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I had the great joy last week of getting in person to a Folklore Society Council meeting again, after my previous attempt was thwarted by finally catching COVID. The meeting was followed by a quite bracingly excellent Katharine Briggs lecture by Katherine Langrish, and the announcement of the Katharine Briggs book award winner – Folklore, Magic, and Witchcraft: Cultural Exchanges from the Twelfth to Eighteenth Century, ed. Marina Montesano (Routledge). I have read a couple of the shortlisted books and can confirm their excellence, so anything that beat them must be worth a look. Edited collections don’t always do so well in the final placings, so it’s impressive to see such volumes both winning and making it to runner-up (the outstanding The Routledge Companion to English Folk Performance, eds Peter Harrop and Steve Roud (Routledge), which I reviewed highly favourably in the Folk Music Journal).

 

Katherine Langrish

Not the least part of the joy of the evening was socialising again, catching up with dear colleagues I hadn’t seen in an age. I may have some moderately gregarious tendencies, even though I am quite happy beavering away at my desk, with the result that I do not always realise that I have actually accomplished stuff unless I tell other people.

 

Which may be where the title comes in. Kenneth Horne, usually seeking commercial assistance of some more or less ludicrous kind, would call out the introduction in his fruitily suggestive tones in episodes of the 1960s radio comedy series Round the Horne. What followed was an encounter with the latest hilarious and rather risqué business venture of sometime theatrical couple Julian and Sandy (played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams), with Horne a game and delighted straight (in every sense) foil to their camp.

 

The scripts and performances are hilarious and still stand up, but they are lent considerable extra power by their context. These two evidently gay characters appeared regularly at a time when homosexuality was only just in the process of being decriminalised. There was no pretence here: as Noel Coward once told Nancy Spain about her frock, they ‘wouldn’t fool a blind child of nine’. But they also spoke in an argot cultivated both as defence mechanism and as a means of disguising their criminalised conversation: Polari.

 

Polari was a specific language usage by gay men, but it had common roots with other argots and street languages, including among theatre and carnival people. (It’s always amused me that the rather macho and aggressively straight Ewan MacColl included in one song a slang word he’d obviously heard from truck drivers which is also well known in Polari). This was where I mostly heard it, and still do to some extent.

 

Times change, and usages change, and it is possible that the appearance of Polari in Round the Horne marked some sort of decline in its necessary use as a defensive measure even as it popularised some parts of it. Enter linguist Paul Baker, whose charming and readable history of Polari, Fabulosa!, charts its early life but also follows a more stubborn persistence. It’s a terrific book, and I had the great pleasure of talking to Paul about it and about Polari. I’d all but forgotten I’d done this, in fact, but it is now finished as part of a Folklore Podcast episode on the subject. Clap your Polari lobes on it here.

Paul Baker

This is what I mean about forgetting things I have actually done, perhaps because they were entirely done at my desk without direct personal contact. I was delighted to be reminded of my conversation with Paul at about the same time I was reminded of another online conversation I’d had. This was about a longstanding interest of mine – cannibalism at sea. A while back, those lovely people at Casting Lots: A Survival Cannibalism Podcast got in touch via Twitter. In the course of the correspondence they even called me a ‘cannibalism celebrity’, and then appeared pleasantly surprised that I had immediately put this on all of my biographical material.

 

For their final mini-season they wanted to have a chat with some people they’d cited along the way. I am always happy to talk cannibalism with anyone, and we spent a fun afternoon chatting about the Custom of the Sea. This has been worked into one of their ‘Dinner Guests’ episodes, and is now available. I think between us we must have done every pun on cannibalism that has ever existed, so I won’t repeat any of them here. All I will say is that it’s out now, and it turns out I haven’t just been locked away to no purpose.

 

As it happens, another long outstanding piece of work has also finally seen the light of day, but that is for another time. For now – just tuck in. (Oh. I said I wasn’t going to do that, didn’t I?)

When Packaging Counts

I received this week a very welcome reprint. In the early 1990s, Penguin published a great series of folktale collections. There were variations in the series, but it contained some brilliant anthologies by weighty and reputable scholars like Jacqueline Simpson (Scandinavian Folktales) and Henry Glassie (Irish Folktales).

 

It also included two magnificent collections by Neil Philip, Scottish Folktales and English Folktales. The latter was absolutely essential to me when I first came to folklore. For an MA class assignment I wrote on ‘The Small-Tooth Dog’, collected by Sidney Oldall Addy in Derbyshire, picked enthusiastically if randomly from this book. (The photograph here is my copy, bought second-hand in Highgate Village, and I’m surprised at how well it has borne its heavy use).

