Folklore Studies: Past, Present- and Future?

SPECIAL ISSUE
Folklore Studies: Past, Present- and Future?
Papers from the International Conference Folklore 150, celebrating ISO years of Folklore Studies,
hosted by the Institute for Folklore Studies in Britain and Canada, Sheffield, July 24th-26th, I996
Guest Editor J.S.Ryan
The National Centre for English Cultural Tradition The University of Sheffield
Lore and Language
The Journal of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition
Editor
Editorial Board
N. F. Blake, University of Sheffield G. Cox, University of Reading D. G. Hey, University of Sheffield J. M. Kirk, The Queen ,s University of Belfast R. Leith, Leamington Spa C. Neilands, The Queen ,s University of Belfast P. S. Smith, Memorial University of N ewfoundland
ISSN 0307-7144
© 1997, the contributors. Published by the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S 10 21N. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988, or where reproduction is required for classroom use or coursework by students, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers. US copyright law applicable to users in the USA.
Lore and Language is published annually. Subscription rates for Vols 15, 16 and 17 are: Institutional, £50.00; Personal, £12.00 (all prices in sterling only). Payment should be sent to NATCECT, the University of Sheffield, Sheffield S 10 21N, cheques payable to The University of Sheffield. Previous issues available at discount price, on request.
The opinions expressed in the journal are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher, and are the responsibility ofthe individual authors.
Lore and Language, Vol. 15, Numbers 1-2 (1997)
SPECIAL ISSUE
Folklore Studies: Past, Present - and Future?
Papers from the International Conference Folklore 150, celebrating 150 years of Folklore Studies,
hosted by the Institute for Folklore Studies in Britain and Canada, Sheffield, July 24th-26th, 1996
Guest Editor
J. S. Ryan
The National Centre for English Cultural Tradition The University of Sheffield
... .
The Journal of the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition
Voh.une 15, Numbers 1-2
GILLIAN BENNETI The Thomsian heritage in the Folklore Society (London)
MALCOLM JONES Barrows, poems and visions: the inspirational dead
W. F. H. NICOLAISEN From Aucassin et Nicolette to the "Humorous Grace"
JULIEITE WOOD Rewriting and rethinking the Welsh folktale
MARTIN LOVELACE The relevance of the rural tradition
JACQUELINE SIMPSON British local legends: the need for closer study
PAUL SMITH Thomas Fairman Ordish (1855-1924): A lasting legacy
JOHN ASHTON Beyond survivalism: regional folkloristics in Late-Victorian England
MARGARET BENNETI One and two percent: Scottish Gaelic folklore studies in Newfoundland and Quebec
1997
1-4
5-14
15-22
23-47
48-65
66-74
75-83
84-116
117-127
128-140
MAVIS CURTIS Transatlantic patterns of transmission in children's oral tradition
SIMON LICHMAN Knowing ourselves/knowing each other: traditional creativity in the multicultural school setting of Israel
GRAHAM SEAL Applying our wares: folklore in the real world
J. D. A. WIDDOWSON Backwards into the fi.rtw-e? English folklore studies in the twenty first century
J. S. RYAN Review Article: Global people or still the folk? Ways of viewing contemporary introductions to sociology
REVIEWS
141-160
161-171
172-180
181-190
191-196
197-214
Introduction
J. S. RYAN
The international anniversary conference, Folklore 150, hosted in Sheffield by the Institute for Folklore Studies in Britain and Canada, July 24th-26th, 1996, was conceived of as, and proved to have, in effect, an outreach to other countries, l;>eing a "celebration of 150 years of folklore studies on both sides of the Atlantic", as well as attracting, very appropriately, one speaker from Australia, 1 and one from Israel. 2
The conference was more than a formal milestone event, almost exactly sesquicentennial in its timing, in the progress of a discipline, since it had to it a Janus-like quality of retrospect/prospect both by virtue of its pre-millennial timing and because of its deeper concerns-particularly as manifested in the first and last papers as now printed-with the origins and with the destiny of its discipline in the country which had given it birth some hundred and fifty years earlier. For only two of the papers which were then given, those ofMavis Curtis and Margaret Bennett, really considered folkloristics on the western side of the Atlantic, in both cases focusing on what was transmitted from one side to the other of that divide rather than considering the stalwart sibling which has so flowished there in both the theory and the practical aspects of the subject.
