SYMPOSIUM IV

Studying Folklore

FIRST SESSION

Chairman: Professor George Herzog

CHAIRMAN: I cannot claim to be an authority on the total field of folklore but since Dean Thompson has asked me to do so I have agreed to act as chairman for this symposium. It covers a great variety of subjects, and I have asked Professor Sigurd Erixon to start off our discussions. We will begin to work on the question of the general concept of folklore.

PROFESSOR SIGURD ERIXON (University of Stockholm, and the Northern Museum, Stockholm, Sweden) : As most of this group know, the term “folklore” was coined in 1846 by the English antiquarian William John Thorns to take the place of the awkward term “popular antiquities.” In connection with the tradition stemming from the romantic literary period the interest at that time was mostly concentrated on such branches of folk culture as were regarded representative of the folk soul, such as language, poetry, tales, beliefs, customs. In this sense the term folklore was adopted especially in Western Europe and later on also in southern Europe and the United States. In the north of Europe other terms have been usually employed. In Scandinavia, for example, folkdigt has meant folk poetry and folkminne has meant folk memory.

For historical reasons the interest in folk poetry in Norway, Denmark, and Finland became so intensive and achieved such high development in the nineteenth century that academic posts in folk poetry were created in the Universities of Oslo, Helsing- fors, Abo, and Copenhagen. In Sweden, where this interest was not so intense, the development of instruction in folklore came about in a partially different manner. After 1910, however, several assistant professorships were created at the University of Stockholm.

In Sweden certain scientific interests for the material aspects of folklore had manifested themselves already as early as the Middle Ages. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this interest was further stimulated, among other things by the famous botanist Linné. In the middle of the nineteenth century an interest arose in the general study of the ethnology of the Swedish people. Hylten-Cavallius produced a regional survey, which was the first attempt at what we call Nordic ethnology. This was the most important work of its kind in Sweden before 1900.

The Northern Museum was founded in 1873 in Stockholm. Under the guidance of this museum a more extensive research in folk culture developed, as the scholars in their collecting were confronted with the environment and the realities of the people’s lives. The program was extended to include arts and crafts, home industries, costumes, and buildings; and some decades later all the dances were subjected to study. In 1919 a professorship in Nordic ethnology or folk life research was established at the Northern Museum, and in 1934 regular academic training began there, in cooperation with the University of Stockholm. Ten years later there was established a professorship at the University at Lund, and in 1947 still another at the University at Uppsala. In Finland, in addition to the early professorships in folklore, there were later established professorships in Finnish ethnography. In 1940 a professorship in folk-life research was founded at the University of Oslo in Norway. The same has also been the case in Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, and lately also in Switzerland. Folk-life research, as you see, has gained an important position in the whole of northern and eastern Europe. This is in combination with the study of all aspects of folk poetry.

In Germany, however, a midway was being prepared. Volks- kunde was considered either to be folklore in a more narrow sense, or a partly extended subject limited to the artistically creative aspects of folk culture, including house types, costumes, dancing, and others.

During the last decades the functionalist theory launched by Malinowski began to influence European ethnology. We consider here of special value the stress on the folk culture as a unit, as a cultural organism whose various elements must not be arbitrarily separated but are to be considered in their relation to one another and to their social environment. Thus the need for a unifying subject of study has brought about a clear-cut distinction in terms like cultural anthropology and folk-life research.

Several French scientists such as Sebillot and Saintyves in France have also adopted the idea of an over-all subject and have demanded a more comprehensive ethnological discipline.

The functionalist school has lately obtained a prominent representative in central Europe by the appointment of Dr. Richard Weiss as professor of Swiss folk-life research at the University at Zurich. He has, for instance, applied functionalist principles in his work Volkskunde der Schweiz,¹¹ which appeared in 1946.

Malinowski and Radcliife-Brown opposed the comparative as well as the historical aspects of research methods in the study of culture. This attitude would have been valid as a historical reaction against the previous passion for antiques and the rather uncritical coupling together of elements from quite different cultural spheres or groups. However, the European scholars working in regionally limited local cultures are not involved in comparative problems to the same extent, and they cannot therefore approve of such over-all negative attitudes. In fact, a regionally limited research of folk culture is a more accurate science than general ethnology, which makes generalizations at a too early stage. At the same time that the folk-life research is based on limited regions, it requires comparative aspects which combine the historic limits with the geographic facts, especially with regard to the migration of cultural elements. The most important instrument, therefore, is the distribution map. Detailed cultural inventories are now made in many European countries and comprehensive atlases are being worked out.

In Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend¹² I have found that the opinions about what folklore means vary considerably in the United States as well as in Europe. Stith Thompson says, for instance, that although the word folklore is more than a century old no exact agreement has ever been reached as to its meaning. He also says that all truly traditional cultural elements must be considered as folklore. Others limit the subject to only literary or only oral traditions. The one definition seems to me as valid as the other. It would be desirable, of course, if these opinions could merge, but it seems to me of the same importance that the limitations should be logical and consistent. The limitation to include only oral and literary traditions is acceptable provided there will be complementary studies for other cultural branches, for instance as it has been done in Scandinavia and Finland.

I will attempt here to show you how we in Scandinavia define the subject of folk-life research in its entirety. For as long as was possible our Swedish ethnologists and folklorists avoided making any fundamental statements when presenting a general research program. They preferred to concentrate their efforts on practical field research, collecting and studying the material collected. This is an attitude which might be plainly justified by the rapidity with which our old cultural forms were disappearing. During the last decade, however, we have begun to express our opinions in this matter, and these can be found in some of our publications.

The object of ethnology or folk-life research is to attain a deeper knowledge and understanding of man, by means of a combined and comparative study of culture, society, and the individual. In the concept of culture, we include the techniques, equipment, products, behavior, norms, and ideas that man has created, developed, and made use of as artificial a^ids in order to supply his physical and psychological needs. It is then essentially an aspect of culture that it can be transmitted both as a whole and in its constituent elements from individual to individual and from group to group. It can also be handed down from generation to generation on the basis of cooperation within the groups. By society we mean the groupings of various kinds within which man lives and works. From the point of view of culture, society functions as a unifying and supporting organization within which each individual and group has a part of its own to perform. The area of distribution of the different culture elements may but does not usually coincide with that of the social groups, and most of them extend far beyond the boundaries of the groups. This makes our task much more difficult than if we were dealing only with a pure group study.

Like society, culture is composed of the old and the new, of products already finished, of repetitions, and of creations still in course of progress. There is a perpetual struggle resulting in variations and losses and renewals in thought and action. Every function and activity needs something to fit into, a progress in time, and cannot be completely visualized before it has been performed—that is, before it has become historical. It is impossible to make a survey of this development in all its functional connections, even within one and the same time level, and we can only approach a kind of superficial perfection. It is therefore an historical task to make an analysis of all the various connections within the general pattern. We must study each cultural element to see its relation to the group unit as a whole, as well as to trace the origin and development of each of these cultural elements. For this reason folk-life research becomes an historical branch of knowledge even when concentrated upon the present age.

The historical process is too complex to be visualized in its entirety, but each separate culture element can be registered, and also whole group activities and conditions can be studied in their chronological setting and in relation to environment. The history of evolution written in this way is therefore founded on the selection of certain elements, and its values are altogether dependent on how representative the selection is and the extent to which the single element may be exactly established.

An investigation of these various elements in folk culture should help us to understand what is essential and not essential in the culture, and how the different phenomena vary and are related to each other. If such investigations can be founded on quantitative relations and be statistically illustrated, this would of course be a great advantage. But we have found that there are too many factors to consider and that the knowledge of quantitative relations is still too sporadic and unreliable and we cannot, therefore, allow statistical studies to dominate our investigations. The consequence is that folk-life researchers havei relied on their practical knowledge of the living culture and on their intuition rather than on statistics.

In Europe, as in the United States, men live and act in a network of intercrossing relations and social contacts. The rather uniform cultural life within the local grouping which may have existed formerly, in the same way as it exists in many primitive tribes even today, has now essentially changed. The ethnological research of our years, therefore, is conditioned by the rapid changes which have characterized our civilization for several decades and which, more and more rapidly, have effaced the traditional culture in the various regions. There has been a breaking up of old groups and communities and a leveling of the differences between earlier areas of distribution. In this period of great change there are still certain islands, which we may call relic islands, and many traces of dying cultures within our reach. Our modern folk-like researchers must utilize the extraordinary possibilities which are thus placed at their disposal.

Our principal task should be to study the happenings of all time, to analyze the processes both of disintegration and renewal. But we must not blame the ethnologist if he continues to make use of the last chances of investigation through the study of the survivals of old cultural life. This may explain the somewhat narrow orientation toward the older traditional peasant culture for which our folk-life research has sometimes been criticized. In the childhood of our research, scholars were in the habit of looking for traces of antiquity in the contemporary peasant culture and in many respects overrating its age. This tendency can be checked if we use comparative methods and regard them always as indispensable for ethnological study, but, properly checked, these studies can be based upon locally restricted researches of one kind or another.

Sometimes a culture is profoundly affected by some outside dominating center such as the state or some international cultural organization or even an invasion from outside. We have something here which is related to but not quite identical with acculturation, as spoken of by American anthropologists. The students of folk-life research do not consider these changes to be within their province so long as the changes are enforced and are continuing to take place. But if this force from outside happens to be discontinued and leaves some survivals in the culture of the group, these survivals then become objects of folk-life research. They have become a part of the real culture of the group. Of course, some of these elements which came from the central focus in the form of propaganda or merely in the form of fashion brought in from outside may be altered to such an extent that it is difficult to tell which is original and which has been imposed. This makes for a particular problem in folk-life research.

In conclusion I should like to suggest that the subject with which we are concerned is in my opinion a comparative cultural research on a regional basis, with a sociological and historical orientation and with certain psychological implications. This is what we call folk-life research. It is now the question for all of you as representatives of folklore to take a stand on the general question as to whether folklore can be regarded as identical with this subject in its complex whole, or whether folklore comprises only traditional oral patterns. Even if folklore be considered in the narrow sense just suggested, there will be many places in which its limits cross the boundaries I have been trying to sketch.

