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Techniques of the Folklorist

Last november [1967] the once lean and hungry American Folklore Society met independently in Toronto for a crowded two and a half day session with one hundred and fifty registered attendants and participants.¹ Several carloads of graduate students drove there from distant points, and faculty members flew in from around the country on their annual free professional junket. Complaints were heard that the staging of parallel sessions prevented eager auditors from absorbing two pet topics at the same time, that the program was too concentrated and should be extended to at least three days, and that the Society was getting too large anyway to meet all together. Back in 1948 this Society had also met in Toronto, but then as a tiny barnacle clinging to the American Anthropological Association, and I delivered the final paper of our session to an audience of six, including the president and secretary-treasurer. In 1948 not a scholar in the United States held a Ph.D. in Folklore. In 1967 some thirty persons possessed such a degree, and in one week in August of that year Indiana University granted five doctorates, while eighty-five others waited in the wings for a Ph.D. or an M.A. in Folklore. A substantial number of higher degree candidates are also pursuing folklore and folklife studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California at Berkeley and at Los Angeles, and the University of Texas. Whatever mana this degree confers, it does designate its holder as an accredited academic species, the folklorist, who is now part of the university scene. The programs carry such mouth-filling titles as The Center for the Comparative Study of Folklore and Mythology at the University of California at Los Angeles, and The Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History at the University of Texas.

Folklorists have of course made their way and their name before the advent of their own special doctorate. Among eminent contemporaries who have advanced the subject, Stith Thompson, Archer Taylor, MacEdward Leach, Wayland Hand, and Herbert Halpert took degrees in English or Germanic literature. Looking abroad, we see England as a prime example of a country where brilliant folklorists developed their new field of learning without benefit of academic chairs or higher degrees. But William John Thorns, George Laurence Gomme, Andrew Lang, and their fellows did organize a Folk-Lore Society in 1878 to identify their calling. Whether in a university, a society, an institute, or an archives, or as a spare-time writer and collector, the folklorist has, for a century and a half, asserted his individuality. How is he to be defined? Defining folklore has proved to be a task for Tantalus, but we may do better defining the folklorist, and then say that what he studies is folklore. Our premise is that he possesses a set of skills setting him apart from his departmental neighbors in literatures and languages, anthropology, linguistics, history and sociology. No one of these skills may be unique but in totality they do describe the gestalt of a particular kind of scholar.

Fieldwork

When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set down the peasant tales of Frau Viehmannin for the second volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1815, they ushered in the serious study of folklore. Two processes were involved in this encounter. Intellectuals from a learned tradition made contact with and paid respect to a spokesman for an unlettered tradition. This was an act of field recording. Beyond the writing down of the recitals of a peasant woman, and publishing them for their charm and novelty, the Grimms treated these and similar narrations as invaluable deposits of a bygone Germanic mythology whose outlines they sought to reconstruct. Collecting was thus not an end in itself but a means of obtaining data to document an hypothesis. The hypothesis of an Aryan mythological system surviving in fragmentary lore among the peasantry succumbed to new theories of evolution and dissemination, but the exponents of these schools too relied on field materials to support their views. A folklorist must understand the technique of fieldwork, even if he does not venture into the field—as Andrew Lang and Stith Thompson, for instance, never did—for his treatises rest largely upon field-collected texts and customs.

The anthropologist too considers fieldwork a basic method, and in notable instances, particularly those of Franz Boas and his illustrious students, such as Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, and Melville Jacobs, anthropologists have contributed substantially to the resources of the folklorist. For many years since its founding in 1888, the American Folklore Society was sustained by anthropologists, and only very recently has the Society abandoned the practice of alternating its main offices between so-called humanistic folklorists and anthropologists. The founders of the English FolkLore Society, who were known as anthropological folklorists, debated vigorously over whether their field terrain embraced both savages in the jungle and peasants in the village. Today we may draw a fairly firm line between the field domain of the anthropologist, which lies outside his own culture and within a largely nonliterate, nontechnological society, and that of the folklorist, which does fall within his own civilization.

And this distinction involves a considerable difference in field method. The anthropologist is visibly the outsider, almost a visitor from another planet, perhaps conducting his interviews through an interpreter. The folklorist operates from the inside, and sometimes, as with the Gaelic-speaking collectors of Scotland and Ireland, he knows from birth the tongue of his target group. Still, no matter how close his ties to his subjects, whether by residence, as Randolph among the Ozarkers, or by faith, as the Fifes among the Mormons, the folklorist stands apart from the folk through his formal education and intellectual outlook. He recognizes, as the Victorians first appreciated, with a shock, that other cultures lie about him, cultures that the intellectuals have ignored or despised or misunderstood. Often the Victorian gentleman could communicate with representatives of these submerged cultures, of the “lower orders” as he was wont to call them, only through his house servant. The folklorist sets out deliberately to establish contacts with these tradition־oriented societies. He may, unlike the anthropologist, do his collecting fitfully and opportunistically from his home base, as did Frank C. Brown in North Carolina. But he can also set off on a quest to a terra incognita, in a mountain region, on a rugged penin־sula, in an industrial city, at a state prison, where he must win friends and gain confidences among people suspicious of FBI agents, tax collectors, encyclopedia salesmen, and novel types of con men.

