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.