CHAIRMAN: I am very much impressed, as I am sure all of us have been, with Professor Erixon’s ideal of folklore study. Although everyone is free in every country to cultivate his own procedures in folklore, I understood you to feel that the ideal of folklore as a science is that it should embrace the entire traditional culture of man. As against that type of definition we have the somewhat more restricted concept of folklore as a subject limited properly to oral tradition, or perhaps extended to include folk arts. These differences of opinion are partly connected with the history of science and the way the various sciences have developed in each country, and they are also connected with individual tastes and preferences. One complicating question is the differentiation between folklore and anthropology which has occupied itself for a long time with a description with what we call traditional cultures, the so-called pre-literate societies. On the other hand in many European countries people calling themselves sometimes folklorists and sometimes ethnologists have done a comparable task in describing the folk life that is the total life of the folk community, in Europe. I think the settling of the boundaries between folklore and anthropology is a question particularly alive in this country. We are certainly worse off, when it comes to clear conception at this point, than many of the European countries.

DEAN STITH THOMPSON (Indiana University) : In order to see how badly off we are, one has only to read the score of definitions which recently appeared in the Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore.¹² This confusion is not entirely confined to the United States. I found it also disturbing the folklorists in all parts of South America.

The cause of the confusion is not far to seek. What folklore study has taken place in the Western Hemisphere has practically all been from the individual interest of the collector or the student and has never been sponsored by the government or by any central organization. The worker in the field has gone ahead with his investigations and he has often imagined that his type of investigation constituted the whole of the body of folklore. It is natural that there should be specialists, people who collect implements and all kinds of material objects for folk museums, students of folk dance, students of folk song, collectors of tales, people whose interest is in customs or superstitions, and even those who study the ephemeral products of the country press or the comic strips which constitute every man’s reading. The difference between folklore and well-organized sciences is that each one of these specialists is likely to think of himself as folk- lorist par excellence and he is not likely to consider that he is cultivating only a small segment of a larger field.

We can, of course, make the differentiation between certain groups of folklorists into those who give a broad interpretation and those who give a narrow interpretation of the field. My impression is that most folklorists in the United States belong to the narrow-interpretation group. They are likely to think of folklore as something having to do with the spoken word. Some of the border of this group would go over into a consideration of superstitions and queer customs and perhaps folk dances. On the other hand, I am not at all alone in wishing that our use of the word folklore should extend over into the type of material culture studies that we have just heard discussed here. It is a rather amusing commentary on our discussion that when I was in South America they were likely to speak of this broader interpretation of folklore as the North American theory. This happens because most of them had read articles by Professor Ralph Boggs and had assumed that his broad interpretation was the one current in this country.

Because of the presence in the United States of a widely scattered indigenous population of American Indians on the one hand, and of descendants of nearly every European and Asiatic literate people on the other, a very special situation has arisen. The work in ethnology and anthropology has been very well recognized and has an old and honorable academic tradition. These anthropologists have studied every aspect of the life of pre-literate peoples not only in America but elsewhere, and to some extent they have begun to extend their interest to some of the groups belonging to European tradition. But the main part of the work with what we call the old American group and the more recent European and Asiatic immigrants has come from amateurs or at least from unorganized and undirected collecting and study. This latter group has usually called themselves folklorists. One of the reasons I have been interested in making a broad definition of folklore is that I have been anxious that the folklorist should extend his interest to include the study of the cultural life of this old American group and European descendants, in much the same way that these are included in folk-life research in Scandinavia. But generally speaking, no one is doing this. The ethnologists have said, “That is not our business, we are primarily concerned with primitive peoples,” and most of the folklorists say, “No, that is not our business. What you are talking about is not folklore. Folklore is songs, tales, proverbs, and so forth but certainly it has nothing to do with the study of types of log cabins that are used throughout the United States.”

You will note that I have suggested that the folklorist dealing with literate peoples use the very broad definition, that would include the study of folk life. We may very well leave to the anthropologist or the ethnologist the study of all aspects of the life of pre-literate peoples. I know that this definition is inconsistent, but I believe that it is a practical one. If it were accepted I think it would clarify our thinking in American Folklore both North and South. It seems to me the Scandinavian folklorists have a clear notion in this matter, and I think the Irish do also. I should think it very unfortunate if the definition so clearly set forward by Professor Melville J. Herskovits in his presidential address¹³ at the American Folklore Society several years ago should gain complete currency. He insisted that folklore should be confined to verbal expression of some kind. I should wish to include all kinds of tradition and cultural history. If we do not do this, there will be no one to study the cultural life of literate peoples.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON (University of Kiel, Germany) : Hearing or reading the different definitions of what folklore is reminds me of a nice story about a celebrated scholar in electricity, if I am not wrong, Clerk Maxwell or Rutherford. This scholar once visited an electric establishment and a workmen who showed him around did not know who the visitor was. The workman gave him all kinds of explanations about the establishment but at last Maxwell (or Rutherford) asked him, “Very well, but can you explain to me what electricity is?” The workman said “I am sorry, that is one part of the work I don’t know.” Then Maxwell said “I am sorry too, that is one thing I don’t know either.” So it is also perhaps with folklore. Whether material folklore can be called folklore at all is a question, but in any case it is a science that has to be considered and, unless we consider it, it is very likely to go unstudied. In Estonia we have made a distinction between folklore and ethnography. Ethnography we call research in Sachvolkskunde, while folklore is the study of the oral or verbal tradition. This is simply a question of terminology, but it has resulted in the fact that some very important practical kinds of folklore have been neglected and forgotten by most of the folklorists. When you begin to speak about such things to the common folklorist he always says, “Can such queer things be folklore? Incredible!” I have some examples in mind; for instance, the study of chain letters— that are sent around with the request to copy three or nine times and send to all your best friends, and if you don’t you! will be taken down with a terrible disease or have a terrible accident. Another is the study of rumors that go around. Whatever we do with the definition of folklore ought to permit and encourage the study of all these various manifestations of culture.

CHAIRMAN: What Professer Anderson says suggests another thing also. There is always the tendency to feel that folklore is something that comes out of the country districts. But there is a good deal of folklore that is urban. Old cities especially have developed their own traditions, and these need to be studied.

DR. ERMINIE VOEGELIN (Indiana University) : For several years I have been troubled about the definition of this field of folklore and of what it should cover. An anthropologist who edits the Journal of American Folklore comes very soon face to face with this question. I know that a number of the anthropologists have always regarded folklore as confined to oral tradition. But I think it is possible that in the anthropological circles the problem is resolving itself, more or less. Within the last five years I have noticed that several of the anthropologists, when they were writing about what we used to call the folklore of pre-literate peoples, spoke of it as primitive literature or oral literature or oral expression, and are dropping out the term folklore entirely from the papers they write. So perhaps the anthropologists are resolving it in that way; I am not at all sure. I could give examples of these. Of course this is dodging the question on the part of the anthropologists, for I know that they still consider folklore is the oral form of expression in the group they are studying. Now as to the point Dean Thompson made about the lack of studies of the culture of literate peoples: Among both the American anthropologists and the sociologists there have been a number of field studies made within the last decades concerning special folk cultures. We know about Robert Redfield’s work on the folk cultures in Central America, and coming nearer home we have Carl Withers’ study, Plainsville, U. S. A. Several such studies could be cited in which anthropologists have thoroughly demonstrated what Kroeber has always insisted on: namely, that anthropology as a subject is not necessarily limited to primitive peoples. These students have taken this study under their roof because no other social science is dealing with it. More and more anthropologists have ceased to consider themselves limited to the study of non-literate cultures. For Kroeber, anthropology is the total study of mankind. And so the field is not quite so restricted as many of us used to feel.

Coming back to the field of folklore itself, I think there are also a few persons working in American folklore who do include the study of material culture such as house types, implements, customs, and so forth. More and more of them are extending their interests into other fields than merely oral literature.

In the large number of definitions which Mrs. Leach has brought together in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend¹² you. will find a considerable dichotomy of opinion existing as to just what the folklore field amounts to. I shall be much interested to see how the question is going to be resolved if it ever is resolved, but I believe that bringing all these definitions out into the open will have a tendency to promote some agreement on the scope of the field of folklore.

CHAIRMAN: I should like to add briefly to Dr. Erminie Voege- lin’s comments. Not only have anthropologists in this country in the last two decades become interested in folk cultures of the western world in contrast to the older preoccupation with the so-called primitive cultures, but as you know we have had several studies by anthropologists of complex contemporary civilizations such as that of Japan by Dr. Ruth Benedict. At any rate the anthropologist in this country has come to believe that for his subjects there is no limit except the earth itself.

DR. SVEN LILJEBLAD (Idaho State College, Pocatello, Idaho) : Like many other people I am confused as to what folklore really is. I studied what you call folklore here for some eight years in Sweden before I had ever heard that I was a folklorist. But one day at the university when I wanted to get a rather large room for a lecture that I was to give I was told, “You folklorists always seem to need too much space.” That was the first time I had ever heard that I was a folklorist, and from that day on the word folklore has always puzzled me. This has been particularly true since I came to the United States and from time to time have had to teach folklore here.

I think the best answer would be a very practical approach. Every man who is doing a piece of research has material in front of him in which he is interested. So he applies a method which is most profitable in that particular case. In field work or in scholarly investigation of material it doesn’t make much difference what we call it, and we are likely to go ahead with our studies without thinking too much about definitions. On the other hand, when it comes to teaching and presenting folklore to students and preparing them to do research in the field it seems to me that we do need a rather well-established definition.

Many American folklorists limit their field of teaching to certain oral forms. They will be interested in tales, legends, folk songs of certain kinds, riddles, proverbs, and dance songs, but they will not go further into the study of the traditional life of the people. Such studies can have their own methods and techniques, and it is possible to study ballads or tales historically without going into the study of the general culture. But there does come a point where such methods are no longer profitable. As soon as we begin to study the function of any of the verbal forms we have to go over to the question of beliefs and customs. The more the necessity for functional studies of folk literature is understood, the broader is likely to be the interest of the folklorist in the whole cultural life of the peoples studied.

CHAIRMAN: I am impressed by the way in which we start with what seems to be the simplest way of exploring the field of oral literature and immediately transcend it. In a way we know about the developments in Ireland but I think it would be very valuable if we could get Mr. O’Suilleabhain’s personal view as to what he thinks folklore is.

MR. SEAN O’SUILLEABHAIN (Irish Folklore Commission, Dublin, Ireland) : In Ireland we are the disciples of the Scandinavians and are very glad to be. I found that when I went to Uppsala to learn the cataloguing system there, it was an eye-opener to me. For the first time I came to see that the study of material culture was indeed a very important branch of folklore.