The mechanics of pencil and pad, tape recorder and camera, dress, and behavior is not my present concern. They have been fully treated by Kenneth Goldstein in A Guide for Field Workers in Folklore. It is the technique, not the mechanics, of entering into and observing hidden segments of the dominant, official civilization that marks the folklorist. Jack London made use of this technique when he donned workingmen’s clothes and walked through the streets of London’s East End conversing with the destitute and despairing. One need not adopt disguise, and London’s motive was to obtain ammunition for his socialist criticisms of capitalist society, but in effect he opened a window into ghetto culture. Unlike the anthropologist and the sociologist, the folklorist does not survey equally and impartially the whole society or its segments. His antennae are alert for signals leading to articulate exponents of the unofficial culture, like W. H. Barrett, the Fenman discovered by museum curator Enid Porter, or Angus McLellan, the crofter of South Uist recorded by the laird of the isle of Canna, John Lome Campbell. Put a folklorist in Vietnam and he would soon uncover stellar tradition carriers who would make the mass of Vietnamese distinctive for Americans.

Fieldwork can be tightly planned for specific objectives, such as the preparation of folklore atlases charting the distribution of a belief or observance or craft. European folklorists have published a number of such atlases, but the only equivalent in the United States is the Linguistic Atlas of America enterprise, which has produced excellent volumes plotting the boundaries of folk and elite speech patterns of the eastern seaboard, based on field interviews with selected regional speakers. But as yet American folklorists have not applied this method to other folklore genres.

Use of Written and Printed Sources

If the folklorist looks for his primary data to the text, custom, or artifact that he, or a professional colleague, has personally collected or observed, he must still employ another technique to amass the raw materials for his study. Field collecting began only in the nineteenth century, but the folklorist needs to trace traditional eustoms, sayings, narratives, and verse back to the beginning of the human record. Any eyewitness report of a ceremony or written remembrance of a legend may furnish him with an early dating of a currently collected item. He must consult a staggering variety and volume of printed sources, from highly visible tale collections assembled in classical and medieval times, such as the Panchatantra, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Gesta Romanorum, to elusive references in travel writings, chapbooks, memoirs, histories, and certain newspaper and periodical files. Even after field collecting begins, the folklorist must continue to comb the printed sources that engulf our culture and in haphazard ways trap traditional matter. In handling these sources, he must continually face the problem of determining how faithfully they report oral traditions or how accurately they render local customs. A ballad scholar attempting to unravel the influence of a broadside on the history of a ballad text and tune has problems enough, but at least he deals with only one avenue of print. What can the student of a popular outlaw tradition make of the welter of printed accounts about Billy the Kid, ranging from penny dreadfuls to sober biographies, and comprising in themselves a book-length bibliography? In his Tall Tales of Arkansas, James Masterson produced an ample volume based entirely on printed folk humor. My own Jonathan Draws the Long Bow explored the printed sources of New England popular tales and legends.

It is also true that Benjamin Botkin has assembled his series of treasuries almost entirely from printed sources. My criticism of his treasuries is that he accepts the most disparate sources without proper discrimination or system. The folklorist must apply rigorous criteria to printed texts. Does the item in hand contain traditional motifs, is it analogous to field-collected reports, does it come from a publication close to the grass roots, does its style indicate a spoken rather than a literary manner, is the purpose of the writer to report rather than to invent? All these are questions to be weighed. The English Folk-Lore Society’s series of Printed Extracts of County Folk-Lore is a model set of volumes in which the answers to the above questions all prove affirmative. They show the wealth of elusive lore to be gleaned from local newspapers, periodicals, and gazetteers. American sources seem less homogeneous. Three main suppliers for Jonathan Draws the Long Bow can illustrate their diversity: town histories, sporting weeklies, and The Jonny-Cake Letters of “Shepherd Tom” Hazard. The town histories are eustomarily written by local antiquaries in stodgy style but with the sound of village gossip in their ears and they transmit the corporate memory of haunted places and village eccentrics. Sporting weeklies like the New York Spirit of the Times and the Boston Yankee Blade flourished in the 1830’s, ‘40’s, and ‘50’s and entertained readers with humorous sketches often drawn from tavern anecdotes and campfire yarns. “Shepherd Tom” wrote a series of letters to the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, gathered in book form in 1880, in which he wove together a string of delicious reminiscences covering the local legends and characters of Washington County. A recipe for Rhode Island jonny-cake launched his recollections and gave his book its title. The folklorist can profitably mine these sources, but he must differentiate between their special styles and perspectives.

