextual as well as textual data still offers the potential for further interpretation.