I don’t think it matters very much whether we call it ethnography, anthropology, or folklore. The folklorist must work where the anthropologist is not working and vice versa. If anthropologists go to Africa to study the peoples, there they must do folklore work if there are no folklorists on hand. And the folklorist has to turn anthropologist when there are no anthropologists present.

I don’t know if everyone here is acquainted with the Swedish system which embraces both the spiritual or shall I say the oral lore, and the material. These two things run in parallel directions throughout the whole system of the Swedish classification. This catalog is of the greatest importance to any fieldworker in any of the three fields we are discussing. It begins with the lore, both spiritual and material, of the people settling down on the land. This embraces legends about the house, the field, the land and all that goes with it, and also oral traditions. Then next we have the question of how people support themselves after they have once settled on the land. There is the study of hunting and fishing and implements and oral lore about them and the like. Then we come to the study of the household, the cultivation of land, the planting of crops, work within the house, the light and heat in the home, food, utensils, cleanliness, and so forth. From there we go on to the study of commerce, communications and trades, shopping, buying, selling, markets, and the like. From these things we go on to the study of the community, the people of the parish or whatever unit they are working in, the relation of master and servant, the relations between the rich and poor, the family as a unit, names, personal names, surnames, and the like. Then the administration of the law, land tenure, education, religion, the growth of towns and villages. Next they take the human .being from before birth until after his death. In some countries like mine the dead won’t lie down when they are buried and you have a tremendous lot of lore about their coming back. Then you have nature lore in all its aspects, and folk medicine. You have the calendar, time, place, and the year. Next comes a very important branch—custom and belief, which runs through all cultures. Next we come to mythological tradition starting with devils, witches, hags, and the like. I suppose we have one of the greatest bodies of fairy lore in the world in Ireland. And we have fictitious beings like Santa Claus and all kinds of bogies and the like. Next we have historical traditions consisting of what people remember or think they remember about the living and the dead. In Ireland we have another subdivision which we call religious tradition, very important in our Irish folklore. We finally get around to popular folk literature. First of all the international folk tales; then we have an equally large body of national tales in Ireland. Then we have folk songs, proverbs, riddles, psalms, prayers and so on, sayings and anecdotes—that part of folklore that you have just indicated some people want to have as an exclusive definition of the whole field. Finally one comes to amusements and pastimes of various kinds.

Now through all these divisions there run two streams, the oral or what we may call the spiritual, and the material stream. For example, if you are studying amusements we have not only to consider the patterns of the games but also the toys and the articles which people use when playing games. I don’t think that the folklorist and the ethnologist can ever be entirely separated. In practical field work one must take in both kinds of material.

PROFESSOR REIDAR TH. CHRISTIANSEN (University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway) : Speaking from the Norwegian point of view I would probably agree entirely with the scheme of cataloguing sketched out by Mr. O’Suilleabhain. There is one aspect of this, however, which occasions some difficulty for us in Norway. We find ourselves more and more broadening the definition and finally getting around to some such phrase as the history of man. Now that is all right, but it makes our subject somewhat difficult to teach. We find we cannot actually put folklore forward as the master of all social sciences. We have to teach students how to study folk songs and ballads, and be broadly conscious of the importance of the social and material background, or on the other hand we may train students in museum techniques and find that we are dealing with a very special technique. This is largely a teaching problem, and it is one that has to be met wherever the problem arises. I don’t believe that a revision of the definition of folklore would help it much.

CHAIRMAN: I would appreciate it very much if Professor Maruyama would tell us a little about the concept of folklore in Japan.

PROFESSOR M. MARUYAMA (Kumamoto City, Japan) : From the Japanese point of view we have divided the scope of folklore into three branches. The first of these is the visual, that which we can collect through our eyes. For example, the types of houses we can draw and see. The second division is that for which we use our eyes and our ears at the same time. This, of course, is the folk tale and the folk song and the like. And then we have a third grouping where we use our eyes and our ears and our minds. For example, superstitions and funeral rites, and everything that has a psychological or philosophical scope. I think that these three divisions are not very different from the Irish, but the language used is the only difference.

CHAIRMAN: Now back to Scandinavia with Dr. Campbell.

DR. ÅKE CAMPBELL (Landsmäls och Folkminnes Arkivet, Uppsala, Sweden) : A couple of years ago I listened to a very lengthy discussion in Paris about the scope of folklore. No conclusion really was reached. The French scholars were always talking about ethnography and the English and many others about anthropology. The anthropologists were speaking of the total study of mankind, and there were also some others who were speaking about Volkskunde and Völkerkunde in a quite German way.

I agree with Dr. Liljeblad when he says that in the actual practice of our science it is of no particular value to have a clear definition in mind, but when it comes to academic teaching and the whole academic policy I believe it is necessary to come to some conclusions. As you perhaps know, in CIAP⁹ and in UNESCO they are trying to get some clear definition of many of these terms in our sciences. Sooner or later I think we must come to some conclusions, especially with regard to the academic teaching of these subjects.

I should like to give you an example which I think will bring the whole question vividly before us. Several years ago a student from Assam wrote from London that he had just finished his doctor’s thesis and would like to come to Uppsala to study at our archives. When he came the first thing I did was to ask him, “Why have you come here? You have taken your doctor’s degree at a very famous university in England and now what more do you think you could get from us? Here in Uppsala, of course, we do not have anything about Assam, and I think you could learn a great deal more about that in Oxford or Cambridge or London.”

“Well,” he said, “you see, in England they treat anthropology as having to do only with primitive people, people without any history, and quite often they refer to them as wild people just as if they were speaking of wild animals. Well, I think that India is not so very primitive and not so entirely without a history, since its history goes far back of the history of Europe. I think the anthropologists in England and in Europe, and the American anthropologists too for that matter, should remember that there is no use of speaking about people in India as being primitive people. They have now come to a new era.” This was just when India got its freedom, you see. “Now it seems to me that India and Indonesia and other nationalities of that kind, even some of the African Negro states, will eventually want to take up the study of their own history, a history of their own culture, on a broad basis. They would like to know how certain people such as the Europeans have taken up the same kind of study of their own culture. You in Sweden are looking upon your folk culture as a subject that you can deal with. But I have not found that in England the anthropologists are doing just that. There is no single museum, that is anthropological museum, in England where the English people are represented.” He could have said much the same thing about the museums in America where I have seen very little from Europe and very little from any Americans except Indians. Now the man from Assam had a second reason. He wanted to introduce into Assam the study of the very many cultures that are already in Assam, and he wanted to establish archives there. He wanted these archives to cover not only the material culture but also the oral tradition and what some people simply call folklore. He continued, “In England I did my doctor’s thesis in anthropology, but if I went to the folk- lorists in England—well it seems as if the anthropologists and the folklorists in England had no close contact with one another.”

Now what was to be said on these two points? I should like to put the question to you here. For myself, I am ready to consider anthropology as a total study of mankind, but this must be a total study and we must think of it for the very moment that we are now living. We are in a year when all around the world peoples, folk, nations, are coming and asking for a study of their own culture. And I think that the word “anthropology” has taken on a connotation that has to do too much merely with the study of primitive people.

CHAIRMAN: Since I am an anthropologist you will forgive me if I comment on the last point. I do believe that the anthropologist in this country, and perhaps also in Europe, has expanded his interest from his older preoccupation with primitive peoples into a desire to attempt the description of the total culture of mankind. We have had studies, for example, on the food habits of the different nationalities of this country, and their connection with what has been preserved of old traditional customs and values in Europe, and there are a good many examples of this kind. Now, our time is getting short but we should like to call on Mrs. Danielli, secretary of the English Folk-lore Society. I wonder if you would care to comment on any of these general questions ?

MRS. MARY DANIELLI (English Folk-lore Society, London, England) : The situation in England is very peculiar, because in this kind of study, as in every other, England has a genius for resisting organization. There have been considerable changes in the direction of academic work in recent years, which confronted the folklorists with some critical problems. Until recently the Folk-lore Society, which is a fairly old organization, and also many of the small local societies which dealt with folklore and were perhaps interested in dialect or in natural history and so on, shared their membership with people in the academic world living in or near the district. The professors of anthropology and related subjects living in those areas would be members of these societies and would also be associated with their own particular academic learned societies. In this way for many years we have had common membership in the Folk-lore Society and in the Royal Anthropological Institute. The discussions of the Folk-lore Society were attended to a very large degree by the members of the Anthropological Institute. Now the curious thing is that in recent years this has ceased to be true. The two societies seem to have split up very much. This is following an academic pattern. In the universities the professors of anthropology used to teach folklore as a study very closely related to anthropology. On the other hand in recent years social anthropology has tended to deny the principles on which folklore in England has been based; it has had a tendency to say that there are so many problems in our colonial government in which anthropological knowledge is needed that the special problems of folklore are of no importance. Therefore they are being neglected. There is no folklore teaching now at all in the universities, and presumably no interest in the teaching of it. The folklorists in England have now to decide what they are going to do. This is a very interesting problem.

CHAIRMAN: In this country when we deal with folklore we are concerned with a subject which is of great academic interest and also has a very rich measure of interest for the general public. Most of us who have spoken here represent the university side of this picture. The time for our discussion now is very short and it seems to me that since we are going to explore many questions more specifically as we go into the further sessions of this symposium, we will very likely come back at the end to the question of what is folklore. My suggestion is, then, that we consider this topic as not finished or resolved but that at the end of our symposium we try to come back to this discussion. Dean Thompson has a communication that he would like to make.

DEAN THOMPSON: I should be very much pleased to distribute the statement of our present graduate program of folklore in Indiana University. We have worked rather hard on it and it will give some idea of what we consider belongs in a folklore program. You will notice as you examine it that it looks into several directions. It extends over somewhat in the field of anthropology, somewhat in the field of literature, and somewhat towards sociology. We thought we might look into the direction of psychology but the psychologists gave us no encouragement and so have omitted that. Perhaps someday we may also have ¹ a psychological outlook.

