On Disagreeing with Legends

More than a century of scholarly debate and reflection has allowed us a hugely nuanced and flexible reading of legend as a genre. The discussion has hinged to a great extent on the relationship of the legend narrative to the truth. In her 1914 rewrite of George Laurence Gomme’s The Handbook of Folklore Charlotte Sophia Burne included legends broadly within the category of tales ‘told as true’. Describing them ‘simply as an account of things which are believed to have happened’, Burne noted that even where told of historical people or events ‘the legend itself may be inaccurate or even baseless’ (i). How the relationship between these two tendencies works has become an intense focus of research, with Linda Dégh famously defining legends by the process within it: ‘The legend is a legend once it entertains debate about belief’ (ii).

Of course, discussions of the defining characteristics of a genre are simply attempts to describe how narrators are using stories: genre is not a set of abstract absolute templates, but a snapshot of function, which is why the same narrative item may turn up variously in different generic categories. After all, stories do not tell themselves, and the shifting interaction played out through the adaptive use of narrative materials between narrator and audience, or between competing narrators, is itself a fascinating and essential part of the folkloric moments we investigate. This may be a contributory factor in legend’s endless attraction for scholars, because its entertainment of ‘debate about belief’ (going so far, in the case of supernatural legendry, as to encompass some expectation of disbelief) is built as an active component into the narration and performance.

There has been much investigation of how this plays out in legend sessions, the dedicated exchange and consideration of legends between narrators. We may need to think more broadly about the performance and contemplation of these narratives, however, beyond the direct exchange of the folkloric narrative text. ‘Debate about belief’ would, after all, also include negative or dismissive reactions falling some way outside the scope of the immediate legend narration. Apparently non-folkloric reactions would themselves be part of this negotiation of the truth (or otherwise) of a legend.

This still only part-formed reflection was prompted by a couple of unexpected readings. I am increasingly interested in the appearance (or dismissal) of legends in unlikely sources, especially political writings and narrative histories. I have also become increasingly interested in the anti-semitic blood libel legends, which have been (and continue to be) used as weapons of political reaction (iii). These coincided in two very different contexts.

The first was Bo Lidegaard’s book about how and why 95 per cent of Denmark’s Jewish population were able to escape the Nazi round-up of October 1943. Lidegaard writes better on the first question than the second, in part because the accommodation of the Nazis is a difficult and tender subject. To some extent, Lidegaard argues, Denmark’s Jews had been untouched until 1943 because the government’s agreement to Nazi occupation left it still able to observe certain domestic arrangements, including its refusal to distinguish Danish citizens by religious or ethnic background. Lidegaard does, however, bring out well how this agreement also created certain problems for Nazi officials tasked with simultaneously pursuing official policies and also maintaining a certain goodwill amongst the local population.

When the realities were finally exposed by the 1943 round-up, it brought home some deeper political realities not just in Denmark but across Scandinavia. In Sweden, public comment on the Danish round-up was much sharper than had been previously voiced about the Nazis. The official Swedish reaction was to declare publicly that all Danish Jews were welcome there. (It was where most went).

On October 3, 1943 the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter denounced the round-up in an editorial entitled ‘Sacrificing to Idols’. It is a furious piece, marking out the separation of ‘the Swedish people’ and ‘the leaders of the German people’ by the vapours from the burned offerings’ of the ‘Pogroms in Copenhagen’. Most strikingly, however, it does so by inverting the very ritual killing invoked so often against the Jews:

‘There exist some pseudo-religions with ritual murders as part of their cult. Sometimes it happens that a resourceful tribe first uses a threat as a means of pressure to achieve what it wants – and after that the prestige of the idol enters the picture’ (iv).

This was intriguing. Clearly not part of any direct interaction on the legend, it was also evidently using the narrative’s shape to reject its argument. This seems a more complex engagement than simply a rejection of the legend, a statement of disbelief. It may not be, but perhaps it requires a more inclusive approach to dismissive contributions to the legend dialectic than I for one had hitherto taken.

