Revenons à nos rats ...

Local archaeology/history/field clubs have an interesting peripheral place in folklore studies in Britain. There is some overlap of our interests, particularly in areas like placenames and dialect (the Kent Archaeological Society, for example, republished Samuel Pegge’s 18^th century Alphabet of Kenticisms in their journal Archaeologia Cantiana in 1874).

Local verse and, by extension, folk song, have also featured in the interests of such societies. The Buchan Club (also known at various times as The Buchan Field Club) published an important selection from Gavin Greig’s collection Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads and Ballad Airs, Collected in Aberdeenshire by the Late Gavin Greig, ed. Alexander Keith (Aberdeen: The Buchan Club, 1925). 

For folklorists, such societies also offer an opportunity to discuss with researchers who may have material to offer us and may also be attracted themselves to our discipline. It puts us in touch with the antiquarianism that fed into the development of folklore in the first place. It isn’t, however, a straightforward relationship. There have been a few famously successful examples, usually linked with particularly determined and effective individuals.

The most notable example is probably the Devonshire Association, which for folklorists will always be linked with Theo Brown. She was the Association’s Recorder of Folklore for many years and played a key role in establishing its Folklore Section. The successful integration of folklore within the Devonshire Association’s remit was not just about Theo Brown’s personal hard work, enormous and invaluable as that was. As the Association’s nice obituary emphasises, she was building on the dedication and commitment of the previous Recorder of Folklore, the classicist WF Jackson Knight. It was Jackson Knight who brought Brown into folklore, the Devonshire Association and the Folklore Society, and he was an instrumental ally in establishing the Folklore Section.

Other societies have been less accommodating, even though not unsympathetic. In the 1970s the Kent Archaeological Society posted requests for folklore submissions from members, without developing any separate section. This kind of attitude was more or less what I found here with the Isle of Wight Natural History and Archaeological Society. There have certainly been some efforts to raise the profile of folklore within the IWNHAS: Alan Phillips, in particular, has contributed some valuable book reviews and given some fascinating papers, chiefly on the relation of ritual and myth to archaeology. When I initially proposed a paper introducing folklore’s disciplinary history, as a means of suggesting how my discipline could assist with the Society’s researches generally, it was not felt to fall closely enough within the Society’s existing remit to accept.

Happily, however, I was able to turn to an old area of research interest that fitted rather better. As Jeremy Harte said, when I told him the story, ‘Well, rats are your route into most things …’. In an 1839 retelling, local author Abraham Elder set the Pied Piper legend in Francheville (now Newtown) here on the Island. I’m going to use this as a way into discussing what folklore is and how it has been used and understood. There remains the remotest of outside possibilities that Elder was reflecting a genuine local oral tradition, but all probability and most considered opinion is that he was not, which makes it a useful example for taking a local audience into new fields of thinking about folklore. Rats are also a good way into discussing how folklore might be useful in archaeology (their gnawing makes rodents liable to fall out of their own historical strata in dig sites) and in natural history (one species discussed here is amongst Britain’s rarest mammals, yet there is little evidence of interest in its preservation).

I confess that that sounds an ambitiously wide scope for a popular talk, but I’m hoping that it will open some new ways of thinking and open the possibility of further discussion and dialogue. And I’m happy to say that I still find rats endlessly fascinating, and it's a nice way to kick off the new year.

If you’re around on Saturday January 12^th at 2pm it’d be lovely to see you at Arreton Community Hall for ‘Rats, Abraham Elder and Folklore’. Further details of the IWNHAS programme are on their website.

Some burial folklore in literary sources

Whiling away my holiday with some light reading I came across several rather throwaway references to folkloric practice and belief. It is the casual manner of their introduction into literary fiction that makes them compelling as folkloric record. I was particularly struck by some references to burial practice.
The idea that a piece of land has been left undeveloped because it covers a plague burial ground has become a common one in London in recent years. Steve Roud has described the motif as 'a real growth area' (1). It may have developed alongside other similar ideas: in the late 1970s my father told me that a grassy corner of carpark outside the Fox on the Hill pub on Denmark Hill remained bare because it covered a Roman burial ground. (Pragmatism - and access to maps of Roman cemeteries - suggest that it remained undeveloped, rather, because it was awkwardly triangular and too narrow for a parking space). I'd associated the development of the motif with the post-war period, but a passing reference suggests a slightly earlier flourishing.
In Chapter 5 of Sax Rohmer's 1916 sequel The Devil Doctor (US: The Return of Fu-Manchu) we find exactly this kind of emergent pseudo-historical legend. Dr Petrie believes an islet in a south-west London park is naturally occurring. Nayland Smith is scornful in such a way as to point to the creation of authority in a legend:
'Nothing of the kind; it is a burial mound, Petrie! It marks the site of one of the Plague Pits where victims were buried during the Great Plague of London. You will observe that, although you have seen it every morning for some years, it remains for a British Commissioner resident in Burma to acquaint you with its history!'
Thinking folkloristically we might take this last assertion as evidence of the recent development of this legend. (I read this courtesy of Project Gutenberg, so I should also tip my hat here to the recently-departed Michael Hart, its founder and the inventor of the e-book).
This assertion of the 'history' of this legend is in marked contrast to another reference to burial practice I came across in fictional form. In Ambrose Bierce's short story 'A Holy Terror', a gold prospector is tipped off about a plot in a cemetery. He digs through a grave, and with chilling Biercean understatement, finds that 'This frail product of the carpenter's art had been put into the grave the wrong side up!' (2) The lack of explanation creates the effect: the detail relies on a reader's knowledge that burial upside-down is reserved for those likely to cause supernatural disturbance otherwise. (People are buried upside-down to prevent them clawing their way to the surface after death).
This is still a relatively late reference to prone burial. A recent historical survey found the last documented incident of the practice in 1916 (3). Of course, this is the sort of practice that is difficult to establish: it requires a degree of trust in the researcher that may not be inevitable given the rather extraordinary and infrequent practice. Ruth Tongue claimed to have been told of such things in Somerset in the early years of the 20th century (4). There must be some doubts about this: she said she was told of such things because she was a 'chime child', born at midnight. She wasn't. She was evidently a remarkable and gifted storyteller, but her reliability as a witness might be questionable. The Bierce reference, though, does suggest some wider familiarity with the idea.