CHAIRMAN: Professor Erixon set the ball rolling in this symposium and I feel sure that he may have some general comment that he would like to make at this point.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: I am stimulated to say a word about how we have divided this subject at the University of Stockholm. We call it folk-life research. The first point concerns definitions, main principles, methods, and history. The second takes up cultural material and its history, economy and techniques, dwellings, decoration, arts and customs, social institutions, beliefs, fiction, traditional knowledge, and what we generally call folklore. Our third main point has to do with fundamental and functional aspects and problems, geographical, sociological, historical, and psychological. For example, we study regional distribution, and cultural change in contact. We have had ten dissertations written in our organization. I will not give them in detail but they concern such things as the cultural areas in Skane, south Sweden, the folk customs in Skane, sledge and wheel vehicles, seasonal fires, sleds, deer, fishermen, and the like. Three of these as you see discuss folk customs, one, agricultural implements, another, implements for land transport, and one, sea transport in relation to the social structure. I think we are gradually evolving a valuable program at Stockholm and we should like to have it eventually involve the science of the whole culture.

CHAIRMAN: It would be difficult to sum up a discussion such as this, and I shall not attempt it. We have heard two rather clear-cut definitions of folklore and I think we cannot legislate as to how we should convince each other if we prefer one definition as against the other. I think, however, that a discussion like this strengthens the feeling that in folklore we are dealing with an area that is in some respects marginal, and that it interconnects with many other disciplines. One thing we can do, of course, is to strengthen the connection with the neighboring disciplines. As far as this country is concerned we have a way in which this can be done in the academic setting. Students working in the university toward a doctor of philosophy degree usually have a major and a minor subject. Now it often happens that we will have a folklore student who will take his major in literature and his minor in folklore, or who will take a major in anthropology or sociology or music and his minor in folklore. This academic division is sometimes very flexible here, and in this way we can emphasize the interconnection of folklore with neighboring disciplines. This is far from resolving the complex problems presented here, but it does show how we are attempting it. Apparently in Scandinavia and some of the other European countries such integration of the training of the student is even better than it is in the United States.

End of Session

SECOND SESSION

CHAIRMAN: Dean Thompson has consented to open our discussion with a statement of the problems of the historic-geographic methods of folklore study.

DEAN THOMPSON: Last week at the opening of the Folk-Music Council I suggested that there were two possible things that one could do with folk materials. In that particular case I was talking about folk songs. Let us assume that the collector of materials and the classifier and the archivist have all done their work very well. We have all the collections sent in to some central bureau or at least they are being properly cared for and now we have available these million and a half or two million pages of folk material which are confined in Dublin and smaller amounts perhaps in other museums or storerooms or archives. Now, what are the things that can be done with these? One answer is that which was suggested at the symposium this morning, that some practical use can be made of them for our culture. If these are songs, sing them; if they are tales, tell them; if they are artifacts, try to use them in the way they should be used. That is one possible answer. The other answer, and the one that the scholar frequently makes and the one that I would make in my own approach to folklore is to say, “Study them.” See of what they consist, see how they are related to themselves and to the rest of the world and experience. See if you can learn something of the processes by which they have come into existence and by which they have survived through the years.

This afternoon it seems to me that we have agreed, to go into this second type of consideration, the studying of folklore materials. Now, we have these materials brought together from all parts of the world. There is first of all the general question of whether these are best studied in a broad comparative sense as, for example, the way in which Fraser studied them in The Golden Bough. You will recall that he brings together certain ideas, beliefs they may be or practices, and he gives examples of them from all quarters of the globe. Often it seems to us that he does this without ever inquiring particularly whether there is a genetic relationship between a practice as found in a particular central African group and in an American Indian tribe. But he brings together good comparative references from all over the world and very largely leaves the reader to his own conclusions. This is one way in which such studies can be approached. The second way of studying folklore materials is one that has a much narrower basis. That is to confine one’s study to a particular area or even a particular racial group or language group or nationality. It is possible to study folklore more intensively in this way and related only incidentally to the world-wide scene.

One assumption I am making is that the student of folklore is resolved to study the history of the particular item that he is interested in. Now this does not preclude an interest in the people who own the item or the people who tell it. It means merely that for the particular study the scholar is making, his interest is focused at least for the moment on the particular item he is working on. If he is studying log cabins, for example, such as are found through southern Indiana and Kentucky and this part of the world, and is relating them to such structures in other parts of America and of Europe, well, he is studying log cabins. Incidentally, of course, he has to remember that people lived in these cabins and that they had their uses and that in order to understand the structure of the log cabin he must understand something of the economic and social needs that made these log cabins a part of the culture of our pioneer ancestors here. Nevertheless, if he is studying a log cabin as such he will be especially concerned with working out very special techniques that can handle the structure of log cabins. And he must understand how to apply these techniques. Later he can make whatever comparative studies he wishes and relate them to life and general culture.

In order to open up this question, let us talk about one kind of folklore, the kind on which I have spent most of my time, that is the folk tale. We find that as a result of the work of many men in many lands, and later of the classification and cataloguing of all that work, we have made it possible to bring together many hundreds of versions of a well-known tale that may be scattered in all parts of the world. When we bring these all together and look at them, we find that there are striking resemblances in these tales and also there are no less striking differences. The scholar must see what significance these resemblances and these differences have. He becomes interested in a study of the distribution of the tale. He tries to find something of its original form, of its original home, and of the vicissitude it has undergone in its history.

The development of a method such as is now well known as the historic-geographic method was, it seems to me, a very logical one. There is nothing mysterious about this so-called historic-geographic method. It is merely a matter of sensibly bringing together as much material as you can and studying that material very carefully. I suppose that the only way to make a careful study of any material from a scientific point of view is to use the analytical method. Therefore, this involves breaking the tales down into their parts and studying not only the resemblances which appear but also minute differences and trying to account for the significance of these.

This is not the place to bring out in detail all the minutise of this kind of method, but rather to show why such a method exists and what its contribution seems to be. And also to point out if possible the weaknesses. This has, of course, been a matter of a great deal of debate among European folklorists. What I hope to do at the moment is to present what I think are the accomplishments of the method and also to suggest possible errors that the method may lead us to.

In general, this method contemplates a breaking up of tales into their various episodes or traits. Any tale may be broken up into episodes, if it has any complexity at all. It is not always easy to explain just what we mean by episode, but really what we mean is a trait that can be handled in several ways. If we are dealing with the Cinderella tale, for example, we can ask who is the cruel person. There may be several answers. We go through and break the tales down into all the possible ways in which these answers can be made and then it is possible to see just how that trait is handled in all parts of the world. You will find that we are dealing in both a historical and a geographical study. We are tracing the trait through all its geographical distribution, and we are also trying to find the earliest forms of the trait and approach it from the historical point of view. We like to approach it both in geographic breadth and in historic depth.

What is the goal of the study that such an analytical treatment is approaching? I think that it can be stated in this way. The student using this method is attempting to find what the tale probably looked like at the beginning, before it started on its long wanderings. He is trying to find out vaguely in what part of the world it started, and also to make some guesses, not too wild guesses it is hoped, as to about what period of the world’s history it may have originated.

You will notice that the study as I have indicated thus far is entirely one based upon internal evidence. It seems to me that some of the students who have used this method have erred by trying to make it a little too simple, Especially when you have an extremely complicated tale, it is not possible to proceed immediately, by a percentage count, to the formation of an archetype and say that this is the original form. As time has gone on and as this method has been revised and the mistakes originally made by some of the hasty scholars were eliminated, I feel that the method has become less vulnerable. The younger scholars are not so prone to follow what the master says and they are likely to make the proper modifications. More and more they are saying that it is better to work by trying to determine regional subtypes first and then later to see whether larger syntheses can be made. They are likely to see what can be done in the way of discovering if there is a Scandinavian-Baltic form or if there is a Mediterranean or South European form. By studying it in this way and by the erection of various subtypes (theoretical subtypes though they may be) before attempting to go on to the larger conclusions, it seems to me that the historic- geographical method is being refined and is therefore likely to produce more satisfactory results.

Now I have noticed that in talking to students one is very prone to overemphasize the analogy between this kind of study and Indo-European linguistics. This is very striking to the student of linguistics, and one has always to warn his students against following the analogy too far. Of course this analogy is, I think, clear. The student of Indo-European linguistics takes words and on the basis of the actual words he has he tries to erect a theoretical pre-Germanic form, a theoretical pre-Celtic form, pre-Slavic, pre-Hellenic, etc. Then having constructed all these pre-Hellenic, pre-Slavic forms, he erects on the basis of these a larger conclusion, a larger synthesis, which is the starred Indo- European form. Now that type of linguistics was very much in fashion when I was a student at Harvard and we spent a great deal of our time memorizing all these changes. The difficulty in applying the linguistic methods is that languages and folk tales do not behave in the same way, Linguistic boundaries are, as a matter of fact, of very little importance in folk-tale studies. We are dealing more with matters of culture and areas of culture.

One thing, therefore, that has to be very carefully avoided is too much dependence upon matters of language study in connection with the folk tale. Years ago I was working on the tales of the North American Indian, making a comparative study of them, and I wanted to make a distribution map. I arranged my cards according to tribe and according to areas. The only convenient map at that early date was one of the linguistic families of North America, and I arranged my cards according to these linguistic areas. I found that it simply made no sense; Then I became acquainted with Clark Wissler’s map of the culture areas of the United States, arranging tribes by culture traits rather than language families. I found that when I arranged my material by these culture areas the whole picture cleared up and my collections made perfect sense. In other words, folk tales are likely to go by culture areas rather than by linguistic areas. Folk song is different, because it is not so easy for a folk song to go over a linguistic boundary. You have the whole question of rhythm and even of rhyme and the linguistic boundaries are not so easily leapt as they are with the tale. But the folk tales go over with the very greatest of ease. For that reason I have never been able quite to understand the contention of Dr. von Sydow that it was an extremely difficult thing for a tale to go from one language area to another. My own experience in dealing with the North American Indians has not borne out that contention at all.

Now there is another problem in connection with the folk-tale study that is also typical with all folklore, and therefore deserves a word. This is the impact of the written folk tale on the oral folk tale and vice versa. The influence of the written folk tale in Europe has been so important and so potent that some scholars have actually stated that the whole study of the oral folk tale is not worth anything, because all of it depended upon the written. The late Albert Wesselski was a proponent of that school and to an extent I think that Joseph Bedier felt in the same way, and these men have promoted a certain agnosticism about the possibility of folk-tale study at all. The conclusions of these men about the influence of the literary tale challenged me some years ago to undertake the study of a North American Indian tale. For this I was able to bring together about eighty-five versions where there was absolutely no question of literary influence. It was possible by means of this study to handle a purely oral tradition. I am now in the middle of that study and I have some very interesting distribution maps which I think show very clearly exactly what has happened with that tale as it has spread over the North American Continent.