Would that today’s newspapers and their editors maintained as close a connection with the grass roots as did the ante-bellum press! Still the daily and Sunday reams of newsprint do inescapably catch matters of interest to the folklorist, if somehow they can be culled. The journal Western Folklore has carried a department “Folklore in the News” to which alert folklorists send clippings about the folksong revival, unnatural phenomena, legends passing as facts, old beliefs still honored, holiday rites, and such folk newsworthy items. For a period of three years, from 1939 to 1941, I subscribed to a news-clipping service to obtain all references to Paul Bunyan, and secured, not so much texts of Bunyan tales, although some turned up, but a mountainous pile of allusions, and even pictorial illustrations, revealing the varied conceptions of Old Paul by diverse American groups, from resort promoters to myth-hungry school-children to the staff of the Daily Worker.

Terminology

Like every branch of the humanities and social sciences, folklore possesses its esoteric jargon, but with one vast difference: the world at large also employs the jargon of folklorists. The barrier of conspicuous terminology shielding the literary critic or the social scientist from the layman does not protect the followers of William John Thorns, who in 1846 chose “folklore” rather than “antiquariology” or “preternaturalistics” to designate his subject, desiring a “good Anglo-Saxon compound.” Since then “folklore” is on everyone’s lips, as are the collateral terms “myth,” “legend,” “fairy tale,” “ballad,” and sundry compounds of “folk.” Much confusion arises from the everyday use of these words when the folklorist attempts to explain, or defend, his mission. Because of the general ignorance as to the serious study and international implications of folklore, the Wall Street Journal chose to attack fellowship grants given to Indiana University and the University of Kansas in folklore in 1961 under the National Defense Education Act, and Congress, immediately responsive, lopped a million dollars off the fellowship funds while barring folklore from further support. Certain of our foundation-wise academic friends suggested changing the name of folklore, in the same way that social scientists started calling themselves behavioral scientists when Congressmen began associating social sciences with socialism and ergo communism. This dodge appears to me to relinquish a valuable asset, for the word and concept of folklore have enjoyed an honorable history, and when used by powerful minds the term has won a respectful audience.

The precise intellectual employment of his vocabulary constitutes a key technique of the folklorist. One of the most original scholarly works in the subject is The Science of Fairy Tales by Edwin Sidney Hartland, and no reader will confuse his sense of “fairy tales” with bedtime stories. Meanings alter of course with historical periods, and such nineteenth century favorites as “popular antiquities,” “custom and usage,” “lower orders,” “savages,” “survivals,” “sagas” (in the sense of legends), “drolls,” and “disease of language” carry little, if any, impact today. Emotive terms in current fashion are “type,” “archetype,” “motif,” “variant” and its twin or cousin “version” depending on the user), “Märchen,” “Sagen,” and the re-charged “myth.”

Now fresh concepts are pressing for attention with shiny new, or dusted off, labels, such as “folk life” suggesting a broader dimension than the oral literature equated with “folklore.” At Harvard, Lord and Bynum push “theme” and at Berkeley Dundes proposes “motifeme” as refinements for “motif,” in the realm of what his colleague Bascom calls “verbal art.” At Indiana University the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music has discarded its two tarnished labels and been rebaptized the Archives of Traditional Music. “Tradition” is indeed one of the most enduring and palatable terms. “Folklore is the science of tradition,” Hartland once stated. Meanwhile the attempt to find an acceptable substitute for “fairy tale” continues, with “magical tale” and “wonder tale” lagging behind “Märchen,” firm in sense if not in pronunciation. Kenneth Jackson has proposed “international popular tale” to replace “folktale,” since all classes of society, and not just the folk, whoever they are, relate traditional stories. “Folktale” itself is usually intended to signify a fiction, even though Stith Thompson in his comprehensive volume on The Folktale covers the whole range of oral narratives. (As a footnote, the spelling of “folk” compounds presents a headache of its own; once when I was preparing a brochure of our Folklore Institute, the proofreader at the Printing and Duplicating Division changed my spelling of Stith Thompson’s course on “The Folktale” from one to two words, according to Webster, and remained intransigent even though I pointed out that we were identifying him as the author of and authority on The Folktale, spelled as one word.)

European scholars have proved far more ingenious and imaginative in word coinages than the British and Americans, and they have now given us two dictionaries of conceptual terms, Ake Hultkrantz’s Ethnological Concepts־, presented from the continental point of view but restricted to English nomenclature, and Laurits Bødker’s Folk Literature (Germanic), offering a wealth of usages by folklorists in the Germanic languages. Bødker particularly admires the brilliant Swedish folklorist, Carl von Sydow, two of whose many neologisms have penetrated into English, oikotype, to designate a regional variant of an international tale type, and memorat, to identify a marvelous personal experience. Whole theories may be synopsized in phrases such as Hans Naumann’s gesunkenes Kulturgut describing folklore as the cultural slag that works its way down from the elite to the folk, and the equally famous einfache Formen of André Jolles applied to primary forms of oral expression.