This was reinforced by shortly afterwards reading about the European plague outbreak of 1347-51. Like many other plagues historically it was rationalised by legends that hostile populations, in this case European Jews, had poisoned water sources. (I had first encountered this legend in Book II of of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War). The result was anti-Semitic pogroms, but the official reaction of the medical faculties at the Universities of Paris and Montpellier was striking. Both declared that ‘all charges lodged against the Jews were false’, noting that Jews ‘usually partook of the same water as their Christian neighbors’ and suffered roughly equivalent plague mortality. This is not presented by the historian Robert Gottfried as being any engagement with the legend dialectic – indeed, in highly rational tone, it is later observed that Montpellier prided itself on its connections with Jewish physicians from Spain and North Africa – yet it clearly needs including as such by folklorists (v).

None of this may be particularly innovative or novel, but it is worth pursuing. Looking for legends in popular sources is great fun and highly rewarding, but understanding their continued broader cultural influence also requires us to look at what might appear less promisingly engaged sources. This is also an evident necessity if we are to understand better the dynamics of non-belief or disbelief, especially in non-supernatural legendry where we might perhaps have paid it less attention so far.

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i) Charlotte Sophia Burne, The Handbook of Folklore (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1914), pp. 263, 262.

ii) Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), p.97.

iii) The 1913 Mendele Beilis trial is a useful case in point. For a good (non-folkloric) summary of the 1913 events and their current revival by the Russian Orthodox Church see Clara Weiss, ‘Russian federal investigators review anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about murder of the Tsarist family’, World Socialist Web Site, 7 December 2017. The Beilis case led even the determinedly publicity-resistant J.G. Frazer to write in protest to the press.

iv) Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen, tr. Robert Maass (London: Atlantic, 2015), pp. 221, 220.

v) Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 52, 73, 106-7.

Shifty Grades of Fey

In the dark with fairies

Much to my own surprise, I have been thinking about fairies and fairylore lately.

It was some way from my main areas of interest. It was somewhat remote, historically: while fairylore has remained a persistent presence in Ireland, here in England it was rather more distant in time. I was not exactly hostile. The influence of literary representations in developing belief systems is always fascinating (1), and my work on belief in ghosts had made me aware of the way various constructs of supernatural lore are transmitted diachronically with changes in the attributed entity.

I had also not set out initially to research emergent spiritual beliefs, and the place of fairies in contemporary thought called for some quite specific focus outside my chosen areas of interest. The historical separation between earlier and contemporary forms of belief and thought required particular attention.

My doctoral researches, and my continued interest in the history of my discipline, have taken me some way into a consideration of new, eclectic and syncretic forms of spiritual observation. I would include the resurgence/reappearance of fairylore in this category. There has been a flurry of recent publications on the subject, both scholarly and less so. Simon Young has been active in research and in bringing together other writers on the subject, as in the volume he co-edited with Ceri Houlbrook, Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD to the Present (London: Gibson Square, 2018). I am not going to offer here a full review of that interesting volume, much as I enjoyed some parts of it and greatly disliked others. Rather, I want to flag up some general concerns.

The book is extremely mixed. One or two contributions were sound enough but still felt like a Greatest Hits compilation, both of their author’s work and of the fairy records. The best work in the book is the historical conspectus material: not much of it feels new, but some of it is well reviewed. There is also a body of contemporary material here, which is intriguing. (Simon Young has been particularly active in collating this material elsewhere). Not much of that material feels well processed here, and it is where the volume tends to drift into spiritual travelogue mode.

The great problem is that in the historical record there is essentially a break between the earlier documented material (which also operated in close interaction with literary sources) and this contemporary lore. The latter seems a voluntary and wilful adoption and adaptation of antiquarian and imaginative literature of Ye Olden Dayes, which points to the necessity for careful consideration and reflection. In the absence of any thorough consideration of the gap between the historical material and contemporary reports, however, we end up with an argument by implication: this is the classic bad Frazerian comparison of purportedly similar phenomena from different periods and with different histories as if they were the same, and with the result (if not the intention) of implying direct continuity through survival. Which very much does not seem to be what we have with fairylore.