I don’t know whether I opened up this problem sufficiently, but I am certain that if we carry on this technique which was developed for the tale, the same distribution method can be used for working out the history of the ballad. I think also that through mapping techniques and comparative analysis along the same general line that has been suggested, something could be done for the study of other types of folklore in Europe. These have already been done, nowhere more extensively than by Professor Erixon.

MR. JASIM UDDIN (Dacca, East Pakistan) : I should be very glad, Dean Thompson, if you would talk a little about the literary approach to folk tales and folk songs. That is, the approach to them from the literary standpoint.

DEAN THOMPSON: There are two reasons that I cannot do that. One of them is that I don’t know about it. The second is that I think it is not really pertinent to this discussion, since we are now studying distribution studies and we ought not to go over to the particular question of the literary uses of folklore. Don’t you think so?

CHAIRMAN: Our program does have a section on stylistic problems and perhaps when we come to discussing styles we can go into the question you are now raising.

Before I call on anyone else I would like to say that I am very glad that Dean Thompson brought up this analogy with linguistics. I can well see how it has been somewhat misleading, especially to students who are working with this type of reconstruction. We can show, of course, that in a given group of languages sounds have changed rather consistently. It would be very convenient if we could similarly say that as you go from German variants to French variants in given tales or motifs, some changes show consistently, in all cases. In folk music too we would be very happy if we had something like this, that is, if we could say that as soon as given melodies turn up in certain countries, particular things happen to them. I should like to call now upon Dr. Walter Anderson who has worked so very intensively with all these problems.

PROFESSOR WALTER A NDERSON: I have, as you say, been very much interested in these matters. There are so many questions connected with them that I cannot speak of them all, but about one point I would like to talk and that is the statistical principle, the principle of majority or percentage. For instance, if we found in seventy per cent of variants of the tale we are studying that we are dealing with a sparrow and that in the other thirty per cent we are dealing with various other birds, do we have a right to say that the sparrow is the original bird or is this too mechanical? There are, to be sure, two versions which say it was a crow. Now could we not say that it was originally a crow? If we do so we must explain the fact that in the majority of the texts the name of the bird is stable. This is a fact and I clearly must explain the facts in the simplest and most natural way, and the simplest and most natural way is that in the original text the bird was the sparrow and that all other birds that occurred in the text are results of mistakes of the teller, mistakes of the person or persons who did not very well remember the original text. Our theories must explain all existing facts and must explain them in the simplest way imaginable. This does not mean always that the commonest form is the original. I have frequently shown that later texts become so popular that they may even drive out the original form. In every text of tales there are mistakes, that is, points that could not possibly belong to the original. These mistakes often become accepted and are adopted by a very high percentage, of the tales.

MR. LAURITS BØDKER (International Folktale Archive, Copenhagen, Denmark) : I must confess that I do not believe in the business-machine approach to the study of folk tales. In my opinion a folk tale is an individual creation made in a particular place, and from this place the tale is transmitted to other parts of the world. We must never forget the local interest in the folk tale and the fact that as a tale wanders from country to country it takes on the special color of that country. If you try to read a hundred animal tales from India and you read the same animal tales in the Danish or German area you will find that there are some consistent differences. This means, as Dean Thompson said, that we must study the culture areas and the material in these special single cultural areas. I am very skeptical of the mere counting percentages in order to find what was the original form of a tale.

CHAIRMAN: As I understand Mr. BØDKER he feels that we should never lose sight of the entire story as we work along with our groups of motifs. He feels that the whole story tends to disappear in our thoughts if we are merely dealing with motifs, and that the surroundings of the story should always be considered very emphatically when we try to trace the history of the tale.

DEAN THOMPSON: I should like to clarify a point. You will recall that a while ago I was speaking of this method of study as entirely from internal evidence. Now when we have made such a construct as the original archetype that we have spoken of, there is no doubt that the most difficult part of our study is still before us, because it is only then that the student of the folk tale has to turn historian. He has to learn all there is to know about the various currents of migration that have occurred in the historic past. He must know all the probabilities, what could happen to a cultural item such as a folk tale in a particular country and in a particular century. He has at that point to leave the internal study of the tale and go to an external study based upon the historical facts.

Now we have also to recognize the fact that Mr. BØDKER has brought up, a point which we all recognize, that in certain countries collecting has been done very assiduously and in certain countries hardly at all. This is a very real problem. Any scholar who works with the material must give due weight to that fact. One way in which this can be handled is by the regional study of these things. If, for example, one wanted in some way to discount the fact that we have hundreds of versions collected in Finland and only a few collected in France, it might well be possible to study all the Finnish versions and see what we could make out in the way of a Finnish form or forms of the tale, and similarly study all the French versions and see what form or forms of the tale appear there. I think in that way we can make proper allowances.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I must say that not every nation possesses one special form of a tale. Finland, for example, often possesses the same tale in many different redactions. Some of these are Russian and some of them are Swedish. It is therefore not possible to study Finnish material without regard to Swedish and Russian texts.

DR. ALBERT B. LORD (Slavic Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) : I wonder whether it is possible to arrive at any archetype of a tale or a song or an epic, if we consider that in every performance of an art form in oral tradition, whether it be a tale or an epic, the individual singer introduces variations. When you multiply that by the number of people who have carried on the tradition over a long period of years, how can you tell what the archetype may have been and how can you tell what variations have entered?

PROFESSOR CALVIN CLAUDEL (Mississippi State College, State College, Mississippi) : In the search for an archetype we can only go back so far as our published collections permit us. Now in a tale like “Stupid John” which I have found practically everywhere in Louisiana it is necessary to break this up into various separate motifs and trace them back. Some of them go back to the literary collections in India and some of them to other places but I think it would be impossible to find an archetype of the story as a whole.

CHAIRMAN: I think that some of us, especially those who are not too well acquainted with the technique of working with motifs, are asking ourselves to what extent these motifs really permit one to reach far back beyond the material that one gets from actual written documentation. We are facing this same problem not only in connection with the tale but also in the folk song and all other verbal forms of folklore. Do we really get back to the so-called archetype and thus catch the material so long before it has been through the reshaping and changes that Mr. Lord suggests, or is this method merely a convenient way of analyzing and studying a large body of complicated materials.

MR. BØDKER: In my opinion the archetype is a pure abstraction. The mistake of the Finnish school as I see it was to throw away the study of the individual motifs and try to get back to an archetype, which they think they can find in a single country and created at a certain time.

Now as to the Panchatantra which Mr. Claudel mentioned, that is, of course, a very important collection. I got the impression that you think if you can trace a story back to the Panchatantra you have found the archetype.

PROFESSOR CLAUDEL: I do not think so at all. I think you are quite correct. My own feeling is that we are concerned too much about archetypes and that such a study is meaningless in itself. What the folklorists should do is to classify material and make it available to people.

MR. BØDKER: Some of the stories found in the Panchatantra are found first in Persia and Arabia. Then you must go back to these things,

PROFESSOR CLAUDEL: And even then you have only tales for which you have historic records. They may have existed thousands of years before.

MR. BØDKER: And then, what then?

PROFESSOR CLAUDEL: Then I think it is somewhat futile to seek for archetypes.

MR. ALAN LOMAX (New York City) : I should like to ask a question which I am sure many people here would like some information on. What so far, in general, are the achievements of the so-called historic-geographic method? From what has gone on so far I can’t make out what the method has brought forth in terms of scientific conclusions.

MR. BØDKER: I will try to say a word about this, and I hope Professor Anderson will object if I am wrong. The historical- geographic method was created in Finland in the nineties. It originated from the general mistakes of the comparative philologists of those times. So far as I know the method is about like this: You take all the variants of a tale and place them beside each other, and then you take your business machine. Supposing you are working with motif A, you bring together all the cards on motif A and put them in the machine, and then turn the machine and they come out. Ninety per cent of the variants agree with each other. This means either of two things, that this particular form of the motif is the original, or at least that it might be the original, or else that it is a new motif invented perhaps three thousand years after the story was created. Then you have to sit in your chair and decide which of these it is. In this way you go on and on until at last you have the so-called archetype. Then from this archetype you go the other way. You place the archetype before you and you say, now these first ten are variants, and how did these variants come about?

CHAIRMAN: I think before I turn the words oyer to others who can speak better to the point, Professor Anderson and Dean Thompson, we should not forget that through the historic- geographic method, which has been used not only in folklore but also in cultural history and anthropology, we have learned a great deal about the fact that a great mass of folklore material has undergone very extensive travel. We have learned a good deal about what happens to culture when it travels, and about the great masses of stories which must have come from India or elsewhere. We have gained much insight into the life of a folk tale and its relation to its history, beyond what you can reconstruct from written documents, from the studies of this kind. I see that both Professor Anderson and Dean Thompson are eager to answer the attack.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: All oral tradition is governed and regulated by a very interesting law, that which I have called the law of self-correction. That is, regularly everybody who tells a tale or sings a song has heard this tale or song not only once in his life but many times and from many persons and in many forms. In this way abnormalities and mistakes have a tendency to be eliminated. Every new abnormality is eliminated, and it is only by that fact that it is possible to explain why tales do conserve their stability in such a striking way. This question of the stability of oral tradition is a very important and serious one and it can be answered only by an experiment.

Now the experiment of what happens when one hears a tale only once has been made several times. I have made it more than once. For example, I read a text once slowly to three students and ask them to come the next day and write it down the way they have heard it. Then these were read to three other students the next day and they wrote it down as they have heard it. After a little while the texts were so mutilated that they had practically nothing to do with the original tale. If one compares the texts you see how mistakes are made, how the tale comes to be spoiled more and more. Now this would happen in reality if a storyteller had heard his story only once in his lifetime.

This general principle gives us the right to apply a general statistical method, because every variant of a tale or story has had not one source but several sources. This is the great difference between the propagation of folk tales and songs and the propagation of a work of literature. A manuscript of some work of Caesar has had only one source so that the manuscripts that we possess can be arranged in the form of families or groups. In oral tradition it is another thing. The very mass of the material does help in the investigation.