Motif-Indexing and Tale-Typing

All forms of folklore must be classified in an orderly and systematic way if they are to be analyzed and interpreted. The interrelated Motif-Index of Folk Literature of Stith Thompson and Types of the Folktale of Antti Aarne and Thompson provide one major system, with other interlocking indexes, such as Baughman’s for England and North America, those of Tom Peete Cross and O’Sullivan-Christiansen for Ireland, Thompson-Balys and Thompson-Roberts for India, and a number of collateral national indexes. No proper folklorist can be untrained in these tools. Anthropologists are noticeably ill at ease in handling them, or rather, they do not handle them, and in essay after essay they depict folk narratives collected from their society as a reflector of culture traits and tensions in that society, unaware that the same tales are told at the other end of the world. Criticisms and resentments of the type and motif indexes deplore their reduction of pleasing wonder tales, fabliaux, exempla, romances, jests, and ballads to skeletal outlines, assembled, tabulated, and computerized by the practitioners of the Finnish historic-geographic method in their ambitious quest for the time, place, and form of the original text. The forbidding lists of numerals and letters make an obvious target for the uninitiated. In reviewing the England volume in the Folktales of the World series, the London Evening Standard captioned the piece, “one time there was an F469.1.” This jeu d’esprit suggests an inside joke about the folklorists’ congress, at which Stith Thompson arose and said, “Gentlemen, I wish to bring to your attention an extremely interesting new tale type, 469.” He sat down to thunderous applause. An amateur in the audience asked his neighbor the meaning of this performance. “Well, we are all such experts we don’t bother to tell the tales, we just refer to their numbers.” The dilettante then requested the platform and announced grandly, “Gentlemen, allow me to make known to you a startling discovery of an extraordinary folkstory, Type 1087.” Complete silence greeted his announcement, and he took his seat abashed and crestfallen. “What happened?” he asked his neighbor. “Well, some can tell ‘em and some can’t,” was the reply. This tale about folklorists is itself a folktale, attached to Bob Hope’s gagwriters who amuse themselves by reeling off the numbers on the jokes in their file.

The criticism of the indexes quite misses the point that they are a means, not an end, a tool or technique, not a theory. Robert Graves had fun reviewing my Negro Folktales in Michigan in Commentary and making snide remarks on the notes packed with type and motif numbers for the purpose, he said, of charting the routes of tales under the obsolete premise of difïusionism. But tracing the migration of stories and songs is not the primary aim of the index-user. Firstly, he wishes to establish the traditional character, the family relationships, the genealogical tree, of his collected samples. In a word, is the story he had heard folklore? If so, how well known is it and in what places? To these questions the indexes provide answers. They lay out thoroughfares and side streets through the maze of collected materials. What the type index can be criticized for is an imperialistic design on the folktales of the world, which cannot all be neatly squeezed into the slots of the European tale-synopses with which Aarne began. For this reason Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Boratav composed an independent type index of Turkish folktales.

Each genre needs its own retrieval system. Archer Taylor has made riddles logical in his analytic encyclopedia, English Riddles from Oral Tradition. Three hundred five ballad types were canonized by Francis James Child, and Malcolm Laws has identified Native American Ballads through a letter and number code. Children’s rhymes are arranged alphabetically by Peter and Iona Opie in the Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes. The elusive legend has been tackled by Reidar Christiansen working with Norwegian examples, in The Migratory Legends, and international committees are now wrestling with the problems of global legend and ballad classifications. Customs and items of material culture cannot be as readily pigeonholed as oral texts, but the Folklore Society keeps issuing volumes of British Calendar Customs, organized on the calendar year, a principle popular in Europe but not in the United States where seasonal rite and celebration are relatively subdued.

Indexing and classifying systems enable the collector to annotäte his texts and field reports properly, and annotating becomes almost a separate technique. A pox on the author who strings together type and motif numbers and bibliographic references without elaboration! Notes should be readable and informative. A text without an explanatory note is the surest mark of a half-baked folklorist. The greatest of all annotations, Bolte and Polfvka’s five volumes of commentary on the Grimms’ Household Tales, has become in its turn a celebrated and indispensable classification tool.