This requires some sensitivity, because with the contemporary material we are looking at a belief practice. It is problematic to see that practice presented by practitioners as being simultaneously scholarship: scholars who are themselves practitioners will have emic insights that are of inestimable value, but the practice itself cannot uncritically and unreflexively also be presented as its own scholarly appraisal. At a recent conference a practitioner raised kataphatic visionary techniques as a research tool in the field to enable fairy encounters: this is an accepted belief practice within that group, but as scholarship it is self-serving and circular. It enables the researcher to find exactly what was already believed, thus confirming a contentious historical narrative that might not otherwise stand up.

It was instructive, then, to read Michael Ostling’s much better collection Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom (London:Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), with its sharper historical focus. Ostling’s ‘Introduction’ places fairies as a product of Christianity rather than a pagan precursor to be overcome. This necessarily prevents universalising speculation, whether by design or accident, and focuses the research much more clearly. It also enables Sabina Magliocco’s consideration (pp.325-347) of contemporary belief practices (including the visualisation mentioned above) to be really shrewd on the limits and character of the fairy revival. As Magliocco notes, ‘In fact, were fairies still creatures of terror and awe, the process of belief revival, with its kataphatic practices designed to contact them, could not take place’ (p.330).

The historical depth and sensitivity I am discussing here is a requirement not just to make scholarly sense of fairylore (or whatever other belief practice). There is, of course, no requirement for belief practitioners to observe such scholarly niceties in their own practice, but for any kind of accurate understanding of the development and interaction of those practices there absolutely is.

This is not, however, just about understanding a belief practice or performing one. It has implications for the scholarship too: as a folklorist I am concerned that my discipline is invoked in some antiquated and unrepresentative ways to support a belief practice. As part of an invented tradition’s own mythopoiesis it is all too common to find an airy resort to an Edwardian armchair universalism that really no longer has any place in contemporary folklore scholarship. I am not denying practitioners their choice of syncretic materials, but if it goes unremarked by folklorists it will be to our detriment. There is a widespread and erroneous popular view, thanks largely to folklore’s academic marginalisation, that folklore is still a Frazerian collation of popular rites and speculation on their pagan origins. It took folklore (especially in Britain) a long time to break the stranglehold of that outdated approach, and I am extremely chary of seeing it being smuggled back in under the guise of practitioners with an interest in folklore conflating the two. If this were to happen we would be at risk of losing what we as folklorists have achieved, and losing it moreover in a process it would require a folklorist to explain.

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1: There’s an interesting discussion in Ronald Hutton, The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (New York and London: YaleUniversity Press, 2017), pp. 215-242, although the book is a little problematic, being inclined to a more sophisticated version of the tendency described below.

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A Question about Dolls

As those colleagues and friends who specialise in material culture never fail to remind me, my research interests have primarily tended towards the intangible aspects of folklore, particularly in verbal and musical tradition. It would be wrong, however, to portray me as wholly resistant to material culture. It's just that I know the limitations of my informed knowledge.

Which is why this post is really an appeal for some (possibly quite basic) information.

I recently and belatedly got to visit the Lilliput Doll and Toy Museum in Brading. It's a really excellent small museum of children's toys and dolls: crowded but well-maintained displays, with the tempting allure of how much more they have in store. It's lovely - charming and fascinating.

My eye was caught by this astonishing piece, a doll made of crab's claws and dressed. The notice explains that she's mid-nineteenth century (1865), made by 'a poor fisherwoman in Perth'. Nearby in the case (not shown in this photo) is a rather fancy pedlar doll made by a small Portsmouth company: she is distinguished by the quality of reproduction of the items in her pedlar's basket, but once you strip down the astonishing craftsmanship there you find that she is, at core, the extremely traditional pegdoll, a clothespeg with a painted face and dressed.

The pegdoll suggests traditional crafts being adapted for commercial purposes, which is all straightforward enough, but I had not come across such crab dolls before. So here is my question: is this the crafted invention of a particularly imaginative and gifted individual alone, or is it also reflective of a broader tradition of making such dolls? Can anyone point me to readings on this?

And if you can't, don't worry. Just enjoy the magnificent craft and skill on display here.

Hi ho, hi ho ...