Those who have criticized the historic-geographic method usually show that they have not tried themselves to apply this method. If they had done so they would see that it is usually enough to read twenty or thirty variants of a tale to see what the normal form must be. The variants of the text tell you what this form is. The form simply cries out from the data before one. For most tales the forming of the archetype does not present a great difficulty. The faithful worker spends his energy and time bringing together so many versions that even the most skeptical will have to be persuaded.

DEAN THOMPSON: I agree entirely with Professor Walter Anderson that usually those who have been most vocal in criticizing the historic-geographic method are those who have not used it. The whole agnostic position in relation to the learning about the history of the folk tale has been well presented by Albert Wesselski and again by Joseph Bedier. Neither of these men ever experimented with the method and I believe that the main contentions of each of them have now been very well abandoned by practically all folklorists, whether they agree with the practitioners of the historic-geographic method or not.

It happens that I have recently been working on a North American Indian tale. I chose this because it seemed to be a very good chance to study a tale without the complication of literary versions. All of the eighty-six versions of the tale with which I am now working have been taken down orally and are entirely free of any literary influence. Now when these eighty- six versions are broken down into their parts and an analysis is made of the occurrence of all of these parts over the continent the picture becomes very clear. I can’t think that it is at all an accident that exactly the same forms of the tale appear in a contiguous area in the Plains, for example. I can’t conceive of it being an accidental matter that another peculiar form of that tale goes without interruption all the way from Alaska down practically to the Canadian border, but never crossing into the United States, and on to the Great Lakes and out to the Micmacs in Nova Scotia. Never once have we found that the form I shall call the Canadian form came into the United States; never once have we found the Plains form anywhere except in the Plains. The geographical laws that come up from mapping a tale like this are so convincing that it seems to me the person who is skeptical is being merely perverse in saying that it is a pure accident that this so-called Plains form appears only in the Plains, and that another form which seems to be the primary form is found all over the whole remaining area. This primary form or archetype, if we wish to call it so, is a theoretical construction, but is based upon a close study of all of the eighty-six versions and it actually exists in many parts of the area. The more one works with a tale like this the more confidence he gets in the conclusions which seem to be almost dictated to him.

I realize that many refinements of this method have to be made. But one must never put aside one’s good judgment. One must never forget that here and there travelers or groups of travelers have carried a tale and have successfully implanted it somewhere else. But those are historical facts and those facts come out with the study as soon as the material is brought together. In a word, I do not believe that you can study any tale without actually analyzing it and getting the material out so you can see it all. The historic-geographic method’s greatest contribution is this display of the material in connection with a certain tale. If any opponents of the method object to the labor and routine analysis that seem to be necessary, they will find that there are no short cuts to the understanding of a tale. A particular interpretation that the student of the folk tale may make, can, of course, be wrong. But so far as I know, this is the only method of studying a tale which permits one to learn all the facts about it and to approach a study of its history and nature with the thoroughness with which one would approach any other study of a natural phenomenon.

I don’t feel at all agnostic about this matter. I feel that we have made real progress.

Now to answer Mr. Lomax’ question as to what this has all amounted to, I think that it is fair to say that thirty or forty of the world’s folk tales have now been studied pretty thoroughly and with greater or less success, so that we know something of their life history even though we do not know all. I believe that after a study has been made as thoroughly as it has to be with the historic-geographic method, we can avoid such wild statements as have frequently been made about what a tale originally meant, or about what the symbolism of the tale is, or any other of the interpretations which have been made without any basis of actual knowledge.

MISS MAUD KARPELES (International Folk Music Council, London, England) : I have been very much puzzled about the relationship of the themes in stories. There are, of course, many themes which are common to many different stories. Now, is it possible to find any principles of variation in these particular stock themes, and is it possible to deduce any principle as to how these themes become assembled and form distinct stories?

PROFESSOR HERBERT HALPERT (Murray State Teachers College, Murray, Kentucky) : I think that to some extent the defenders of the historic-geographic method have been so busy justifying some of the things they do that they forget their real accomplishments. There are many things they have done which some of us who are never going to try this method still find very useful for our own work. I am thinking in particular of the laws which Kaarle Krohn included in his book and which all of you know. I mean such things as the laws of variation, the kinds of change, the contamination of texts, and the like. All of us have to attempt to establish from a body of material or a body of variants the kind of changes that are likely to occur. As for my part this is the thing that I have found most valuable from my study of the method. In the debate over the archetype we tend to forget that one of the most valuable contributions of the historic-geographic method is the study of the nature of change that the archetype undergoes in its history. I recall that Dean Thompson in teaching us about the method used to spend a great deal of time saying, “Once we have laid all this material out on the table and have discovered the original form or at least the theoretical form, then interesting problems come.” We get so bogged down in a discussion of the archetype that in a meeting like this we frequently do not hear about this interesting problem, that is the problem of the effects of culture on the change of a folk tale. There are usually very simple answers as to the reason for the change in a tale, and they would remain valid even if we should disagree with the form of the selected mystical archetype.

CHAIRMAN: I wonder whether anyone would volunteer to answer the interesting question which Miss Karpeles has raised? Is there a way of telling what laws govern the fate of single motifs ?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I had thought of raising the question myself as I think it is a rather important thing. In my opinion the only possible unit of folk-tale study is the story itself, the tale as a whole and not the materials of the tale. Folk tales have to be considered as works of fiction, as works of art— indeed the only international literary form that we have. It is more than a complex of its motifs. The sequence of motifs and their construction is important and they often remain constant all the way, say from India to Ireland. There is evidence enough in Stith Thompson’s The Folktale¹⁴ to show that we always start with definite stories told in a definite way.

I heartily agree with Professor Walter Anderson on the use of the historic-geographic method. Perhaps there would be less opposition if we merely dropped the word archetype and called it “the only rational arrangement of the material.” If we could drop the word archetype we could get away from the idea that the whole story may be found in a definite form just like the theoretical archetype. I think what we are able to get back to is the plot, the construction of the story. If you look through the studies of the folk tales you will find that the archetype is usually reduced to a mere plot. That is the important thing. Then you have a clear conception of what the story is about. I particularly like that part in Professor Anderson’s book⁶ in which he says that this pattern was continually trying to assert and reassert itself.

We must remember that tales are told as works of art. I think it is very difficult to work out exact laws as to what happens to tales. Attempts, of course, have been made by Professor Axel Olrik many years ago to enunciate these epic laws. Something may well be done along these lines, but the main part remains as a task for the future.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: I know very little really about the practical application of this Finnish method, but I can very well see from what I have read that scholars working with that method are faced with two very definite difficulties. The first is that in Europe the telling of folk tales is largely dead. In Finland, Germany, France, and so on, folk tales are no longer told to any great extent. You have to go to the very western rim of Europe, to Ireland and Scotland, where the folk tale is still told, but will probably not be told for much longer. It is like wiping out the writing on the blackboard, with a little of the writing still remaining on the edge. That is the way it is in Ireland and Scotland at this moment. I think, therefore, it is important that scholars of the folk tale should try to study it as it is told in the field, as well as studying versions from manuscripts and collections that come into their possession. Our collectors in Ireland keep diaries, as I mentioned the other day, and a great part of these diaries is devoted to how the storyteller told the story, how the audience reacted. Now I think that is very, very important. Professor von Sydow has been insistent upon the point that a story is a living organism and that one of the phenomena in connection with it is the tenacity of life in the folk tale and in the traditional discipline which is applied to the telling of the tales. The man who takes storytelling seriously and is not just a casual storyteller is very conscious of this traditional discipline.

Von Sydow proved, I think, fairly well that folk tales are above linguistic borders. They do spread first of all perhaps to the bilingual people living along the border but they are always carried over by people who take pride in storytelling. You may, of course, get a folk tale carried from Persia by a peddler into Russia, and it can take root in Russia even though he is not a professional storyteller. This would happen because the type of the story might appeal to the people in Russia who heard it from him. In general, however, folk tales are spread and kept alive by responsible, traditional storytellers.

Another point I want to make is that the work we have been doing in Ireland is undoubtedly changing the picture. Just before I left I ran through our catalog cards of the Aarne- Thompson tales and jotted down a few examples of the number of versions we have catalogued. Now we have catalogued only about one-twentieth of our collection. Of one of the most popular tales, Aarne-Thompson 300, we have already catalogued 143 versions. I could give other examples which will show very much the same picture. I must not, of course, weary you with all these numbers but I do want to give you an idea that in the studies in the future the material collected in Ireland must certainly be taken into account. If you look up the Aarne-Thompson register you will, I think, find only two or three folk tales of the. Gaelic- speaking world listed at all. In any future study there would be not only hundreds but thousands of versions to be taken care of. That is one point I wish to make, and the other is that the late history of the tales can best be studied among people who have kept folk-tale telling alive.

CHAIRMAN: We seem to be discussing this matter very much from the European perspective. We have with us Dr. Erminie Voegelin who has worked intensively in the American Indian field, and from the special anthropological background.

DR. ERMINIE VOEGELIN: Though there have been a number of distribution studies of particular tales aiming to determine tale types among the American Indians, such as that which Dr. Thompson speaks of, the “Star Husband,” there has not been to my knowledge any attempt to carry through the investigation to the archetype. I think the anthropologists have been on the whole somewhat skeptical in applying these methods to American Indian material. Paul Radin and others have voiced the criticism that because of the great linguistic diversity in the New World you can’t carry over the investigation of the distribution of a tale itself. So there isn’t very much to comment upon about the application of the method by American anthropologists. It simply has not been done. They have been more interested in the function of folk tales, in the various other interpretations of folk tales in their setting, and in their meaning to the teller. And there has lately been a good deal of interest in stylistic studies, All of these, of course, are points outside the topic which we have under discussion now.

CHAIRMAN: Students who have worked in American Indian anthropology have always been impressed by the fact that a number of motifs in stories show up in the New World and also in the Old. We see in this a reflection of the influence coming from the Old World, of folkloristic materials entering through the migrations of culture and people. I should like to agree most heartily with what has been expressed by Mr. Christiansen and Mr. O’Suilleabhain: that it is always well, if possible, to collect folk materials from a living tradition and understand it against its cultural background.

