the Witchery Society

Dear Reader,

Welcome back!

I thought I’d share a bit about my folklore training and how the term came to be. 

Although I was trained by a Slavic folklorist, my folklore training/experience is really rooted in the Irish tradition and informed by the English (and of course, the Scandinavian, which all Irish folklore is). Now, let me explain because unless you’re a folklorist geek, that’s probably not going to make a tonne of sense! Today we’ll start with the origins of the term folklore.

Though the concept of folklore existed prior (attested to as far back as the late 18th c) the term ‘folklore’ was coined in 1846 by Thoms (aka Ambrose Merton), who was building off the work done in Germany at the time (yep, the Grimm brothers). In England the term of the day was “popular antiquities and literature” to describe the German “Volkskunde”. Thoms, like many of the other Victorians seeking a romanticised past, sought a word to capture a mood, rather like the idea of “Viking” or “Anglo-Saxon”* and like those two terms, picked ‘folk’ which was also not truly part of the historical record in any rigorous way but has now become ubiquitous. 

Thoms sent his letter to the Atheneneum, explicitly stating his hope that publication in the Atheneum, with its broad readership would result in an uptake of this term. He railed against the loss of the rural and ‘folk’ lore that he saw as being a problematic side effect of industrialisation. He felt that much of the culturally richness of ‘olden time’ was being lost and hoped to mobilise the readers of the Atheneum to, as the Grimms did in Germany, capture it before it was completely gone. 

Initially he suggested “folk-lore” as way to capture the wide range of what people were trying to articulate but truly, it initially was attached to tales, ballads, customs, etc from the pre-industrial, pre-literate, etc world. Basically, the folk were the primitives and their primitiveness meant they were closer to the Way Things Were, uncontaminated by modernity. And sure, that’s probably true to some degree but it was also really problematic both for the romanticising of the difficulties of rural and agrarian life but also because it was actually an extractive orientation. I mean, consider it this way: we’re wealthy enough to spend time coming to your village to observe you like some strange Other. We’re going to collect your customs, tales, songs, etc. and use them to leverage our careers but you and yours will continue to toil with no assistance from us. And we’ll rationalise it as keeping your existence true and pure. Gag, seriously but also soooo Victorian (more about them in future posts, I’m sure).

So back to the term; folklore stuck but still, it’s not the best word for it. I mean, folklore is a discipline and an aspect of critical discourse; it has a strong academic thread but equally strong and arguably more plentiful, amateur/popular threads. It is the practice, the process, and the materials. It is incredibly conservative but also counter-culture and boundary pushing. And in the colloquial, it’s often conflated with things that are not factual or ridiculous/inane and people throw it around in all sorts of ways. And lately, I have encountered a few people calling themselves folklorists and who are clearly interested in aspects of folklore but who are definitely not trained in folklore (and probably shouldn’t call themselves folklorists). So as a folklorist, you’re constantly explaining what that means.

The other thing we need to talk about is that although folklore has become a kind of bad ass discipline with people doing some boundary pushing work, we cannot talk about folklore in the European/N E context without talking about the history of classism and romaticisation of ‘the folk’, which really ties into the whole ‘noble savage’ stereotype. To consider from the Irish context, in the Victorian era, you had English people heading on over to Ireland literally to collect the lore from the Irish savage because, as stated above, it was believed their primitivism meant they were closer to the ‘true source’. And in that collecting, there was literally no reflection on how the nation had been kept oppressed and, dare I say ‘primitive’ as a direct result of repeated attempts to colonise by the English. Ó Danachair famously said that the word itself was not the most encouraging of terms, savouring the “mental slumming of a victorian [sic] savant.” And it was not just something that happened in Ireland. In a sense, it was part of a colonial mindset all over the world. And if you know anything about anthropology, you’ll know there’s a similar reckoning in that field as well. 

I am happy to speak more to that, and how folklore became a force to be reckoned with in Ireland, the start of the Irish Folklore Commission and all of that, if people would like. I love that stuff but I know not everyone does. I mean, you might now be wondering how the Swedish tradition had any influence over the Irish and if you are, let me know so I can write a post about that.

Yours, in folkloric fun,

Colleen

*Usually when used, I will not write out Anglo-Saxon and abbreviate it as A-S. It’s become a really problematic term with little connection to the historical record (mostly it’s a Victorian term that denotes a romanticised past). I will do a post about that coming up. In fact, I have a paper on this that I gave for a folklore conference. I may just post that.