Archiving

The manuscript and tape archives of Europe and the United States are treasure houses for the folklorist to plumb, or perhaps they represent the labyrinthine maze of Daedalus through which Theseus must find his way in and out, grasping for a thread. Field collecting, indexing, and archiving blend one into the other. The collector often deposits his hard-won specimens in an archive for safe-keeping and greater or less availability to others, depending on the contract option he chooses. In Europe a government or university-supported folklore institute often has professional collectors on its staff who feed materials regularly into the national or provincial archive. The much less pretentious American archives have developed chiefly at universities on the basis of student collections. Archivists tend to organize their genres according to standard reference systems: tales by Aarne-Thompson, ballads by Child and Laws, beliefs by Wayland Hand’s two volumes in the Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, riddles by Taylor, games by Paul Brewster’s American Nonsinging Games and Alice B. Gomme’s The Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland. When Stith Thompson was revising The Types of the Folktale, he visited major archives to obtain information on the number of established tales and possible new tale types received since the previous edition in 1928, and he incorporated this data into the 1961 edition. One of his significant findings was the trend to greatly increased collecting of anecdotes and a corresponding diminution of magic tales. Sean O’Sullivan, archivist of the magnificent Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin, has written the invaluable Handbook of Irish Folklore, adapted from the categories of the Swedish folklore archive in Uppsala, and used by the field collectors in the Irish counties as a questionnaire guide; and he also compiled, in association with Reider Christiansen, The Types of the Irish Folktale, a listing of the Aarne-Thompson tales in the Dublin archive. In this kind of symbiosis the archivist, collector, and type indexer join forces.

In spite of the use by folklore archivists of certain national and international classification systems, archives do not conform to any universal model, and each is to some extent idiosyncratic. The master file rests in the brain pan of the chief archivist. Descriptions of the organization of various major archives can be found in the files of the Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, edited at Indiana University by George List, director of the Archives of Traditional Music. As an example of the problems confronting archives builders in the United States, we may cite the question currently under heated discussion, as to whether a collection should remain intact and be catalogued under an accession number or whether it should be distributed among the various genres already in the archive. The genre specialist will of course prefer to have all the texts of a tale, song, or custom side by side, while the ethnologically minded folklorist will argue persuasively that each collection possesses its own individuality, marked by the bias of the collector, and must be preserved as a unit. Compromises are possible, such as photocopying the collection and distributing the sheets of the copy. The accessioning of tapes presents problems quite different from those of manuscripts. Tapes must be copied to protect the originals, and they cannot be reshuffled as can paper sheets. But again procedures vary, and the Irish Folklore Commission has transcribed its tapes onto manuscripts, microfilmed the manuscripts for security, and released the tapes for fresh collecting.

At any rate the all-around folklorist must know how to make the most of the institutional folklore archives whose materials dwarf even the mountains of printed texts.

Bibliography

Since the world is his province, in the sense that items of folklore can traverse the globe, the folklorist must acquire bibliographical savvy. Stith Thompson tells how when as a graduate student at Harvard in 1914 he was assigned by the great Kittredge to investigate the presence of European tales in the repertoire of North American Indians, no one in Cambridge knew about the Aarne index published in Finland four years before, in the now prestigious Folklore Fellows Communications series. At that time, and for long after, the Harvard faculty contained no committed folklore scholar. To enable their colleagues to keep up with the multifarious publications issued in many languages, some folklorists devote a large portion of their energies to preparing bibliographic inventories. The most monumental of these is the Internationale Volkskundliche Bibliographie edited from Basel, Switzerland by Robert Wildhaber with the aid of scores of collaborators around the world. Because of its formidable coverage, this work appears some years after the period it deals with. For more timely aids, there is the June issue of Southern Folklore Quarterly given over entirely to a classified listing of books and articles issued the preceding year. Ralph Steele Boggs conducted this bibliography for twenty-five years, and Merle Simmons is now in charge, both professors of Spanish. The SFQ bibliography has always emphasized Latin American as well as North American publications, although Professor Simmons has extended its scope to the Romance-language countries of Europe; it furnishes pithy synoptic notes for nearly every entry. Folklore Abstracts commenced in 1963 as a quarterly bulletin sponsored by the American Folklore Society and devoted to summarizing the contents of articles in folklore journals and periodicals of related interest. The first editor, Donald M. Winkelman, steadily enlarged the corps of abstracters, enlisting fellow degree candidates at Indiana University from countries abroad, and building up an editorial staff at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University. Herbert Halpert of Memorial University, St. John’s, Newfoundland, assumed the demanding editorial post in 1968. The acceptance of this responsibility by Halpert, an expert collector and annotator of oral folklore, indicates the links between fieldwork, indexing, and bibliography recognized by the folklorist. Vance Randolph is another case in point of the indefatigable collector who turned to patient exhuming of all kinds of elusive printed references for his forthcoming Ozark Folklore, A Bibliography. A dramatic example of the American folklorist on alien soil faced by not one but over a dozen impenetrable tongues, who unearthed and made visible nearly 7000 publications, is Edwin C. Kirkland, author of the compendious Bibliography of South Asian Folklore. On leave from the University of Florida as cultural attaché of the State Department in India, Professor Kirkland enlisted the aid of official translators of the National Library in Calcutta to render titles from the thirteen major languages. Since spellings are completely individualistic, and the same person may sign his transliterated name differently on different occasions, Kirkland faced formidable problems.