I'm busily gearing up for a couple of conferences, and finding that my fascination with the history of folklore is moving on apace.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Folklore Society's annual conference. This year's theme is 'Working Life: Belief, Custom, Ritual, Narrative'. It looks, as ever, a fascinating event (it's always the central point of my intellectual year, I must say), and I'll be talking essentially about the folklore of folklorists. This has been raised and discussed before, but I'll be considering the lore that we deploy to consolidate our understanding of our own thinking and practice: like any occupational group, folklorists use folklore to consolidate our social cohesion and to consolidate our occupational practices. It may be a slight topic - I don't want it just to be an exercise in navel-gazing, but it's also not the main event in folkloric research - but its personal significance for all of us makes it rather special to me.

When I get back I'm working again on some earlier folklorists, but in the meantime I've also written a guest blog post for Twitter's #FolkloreThursday crowd. When I started my Folklore MA in the much-lamented National Centre for English Cultural Tradition at Sheffield, Julia Bishop asked us 'Ok, then, you're all interested in it: so what is folklore?' And we struggled for an answer. At the end of that module Julia asked us again 'After a whole term's study: what is folklore?' And we realised that it hadn't been a trick question, after all, but finding ways of explaining succinctly what folklore is involves some knowledge of how it had been understood and explained previously. I'm happy to find that I've been doing this quite a bit of late, but this blog post, '"Folklore"? What do you mean? And why?' marks another attempt by me to set out some of the issues, highlight some of the problems, and hopefully still make it all as fascinating as I find it.

Once I'm back from the 'Working Life' conference I'm intending to get down to some more serious work on one or two of these questions. I've described my paper tomorrow as 'another love letter to my discipline', and I'm standing by it.

Getting back to it

It's been over a year since I posted here. Latterly such an absence has usually indicated some health catastrophe (my 'career dogged by injury', to borrow the footballing phrase), but the last year has finally seen me getting back into the swing of things a little. I've given papers at conferences and symposiums (including my first international trip since the major medical interruption), I've done a couple of more popular talks and events (the first large-scale outing for my singing voice since 2014, for example), started to get used to indexing Folklore (in my second year at it), drafted a long-awaited chapter for an edited collection, and taken part in various other events and ventures that begin to feel like me finding my place in the world of folklore again. As someone who's still a little wary of his own physical fragility I'm surprised by how much I actually have done in the last year.

More interesting to readers here is the fact that I haven't just been picking up old threads. I have been doing that, of course, because it's essential - the book chapter sees me reviewing some of my thinking about ghost beliefs and new religious syncretism, for example, while last week I was giving a Vaughan Williams Memorial Library lecture on ghostlore in traditional songs - but it's not been static. My ongoing engagement with the history of the discipline has become ever more a way of introducing non-academic non-specialist audiences to its full range (I've just written a forthcoming guest post for the Folklore Thursday blog), as well as a way of trying to negotiate the survival of academic folklorists and other interested academics in a university world that offers us little security or support.

It's also seen me getting interested in some new figures and areas: I spoke twice last year (at the splendidly titled 'Folklorists Are Fallible' conference in my beloved Tartu, and then at the third Folklore Society/Royal Anthropological Institute 'Folklore and Anthropology in Conversation' seminar) about the 20th century field collector and writer Violet Alford, and will be speaking about her again this summer. My paper at the forthcoming Folklore Society conference is also very much about how we are as folklorists, what we do to identify as such and how we interact with other folklorists. Later in the year I'll be going back to the question of ghost belief and religious syncretism (particularly around Spiritualism) for a major conference in Oxford.

I actually have things to blog about again, it seems, so I will.

Part of this reorientation/reawakening has involved some apparently cosmetic fiddling with my library, refiling and reshelving books and copies of papers. In doing so I also moved around a lot of my fieldnotes. One sheet caught my eye as it fell loose. It dates from early in my MA researches (2004-6), when I asked co-workers in the Civil Service department where I was temping for their recollections of childlore, skipping games etc. The following was remembered by a woman in her late 20s from her schooldays in South Essex:

1, 2, 3 Mother caught a flea
She put it in the teapot and made a cup of tea
The flea jumped out,
Mother gave a shout,
And down came father with his winkle hanging out.

It's good to be back.