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American Folklorists in Britain

Introduction

Professors of english in American universities teach both English and American literature, English universities are now showing interest in American Studies, and we might reasonably expect a comparable relationship between American and British folklore and folklorists. We think of Henry James and T. S. Eliot leaving the United States for Britain, of Auden going the other way, of Emerson visiting Carlyle, of Cooper emulating Scott, of Mark Twain lionized in London, of a thousand interrelationships. Yet, if we leave aside ballad scholarship, the histories of American and British folklore studies seem surprisingly separated. True, W. L. Hildburgh, an American who held an engineering degree from Columbia University, did become president of the Folklore Society. I frequently lunched with him in the winter of 1949-1950, when I had digs close to his near Hyde Park, and became very fond of him, but Dr. Hildburgh was indistinguishable from other Edwardian, or perhaps even Victorian, gentleman scholars, and his speciality of medieval alabasters had little to do with American folklore. Some Britishers sent papers to the International Folk-Lore Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition held at Chicago in July 1893, and in the Proceedings we find contributions from Sidney Hartland, David MacRitchie, Lucy Garnett, John Canon O’Hanlon, John Abercromby, and other active British folklorists, but, unlike its predecessor in London of two years before, this congress was an empty affair. There was in truth no well-defined American folklore movement before the first World War with which British folklorists could make contacts. Conversely, folklore-minded Americans could enter into the intellectual ferment of their well-established colleagues in the British Isles, and four of them did, in ways worthy of recall.

Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903)

The American who penetrated deepest into the English folklore movement, and into the Victorian world of letters and culture, was Charles Godfrey Leland, best known in his own day and still faintly remembered in ours as Hans Breitmann. His more than fifty books and pamphlets include a discourse on the art of conversation, a manual on wood carving, a translation of the works of Heinrich Heine, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, an account of a transcontinental railroad trip, a record of travel in Egypt, an historical analysis of the dispute over Alsace and Lorraine, a self-help essay titled “Have You a Strong Will?,” fiction, poetry, and a dozen diversified folklore works. Of them all, it was the one he least regarded, Hans Breitmann’s Party, with other Ballads (1857), originally written as jeux d’esprit in letters to a friend and published more or less by accident to oblige a printer, that gained him his reputation.¹ It became an instant success and Hans Breitmann speedily passed into the American comic lore of ethnic stereotypes. Leland himself recognized the analogy of his German-American creation with Bret Harte’s heathen Chinee and James Russell Lowell’s Hosea Bigelow —the latter the closer parallel, since Hosea speaks in Yankee dialect, as Hans talks in the Germanic English of the immigrant coming to the United States after the abortive liberal revolution of 1848. Leland could lapse into his lingo—he did not consider it a dialect, but a transitional speech—at a moment’s notice, as in this verse he penned in a letter from a French seaside resort, where he was badgered by officious bathing guards:

This feeling for off-standard language that produced the Breitmann ballads gives one clue to the folklore interests and instincts of Leland. It led to his learning Romany in England and becoming a dedicated gypsiologist, and to his discovery of Shelta, the tinkers’ tongue. In the way of books, it resulted in The English Gypsies and Their Language (1873); Pidgin-English Sing-Song (1876), a Chinese version of Hans Breitmann; and, with Albert Barrère, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, embracing English, American, and Anglo-Indian Slang, Pidgin English, Gypsies’ Jargon and Other Irregular Phraseology (2 volumes, 1889; revised, 1897). Leland became so versatile in European languages, from his long residence overseas, that he could convert phrases between German, Italian, French, and English without a breath;³ yet as a student in Germany he tells how he struggled with Teutonic syntax. He continually played around with patois, from Schüssen, the lowGerman Hebrew dialect, to Irish brogue and Tuscan Bolognese.

A second general thread in Leland’s folklore output was his fascination with the living informant. While not a systematic field collector, he had the knack for unearthing carriers of tradition in or near the big cities where he lived, London, Brighton, Philadelphia, Florence, or on a summer trip to Maine where Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians still told old myths. Leland prided himself on getting his legends first-hand, and regarded with some disdain the critical theorists who assembled for the great English folklore congress of 1891, seeing them as men of books and not of the folk. “For him it was strange people and strange coincidences all the way,—Gypsies, tinkers, witches, magic working of his Voodoo Stone,” wrote his niece-biographer, Elizabeth Robins Pennell.⁴ His first year in England, in 1870, he encountered Matthias Cooper, a full-blooded Romany, sleeping out of doors in Brighton, “wild” and “eccentric,” and conversant with all aspects of Gypsy life. “I soon learned his jargon, with every kind of Gypsy device, dodge, or peculiar custom, and, with the aid of several works, succeeded in drawing from the recesses of his memory an astonishing number of forgotten words.”⁵

In the Preface to The English Gipsies and Their Language, he underscored the announcement that all his material “was gathered directly from Gipsies themselves.” Nor was this just a matter of conventional field collecting. In a letter to his niece (April 6, 1895), he stressed the point that “There is a great difference between collecting folk-lore as a curiosity and living in it in truth. I do not believe that in all the Folk-Lore Societies there is one person who lives it as I do. . . . It is curious how I find such characters—it is like miracle—I don’t seek them, they come to me in dreams.”⁶

His books are full of these chance meetings with folk personalities. Writing Elizabeth from Whitby, August, 1884, he tells of drinking ale with four blithe spirits in the Luggerhead Inn that dated back to the tenth century. One of the four was “a radical mason, covered with lime, who abused the Queen, cussed the Prince of Wales, blasphemed the bishops, and chaffed the Church —I stood four pints of ale and got the ancient legend of The Luggerhead.”

After he fled the fogs of London to the milder clime of Florence, in 1888, Leland soon found himself living in “an atmosphere of witchcraft and sorcery, engaged in collecting songs, spells, and stories of sorcery.”⁸ In his “prowls about Florence” he ran onto a celebrated witch, Maddalena; a photograph in Pennell’s biography shows her holding cards and exhibiting the face of the “antique Etruscan.” “She was from the Romagna Toscana, born in the heart of its unsurpassingly wild and romantic scenery, amid cliffs, headlong torrents, forests, and old legendary castles.” When Maddalena was in Florence Leland saw her regularly and learned about her spells, philtres, invocations and legends; when she was away, she wrote him copiously about witch news.

All the folk groups whom Leland cultivated seemed to him facets of the same primitive type. The Indians, living in the fields and woods, reminded him of the Gypsies, and so did the Florentine witches, both maintaining the occult practices of an ancient past. American Negro Voodoo and its practitioners intrigued him on the same grounds, and in 1889 he began a lengthy correspondence with the Voodoo collector Mary Alicia Owen of St. Joseph, Missouri, who sent him many specimens of her Negro-Indian tales. He encouraged and advised her, obtained a publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, for her tales, which appeared in 1893 as Rabbit the Voodoo and Other Sorcerers, and wrote the Introduction ascribing a Red Indian origin to much African magic.

