Academic folklorists without an institutional position, like me, have to find various workarounds to provide such things as university library access. I am grateful, therefore, to the University of Hertfordshire for my Visiting Research Fellowship, which has given me this as well as some sort of institutional recognition I can appeal to when out in the wider academic world of conferences and publications. It is all too easy for the precarious academic to feel that they are under-achieving, or not achieving at all, simply because they have no wider social academic context in which to place their work. Over the last month or so I’ve been reviewing my output for the period of the Fellowship to date, and it’s been a relief after all to see that I have put out more than I’d realised, which has therefore gone out over that institutional affiliation as the quid pro quo.
What hasn’t happened so much – inevitably, given the circumstances – is conference and live appearances, but even that is beginning to change. Having missed two years of Folklore Society conferences (family bereavement followed by COVID-19 suspension of events), I’m really happy and quite daunted to be back presenting at next weekend’s Folklore, Learning and Literacies conference, held over from last year.
I’d submitted a proposal to force myself finally to have a look at some 1920s Belgian notebooks containing songtexts that I was shown some years ago. As some of the notebooks were previously study exercise books, I’d hoped to investigate the relationship between formal school/informal folklore education and transmission of knowledge. I’m not convinced I’ve got very far with that aspect of the investigation, but I have started to piece together an overview of interwar popular singing traditions as they’re represented and play out in these notebooks. This is beginning to pose questions about interpretation, as well as further historical research: some of the songs, for example, came from the doyen of marktzangers, Lionel Bauwens, known as Tamboer, a man so significant he has this statue in his hometown of Eeklo. I think this paper is very much the starting point for research rather than its conclusion, but that makes it all the more stimulating to me.
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| Lionel Bauwen, 'Tamboer' by Spotter2 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Shortly afterwards, when I’ve caught my breath, it will also be my turn to give an online talk for the Folklore Society. ‘Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire: St Clement’s Day and Dickens’ is a return to a talk I gave some years ago (but have now completely forgotten, it seems). It started with an investigation into Joe Gargery’s song at his forge in Great Expectations, which led me to contemplation of the relationship between folklore and literature (something which has exercised me more recently in consideration of the folkloresque) as well as to the specific folkloric content of St Clement’s Day observations. This, in turn, opened up something of a rabbit warren of details about saints’ days generally. Bernardino Fungai's lovely picture of St Clement being hoiked overboard chained to an anchor, for example, codifies one account of his martyrdom, but it is unclear who (if anyone) he really was. The situation gets even murkier when you look at the various St Catherines with whose observations Clement’s later merged, so it’s a pleasingly chaotic mélange of ideas and avenues for exploration. And it does involve dynamite. Booking is still open!
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| The Martyrdom of St Clement, by Bernardino Fungai |