The folklore bibliographer has two perpetual headaches: how to classify and arrange his entries; and what to accept or reject. In his preemptive but fallible production, A Bibliography of North American Folklore and Folksong, Charles Haywood solved the first puzzle creditably, with his separation of the Indian from all other groups, and his subdivision of these other groups into regional, occupational, and ethnic units. But he came a cropper on his principle of inclusion, for he mixed together all kinds of writings, from local-color novels to county histories to memoirs to scholarly articles to fakelore. For expert screening of field collections and library studies, one turns to the comprehensive bibliographical lists in Aarne-Thompson or Laws or Baughman’s Type and MotifIndex of the Folktales of England and North America, or any of the standard indexes. Here again several folklore techniques merge: bibliography, fieldwork, the making of classificatory indexes.

Related Fields

As part of his technical equipment, the folklore scholar needs to possess more than a bowing acquaintance with three well established disciplines which intersect with his own at certain key points.

Folklore and Anthropology. With cultural anthropology, a branch of anthropology unfortunately somewhat on the wane since the death of Melville Herskovits, folklorists have a natural affinity. Cultural anthropology relates the verbal, graphic, plastic, musical, and performing arts to the institutions of the society in which they function. These concepts of “culture” and “function,” as used by ethnologists, enable the folklorist to transcend random collecting and place his materials within a social context. Jerome Mintz’s Legends of the Hasidim is an example of a field study drawn from a rigidly orthodox Hasidic community in Brooklyn that applies Boasian concepts to a body of oral narratives. If Frazer is now a whipping boy, his intellectual influence on anthropologists and folklorists jointly in the realm of comparative agricultural rituals must be reckoned with in the history of ideas. The doctrine of survivals that Frazer applied to his thesis of the ritual sacrifice of the divine king was formulated by an anthropologist still highly esteemed, Edward B. Tylor, who himself made extensive use of the materials of folklore on a comparative basis. In his theory of animism in primitive religion, Tylor opened another door through which anthropologists and folklorists both pass. Today the term “folk religion” is replacing primitive religion, and applies not just to non-Christian polytheistic societies but to the underlying strata of magico-religious belief in Christianized countries. Robert Redfield’s concept of the “great and little traditions” appeals to some folklorists who see in this polarity an analogy between the official and unofficial cultures.

Because the streams of folklore are continually crossing between the nonliterate societies and the blacked-out segments of advanced populations, folklore and anthropology do find a common ground. It was Boas and his disciples who collected North American Indian tales, but it was Stith Thompson who demonstrated the European examples among them, and Alan Dundes who worked out their morphology.

Folklore and Literature. Although Francis James Child began as a mathematician, he ended in the English department at Harvard and bequeathed to the history of English literature the hallowed 305 ballads that bear his name. Since his time the literary historians of England have often strayed over their boundary line into folklorist enterprises, in balladry, in medieval romance, in source studies of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Child’s eminent successor George Lyman Kittredge ventured deep into popular belief in Witchcraft in Old and New England and The Old Farmer and His Almanac.

We may define three broad relationships of folklore to literature. There are oral poetry and oral narratives of such artistic power that they win acceptance on their own merits as literature, even though these field-recorded texts lack known authors. A generation of critics have considered the dramatic tautness and tensions and eloquent phrasings of the best ballads. Milman Parry and Albert Lord have rescued orally sung south Slavic epics and conjectured that Homer’s epics relied on similar processes of oral composition. Beowulf has been scrutinized by Robert Creed and Bruce Rosenberg as one surviving variant of an heroic folk epic. The Danish folklorist Axel Olrik in his essay on “Epic Laws of Folk Narrative” elaborated a set of aesthetic principles governing oral literature that can aid in identifying artistically superior texts. Or to put the case in reverse, I have singled out Anglo-American narratives that appealed to me for their power and intensity and found that they conform perfectly to Olrik’s laws of peak tableaux, dual protagonists, and uncluttered action.

Secondly, there is literature that begins as folklore and ends as a polished product stamped with an individual genius. In this class belong the finished Iliad and Odyssey, if we consider that Homer set in writing, with selection, revision, and time for reediting, the traditional texts of oral bards. Elias Lönnröt went further in stitching together traditional runes and charms to compose the Kalevala. The whole process whereby oral legends and lays cluster around celebrated champions in preliterate, seminomadic cultures and eventually arrive in written form as sagas, romances, heroic ballads, and folk epics, has been admirably treated by Hector Munro and Nora K. Chadwick in their three wide-ranging volumes on The Growth of Literature. Do we place here a so-called folk poet like Larry Gorman, the lumberjack minstrel of Maine and the Maritimes, who composed satirical verses within a traditional form and with traditional tunes, but aimed at the immediate objects of his ire? The West Indian calypso and Puerto Rican plena are similarly composed on the spot within a set metrical and stanzaic pattern. If these compositions endure and become traditional, as have the songs of Larry Gorman, collected half a century after his death by Edward Ives, they represent a process of literary creating indebted at both ends to folklore.