A third consistent strain in Leland’s folklore work is his particular brand of survivalism. The Rye (his niece’s constant and rather irritating appellation for him) was no high-flying speculative theorist or system builder, but he clearly shared the assumptions of the Victorian folklorists. In his Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling (1891) he quotes approvingly from a paper by George Laurence Gomme in the Archaeological Review (January 1890) on “The Conditions for the Survival of Archaic Customs” affirming that even in civilized countries masses of people were still in a state of savagery, unbeknownst to monarchs and historians.⁹ He himself believed that the amount of magic in the world among the “lower orders,” and the higher too, was as great as it had ever been, whether in the special forms of witchcraft and voodoo, or in occult creeds and practices spread among the entire population.

And he is reminded of his first publication forty years earlier, a “Folk-lore book” titled The Poetry and Mystery of Dreams explaining dream symbolism through allusions in poetry and popular ballads. Some hack, giving no credit, turned the work into a “common sixpenny dreambook.”¹¹

Since the old magic did persist, even if in new bottles, it gave a clue to the nature of early man, and Leland delighted in the thought that his English gypsies and Etruscan witches preserved prehistoric systems of belief and worship. Accepting the thesis that the gypsies had made their way across the Middle East and Europe from India, he speculated that “the Dom of India is the true parent of the Rom. . . . The Dom pariahs of India who carry out or touch dead bodies, also eat the bodies of animals that have died a natural death, as do the Gipsies of England.”¹² There were other likenesses: in the dancing and festival music; in death customs, such as friends preparing food for three days for the family of the deceased; in the veneration for cooking utensils. “The conclusion which I have drawn from studying Anglo-Rommany, and different works on India,” he writes in The English Gipsies and Their Language, “is that the Gipsies are the descendants of a vast number of Hindus, of the primitive tribes of Hindustan, who were expelled or emigrated from that country early in the fourteenth century.”¹³ Leland did add diffusionism to survivalism in his gypsiology, and applauded Groome’s description of the Romany as the true colporteurs of folklore, but it was the echoes of old Hindi words and ideas that pleased him most. So too, in his last phase in Florence, he reveled in the Latin survivals in modern Tuscan speech and supernaturalism, and wrote ecstatically to Elizabeth Pennell (Florence, January 1891), “Cosa stupenda! I have made such a discovery! . . . For I have found all the principal deities of the Etruscans still existing as spirits or folletti in the Romagna. ... In all these cases the informer did not know the Latin name—only the Old Etruscan.”¹⁴ Two months later he had finished his “great work on the Etruscan mythology and witchcraft” and in October that year he delivered a paper on his findings in London to the international folklore congress dominated by the Tylorian theory of survivals in folklore. His paper fitted in well. In the Gypsy Sorcery he speculated that the first stage of shamanism was a “very horrible witchcraft” which most likely once prevailed universally among savages.¹⁵

A fourth vein of Leland’s interests that he never connected with folklore, but which the folklife enthusiasts today emphatically would, was his espousal of the industrial arts, or the minor arts, or the home arts, as he variously called them. He loved to work with wood, leather, and metal, to sketch and draw, to restore and repair the craft objects he was constantly acquiring. His writings along this line include a series of twelve Art-Work Manuals which he edited and in large part wrote (1881-1882), Drawing and Designing (1889), Manual of Wood Carving (1890), Leather Work (1892), and A Manual of Mending and Repairing (1896). He conceived of these skills within a theory he presented in a book on Practical Education (1888), and to which he devoted much time, energy, and personal funds during his four years in Philadelphia, 1880 to 1884, sandwiched in between two long term residences in Europe. Officially he held the title of director of the Public Industrial Art School of Philadelphia, and on his return to England he sought to develop the home arts movement there.

His theory rested on the principle that “a knowledge of art, or how to make one or more things, is of immense value in stimulating in every mind a love of industry.”¹⁶ He believed that interest in the minor arts helped cultivate general intelligence and an appreciation of literature. Children came from all the school districts in Philadelphia to a central schoolhouse, where volunteer teachers instructed them, and Leland himself conducted the largest class, in drawing, wood-carving, and working with metal and leather. His goal was the forming of classes in every village and town for the study of decorative work. The public school made no provision for teaching pupils the use of their hands. He dreamed of “a great future when the people of the United States, after three or four generations had been thus trained in decorative art, would become craftsmen by instinct—rivals of the artisans who decorated the Cathedral of Europe, and who made of every pot or pan a thing of beauty now to be treasured in museums.”¹⁷ In his field interviews, Leland inquired into material culture as well as oral literature. Meeting a gypsy cooper in Tottenham Court Road carrying a roll of split canes, he took him to a bar, ordered him a pint, and then a potquart of good pale ale, and another pot for a friend, “an appalling rough who had prize fighter of the lowest stamp in every feature,” but in return he learned their art of splitting the cane.¹⁸

Fifthly, Leland organized folklore societies. He had a flair for founding clubs and relished the titles, honors, and sense of exclusiveness of such societies. One of his fondest schemes was for a London dining club, the Rabelais, which he planned in 1878 with his good friend Walter Besant to outclass all other London clubs. “Great names are our great game,” he wrote candidly, and warned against “small or mediocre names” and too much “democracy “ He raged when Browning declined and sought to “punish” him by bringing in other celebrities. “I want the Rabelais to corruscate [sic]—whizz, blaze and sparkle, fulminate and bang.” The Rabelais had its day in the 1880’s—it was de rigueur to wear evening clothes —and finally succumbed in 1889.¹⁹ Meanwhile, with the acceleration of the folklore movement, Leland took an active part in its organizing endeavors. After his final return to England he corresponded with David MacRitchie, in 1888, on establishing a GypsyLore Society, and accepted the first presidency.²⁰ In a letter of May 9 he agrees to the spelling of gypsy with the two y’s, and the Society and Journal followed suit. At the First International Folk-Lore Congress in Paris on August 1, 1889, he acted as standard-bearer for Britain, writing that “it has fallen on the Gypsy-Lore Society to come to the front, and take all the honour of representing England, as the English Folk-Lore Society has not appeared at all in it!”²¹ He is fertile with all kinds of ideas for invigorating his society and not serving simply as figure-head; thus he suggests a “Notes and Queries” Corner in the Journal, an American corresponding Society of Gypsies, and an exchange of advertisements with a London publisher specializing in occult and magical literature.