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1: Steve Roud, London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World's Most Vibrant City (London: Random House, 2008), pp. 117-119.
2: Ambrose Bierce, In the Midst of Life (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939; first pub. 1892), p. 121.
3: Caroline Arcini, 'Prone Burials', Current Archaeology, 231 (June 2009), 30-35.
4: Ruth L. Tongue, 'Some Odds and Ends of Somerset Folklore', Folklore, 69.1 (1958), 44.

Paremiology and literature

I've long been interested in the relationship between folkloric items and their presentation in literary material. (It's one of the things I touch on in a talk I'm giving on St Clement's Day celebrations to the South East London Folklore Society in November). There is, I think, a tendency to underestimate the capacity of literary authors to be inventive and adaptive with traditional material, and to assume that how they present an item in their fictional, created world is identical to the way it is used in the ethnographic world around them.
A corresponding tendency is to look at literary works primarily for their folkloric content. I confess to a sinking feeling on learning that Archer Taylor's first reaction to a William Faulkner novel was 'He doesn't use many proverbs!' (1) This seems to me to miss the point on a number of levels, but that might simply be because there is no further record of what he made of the novel as a work of literature.
However, paremiology is actually an area where a straightforward reading of folkloric material can be possible in literary text. I was reminded of this after some summer escapist reading, having finally got round to Arthur Bernède's Belphégor (1927). Many of the characters use proverbial expressions, but they do so in direct speech. One might have to take into account personal characterisation employed by the author, but the proverbs here are familiar and seem to employ standard forms. Characters describe a situation more than once as 'clair comme l'eau de roche' (clear as crystal). Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau record the phrase but give no historical antecedents (2).
Rey and Chantreau do not record the expression 'Un homme prévenu en vaut deux' (forewarned is forearmed), found in Belphégor, but it is noted in online collections of French proverbs along with the variant 'un homme averti en vaut deux'.
Another other proverbial item that leaped out at me was when the protagonist insists 'j'ai toujours eu pour principe de ne jamais vendre la peau de l'ours avant qu'il fût à terre' (I've always made a point of never selling the bear's skin before he's down). While the second part of the phrase is variable, the bearskin element is widespread, most famously found in La Fontaine's Fables. Rey and Chantreau note that in Middle French the specific mention of 'the bear' wasn't necessary (3).

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1) Quoted in Jan Harold Brunvand, 'My Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business: The 1999 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture', Western Folklore, 58.1 (1999), 4.
2) Alain Rey and Sophie Chantreau, Dictionnaire d'Expressions et Locutions (Paris: Le Robert, 2007), p. 201.
3) Rey and Chantreau, pp. 664-5.

Folklore in local novels

I whiled away some time on holiday reading a Dutch translation of Joost Hiddes Halbertsma's Frisian novella 'It Heksershol' (The witch-hole, a local name for the village of Molkwerum).

I'm always wary of reading local novels as simply ethnological records. There are two main dangers. One is that authors don't get the artistic credit for adapting folk culture in their own literary constructions. (They cease to be artists, and become just observers). The other, especially problematic with authors who are consciously attempting to establish the literary credentials of a minority language, is that the broadly political aspects of their work tend to get sidelined. Such writers are often trying to create a regional cultural identity in their work, rather than just reflect one. This involves a highly focused use of source folkloric material.

That said, such novels do rest heavily on local folklore. Halbertsma's account of how Gosse Knop sold his soul to the devil, the amazing things that happened to him on his travels through Friesland, and how he came to a bad end, weaves rich elements of local lore into its narratives. These can be teased out: they're not the whole picture, but they add to it.

In one sequence Gosse has lost his shadow, which is discovered when he steps into the light during a dance. That's the point of the episode, but Halbertsma enriches it with all sorts of details about the dance itself. He tells us when such a dance might be likely (after an auction), the instrument they danced to (a fiddle), and even some of the dances and tunes (they dance the Schotse-drie, and Gosse's predicament is revealed during the Utrecht march).

It's also possible to hear something of the spoken language culture. This has the huge caveat, of course, that I read it in a Dutch translation and not in its original language, but the sound of language is emphasised in some of the stories. An origin story is offered for the name Ameland. According to the skipper of a boat, Heintje Pik (the devil) had given names to all of the islands along the Frisian coast and written them down in his notebook. Beneath the last name he wrote 'Amen', but then realised that he'd forgotten one of the islands, so he wrote '-land' after it. Because Heintje is from Amsterdam he doesn't pronounce the -n at the end of words, so Amenland becomes Ameland. This isn't just a story directed against Amsterdammers, it gives a sound to history.