In the event also, most of the papers focused on particular aspects of the discipline's vast accreted English materials and theories, discredited or modified, but those applying their British training to other settings-Margaret Bennett, Simon Liebman and Graham Seal-were obviously looking rather to the future in the countries of their fieldwork, as well as to freeing up the orthodoxies of the past, accepting the "tradition", seeing how it worked in new settings, and interpreting the present/future as a further continuum, very much in the way in which the final paper by John Widdowson quietly observes how "certain older traditions have much to offer both to the present and to the future".
Another highly significant aspect of the papers is the fact that earlier scholarship and particular scholars or authorities come easily to the minds of their writers, an emphasis or characteristic of a discipline/profession well aware of its own progress and of its nec~ssarily being firmly rooted in an earlier period of culture and, ideally, ever modifying under the pressures of changes, both social and technical, yet remaining part of a continuum of recorded/remembered experience. For like "religion" or the historical linguistics/etymology field, "folk" studies must perforce see themselves in every age as part of mankind's progress through time, place and circumstance, ever evolving, modifying and reshaping themselves, yet not so violently as to destroy national/personal
identity and the confidence of their place which is thereby bestowed on new generations in the ever more quickly changing societal situations.
Readers will note that there is but little specific reference here to the English­ inspired pioneering work in the 1980s that has led to the exciting and developing study of the contemporary or urban legend, particularly in the United States, although Gillian Bennett refers to several positive signs of postmodem awareness in English folklore circles: the palace revolt against antiquarian amateurism within the Folklore Society ·itself; the Opies' influential work on children's folklore which consulted the tradition-bearers themselves; the several recent English and Scottish footholds for folklore in academe; and the attempts at much greater inclusiveness of subject matter by the folk-focused societies in the last quarter of the century. Clearly all these developments, which have also borne similar fruit in the United States, Australia and elsewhere, are already re­ invigorating folkloric thought and practice in the United Kingdom itself: as witnessed by the various overseas visiting academics coming to England and in particular to the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition and its conferences.
At the climacteric of the conference in 1996, vezy much as he had done in his reflective paper, "Folklore and Regional Identity" at the Centenazy Conference of the Folklore Society in 19783 John Widdowson again appealed for: much greater English folkloric research into the form, structure, fimction and context of the data; large scale surveys of contemporary cultural traditions in all social classes, all age-groups and all geographical regions; a regional focus on the five major genres in (existing) collectanea - (i) speech/communication/gesture; (ii) custom and belief, (iii) popular narrative; (iv) music, dance and drama; and (v) material culture, work techniques, arts and crafts. His concern was and is to shift the emphasis away from data-especially that emphasising the rustic, archaic, picturesque and bizarre-towards "an appraisal and analysis of its practical applications to the lives of people today''. 4 Yet in 1996 he chose to redefine the discipline, incorporating ethnic groups; women's folklore; childlore; political/medical/legal/professional folklore; media-generated lore, etc., and to stress the need for the rise of a true academic discipline, with professional qualifications and, ultimately, well recognised career paths, as well as opportunities for teaching and identified research fields in which funded work would be welcomed "in order to monitor and record the richness of our changing heritage". 5
At several points, notably in the initial and final papers presented here, there is expressed the deeper concern that the field needs a new beginning in the twenty first century, a new place in the academy, a central focus in all levels of formal education and, perhaps inevitably, a new name. This might seem perhaps best encaptured in the phrases "traditional culture" or "the cultural tradition". While this appears a violent severance from the past, it is no more than the
2
terminology already in use, the first as used by the (international) Modem Humanities Research Association, 6 and the second by the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, 7 long situated at the University of Sheffield. And as Widdowson's paper has properly observed, "folklore is the common inheritance of a culture"8 and it persists so meaningfully when "a pervasive sense of anomie threatens our traditional allegiances and patterns of identity". 9 While these last thoughts may savour of a pre-millennia! eschatology, they underscore the larger claims for the discipline and its right to forefront rank in academe.