He speaks of other folklore society involvements in a letter of August, 1893, to Mary Alicia Owen from Bagni di Lucca, Italy. “Four years ago I tried hard to get the learned Count de Gubernatis to establish an Italian Folk-Lore Society. I have just received from him a letter in which he says that he has at last effected what originated with me, and we now have one of 500 members—at 12 francs or $2.40 per annum. . . . There is to be an Italian Folk-Lore Congress at Rome in November. It is odd that in precisely the same manner, I originated the Folk-Lore Society of Hungary, and was accordingly the very first member entered. And I may be said to have been, in fact I was, the very first member and beginner of the London Folk-Lore.”²² Earlier he had written that “the greatest Folk-Lore Society in the world” with fourteen subdivisions—Hungarian, Armenian, Yiddish, Gypsy, Wallach, Croat, Serb, Spanish, and so on—had been founded in Budapest in 1888 during his sojourn there, and that he was the first member nominated.²³

Leland could be severe as well as enthusiastic about the activities of folklore societies, particularly their publications. “What the trouble is in all Folk-Lore Journals,” he protested to MacRitchie, “is that those who contribute are, as a rule, timid and yet very critical old gentlemen who generally write, in the style of ‘a letter to the Times,’ small paragraphs in ‘an other seen in the Thames’ kind of foozles. It was such writing which kept the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ in a dead-alive condition for about a century. . ..”²⁴ At this moment (February 1891), Leland was feeling blue about the coming demise of the Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, and repining that he, MacRitchie and Groome were put at menial tasks, “rather like architects kept at sawing boards.” But his euphoria could never be damped for long, and he confides to his niece, in advance of the Italian folklore congress, “You have to live in the world of FolkLore to know what excitement there may be in it, even for a man who, after an adventurous life, has reached his seventieth year.”²⁵ The Queen of Italy was an ardent “Folk-Lorista,” and intended to be present, but a political crisis and threats of mobbing prevented her attendance. Since she was expected, a full crowd did attend, “with all the fashion and learning of all Rome”; Leland read his paper to them in Italian, and the next day he was célèbre and illustrissimo in the newspapers.²⁶

At the Second International Folk-Lore Congress sponsored in London in 1891 by the Folk-Lore Society, one of the landmarks in the history of our subject, Leland took a prominent part, and his role there capped his long career in English letters and folklore, which we might now briefly review.

In 1869, after his father’s death freed him from dependence on journalism for a livelihood, Leland moved to Europe for a ten year period, living chiefly in London and Brighton with side trips to health resorts on the continent. Already well known as a versatile writer of prose and verse, he entered easily and delightedly into English literary and cultural circles. He was himself an imposing figure and something of a celebrity, although he could never shake off the aura of Hans Breitmann, and his fame has dimmed alongside the giants, on both sides of the Atlantic, with whom he supped and walked. His niece gives us her impression of him on his return to the United States in 1880, noting “his unusual height, his fine head, his long flowing beard,” much as she remembered them from her childhood, all comprising what she twice called a “commanding presence,” but now she notices “the light in the strange blue eyes,” eyes of a seer and a mystic, and she is struck by his great kindness. Conventionally dressed in formal frock coat and black tie, he talked unconventionally, with deep seriousness, on all topics except the idle and trivial, in a low, slightly monotonous voice, but “What he had to say, he said with all his might.”²⁷ Leland observes in one place that he wrote better than he talked, but elsewhere he prides himself on his storytelling, and tells of swapping yarns with Mark Twain in a Florence hotel.

During this his first English residence he became attracted to the gypsies, and gathered the materials which appeared in The English Gypsies and Their Language (1873), English Gipsy Songs (1875), and The Gypsies (1882), the largest section of which was devoted to the English Romanies. In the American interim he made contact with Passamaquoddy Indians while summering in 1882 at Campobello, New Brunswick, and two years later published The Algonquin Legends of New England, a collection he conceived to be “a stupendous mythology, derived from a land of storms and fire more terrible and wonderful than Iceland,”²⁸ and strangely suggestive of the Edda. His experience with the Christianized Passamaquoddy, Penobscots, and Micmacs in Maine and New Brunswick, living in the midst of a dominant white population, paralleled his encounters with the gypsies. In 1884 he left his homeland permanently. For the next seven years he resided chiefly in England, until recurring attacks of the gout forced him in 1891 to quit Langham’s Hotel in London and take refuge in Italy for the rest of his life. In all he and his wife lived twenty years in hotels, a situation that pained Leland chiefly because he could not invite his friends to dinner of a Saturday evening. In his final dozen years, although physically removed from his beloved England, he retained his intellectual ties there, and sent his unceasing flow of book manuscripts to English publishers. The exciting string of folklore collections from north Italy—Etruscan-Roman Remains in Popular Tradition (1893), Legends of Florence (2 volumes, 1895-1896), Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches (1899), and The Unpublished Legends of Virgil (1899), all came out in London, under the imprints, respectively, of T. Fisher Unwin, David Nutt (twice), and Elliot Stock, and were much better known in England than in the United States.

Leland savored the London life of literary gossip and excite־ ment, bonhomie, wining and dining, and boon companions of intellectual distinction. He knew and met everybody, and has given us saucy anecdotes of the great names he so coveted for his Rabelais Club: how George Borrow advertised his own work on the gypsies immediately after Leland offered to dedicate The English Gypsies to him; how Tennyson, on the other hand, graciously accepted the dedication of English Gipsy-Songs, after hearing that Leland had translated one of his poems into Romany, but before Leland inadvertently stole blackberries from Tennyson’s garden; of Richard Burton sending in his subscription to the Journal of the Gypsy-Lore Society, on learning that gypsy would be spelt with the double y; of Lord Bulwer Lytton’s astonishment when Leland tells him he knows how to restore old brass salvers, and that he has written a Manual of Repoussé; of meeting George Eliot and wishing to chide her for depending on books about Jews instead of learning Yiddish and talking to them; of shocking the dour and contemptuous Carlyle into a broad Scots exclamation, to which Leland replied in kind, by saying that Carlyle was unduly influenced by the melodramatic. Every Sunday in 1870 (the last year of his Memoirs), he dined with his friends and publishers, the Trübners, and loved the sparkling fellowship. “For it was a salon, a centre or sun with many bright and cheering rays—a civilising institution!”²⁹ So Anglicized did he become that he even learned, in middle age, to ride to hounds.

Leland was a character, an original. He could mix with the English swells and with the “lower orders.” He wrote dialect rhymes and mystical philosophy. The scholar, the poet, and the humorist were always at odds within him. His personal foibles show the same ambiguities. In a letter from Brighton of October 20, 1870, he complains about the amount of drinking in English society.

Yet fifteen years later, in another letter from Brighton he gives the following anecdote about his own drinking capacities.

Leland’s Anglophilism and folklorism happily converged. Like the Victorian gentlemen-intellectuals with whom he mingled, he found himself increasingly drawn to the observation of curious customs and ways of humble folk. Here is a typical account of his method of fieldwork, or fieldplay as it was to him.

