Literary theoretician, philologist, medievalist. Gummere was born in Haverford,
Pennsylvania, the son of the then president of Haverford College. He received his A.B.
from Haverford in 1872, and in 1875 he was awarded an A.M. from Haverford and an
A.B. from Harvard College, where he had studied under Francis James Child. He then
went on to study at the Universities of Strasbourg, Berlin, and Freiburg, from which he
was granted a Ph.D. magna cum laude.
Though he taught for a few years at two different preparatory schools and was an
instructor for the academic year 1881–1882 at Harvard, where he was a colleague of
George Lyman Kittredge, he spent most of his academic career as professor of English at
Haverford College (1887–1919). He was also the fifteenth president of the Modern
Language Association of America.
Gummere devoted his scholarly life to the study of the origins of literature.
Thoroughly indoctrinated in the methodological techniques of the German philologists,
he theorized that at one time in history poetry was the product of everyman, the theory on
which two of his books—Germanic Origins and The Beginnings of Poetry—are based.
He became the principal proponent of the theory of communal origins for the traditional
ballad, a theory based upon his understanding of the concepts promulgated by the
brothers Grimm, especially those of Jacob, and by his interpretation of a statement that
Gummere attributed to them, “das Volk dichtet.” From its introduction in 1897 until the
1930s, the theory served as an often misinterpreted foundation for ballad scholarship.
W.Edson Richmond
References
Gummere, Francis Barton. 1897. The Ballad and Communal Poetry. Child Memorial Volume,
Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology, 5:40–56.
——. 1897. Old English Ballads. Boston: Ginn.
——. 1903–1904. Primitive Poetry and the Ballad. Modern Philology 1:193 202, 217–234, 373–
390.
1907. The Popular Ballad. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.