DR. LILJEBLAD: The method we are discussing should certainly be called geographical-historical, because that is the order in which things are taken up. Geography first, and then history. In order to evaluate that method I think we should bear in mind not only the life history of the tale but also the life history of the method itself. When fifty years ago Kaarle Krohn laid the foundation for the technique he certainly had in mind to answer Alan Lomax’ question, “what will this ultimately lead to?” He realized, however, that a tale is a type and not simply a cluster of motifs without any order, and although he was interested in getting an answer to the question of the history of the folk tale as a whole he realized that this would be utterly impossible without knowing first the history of each single type.

Now this is a very long, drawn-out problem for several generations of scholars. In order to study a tale you must, as Professor Thompson has said, analyze it and see in what way the component parts of the tale vary in different parts of the world. You can establish local redactions, what Professor von Sydow calls oikotypes. Whether you can actually go back to an archetype is another question, and the geographical-historical method does not necessarily lead to that. What the method has done so far is to give a very good, orderly arrangement and analyses of particular types. In order to have any science you must have a method or a technique, and it seems to me that critics of this method have never really presented anyone with an alternative way of constructing the monograph of a tale. Now after a large number of monographs of various tales have been constructed, then we begin to see that there is a certain order within the development of folk tales as a whole. Our attention has been called to the fact that there are certain borders between various types on the American Continent, certain areas of distribution. Now these are beginning to clarify, as a result of certain monographic studies. When we have enough studies to be certain of these borders then we can begin to ask ourselves about the reasons for these boundaries. But it is only on the basis of a number of special studies that we can talk with any certainty about the larger general movements of tales.

There is another confusion that I think should be brought to the attention of this group, and that is the confusion between the study of motifs and of types. You frequently have small motifs which are found in various parts of the world. Now, these are attached in one country to one tale and in another to another tale. For example, a number of tales both in Europe and America contain the motif of the so-called magic flight, where the hero throws behind him certain magic objects and these become obstacles in the path of the pursuer. Now that motif cannot be studied by itself. All we can do is study the types in which that motif occurs. But in order to carry out any geographical-historical studies it is necessary that the object studied shall have a certain amount of complexity.

MR. ARTHUR FIELD (New York City): I am much surprised in this discussion of folk-tale themes that we seem to be discussing them without thinking of the people who tell the tales, just as if those stories had lives of their own. As a sociologist I am convinced that tales have very special functions for those who tell them, and that when those functions die the tale dies. It also seems to me that we have overlooked the very well-known fact that things may be invented independently in many different areas. Merely because there are parallelisms there is not necessarily a real connection. Now from what I have listened to in this discussion it seems to me that everyone is saying that if there is a theme it must undoubtedly have had an origin and that is a single origin. I am interested to know why this point has been neglected and also to discover why no attention seems to be paid to the psychological function of a story.

CHAIRMAN: Our program indicates headings for discussing the relevance of psychological studies, socio-cultural studies, folklore and the community, folklore and folk tradition, and so on. Today we are devoting our discussion primarily to special types of studies with which we are all familiar, those based on the historic-geographic methods. In this connection, it is not an especially new consideration for the folklorist or for the student of anthropology or cultural history that some similar or almost identical items may have arisen independently. We have taken these points quite for granted.

The time for this session is drawing to a close. I am not especially distressed that we have seen a variety of opinions, and had rather intensive discussions without coming to final agreements. It is, of course, the function of a group like this to explore one another’s points of view. I should like to suggest some of the questions that seem to me to have arisen here. Is it possible that the folk tale or story has more stability or cohesion than let us say the folk song or folk melody? It seems that the folk tale does have a good deal of cohesion. The coherent plot helps to preserve its identity.

We wish to remember that today we have been discussing a particular method of studying the history and geography of a tale. Now there have been two types of objections raised. One of these is whether it is of any use to go back into the historical background of the material. This seems to me like asking whether there is any use in studying history at all. One of the reasons why we are interested in history is that we hope to learn something about the various processes that have gone on in the past and that are continuing into the future. Another objection was that the study of a tale by the historic-geographic method offers too limited a scope; that it might be made part of a more expanded study which would include an investigation of the social background, the style, the conditions of tale telling, the reception of the story by the listeners, and such other topics as have been suggested by various speakers. The method we have just discussed is only one of many methods that can be applied to the study of the folk tale.

End of Session

THIRD SESSION

CHAIRMAN: In the course of our discussion of the use of the historic-geographic method in the study of folk tales a number of questions were raised which are challenging to all folklorists. It was pointed out by several that folklore can be studied from the point of view of the social background which is to some extent reflected in it. So many points of view came up in that connection that it is clear that we should spend some time in exploring them.

The historic-geographic method has a certain unity about it. It has behind it a tradition of cultivation by many scholars from different countries; the study has been carried on for a number of decades, and it has worked out a rather definite technique of its own. On the other hand, problems connected with the social and cultural analysis of folklore material have not been cultivated in any systematic fashion by schools or groups of people, or by following a definite method. We have, rather, a variety of points of view and of possible approaches.

As we consider the methods used in historic-geographic studies, it is clear that these studies easily lead to a consideration of the social and cultural background of the story material. The students who use this method are very much interested in the problem of variation. One finds that stories are not limited to just one spot but that they are distributed over large areas. This applies not only to tales but also to songs and other bodies of folklore as well as to all contents of culture. The study of geographic distribution itself is important not only in folklore but also outside of it—for example, in the general field of cultural history, in anthropology, and also in zoology and botany. A story is apparently never unique; it always occurs in a number of similar forms which we call variants, spread over a given geographical area, and so we are led to a systematic study of these variations.

Inevitably one will ask the question, why is it that stories at a particular place show certain differences from the stories that are found elsewhere? To furnish an answer, one may try to compare the social setting of the variants which were found in the two places. But it is hardly ever possible to explain all variations on the basis of the different social backgrounds. One may easily be led into error here, especially if he leans too much on one kind of theory and disregards other possible explanations.

We all know well that there are certain forces or trends which folklorists speak of as laws. These forces seem to operate wherever there is oral tradition. Some variation it seems could always be due merely to the fact that folklore is usually preserved in a tradition that is fluid and is not bound by the printed page. Some variations will therefore occur regardless of social and cultural factors. Perhaps we can say that some variability is due to the inherent nature of oral tradition as such, and some is due to the differences of cultural and social backgrounds. It would seem, then, that we have two convenient categories for explaining changes.

This conclusion, however, is not fully satisfactory. We referred to tendencies or laws in oral tradition which occur in all cultures and thus seem to be intercultural. But these tendencies depend to a large extent upon the individual. It is the individual’s memory or creative capacity that makes for the changes. It is extremely difficult to tell where the individual’s own conscious or unconscious idiosyncrasies shade over into those of his group, or those of his culture. Does the retelling represent something rather individualistic, or does he retell it in a way in which many other people in his group might treat the story at that time? Perhaps very specific and subtle details do be^ come a matter of individual idiosyncrasy. Sometimes one sees this force at work in songs. An individual does at times give a special turn to a song text which he has acquired from his family. On the other hand, the new direction may be influenced considerably by the way his fellows in the group have thought and felt. So we do undoubtedly have to study group and social values, conscious and unconscious.

Some types of cultural studies are certainly indicated for the better understanding of folklore. What type of questions should we pursue here? One promising inquiry takes its start from the problem of variation. How can we actually demonstrate that certain cultural differences have brought about some specific variations between regional materials? Another inquiry can begin with the folkloristic inventory. Can we explain the presence or absence of folkloristic items in the material of a given group by looking at the social background ? Do we find stories and songs that do not seem to tie in directly with the present-day values, attitudes, and customs of the people, and if so, how shall we explain these? One type of explanation points to survival. Folklore may preserve material that reflects a mode of life which has passed away; still, such material will not be lacking in function, its role may be to provide the group with room for fantasy or escape. This role is not necessarily limited to the cultivated literature of the civilization of the cities. We want to think also of the problem of values. How does the social life of the group affect the body of folklore? Are its standard values reflected, elaborated, perhaps conventionalized in folklore, or does folklore give an expression also to submerged, deviant, or unconscious values? The role of fantasy is again significant here, and may often explain why some imported elements, extraneous to the culture and the folklore, were accepted while others were not. All these questions indicate the connections of our problems with social psychology and also the psychology of the individual.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: By no means all variations in tales are caused by social or cultural forces. They are often merely the result of the fact that a variation or a new idea is liked by all those who hear and read the tale. It is dangerous to explain every new redaction or every abnormality in a version by citing a social or cultural reason. Many times there are such reasons. There is a very interesting story that has been studied by the Russian folklorist Andrejev, on the “Two Arch Sinners.”¹⁵ A necessary part of this story is that there shall be the most mortal sin, the worst sin in the world. Now in Moslem countries this sin is always sexual relations with a corpse. In other countries it is another sin. In certain places it is the interference with the conclusion of a marriage. There are, therefore, certain changes depending upon social background, but one must certainly not overwork this explanation. There is a danger that we will lose sight of the real facts.

PROFESSOR C. F. VOEGELIN (Indiana University) : I am reminded here of a debate which we in the field of linguistics have been recently having, as to whether linguistic structure is also a part of the culture in which it is found. It is, of course, very easy to abstract the language from culture, and it seems that folklore by itself may also be abstracted from the rest of culture. I think there may be some significance for our discussion here in an experience we had yesterday. We had a Ph.D. candidate who had written his dissertation in folklore, and who was thoroughly acquainted with style in the folklore of the people that he had studied. He distinguished two kinds of style, one which would be the same for all speakers for the whole corpus of folklore, and the other which would distinguish a particular storyteller from other storytellers. Now this first kind of style, that is the style which would be the same for all speakers, is I think a crucial problem which I believe would require the collaboration of folklorists and linguists to solve. Offhand, I would suspect that this particular style will be indistinguishable from what a linguist might call the syntax of language. There is no doubt that the style of narrative folklore is, generally speaking, determined by the structure of the language and not by the structure of the folklore itself, except when it is the peculiar style of the raconteur.