Off on his jaunts Leland never feigned a disguise but kept his gentlemanly manner and attire, as would Cecil Sharp among the southern Appalachian mountaineers. It humored him to see the consternation of the Romany when he spoke their tongue and penetrated their secrets. Finding a gypsy lad carting home a load of obviously stolen firewood, he spoke to him in Romany, gave him a hand, cautioned him against the police, and waited at his camp until the foraging mother came home, ashen to see the fine gentleman with her lad, but soon put at ease when Leland said to her in Romany, “Mother, here is some wood we’ve been stealing for you.”³³

English folklorists as well as the English folk pleased Leland. He mentions Max Müller trying to persuade him to give up gypsies for Red Indians,³⁴ and he refers cryptically to “my foe Lang,”³⁵ although he also speaks ecstatically of Lang’s laudatory review of his Songs of the Sea in the Daily News.³⁶ Groome, his fellow Romany Rye, was a close friend, and they went together to Cobham Fair. York Powell, Oxford Regius Professor of Modern History and then president of the Folk-Lore Society in 1904, wrote an affecdonate and eloquent obituary of Leland in Folk-Lore. Had Leland carried his Memoirs beyond 1870 we would know more of his associations with the Great Team and their group, but we can surmise his activity in the Society from his role in the great London congress of 1891. He served as Vice-Chairman of the Organising Com־ mittee, and his name appears prominently in the first two para־ graphs of the Papers and Transactions of the congress, as the intermediary from the First International Folklore Congress at Paris in 1889 designated to bring a motion before the Council of the FolkLore Society to hold a second congress in London. In addition he delivered a paper on “Etrusco-Roman Remains in Modern Tuscan Tradition,” which elicited the comment from the chairman of the Mythological Section, Professor John Rhys, that “they had listened to a whole world of discovery” revealing “much survival of ancient beliefs.”³⁷ In his turn Leland commented on F. Hindes Groome’s paper on “The Influence of the Gypsies on the Superstitions of the English Folk,” praising it but disagreeing with Groome’s contention that the gypsies knew about palmistry. He was responsible for bringing another American to the congress, his protegé Mary Alicia Owen, who read a paper “Among the Voodoos” in which she discussed “conjer-stones,” even one belonging to her mentor.

Leland’s personal letters give a wholly different slant from the official transactions of the congress. He wrote to one of his publishers, T. Fisher Unwin, that his paper “caused amazement and admiration,” and had provided the content of a leader in the Times, along with Mary Owen’s paper on voodoo. Unabashedly he declared “They have certainly been the two most sensational papers of the Congress.”³⁹ A letter to his niece (Oct. 11, 1891) is full of the congress, and of his own impatience with bookish folklorists and stuffy discussions.

For all his valiant endeavors and numerous publications, Leland has left little mark on folklore studies, and he has candidly given us the reason why. In the Preface to Legends of Florence he refers to “certain tales, or anecdotes, or jests, which are either based on a very slight foundation of tradition—often a mere hint—or have been so ‘written up’ by a runaway pen—and mine is an ‘awful bolter’—that the second-rate folk-lorist, whose forte consists not in finding facts but faults, may say in truth, as one of his kind did in America: ‘Mr. Leland is throughout inaccurate.’”⁴¹ True, Leland could never restrain his bolting pen, as anyone who reads his marvelously chatty letters and Memoirs soon sees. Texts were not sacred to him; his own stories were at least as good as the ones he collected, and he inserted himself unashamedly into his books. “It was once said of a certain man that he would tell a story on less provocation than anybody that ever lived,” he wrote in The Egyptian Sketch-Book. “I begin to believe that that man was I.”⁴² But he would also convert stories into verse, as he did with his Glooskap tales, contending that the original Indian form was poetic, and he would make poems out of bits of tradition, as in his Songs of the Sea and Lays of the Land (1875), which he explicitly stated was “not a folk-lore book,” and hence he need not indicate his borrowings— although Nutt included it in a list of Leland’s folklore publications. At the same time he strove to keep faith with his folklorist readers, and explained to them that in collecting legends of Virgil the magician, he had to prime the pump by narrating them to his field assistant. “If you want fairy-tales, take whatever the gods may send, but if you require nothing but legends of Red Cap, you must specify, and show samples of the wares demanded.”⁴³ And his wares did come back with “important changes.” It was Hans Breitmann’s fate to be caught between the horns of his belletristic and his scientific impulses.

William Wirt Sikes (1836-1883)

The most substantial book of Welsh legendry in English was produced by the United States consul to Wales, Wirt Sikes, in 1880 under the misleading title British Goblins. Its contents are accurately portrayed in the subtitle, Welsh Folk-Lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions. Where Welsh nationalists themselves had fallen far behind Ireland and Scotland in uncovering extant lore, the Yankee who had never written a folklore book and who had lived only four years in Wales came up with a rich haul of Welsh folk stuff. When John Rhys, dean of Welsh philologists, assembled his two large volumes on Celtic Folk-Lore, Welsh and Manx in 1901, he conveyed chiefly a negative impression of the leanness of Brythonic tradition. Rhys took much space to report that there was little to report. By contrast, British Goblins is packed with legend texts and descriptions of customs. The explanation is that Rhys was an inept field man, like his associates among the Great Team, who were system-builders, while Sikes talked, collected, and observed with facility, and added his own personal materials to those he amassed from printed sources, both Welsh and English. Sikes had the wit to recognize folk matter in the Cardiff Western Mail he read at the breakfast table as well as in the Mabinogion.

Born in Watertown, New York, Sikes learned the printing trade as a youth, became a journalist on Utica and Chicago newspapers, and then took over the editorship of two up-state New York newspapers. In addition, he contributed poems, tales, and sketches to newspapers and magazines in such abundance that he employed twenty-two pseudonyms. Some of his original compositions were gathered in A Book for the Winter-Evening Fireside (1858), when he was only twenty-two, and he wrote two novels, The World’s Broad Stage (1868) and One Foor Girl (1869) that reflected his interest in the social conditions of the lower classes in Chicago and New York. After divorcing his first wife, he remarried Olive Logan in 1871, a prominent New York actress, lecturer, playwright, and author, whom he had served as business manager, and who survived him to die in a mental institution in Banstead, England, in 1909. Shortly after this marriage Sikes visited the Wiertz Museum of fine arts in Brussels, and subsequently published a pamphlet about its collection.

In June 1876 he accepted the appointment of United States consul to Wales, and rapidly immersed himself in the living and historic culture of his new residence. An inveterate walker, he came to know familiarly the villages and byways of southern Wales, and wrote up his impressions in Rambles and Studies in Old South Wales in 1881. That same year he also brought out Studies of Assassination. With his journalistic fluency, Sikes retold Welsh legends pleasantly enough, but the British Goblins is more than a second-hand compendium. Its special merits lie in the orderly and perceptive arrangement of the traditions, almost suggesting a subject classification; in the fresh store of orally reported tales and usages interspersed through the volume; and in the occasional comparisons the author makes between British and American folklore. On the debit side is the mixing of uneven sources, from medieval monkish chronicles to early nineteenth century Cambrian collections, with some materials not clearly specified, all jumbled with the first-hand texts, leaving the reader puzzled as to which tradition is current in what period. Sidney Hartland, who perforce relied on Sikes in constructing The Science of Fairy Tales (1891) and in his own writings on Welsh folklore, expressed irritation at the consul’s inadequate documentation. On the whole, Sikes performs much better than folklore scholars could reasonably expect from a Johnny-come-lately. He knows his Tylor and accepts the survival theory of animistic belief and pagan rite lingering in the “superstitious prejudices” of the peasantry; he is familiar with the antiquaries, Brand, Hone, Aubrey, Scott, Baring-Gould; he recognizes the parallelisms of comparative folklore, and introduces occasional far-flung similarities culled from such works as Nicholas B. Dennys’ The Folk-Lore of China (1876); and he has scoured the library for unusual resources, pointing with pride to the rare publications of Prophet Edmund Jones, a dissenting and credulous minister of Monmouthshire in the early years of the nineteenth century who wrote An Account of the Parish of AberyStruth and a Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth, a title often cited but seldom seen by writers on folklore. Thus Thomas Keightley quoted it from Crofton Croker, who had never seen the book but heard of it through a Welsh friend, and Keightley erred on the author’s name and the publication date. Sikes shows himself a wily collector, and appreciates that, from Chaucer on, old people have always credited the fairy belief to an earlier generation, and to the next parish.