The papers in this special double issue of Lore and Language have been arranged in a sequence which follows a more or less chronological ordering of subjects after the first scene-setting paper by Gillian Bennett, which focuses admirably on the heart of this commemorative conference, namely the remarkable sequence of events and scholarly activities which flowed from the letter to the Athenaeum from W. J. Thoms in August 1846, and the early formative style and leading personalities of the Folklore Society}0
It is regretted that the publication of these papers has taken so long, but it is anticipated that they will be read with appreciation as a set of perspectives savouring of so many of the myriad aspects of the field-topographic, Celtic, literary, "rural", local, prosopographic, migratory, educationally creative, xenophobic-corrective, and many others.
The publication of this volume marks a moment of appropriate pause, as English "folklore" contemplates its somewhat hesitant past and its necessarily different and so much more dynamic future, where there is little doubt that North America will further challenge and stimulate its unduly introspective parent.
Notes
1. Graham SeaL of Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, who was the foundation co-editor of Australian Folklore in 1987, and is co-author of The Oxford Companion to Australian Folklore (1993). 2. Simon Lie~ from the Centre for Creativity in Education and Cultural Heritage in Jerusalem. 3. The centennial of the founding of the Folklore Society in 1878 was commemorated in a major international conference organised by the Society in London in 1978. The proceedings of this conference are available in V. J. Newall, ed., Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century, Woodbridge, Suffolkffotowa, New Jersey, D. S. Brewer/Rowman and Littlefield, 1980. 4. J.D. A Widdowson, ''Folklore and Regional Identity'\ in Newall, pp. 443-453. 5. Ibid., p. 451. 6. This academy, which draws its members from many countries in Europe and, indeed, worldwide, has for a number of years called the folklore area "Traditional Culture" in its massive Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, compiled from its office in the University of Cambridge Library.
3
7. From 1974 it was styled the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, and in 1997 became the National Centre for English Cultt,rral Tradition. 8. Newall, p. 444. 9. Newall, p. 451. 10. Gillian Bennett's paper was also published almost immediately in the Journal of Folldore Research, Vol 3, No. 3 (1996). Malcolm Jones's slide presentation at the conference, entitled 44The 4routes' of popular imagination", is replaced here by his paper ''Barrows, poems and visions: the inspirational dead", delivered at the Annual General Meeting ofthe Folklore Society, held at the same venue at the University of Sheffield, March 22nd-24th, 1996. The unavoidable delay in the publication of this volume has allowed some of the contributors to update references beyond 1997.
National Centre for English Cultural Tradition, University of Sheffield
4
GILLIAN BENNETT
When W. J. Thoms coined the term Folk-Lore in Augpst 1846, he intended his new term to give independent life to a branch of antiquarian study that he saw as a potentially prestigious national resource. Since the seventeenth century, British antiquarians had been collecting and writing about national "curiosities", some physical-monuments and so on-others principally literary-oral, the so­ called "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". In England, antiquarian pursuits had their roots in the pull of living in an old country with a visible (and often puzzling) ancient history laid out in stone- and earth-works. They took particular impetus and direction in the second half of the nineteenth century from a concept of "Englishness" founded on a revulsion against increasing urbanisation and industrialisation. 2 Victorian gentlefolk recreated the past to compensate for the present, retreating into the myth of "Merrie England", a largely imaginary heritage which they sought to restore and place at the centre of national cultmal life. 3 It was attitudes like these that Thoms could be sure of plugging into when he wrote to the Athenaeum, but he also called up the spirit of "romantic nationalism"4 by suggesting that popular literature might provide the raw material that some future "British Grimm" could use to establish a native British mythology. 5 In order to secure these potentially valuable materials, they first needed to be independently defined and given some national significance-hence the change from "popular" to "folk" and from "literature" to the more sonorous "lore".6 Then they needed to be collected and preserved in a national archive. The chosen term thus wrote "relics" and "survivals", especially the relics of a lost rural past, into the earliest history of British folkloristics, and the task was defined as the preservation and collection of material which more gifted successors would later interpret.
