Has anyone—other than Peter Bellamy—done any serious work on Kipling's relationship with and contributions to the folk tradition? Yesterday I was flipping through a copy of Captains Courageous (1897) that I found on the used-book shelf in Stop & Shop and noted the number of sea-songs he either references or quotes explicitly, and while I am sure he did not write "The Dreadnought," I am still looking for a version of "Wheat in the Ear" that is not spliced into a Southern game-song by Gordon Bok. This is not a new thought. I have had various of the Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) stuck in my head since last summer. Fragments of The Seven Seas (1896) keep turning up in my stories. And I am hardly the first person to notice how many of his poems are written like songs, as though to invite setting; there is even an ongoing catalogue being compiled. So I want to know: where's the scholarship on it?
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