The consul divided British Goblins into four sections: “The Realm of Faerie,” “The Spirit-World,” “Quaint Old Customs,” and “Bells, Wells, Stones, and Dragons.” If the rubrics sometimes overlap, they do designate major clusterings of tradition. The fairies and the spirits he further subdivided according to their abodes or habits: fairies of the valley, mine fairies, water fairies, mountain fairies; changelings; fairy cattle; household ghosts, familiar spirits, death portents, corpse candles. In his tracing of the consistent patterns in fairy activities Sikes anticipates Hartland’s formulation of the laws of fairyland, and he seems to suggest a comparable work for “The Science of Ghost Stories.” Here he virtually outlines such a treatise.

For the “Quaint Old Customs” Sikes ordered his comments according to days and seasons, and rites of passage. The bells, wells, stones, and dragons all involved magical associations and local landmarks.

Field observations give zest to Sikes’ work. He is in a pub at Peterstone-super-Ely, outside Cardiff; men drink tankards of ale, smoke long clay pipes, talk about crops and hard times and the prospects of emigrating to America. The consul enters the conversation, steers it into “the domain of folk-lore/’ and captures tales, such as the appropriate one of a helpful fairy who brought prosper־ ity to a poor Glamorganshire farmer by instructing the farmwife to leave her candle burning at night—so the fairies could see at their work, as it turned out.⁴⁵ Another time he is in a country inn at Christmas in a little Carmarthenshire village. A scene of festivity unfolds.

And Sikes further remarks that such scenes contrast with austere religious proceedings in the churches. In another scene a peasant points out to him on a mountain top in Monmouthshire the crossroads stone under which a witch slept by day, and was said— though he himself had never seen it—to come forth by night.⁴⁷ Sikes notes with annoyance the long list of tradesmen and work-boys who applied to him for their Christmas box, an expected customary gift although he had never seen any of them.⁴⁸ He describes festive weddings he saw at Tenby and Lampeter, with flower garlands, flags and banners, evergreen arches, a brass band, fireworks and bonfires, and thousands of spectators attending the traditional ceremonies. In the village of Sketty in Glamorganshire in August, 1877, he saw a “chaining,” an old custom of a chain being stretched across the street to prevent the wedding couple—in this case a groom of fifty and a bride of eighty—from passing until the chainers were “tipped.” All the village was in the streets to see the unlikely couple. Their English driver, unaware of the custom, tried angrily to force the barrier, to the glee of the Welsh onlookers. As a participant observer in Welsh folk life Sikes vividly describes a narrator of ghost stories: the “excited eye, the paling cheek, the bated breath, the sinking voice, the intense and absorbed manner. . . .”⁴⁹ He adds that no one observing this physical behavior could doubt the speaker’s sincerity.

An unusual aspect of British Goblins for the Anglo-American folklorist is the parenthetical reference Sikes offers to like matters in the United States. Traditions of the visit to fairyland by a mortal who finds time supernaturally elapsed on his return makes Sikes think of Rip Van Winkle, rendered popular by Washington Irving and Joseph Jefferson, as “an honour to the American genius,”⁵⁰ although he concedes that the Grimms and the Hartz Mountains of Germany were the likely originals. Speaking of fetishes like magic bells and wells, Sikes muses in Tylorian fashion on the childlike mind of primitive man, exemplified by the Mississippi Negro boy on his first visit north who thought snow to be salt and claimed that it bit his fingers. He also recalls the belief of Negroes along the southern seaboard in the “Jack’mun-lantern,” a hideous, goggleeyed, long-haired, bounding goblin which, like the Walsh Sllylldan and English Will-o’-wisp, led travelers into impenetrable swamps. The Fourth of July is, for Sikes, a direct echo of the Beltane rituals. “The lad who in the United States capers around a bonfire on the night of Independence Day has not a suspicion that he is imitating the rites of an antiquity the most remote; that in burning a heap of barrels and boxes in a public square the celebrators of the American Fourth of July imitate the priests who thus worshipped the sun-god Beal.”⁵¹ (Else why endanger their wooden houses?) At the same time Sikes recognizes that American life has lost “certain joyous and genial wedding customs”⁵² common throughout the British Isles.

If the fairy people and magic wells did not appear on American soil, comparable notions existed. American boys rubbed their warts upon impaled toads; when the toad died, the warts shriveled.⁵³ This in lieu of being able to stick a pin in their warts and throw the pin down a curing well. The Pembrokeshire taboo against a female being the first to cross the threshold on New Year’s morning suggested to Sikes practices of American show business.

To Sikes’ thinking American spirits exhibited characteristics very like those of their British cousins. Spiritualism as a cult originated in the United States in the nineteenth century, but old-fashioned ghosts still walked and groaned throughout New England—and Sikes referred to haunted houses in Newburyport, New Bedford, Cambridge. As recently as 1877 a tenant was driven from his Cambridge dwelling by the spirit of a murdered girl buried in the cellar. “An American journal lately gave an account of an apparition seen in Indiana,”⁵⁵ not only by the riders in the coach but by the horses, who shied in terror until the specter dissolved. Horses in Wales particularly had the gift of seeing spectral funeral processions. To an account of a mischievous spirit which upset the inmates of a house in Tridoll Valley, Glamorganshire, Sikes appended a footnote of the “latest American case” to come to his attention, reported from Akron, Ohio, in 1878, where the home of the Michael Metzlers was plagued by rappings and stone-throwings; a priest who came to exorcise the spirits was himself hit by a stone and left hastily.⁵⁶

Besides noticing analogous folklore, Sikes indicated two other relationships between British and American traditions: the United States as a fabled land in British legend; and the transplanting of British custom and belief in America. One of his best narratives tells of an innkeeper’s son in Treconshire transported to Philadelphia by the spirit of a well-dressed woman, later identified as one Elizabeth Gething who had actually emigrated from that parish to Philadelphia. The spirit took him to a fine house, and had him lift up a board, locate a box, and carry it three miles to cast into the black sea. Thereupon he was free to return home.⁵⁷ A similar circumstanrial account of an overnight trip to America from Ballinskelligs, County Kerry, Ireland, told me by Tadhg Murphy in 1951, is in Folktales of Ireland.⁵⁸

In evidence of migrant British lore, Sikes speaks of a banshee in Evansville, Indiana, which had appeared before the deaths of five members of an English family from Cambridgeshire named Feast. The Evansville newspaper reported the banshee’s visits.⁵⁹ Curiously, Douglas Hyde heard four Irish-Americans discourse on spirits in an Indianapolis hotel—“the only time during my entire American experiences in which such a thing happened.”⁶⁰ Should a folklorist living in Bloomington, Indiana, feel guilt twinges at these reports of British traditions in nearby cities?