Thirdly, there are the famous authors who have drawn for plots and local color upon folk tradition. Again a number of gradations exist, from Joel Chandler Harris who listened to Georgia Negro folktales and reworked them with a close knowledge of their form and mood, to Longfellow who contrived The Song of Hiawatha at second-hand, from the notebooks of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and adapted these genuine materials to fit the nineteenth century sentimental stereotype of the primeval red man. Constance Rourke was the first literary scholar to illustrate the debts of a number of major American authors, among them Irving, Mark Twain, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, and Henry James, to a pervasive popular humorous lore. Other critics followed her lead, most recently and most notably Daniel G. Hoffman in Form and Fable in American Fiction. These critics do not distinguish between the influence on an author’s imagination of folklore directly encountered, and folklore read in printed form. If he recognized this distinction Hoffman would be in a much better position to appreciate the Vermont sketches of Rowland Robinson, who deftly captured the themes and rhythms of oral yarn-spinning in a cobbler’s shop. At any rate, this large area of investigation beckons the folklorist, who must at all odds have some training in literature.

Folklore and History. Few will argue about the interrelationships of folklore with anthropology and literature, but eyebrows, or even hackles, will rise at the suggestion that folklore has a common interest with history. One new development that is reducing the opposition of historians who value the documented fact and scorn the verbal rumor is the coming of age of oral history, although a large gap separates the emphasis of oral historians on the elite from the focus of traditional history, or historical tradition, upon the common folk and minority groups. But the use of the tape recorder and the personal interview to obtain remembered information now unites folklorist and historian. And there are historians, from Herodotus to Samuel Eliot Morison, who have respected traditions as a source of historical knowledge. The question of validating such traditions, which deal with events major and trivial, has perplexed scholars in a number of fields, and has attracted the attention of one active folklorist after another, although usually, like George Laurence Gomme who wrote Folklore as an Historical Science, they have not possessed historical training. From the other end, the historian Theodore Biegen in Grass Roots History contended persuasively for a reorientation of historical thinking away from the national political scene in Washington, D.C., to the towns and hamlets of the countryside. In speaking of sources for the grass roots historian, to be found in attic mementoes, diaries, and the so-called America letters and songs dealing with the immigrant experience, Biegen verged toward oral traditions. The folklorist certainly needs to understand sufficient of historical method to handle and evaluate the local legends, blason populaire, anecdotes, and reminiscences that continually pour his way.

Just as I wrote this, a graduate student in the history department at the University of California told me how he stumbled on folklore, actually through a course taken by his wife, and so discovered a means of learning about the 95 percent of the Negro population omitted from histories of the Negro. There is Gladys Fry, a recent Ph.D. in Folklore at Indiana University, with an M.A. in history, herself a black, who obtained historical traditions with a tape recorder and used them for her dissertation on the “night doctors” and other bogies feared by slaves. Two other students have completed dissertations on county folk histories in Kentucky and Ohio combining oral and written sources. Traditions may not yield precise dates but they can reveal accurate prejudices, hates, dreads, and what Thomas Browne once called “vulgar errors.”

Folklife Studies and the Folk Museum

Ever since the baptizing of “folklore,” the term has to some suggested artifacts as well as oral forms. At the International Folklore Congress held in London in 1891, a special exhibition featured objects connected with folklore, such as sorcerers’ instruments, amulets, a harvest “baby” of straw, a forked hazel twig used in dowsing, ornaments, and carvings. The idea of a folk museum, indoor or outdoor, displaying utensils, furniture, and dwellings of an agrarian past, is commonplace in Europe and now gains headway in the United States, particularly at the New York State Historical Society headquarters in Cooperstown. There a folk art collection, ranging from wall paintings to hay rakes, is housed in the Fenimore House, and an outdoor Farmer’s Museum reconstructs a pioneer village, with handicrafts demonstrated. A master’s degree may be obtained in either Museum Methods or American Folklore, administered by a resident faculty attached to Oneonta College in the State University of New York system. The doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania in Folklore has now added Folklife to its title. In England a Society for Folk-Life Studies organized in 1963 issues a journal and holds annual meetings that attract some members of the much older Folklore Society. The terms “material culture” and “folklife” appear regularly in the current vocabulary of folklorists.

Examples such as these indicate an enlargement of the concept of folklore as oral literature to bring it more into line with the German notion of Volkskunde and the European notion of ethnology. Accordingly the folklorists of today must be familiar with techniques of folklife research, such as field collecting of material culture specimens, interviewing of craftsmen concerning their skills and markets, and distribution mapping of traditional house types and pottery designs. In his added dimension, the folklorist will perceive relationships between economic practice and folk belief, as in the “Shetland fisherman’s taboo names for boat parts and fishing equipment,” alluded to by Alexander Fenton in writing about “Material Culture as an Aid to Local History Studies in Scotland.”²

