Ten years ago, reviewing Gillian Mitchell’s The North
American Folk Revival (i), I commented on a strange and misleading formulation
in the author’s survey of historical folklore research. She had written: ‘Influenced
by the activities of British folksong collectors, particularly Cecil Sharp, scholars
such as Francis James Child and his pupil, George Lyman Kittredge, began to
involve themselves in the study and classification of folksongs’ (p.27). This
seemed unlikely, to say the least: Child died in 1896, while Sharp only heard
his first Morris tunes in 1899 and did not begin the field collection of song
with which he is most associated until 1903. Further, there was no evidence elsewhere
that Mitchell really thought this was the case.
I attributed the comment at the time to an unnecessary
compression of writing, a problem I came to sympathise with more as I wrote up
my PhD. I did also acknowledge that ‘It is impossible to eliminate typos altogether,
of course’. (I am glad of this, as my review erroneously gave Child’s death as
1898). I attributed it to individual circumstances, but it was odd enough to
remain in my memory.
I now suspect it was not just an individual wrinkle in
Mitchell’s writing. Reading Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt’s American Folklore
Scholarship (ii), one of the important historical works published around
the centenary of the American Folklore Society, I came across this in her survey
of Child and Kittredge’s orientation to European scholarship: ‘[Child] maintained
extensive correspondence with Andrew Lang in Britain, Reinhold Kohler in
Germany, Kaarle Krohn in Finland, Giuseppe Pitré in Italy … and was influenced
by Cecil Sharp in England’ (p.101).
Mitchell gave no attribution for her comment on Child and
Sharp, but Zumwalt’s book is listed in her bibliography so may well have been an
influence. Zumwalt did give a reference for her claim, citing a 1966
article by Alan Dundes. The argument seemed peculiarly un-Dundes-ish, so I went
back to his article (iii). Discussing European influence on American
scholarship, here is what Dundes actually wrote about Child’s The English
and Scottish Popular Ballads: ‘Francis James Child … specifically mentions
that he “closely followed the plan of Grundtvig’s Old Popular Ballads of
Denmark” … With regard to the collection of Child ballads in the field, one
must note that such fieldwork was largely stimulated by the work of an English
collector, Cecil Sharp, in the southern Appalachians’ (p.12).
Dundes, then, very much wasn’t saying Child was influenced by
Sharp, but that (American) collection of ‘Child ballads’ in the field was.
This is actually rather important for Zumwalt’s book, which sometimes does not
clarify adequately that the American ‘literary folklorists’ did also engage in
fieldwork, although perhaps not as systematically or routinely as their ‘anthropological’ counterparts. (The less than
ideal labels compound Zumwalt’s problems, but playing the terminological hands
history has dealt us is a major part of folklorists’ theoretical work).
Given Zumwalt’s reference, it seems likely that this is the
earliest point of this confusion. Given Mitchell’s later repetition of the error,
clarification was clearly worthwhile.
My aim was not just to clear that up or score one over on
Zumwalt, however. In one of his classically witty and smart Natural History
essays, the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould examined the place of the fox terrier
in what he called ‘the case of the telltale textbook’ (iv). Gould examines the frequently
repeated textbook comparison of the size of the early horse Hyracotherium
with ‘a fox terrier’. He was intrigued, because he realised he had no idea how
big a fox terrier was, prompting his inner voice to say ‘I can’t believe that
the community of textbook authors includes only dog fanciers – so if I don’t
know, I’ll bet most of them don’t either’ (p.159).
 |
| This is how big a fox terrier really is. NB no size referent is given. |
He traces the textbook repetition backwards historically. Reading
Zumwalt I had a Gouldian fox terrier inner voice moment. Hopefully, in
identifying her thankfully well-referenced misrepresentation of Dundes, I have similarly
found the earliest appearance of this particular error, albeit working with a
much smaller sample than Gould. (I would be interested to know if the mistake
is replicated in other scholarship, especially if it transpired that the
confusion had been made independently of – or earlier than – Zumwalt).
However, Gould’s broader point also applies. We need to be
careful of a temptation simply to reproduce statements from previous
scholarship, especially if they seem (suspiciously) neat and succinct. We need
to check our sources more carefully, and our writing, to ensure that we have
evidence and that we have represented it accurately.
I’m above all mindful of these questions as I start to think
about my paper for the Folklore Society’s forthcoming conference, one of the
themes of which is precisely learning and the transmission of knowledge. I won’t
be speaking directly to my fox terrier moment, but I will try to remember it as
I put pen to paper.
* * *
i: Gillian Mitchell, The North American Folk Revival:Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945-1980 (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2007); Paul Cowdell, ‘Review’, Folklore, 120.2 (2009), 236-237.
ii: Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt, American Folklore Scholarship:
A Dialogue of Dissent (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University
Press, 1988).
iii: Alan Dundes, ‘The American Concept of Folklore’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 3 (1966), 226-249. I am quoting the
article from its reprinting in Alan Dundes, Analytic Essays in Folklore
(The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 3-16.
iv: The essay ‘The
Case of the Creeping Fox Terrier Clone’ is in Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections
in Natural History (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1992), pp. 155-167.