Sikes never pulled together these scattered threads of Anglo-American folklore, but in noting them he pointed to a beckoning line of inquiry few folklorists have pursued.

Jeremiah Curtin (1835-1906)

A friend of the poets Longfellow and Lowell, the scientist Louis Agassiz, the ballad scholar Francis James Child, to whom he dedicated one of his folklore books, Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote a preface to his history of the Mongols, Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot, and the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz, among others, Jeremiah Curtin was himself a figure of eminence in his day, known for his translations of Russian and Polish novels and for his work in what was then called “comparative mythology.” Born in Detroit of Irish stock, he moved with his family at the age of one to Greenfield, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee, where numerous German, Polish, and Norwegian immigrants had settled, and showed his extraordinary linguistic aptitude by picking up their tongues, as well as some Indian languages. After graduating from Harvard in 1863 he made contact with the Russian fleet under Admirai Lissofsky then visiting American waters, and returned with them to St. Petersburg. He spent much of the next decade in Russia, eastern Europe, and Asia, in the services of both the American and Russian governments. In the 1880’s and 1890’s he made several trips to Ireland in search of Gaelic lore. From 1883 to 1891 he served with the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., and conducted fieldwork among Indian tribes. His last years were passed in Vermont writing up his accumulated materials, but he visited the Balkans and Russia again in 1903 and 1904. At that time he predicted a shift in the balance of power from the white to the yellow race. He was reputed to know seventy languages and dialects. An inveterate traveler, he lived constantly in hotels, rarely staying in one place for more than a few months, with his faithful wife as amanuensis.

Curtin’s large body of published work falls into five distinct groupings: his ethnological reports of the Iroquois, Modoc, Yuchi, and Shawnee; a series of books on the Mongols, all published posthumously; his translations of Slavic fiction, including works of Tolstoy and Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis, the English edition of which, in 1906, finally eased his financial burdens, selling over a million copies; three volumes of Russian and East European folklore, the one published during his lifetime being Myths and Folk-Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs and Magyars (1890); and his four collections of Irish folktales.

The achievement and role of Jeremiah Curtin in British, and specifically Irish, folklore studies are known but not perhaps fully appreciated. He was the first systematic and intensive fieldworker in Ireland, and the first deliberately to pursue the Gaelic mythtellers. Unlike the resident Irish collectors who succeeded him, he had to make his way in a foreign land, although one where he had distant relatives and made fast friends. He tells of the discomforts, difficulties, and even dangers of the field in graphic chapters in his Memoirs on “First Visit to Ireland” (1887), “The Second Irish Period” (1891-1893), and “Sojourn in Wales and Ireland” (1899). There he explains his motivation for going to Ireland.

So off he went to the western counties and islands, to Kerry, Galway, Donegal, to Blasket and Tory and the Aran Islands, and to northern Ireland too. Everywhere he encounters unbelievable wretchedness and poverty and brutal landlordism; one can see his passions roused in the same spirit that produced Irish nationalism. In one anecdote he relates how poor tenants pretended to bury alive a tinker, whom they hired for the purpose of shocking the old Duke of Sutherland when he came to inspect his Irish estates. The Duke was indeed shocked when his tenants informed him that they must dispose of the useless old fellow, whom they could not feed because all their money went for rent. Thereon the Duke reduced the rent ten shillings an acre. Time and again Curtin describes windowless huts with earthen floors, filled with the smell of a peat fire, roosting hens, and grunting pigs—literally pigpens—in which he was fain to collect his myths. One house in Mallow in which four pigs were eating in the kitchen was beyond even his endurance, and he took the old man outside beyond a manure pile at the back door to record his myths. “The price paid for ancient lore is not small/’ he remarked ruefully, and further observes, “It is not in homes of ease and wealth that ancient lore is found.”⁶² The search for local accommodations also continually plagues him. “Fitzgerald’s hotel looked dingy and smelled musty,” he lamented typically. “The food was impossible.”⁶³ Sometimes there were no hotels. In Glen Columbkille, which he reached on a donkey-cart through wind and rain, he had to sleep in a io X 12 storeroom whose windows had never been opened or washed. Curtin encouraged his landlady to fry eggs in an iron kettle, her only cooking utensil. To get to Blasket Island he had to hire a canvas boat; on the return trip a heavy wind threatened to fill the craft with heavy waves and sink all aboard.

Curtin sets down vivid and amusing portraits of his myth tellers and the Irish folk who knew witches and had seen fairies. On Blasket he asked a man on crutches for Gaelic myths, and received for an answer, “I care more about getting the price of a bottle of whiskey than about old stories.” Another man told him, “If you’ll give me the price of a bottle of whiskey, I’ll talk about stories.”⁶⁴ Neither produced for him. But rarely did he draw a blank on fairylore. A feeble old woman petting a blind chicken in Mallow, when asked if she knew anything about the fairies, responded:

A gentleman in Dingle, Maurice Fitzgerald, confided to Curtin that in his youth nine out of ten persons professed a belief in fairies, where only one would nowadays. Similarly a well-acquainted native asserted to him that the old myth-tellers were dead or gone to America and Australia; the language had been exterminated, and with it the old stories. Curtin proved the prophets false, with his exciting collections of complex wonder tales, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (1890), and Hero-Tales of Ireland (1894). Other like narratives of the King of Erin and Finn Mac Cumhail that Curtin printed in the New York Sun, whose editor, Charles H. Dana, sponsored Curtin’s Irish journeys by paying for his stories, were gathered and edited by James H. Delargy in 1944 as Folk-Tales of Ireland. Shifting from the highly structured Märchen and bardic narratives to modern traditions, Curtin also published Tales of the Fairies and of the Ghost World, Collected from Oral Tradition in South-West Munster (1895), resulting from a story-swapping session in a Dingle farmhouse among workmen who had seen spirits.

More than an indefatigable collector, Curtin also theorized about his materials. He speculates on comparative mythology in his introductions to Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, Myths and FolkTales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars, and Creation Myths of Primitive America, and occasionally within his Memoirs. While a close friend of John Fiske, the Harvard historian whose own Myths and Myth-Makers (1873) followed Max Müller’s system of celestial mythology, Curtin chose his own direction, and did not hesitate to criticize Müller and Herbert Spencer for constructing their theories of “oblivion” and “confusion” to explain myths on the basis of personal biases and scanty sources. Müller deals with a limited and relatively late body of myths, and Spencer speaks of the confused mental processes of primitive peoples as if he has positive facts at his command. By virtue of his own extensive field researches in different parts of the world, Curtin had a unique advantage in the mythic argument. He accepted the uniformity of mythmaking patterns among primitive peoples, until cultural development produced differentiation, most pronounced in the Aryan mythology “containing myths and myth-conceptions of the loftiest and purest character connected with religions of Europe and Asia.” The science of mythology should seek to explain the Aryan product by examining all the extant lower mythologies, “for the highest forms of Aryan myth-thought have beginnings as simple as those of the lowliest race on earth.”⁶⁶ Gaelic myths occupied a strategic position in the spectrum of non-Aryan and Aryan mythologies. In his work with North and Central American Indians, Slavs, Mongols, and the Gaelic-speaking Irish, Curtin continually bore in mind his grand objective.