The Penguin Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Penguin, 1992)

It wasn’t just that its 136 stories were marvellous, nor that they provided an invaluable snapshot and overview of the earlier collections of tales. The book also provided a useable small scholarly apparatus of Aarne-Thompson Tale Type numbers alongside the bibliographical data. As an editor, Philip was everything I could have wanted: his Introduction was fascinating and informed, shedding critical light on the stories, the narrators, the folklorists and the re-tellers, all with a sympathetic and shrewd writer’s eye for their qualities. On my beloved ‘Small-Tooth Dog’, he wrote, briefly but astutely: ‘The only real Beauty and the Beast story recorded in England, this succinct narration seems to me a much more potent text than Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s wordy and literary La Belle et la Bête (1756), which has been the basis of almost every retelling ever since.’

 

Such an historically informed and solid collection was clearly vital as a way of orienting the reader to oral traditions as well as scholarly interactions with them, so its unavailability for many years was a blow. This kind of book becomes all the more essential as volumes of retellings of traditional tales proliferate, as it helps the ever-growing numbers of people fascinated by this wonderful stuff to understand it a little better, to understand what might lie behind and around it.

 

I would have welcomed its reappearance in any form, therefore. What arrived this week, however, exceeded my expectations. It is more durable than my now-retired paperback, obviously, but that is only one criterion. The book is essentially a straightforward reprint of the 1992 volume with a couple of additions. (The apparatus reprints the Aarne-Thompson details, although the Introduction to the reprint does cite updated Aarne-Thompson-Üther numbers). Philip’s 2022 Introduction takes account of the flourishing storytelling scene since his original publication, and uses this and more folkloresque interpretative and creative uses of folklore (my description, not his) to offer a magnanimous reconsideration of some of his earlier comments. He gives Ruth Tongue the benefit of the doubt this time – I remain more ambivalent, but I take his point – and he points to Maureen James’s convincing work as clearing up his concerns over Marie Clothilde Balfour. He also, excitingly and compellingly, points to the durability of the oral tradition. As he notes, ‘the English folktale, far from being moribund, is alive and kicking’ (xix). 

The Watkins Book of English Folktales, ed. Neil Philip (London: Watkins Media, 2022)

But there is something, too, in its presentation. The book is extremely attractive. The title of each story is contained within light black-and-white decoration – nothing too fancy, but elegant rather than austere. The beautiful cover features imagery invoking both specific stories and a more generalised view of folklore as it might be understood by an interested contemporary audience. It appeals to what a readership might think it already understands, while bringing readers to a body of work that will flesh out and expand dramatically that understanding. It seems the perfect meeting and interaction of form and content, aimed at the specific conditions of current interest in folklore.

 

In this respect, the Foreword by Neil Gaiman is charming and outstanding. Gaiman, with his usual generosity of spirit, outlines exactly the voyage of discovery awaiting those who have come to it without perhaps fully expecting what they will find within, just as he did when he read the first edition. The cover will get people in. Neil Gaiman will get even more in. And when they arrive, they will find folklore in all its riches, courtesy of Neil Philip. An exciting journey of discovery awaits, and this is exactly how such a journey should be prepared.

Catching Up

I’m rather surprised to find how long I’ve left this blog. There have been times when that might have reflected inactivity, but in the last year or so I’ve actually been getting underway again. Perhaps it’s because I’ve only recently recovered from having finally caught COVID that I’m taking stock a little, and recognising signs of some return to engagement.

 

It may in fact appear that I’ve been rather productive, as I’ve revisited some older projects for conference papers and online talks as well as finally publishing a couple of pieces of rather long gestation. I returned enthusiastically to ghostlore for the recent International Society for Folk Narrative Research conference, and will be presenting an expanded version of this for the Folklore Society later in the year. This year should also finally see publication of a chapter I wrote while recovering from surgery on metaphor in academic and vernacular discussions of ghosts. While that publication is still ahead, it is very much a conclusion to several years’ work.

 

An earlier paper for the Folklore Society’s excellent Open Voices: Folklore for All, Folklore of All conference also saw a return to ghostlore, combined with one of my other current preoccupations, disciplinary history and its ongoing reception. As I began that paper, ‘There is a spectre haunting folklore – the spectre of folklore itself.’

 

For British folklorists, and English folklorists specifically, there are many historical and historiographical issues still to be addressed, especially under conditions where interest in folklore has never been greater. How do we deal with the legacy of the weaker periods in our disciplinary history? What is that legacy? That was one of the drivers behind my interest in the prolific and fascinating Violet Alford. Over a (too) protracted period I’d spoken about her many times, with the result that pretty much everyone involved in folklore in Britain had chipped in at some point. Whatever deficiencies still remain in my arguments, those contributions strengthened what I wrote, which was finally published in Folklore. I’m hugely grateful. This is a collaborative process.

 

The other area where I’ve been trying to trace the legacies of some more doubtful British folklore studies – Murray and Frazer in particular, who remain powerful poles of attraction outside academic scholarship – has been through representations in popular culture. I followed up my Western Folklore article on Folk Horror with a chapter in this collection, tracing similar themes and representations in a 1930 crime novel.

 

I haven’t quite said my last word on this subject, but that’s still work in progress.

Clearing the decks in this way does allow me to sharpen my focus on such works in progress, as well as on projects which are not so far advanced. It’s a nice feeling.