History of the Study of Folklore

Folklorists properly prize the accomplishments of brilliant theoretical scholars and dedicated collectors who established the science of folklore in the nineteenth century, and drew upon the labors of still earlier antiquaries and traveler-reporters. It is such illustrious names as the Grimms, Benfey, Pitré, Afanasiev, Asbjörnsen and Moe, Sébillot, Gaidoz, Campbell of Islay, and the group I have called the “Great Team of English Folklorists”—Lang, Gomme, Clodd, Nutt, and Hartland—who sparked each other through their philosophic controversies as much as through their agreed principles. The United States too can point to earlier giants, who deserve more attention: Jeremiah Curtin, industrious collector of Irish and Slavic folktales; Charles Godfrey Leland, writer on Algonquin Indian legends of New England and gypsy lore of Europe; and Thomas F. Crane, editor of Italian Popular Tales and The Exempla of Jacques de Vitry and author of informative articles on the “external history” of the Grimms’ Märchen collections. These pioneer scholars wrote classics still irreplaceable, and upon which the modern masterworks build: Stith Thompson commenced the MotifIndex with the rich treasury of references Bolte and Polivka had patiently added to the Grimms’ own notes and commentaries to their household tales.

Writing the intellectual history of a field of learning and critical biographies of its eminent men and women requires a special technique of library research, value judgments, and the tracing of genetic relationships. In folklore, this kind of history has special rewards, more even than in the history of historical writing or the history of literary scholarship for tasks of the folklorist are to a large extent cooperative and collaborative and require the contributions of the living as well as the dead. The large theoretical systems of both Lang and Müller have passed, but some of their statements on folklore problems cannot be improved upon today, and they both stimulated collectors throughout the Empire.

The other side of the coin is the danger that specialists unfamiliar with the major folklore works of the past may duplicate or fail to profit from them. Archer Taylor points out how such clever scholars as J. G. Von Hahn, Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, and Joseph Campbell unwittingly repeated some of each other’s formulations on the biographical pattern of the legendary hero. Because so many doors lead into the study of folklore, the history of folklore studies offers as many problems to the folklorist as does the neat archiving of the materials of folklore.

International Relations in Folklore

Whatever his special interest or regional preoccupation, the folklorist who pursues his subject far enough will find his trail leading to the corners of the globe. Somehow he must gain access to the comparative materials and learn about the relevant studies that will buttress his own inquiry. To cultivate international channels of communication and contact open to folklorists is a technique in itself, and one that can afford many delights. In my own case, beginning as the most parochial of American folklorists, I have been able, after getting on the international bandwagon, to attend folklore congresses in Sweden, Germany, Denmark, France, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Scotland, and Argentina, as well as meet folklorists during extended stays in Japan and England. These congresses and the personal friendships that accrue are an education in themselves and productive of enterprises not otherwise feasible. The Aarne-Thompson index resulted from Stith Thompson’s visit to Finland and consultation with Kaarle Krohn, the dean of European folklorists. The Folktales of the World series could never have developed, or even been conceived, without the network of international contacts made possible through the congresses and conferences of European-based societies. Now a Society for Asian Folklore has been organized, and held its first meeting in Bloomington in 1966.

What might be called the technique of international relations involves travel and visits to archives, institutes, centers, folk museums, and society meetings, reinforced by correspondence, symposia, translation projects, and publications exchanges. By such means the world-wide fraternity of folklorists maintain their intellectual bonds in the face of vast distances and hostile ideologies. A tangible demonstration of the bonds formed and the forays completed into foreign lands by American folklorists in the past two decades can be seen in the volume Folklore Research Around the World, A North American Point of View, which I edited in 1961 in the Indiana University Folklore Series. Europe still attracts the largest number of peripatetic fieldworkers, archives-workers, and folk-museum workers, but Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Australia too have their aficionados. Nor is it only senior faculty who develop overseas ties. The latest Newsletter of the Folklore Institute at Indiana University quotes correspondence from pre-doctoral students or new Ph.D.’s (some of whom have returned to their home countries) from American Samoa, North Malaita in the British Solomons, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Poland, Malaysia, East Pakistan, and Thailand. Certainly one of the chief strengths of the folklorist in today’s anxious world is his ability to locate and work with like-minded colleagues on every continent.

This paper has attempted to isolate components of the genus folklorist. Members of this genus may vary widely in their theoretical views, but they do employ a common set of techniques, or ways of examining, ferreting out, and cogitating over their materials. A number of folklorists, swayed by the computer and awed, like everybody else, by the scientific method, will wish to consider themselves hard-nosed social scientists, who draw representational models and predict the migration routes and stylistic changes of tale and song, perhaps quantifying the number of proverbs a given individual will utter in his lifetime. But even the most hard-nosed folklorist is at heart a humanist, attracted by the vagaries, the affability, the expressive power, and the wayward genius of tradition-directed peoples.

Notes

1. Just to show how the Society keeps growing, this past November, 1971, the Society held a four-day meeting in Washington, D.C., with three concurrent sessions.

2. Journal of the Folklore Institute 2 (1965): 326-39.

Reprinted from the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 11 (August, 1968) : 1-23.