Curtin would dig back before Müller’s mythopoeic age into Tylor’s animistic universe of prehistoric man, still preserved in certain contemporary societies that were rapidly being obliterated. He waxed bitter at the Americans who were erasing the Indian inheritance, as the English were the Irish.

So compulsive a traveler as Curtin must needs touch base on all the British Isles. He spent some months in Scotland in 1893 in Fort Williams expressly to learn Scotch Gaelic, and in Oban in a bookstore he chanced on the author of a book of Scotch myths he held in his hand. The author, James MacDougall, at first seemed suspicious that Curtin had come to take away his myths, but appeared relieved when Curtin praised his work (Folk and Hero Tales, 1891) as the best of its kind. In 1899 he tarried in Cardiff and took lessons in Welsh. London was a regular port of call for him, and we find him moving in some of the same circles as did Leland, dining with the publisher Trübner, meeting George Eliot. He gives us a glimpse of the English folklorist William R. S. Ralston, a withdrawn, unhappy man, with whom he shared strong interests in Russian folklore; Ralston read the manuscript of his work on early Russian history to Curtin and Fiske. Curtin was never the Anglophile of Leland’s stripe, and castigated John Bull as an enemy of democracy during the Boer War. He was properly a world-man; during what he calls a few quiet months he read Hebrew and Persian, learned Cherokee, and perused straight through the twentyfour volumes of the Mahābhārata.⁶⁸ Endowed with a strong frame, broad cheek-bones, blue eyes, and a tawny curling full beard,⁶⁹ he was impressive in appearance as in accomplishments, and a worthy cultural representative of the United States abroad in the days before Fulbright fellowships.

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965)

One American who knew intimately and worked closely with British folklorists of the Heroic Age lived into our own day, although after his exciting first book he moved away from folklore into religious mysticism of the Orient. In that book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911), Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz drew together many strands of the British folklore movement, and then sought to direct it along a new path.

Evans-Wentz was born in Trenton, New Jersey, lived as a youth in California, and took his B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford University in 1906 and 1907. At Stanford he came under the influence of William James in psychology and pondered on the concept of the reality of the unseen. From 1907 to 1909 he studied at the University of Rennes in Brittany, receiving the degree of doctor of letters for the first draft of his Fairy Faith. At Oxford in 1910, where he took the research degree of bachelor of science, he shifted from a literary to an anthropological perspective. Still further work brought his opus to publication in 1911 in a formidable volume of five hundred pages. Nothing like The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries can be found in the history of British folklore, although it is firmly embedded in that history.

In the first place, Evans-Wentz undertook a comparative field study. Where conventionally the collector investigated one region, and that usually his own, the American journeyed to all six Celtic countries, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany, to interview peasants and intellectuals on the fairy belief. Secondly, he concentrated exclusively on traditional beliefs and folk philosophy. Märchen, ballads, proverbs, jests were not his concern. In a commentary within The Fairy-Faith, Douglas Hyde distinguished between the sean-sgéal or structured wonder tale, which he himself chiefly collected, and the formless statement of fairy belief and experience that Evans-Wentz was eliciting. Thirdly, The Fairy-Faith combined exhaustive field and library evidence to build its case. Unlike the books of collectors who simply presented their hard-won texts, or of theorists who never ventured into the field, Evans-Wentz exhaustively pursued every source that could illuminate the question of the fairy creed: archaeological sites that might have served for pagan religious rites and ceremonies; bardic and monastic literature offering precedents and analogies with the modern fairy creed; anthropological reports of comparative folklore demonstrating the universal recognition of spirit beings. Fourthly, Evans-Wentz advanced an original thesis of his own, the Psychological Theory, to account for the belief of mortal man in fairy creatures. Not content merely to prove, by overwhelming evidence, the fact of the pervasive fairy-faith, he raised the level of his study from an empirical, ethnological plane to a closely reasoned, metaphysical argument climaxed with a presumed proof in a residual x-factor in his evidence explicable only on the basis of the real existence of fairies. Here Evans-Wentz was allying comparative folklore with psychical research, in the manner of Andrew Lang, but carrying the argument beyond Lang’s cautious claims to inelude the philosophical theory of William James on the subliminal consciousness, the psychoanalytical theory of Freud on the mechanism of the superego, and the psychoreligious theory of Mary Baker Eddy on the power of malignant animal magnetism. These and other modern immaterialists agreed in hypothesizing an invisible world that some men apprehended, and with which their own world overlapped.

In a short period Evans-Wentz made contact with the leading British folklorists. He read at Oxford under Robert Ranulph Marett, inheritor of Tylor’s mantle and himself an ingenious expositor of a psychological theory of folklore, although from a functional rather than a psychical viewpoint. The two examiners of his Oxford paper were Sir John Rhys, whose two-volume study of Celtic Folk-Lore, Welsh and Manx, had appeared in 1901, and Andrew Lang, alone of the Great Team to take seriously the efforts of the Psychical Research Society, whose president he became in the last year of his life. In The Fairy-Faith, Evans-Wentz invited six experts in the lore of the six Celtic lands each to write an introduction to the field report, or “taking of evidence,” on his particular country. Douglas Hyde, key figure in the Irish folklore movement, introduced the section on Ireland with the most substantial comment; he suspended a decision on the Psychological Theory, but was reminded of a talk in an Indianapolis hotel with four affluent IrishAmericans, all of whom told of ghostly sights in Ireland, two falling quite outside regular categories. Hyde often accompanied EvansWentz into the field. So did Alexander Carmichael, author of the famed Carmina Gadelica, who introduced the Scottish section. Rhys gave a brief summary of the main Welsh fairy-legend types as preface to the Welsh section. In addition to these inserted prefaces, Evans-Wentz also asked Andrew Lang for a special statement on “Psychical Research and Anthropology in Relation to the Fairy-Faith.”⁷⁰ While underscoring the worldwide currency of the fairy belief in various forms, Lang declared that “sane and educated persons” seldom reported seeing fairies, although they frequently beheld phantasms of the dead. Evans-Wentz responded in a note⁷¹ pressing the point, which he reaffirmed throughout his book, that fairy and spirit phenomena merged into each other and equally merited scientific attention. In citing the scholarly literature on Celtic folklore, Evans-Wentz acknowledged the achievement of Alfred Nutt, especially for his study of the Celtic doctrine of rebirth, and approved his conclusion, that the Happy Otherworld in medieval Irish mythic romances was not only pre-Christian but from the oldest Aryan epoch. Evans-Wentz had much of his own to say on the rebirth doctrine, in which he perceived a Buddhistic perception of reincarnated spirits. Cuchulainn and King Arthur could be both gods above and incarnated kings of the Celts; extant peasant legends from Lough Dur treated Charles Parnell as the reincarnation of an old Gaelic hero. The Sleeping Hero fit into this theme, and gets attached to King Arthur and Garret Fitzgerald, Earl of Desmond, who rose against Queen Elizabeth, and who rides a silver-shod white horse across the lake every seven years.