It was more than thirty years after Thoms's letter to the Athenaeum before a "Folk-Lore Society'' was inaugurated, but as soon as it began to be mooted, Thoms (now a septuagenarian) was quickly on the scene to take credit for the invention of the word folk-lore, implicitly laying out his claim to shape the emerging study.7 In the year before the formation of the Folklore Society (FLS), Thoms had been victorious in practical matters such as the cost of subscribing to the Society (one guinea) and the location of its headquarters (London). He had also succeeded in imposing his own vision of its role and nature. When the FLS was inaugurated in 1878, Thoms was its first director, and its Prospectus begins with a statement clearly reflecting the concepts and language of his letter to the Athenaeum. 8
5
Between 1846 and 1878, of course, the intellectual climate had changed to a remarkable degree. Evolutionary ideas, which had already been in the air in 1846, were by 1878 inspiring the bulk of the newly-emerging professional scientists and scholars. Many of the men who were active in the formation of the FLS, or who joined immediately and were soon on its Council, were ardent evolutionists, including all of Dorson' s "Great Team" of British folklorists, George Laurence Gomme, Andrew Lang, Edward Clodd, E. Sidney Hartland, and Alfred Nutt. 9 Leading proponents of the evolutionary thesis were also closely involved with the FLS's early history, including Edward Burnet Tylor (who joined its frrst Council), Thomas Huxley and Sir John Lubbock, an eminent evolutionary anthropologist in his own right and godson to Darwin.
However, the mid-nineteenth-century Thomsian heritage-homage to the myth of rural England, the preservation of the past, library researches, and the separation of fieldwork and theory-far from being undermined by these developments, was actually endorsed. In many respects evolutionary theory was both a logical expansion of, and a justification for, the impulse towards the docwnentation of rural areas and the remains of earlier epochs. It strengthened the "gleaner's vision" 10 by specifically interpreting the materials of folklore as fragments and relics, and it "encouraged ... an antiquarian rather than a sociological attitude to contemporary society". 11 Perhaps most significantly, in practical terms, it preserved the separation of collection and interpretation. The FLS' s First Annual Report, for example (presumably written by Gomme ), stresses that "the main work . . . belongs essentially to the department of collecting materials. The equally important work [of interpretation] can only be a subsequent work." 12
So it was that most of the FLS' s early effort went into the reprinting of antiquarian books, and the compilation of the vast, incomplete, "County Folklore" series which tied up eminent field collectors in the work of trawling through local newspapers, guidebooks and regional histories for items of printed folklore of which, according to one distinguished member, "not one item in twenty was worth reproducing". 13
Though attempts to reorientate English folklore towards alternative perspectives had begun within a few years of the formation of the FLS, they failed to capture its agenda. Diffusionist ideas, which were being mooted on the continent, were ardently advocated in England by Moses Gaster and Joseph Jacobs, among others, but failed to make much headway in the folklore establishment. Likewise, unsuccessful attempts were made by E. Sidney Hartland, Alfred Nutt and others to woo folklore away from the classic "historical" approach and persuade the Society to back the more progressive "psychological" theories of human evolution which were winning the day in anthropological circles. 14 To a large extent, these failures were due to the politics of the FLS. Diffusionist approaches were always doomed to failure
6
because the positions of power within the Society had been sewn up by the "Great Team", who continued to be major influences until their deaths and, through Nutt's family connection with a London publishing house, controlled the publishing programme.
Much also depends on the personality of the FLS' s first Secretary and its Director from 1885, George Laurence Gomme, who was effectively Thoms's protege. 15 He was a man of energy and conviction, autocratic and determined to have his own way. His ideas about the nature of folklore (derived from rigid historical perspectives) were written into early editions of the FLS' s only handbook. 16 His success in putting his own stamp on this volume, despite concerted attempts to control him, 17 to a great extent ensured the ultimate success of the historical evolutionary approach. In part, too, it is due to his holding out to members an inspiring vision of folklore being able to seize the opportunity created by anthropology's secession from history to forge an independent place in the academy as a "historical science". 18 But, apart from the politics of academia and the FLS, there were other reasons for the reluctance to abandon the classic historical evolutionary approach. These lay wholly, I think, with the Thomsian heritage. "Psychological" evolutionism demanded the ditching of history. Diffusionism demanded the ditching of the "folk". 19 These were challenges the FLS could not face.
The failure of the attempt to establish folkloristics as an independent discipline with a place in the academy not only divorced English folkloristics from the intellectual movements that might have secured its position at the turn of the century, but left the succeeding generation to retreat even further into the Thoms ian world of peasants, relics and fragments, augmented, after the nmaway success of J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough in 1890, by the search for rituaVpagan origins. In tum, this increasingly isolated folkloristics from the academic mainstream, especially after the Malinowskian functional revolution in British anthropology, which…