Closely bound as he was to the British folklorists, Evans-Wentz still retained his own marked individuality and bias. While partly Celtic himself, he felt an advantage in being an American, saying “I was in many places privileged to enter where an Englishman, or a non-Celt of Europe would not be.” His education in the ideals of a free democracy detached him from European prejudices regrettably apparent, he felt, in Celtic countries.⁷² Yet Evans-Wentz was no chauvinistic American. Reacting against the materialistic, positivistic, natural-science emphasis of his homeland, he responded warmly to Celtic seers and mystics. In his theory, he always claimed to weigh evidence as a scientist. Tylor’s prehistoric animism found its strongest growth in the Celtic zones, where wild and awesome landscapes and seascapes brought man close to the elemental psychic forces of nature. All Celtdom, indeed, formed one connected mystic terrain between the poles of Carnac, in Brittany, land of the returning dead, and Tara, in Ireland, land of Faerie. At the end of his voluminous treatise Evans-Wentz has proved to his satisfaction the existence of Fairies and a Fairyland, and the validity of his own vitalistic theory of evolution. He considered other theories: the Naturalistic Theory that explained the fairy faith by the mood of the countryside; the Pygmy Theory of MacRitchie that saw in the fairies a race-memory of dwarfish people; the Druid Theory which substituted druid priests for pygmies in racial remembrance; and the Mythological Theory that beheld in the fairies the lineal descendants of an ancient pantheon. Something there might be in all these theories, but none explained where the fairy idea came from in the beginning, save only the Psychological Theory. Fairies belong to the invisible surrounding world that privileged percipients occasionally fathom.

Evans-Wentz followed the trail he had marked out in The Fairy-Faith by journeying to India in 1917, seeking out, as he said, the Wise Men of the East. He became a Buddhist monk and lived for three years in Tibet with Lama Dawa-Samdup until the Lama’s death in 1922. Between 1927 and 1954 he edited a series of the Lama’s translations of religious documents, beginning with The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford University awarded him an honorary degree of Doctor of Science in Comparative Religion in 1931, he being the first American to be so honored. From 1923 until his death he lived in San Diego, California, corresponding with Hindu and Buddhist sages, working with the Self-Realization Fellowship, and completing his final book on Sacred Mountains of the World. In his will he left the mineral rights to his 5,000 acre estate to Stanford University for a chair in Oriental philosophy and religion. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries was reprinted in 1966 with an admiring introduction by the English folklorist Leslie Shepard, and the Mystic Arts Book Club distributed it as a book choice in 1969.

Conclusion

What generalizations, if any, can we draw from the careers of our four American folklorists in Britain? Strongly individualistic as each was, they still share certain traits. All were uncommon Americans of unusual talents, energies, and wanderlust. Leland and Curtin lived much of their lives restlessly in European hotels; EvansWentz sought mountain retreats in India, Ceylon, and Tibet; Sikes, who died in Wales at 46, may well have had further wanderings before him. All possessed facility at languages, not a notable American aptitude, and Curtin and Leland were fanatic in their zest for acquiring new tongues. All wrote skilfully and prolifically on a variety of subjects; both Leland and Curtin have left us meaty, delightful Memoirs. None was a full-time, or even a half-time folklorist, and in these respects they resemble the Great Team with their broad range of intellectual interests. None was an academic scholar.

The strongest unifying element in the four is their love of the field, and here they depart entirely from the Great Team. All demanded and savored the personal contact with the folk bearers of tradition, and achieved unusual successes in their field interviews, before fieldwork had made much headway in Britain. At the same time all showed some interest in theory; Curtin, Leland, and Sikes within their lights followed the survivalist point of view, while Evans-Wentz advanced an original thesis to explain the fairy creed. If his psychical research places him in doubtful company, we have to concede that today he could bolster his argument with the multiple sightings of UFO’s. Curiously, none worked in mainstream American folklore; Curtin and Leland concentrated on Indians. Why did these four evince no interest in the folklore of the Celts, Slavs, Italians, and Asians who had come to America? But this is a rude question; their labors were prodigious, and each entered into the spirit and added to the triumphs of the British folklore movement.

Notes

1. Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs, 2 vols. (London, 1893), II, 159-60.

2. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Charles Godfrey Leland, a Biography, 2 vols. (London, 1906), II, 266.

3. Pennell, II, 344.

4. Pennell, II, 258.

5. Memoirs, II, 275.

6. Pennell, II, 379.

7. Pennell, II, 261-62.

8. Pennell, II, 309-10.

9. Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling, pp. xv-xvi.

10. Ibid., xvi.

11. Ibid., xvi, note; Pennell, II, 429-30, who gives the date as 1856 but believes there must have been an earlier edition.

12. The English Gipsies, p. 124.

13. Ibid., p. 132.

14. Pennell, II, 340-41.

15. Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune-Telling, p. 6.

16. Pennell, II, 105.

17. Pennell, II, 87-88.

18. Ibid., II, 273-74.

19. Ibid., II, 54-61.

20. Ibid., II, 200.

21. Ibid., II, 207.

22. Ibid., II, 367-68.

23. Ibid., II, 307.

24. Ibid., II, 210.

25. Ibid., II, 369.

26. Ibid., II, 370.

27. Ibid., II, 76-79.

28. The Algonquin Legends of New England, p. 5.

29. Memoirs, II, 236.

30. Pennell, II, 27.

31. Ibid., II, 271-73.

32. The Gypsies, Centenary Edition, pp. 10-11.

33. Ibid., p. 102.

34. Pennell, II, 19.

35. Ibid., II, 350.

36. Ibid., II, 378.

37. International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 201.

38. Ibid., 248.

39. Pennell, II, 353.

40. Ibid., II, 350-52.

41. Legends of Florence, First Series, 2nd ed. (London, 1896), pp. xi-xii.

42. (London, 1873), p. 156

43. The Unpublished Legends of Virgil, p. 47.

44. William Wirt Sikes, British Goblins: Welsh Folk-Lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions, 2nd ed. (London, 1880), pp. 148-49.

45. Ibid., 14-16.

46. Ibid., 290-91.

47. Ibid., 368.

48. Ibid., 296.

49. Ibid., 246.

50. Ibid., 89.

51. Ibid. 278.

52. Ibid., 314.

53. Ibid., 352, n. 7.

54. Ibid., 255.

55. Ibid., 171.

56. Ibid., 185.

57. Ibid., 157-59.

58. Sean O’Sullivan, Folktales of Ireland (Chicago and London, 1966), pp. 209-20.

59. Sikes, p. 247.

60. Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (n.p.: University Books, Inc., 1911), p. 26.

61. Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin, ed. with notes and introduction by Joseph Schafer (Madison, Wisconsin, 1940), p. 385.

62. Ibid., 450, 457.

63. Ibid., 763.

64. Ibid., 455.

65. Ibid., 390.

66. Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Boston, 1880), p. 27.

67. Creation Myths of Primitive America (London, 1899), pp. xxxv-xxxvi.

68. Memoirs of Jeremiah Curtin, p. 382.

69. Dictionary of American Biography.

70. Evans-Wentz, pp. 474-76.

71. Ibid., 476.

72. Ibid., xxviii.

Reprinted from the Journal of the Folklore Institute 7 (August-December, 1970): 187-219.