CHAIRMAN: As I understand our speaker he says that it is possible to distinguish between the style, which is a matter of general trends, and the individual variations which constitute the style of individuals, and he suggests that it would be possible to make a good description of the generalized style. This description would require the cooperation of students of language and of folklorists. The description would be essentially linguistic and syntactic. This is a very challenging statement. I think it may well be that the linguistic student who has immersed himself in folklore may be able to make valuable statements about this general style. But I do not believe that if we know the style of the language, we also know the style of the folklore. In folkloristic materials, like stories and songs, we do have special stylistic trends which set them apart from normal conversational prose. The linguist would have to take this into consideration; at present he often prefers non-literary conversational materials for his language studies. Nevertheless, the value of linguistic analysis for the determination of style in folklore should not be minimized.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: Besides investigations of social and functional groups, the study of the distribution of the cultural elements has been of interest to us in Sweden. Such studies have given us the possibilities of making chronological distinctions in a way that is sometimes impossible with the study of oral tradition. For example, it has been possible to follow the historical development of agricultural implements from prehistoric times, and to see their connection with the general movements of history. There is a branch of folklore which has not been spoken of here, namely, folk art, which it is possible to study in the same way as other kinds of material culture. In Europe we frequently have good possibilities for studying the chronological and historical development of folk art. We can sometimes see exactly when a particular style in art is created and how it is distributed and afterwards how it has died. We are even able to follow the developments and changes in the folk art within a single family. I believe that it is not often possible to make similar studies in primitive cultures.

MR. BØDKER: One matter about style in oral folklore has puzzled me. Can we be sure of the style of the same storyteller ? Can we always be sure he tells his stories in the same way? In our own group here we have some very excellent storytellers and I have heard them tell stories. One of them I have heard tell the same story about five times and to different groups of people. And every time he tells it he changes it, Another one has to my knowledge invented a story here in Bloomington and he has also told it about five times, but every time he tells the story he tells it in the same words. I am wondering whether if we go out with a tape recorder and ask a man to tell stories we can be sure that he tells the story to us in the same way that he would tell it to the folk, or does he tell it differently to different groups ?

As for the written materials I don’t think it is possible to discuss style at all, because of the fact that if a collector goes out and writes down a story in long hand, as he usually does, he can’t write as fast as the storyteller tells the story. He usually gets the plot and the motifs and then he goes home and rewrites the story.

CHAIRMAN: I very much agree with Mr. BØDKER. I think we schematize the picture when we assume that if we take down a story exactly, it is necessarily in the style of the storyteller. If we had a chance to take the story from him five times, we could see what is stable in his style and what is not.

DR. ERMINIE; VOEGELIN: The field method used in collecting folklore from Indians in English translation by the American anthropologists is to take a quite literal transcription at the time of the telling of a tale and not to abbreviate in any way. Of course you have to write very fast in either case and Gladys Reichard has commented upon the necessity of informants having to slow down and thus impairing their style of presentation when it is being taken in text. I know that. But my experience in taking from bilingual informants some English texts of American Indian tales is that I recorded it very fast, and used a few abbreviations for the common words that came up, but I literally took down all the words and even tried to take all the gestures at the same time as the text.

CHAIRMAN: I suppose the ideal is for the folklorist to know the language in which he is collecting, and if he doesn’t, the door is open to all sorts of difficulties.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: In Irish storytelling we have two completely different styles. The ordinary folk tale of an international type is told in a straightforward manner in simple language. But when you come to the heroic tales which are known to comparatively few storytellers, a completely different style of telling develops. Into these tales there comes that phenomenon of storytelling which we call runs. These fall into certain definite types, for example, where the hero gets up in the morning and is about to set off on his day’s journey for his first exploits. The storyteller for about three or four minutes will repeat this formula very rapidly. This formula has a set form in all the tales. There are special places where they should be used, such as setting out in the morning, the fight against the enemy, coming home in the evening, voyage on the sea, and the like. Now some of these runs must be extremely old because no matter how many versions of them you write down you will always come upon several phrases which are unintelligible at the present time. Even after studies have been made they are still unintelligible and that shows, I think, that that particular type of rhetoric has been developing for a very, very long time. Storytellers put them in for two purposes, or even for three purposes perhaps. First, because they heard them traditionally; second, because they use them as rest points in their story, merely to fill up time; and third, because they impress the people. All the young people especially gape openmouthed at the storyteller when he rolls out this strange language.

I know that in some of the Slavic stories there are similar conventional passages. Often the first three or four lines of . Russian stories will be essentially of the same kind as the Irish runs. I should be interested to know if that literary style is known among people besides the Celts and Slavs.

DR. ERMINIE VOEGELXN: In American Indian material you don’t get an elaborate thing like that, but you do get formal introductions and formal endings to the tales. Usually these consist of one or two sentences and they vary from place to place even in a single tribe itself. But they are usually only one or two sentences long.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: In the older English and Scottish material, particularly that which is carried on by Negro tradition, we do have rhymed openings and rhymed closings, but I don’t think very much of that has survived in the American White English-speaking tradition.

CHAIRMAN: Two somewhat different points have been raised. One concerns the beginning and final formulas. It seems that the beginning and the end are points where stories and sometimes songs have a tendency to assume a regular formula. This may be, for all we know, worldwide; at least it is very common. The other is a more specialized thing: these rhetorical runs in the body of the stories which as Mr. O’Suilleabhain said are very frequent in Ireland. This I think is a somewhat rarer phenomenon.

DR. MAURICE JAGENDORF (New York City) : As one who collects stories this discussion interests me intensely. If I am correct in my interpretation, all of the stories that have just been discussed are those told by trained or professional storytellers. Now in my collecting I gather stories as I go about, stories which are in some ways traditional. I may hear them from several people. One gives me a local legend and gives me the name of a priest who was concerned, another says it wasn’t that priest at all, it was another, a third says it was not a priest at all. Then you are up against it. The story is a local story and it seems to be well known within a well-established tradition. Now the question is, what version should the collector use?

As to the point of falling into a rhythmic pattern when one tells a story, I think that a thing like that is almost unconscious. For example, when you have heard a story three times it would be perfectly normal to say at the end, “I heard it once, I heard it twice, and now I am telling it to you.” This is just a type of repetition, but when you come to a modern story collection how can you handle that kind of thing? You can’t put down every variation.

CHAIRMAN: I think one should put down every variation.

DEAN THOMPSON: It seems that our discussion here has gone over entirely to the question of style. I was hoping that we were going to continue to discuss the matter of social background. If you don’t mind, I will revert to the question of social background and leave the matter of style for a while. My experience with the handling of social background has been rather negative. I started off bravely in my studies of tales, thinking that I was going to get some real results from the study of the societies in which the tales were told. I have found actually that in the distribution studies which I have made I have not been able to make the correlations which I had expected to make. The distribution maps which come about as a result of these studies seem to work in utter disregard of any kind of social background at all. Now I have studied rather seriously the particular tribes concerned and I have been unable to find any correlation between the culture of the tribe and the form in which the tale is borrowed from someone else. For example, I am not able to explain on any ground of cultural pattern why it is that the tale I am interested in goes without any break at all through whole sections of the American continent and then all of a sudden when you get down to the boundary of Arizona and New Mexico the tale stops there. The reason would seem to be historical or geographical rather than primarily social. I am hoping that I can find some correlation there, but at the moment I don’t seem to find much that will explain the distribution and the way in which the tale is or is not accepted.

DR. ERMINIE V0EGELIN: A possible explanation for the absence of the “Star Husband Tale” in Arizona and New Mexico, that is among the Southwestern groups, is their especial interest in the emergence of the people from the underworld. It is therefore the underworld and not the sky at all that is stressed, and the preoccupation with the sky and the stars would therefore be outside the mythical concepts of these people.

DEAN THOMPSON: It may, of course, be possible to work out some correlations of this kind, and I am merely trying to register some disappointment in my first attempt at it.

MR. LOMAX: It seems to me that you can’t really answer these questions about the distribution of folk songs and tales over vast areas until you have got the techniques through which you can understand how things go on in one community or in one family. We don’t think we know very much yet about why one individual chose his particular story or song as a part of his repertory, but whenever we do get into a small situation and look very closely at the accounts which informants can give you of their relationships to their own songs, it seems to me that you begin to get very positive results. These may not lead to broad generalizations but at least you begin to get views that seem to make sense in relation to ordinary, everyday experience in a particular culture.

I remember the only place where I ever collected a lot of folk tales there was an audience participating in the situation all the time, and as far as I was concerned I was only interfering a little bit with a microphone. It was in a little isolated community in the Bahamas where it happened that the men were off on the sponge fishing grounds a good deal of the time. They had a great repertory of European stories and African animal tales, but the stories that the community all got the biggest kick out of were incest stories—the relationship between sisters and brothers, mothers and sons. Now this was a problem that the community actually had very close to itself for six months in the year. This was not true in Nassau, but in this little community these incest stories were the ones that were asked for over and over again, and the whole community rolled in the aisles and laughed and had a great deal of pleasure.

I have just cited this as one instance of the kind of approach to what seems to be the almost impossible problem of guessing how culture patterns operate on folk tales, which are after all more or less dreams, until you know something about how the individuals in a culture operate.

MRS. DANIELLI: I just want to say very briefly that in my experience cultures have enormous differences of levels. You have survivals from the very far past, not only from the regular line of development of the culture but also from things that have been learned from contacts with other cultures, from outside. All of these things complicate the pattern when you are dealing with folk tales and with other traditional lore. What may have been true about the social contents in the story at one time may be quite out of phase with what is happening at the present time. You may find there is very little correlation between the folk tale and the existing social situation at all. It seems to me very largely a matter of chance.

CHAIRMAN : The problem we are dealing with is very complex, and some distinctions are clearly necessary. A great deal of the material that is available for the folklorist to study has been collected by others, and without any special attention to possible ways of tying it in with the culture. This material, therefore, may lack in social, cultural, or psychological documentation. In dealing with the material like this it can be very difficult to do much with the cultural background. The folklorist is sometimes handicapped because he has to use material which has been collected by others, and often the material comes from a culture which itself has actually disappeared. Clearly, if one follows the ramifications of a story over ten or fifteen countries or cultures and then takes upon himself the obligation of relating these differences to each of the cultural backgrounds, one has taken on a very difficult task. The folklorist in this case might often find that his results will be negative.

We should also bear in mind that sometimes the social-cultural background may show up not in the main contents of the story but in some very small detail. This may be an item in the plot structure, or it may be matters of style. Another way in which the cultural setting may show its effect is the fact that one culture prefers stories of a particular kind, and another will choose another kind.

DR. LORD: At the opposite extreme from the small detail, the cultural influence can often be seen from the fact of the existence or non-existence of storytelling, or in my own field the existence or non-existence of epic poetry. In the case of epic poetry, you have it in a society or in a cultural background which has, or has recently had, a heroic way of life, but if that kind of life is not existing the epic poetry is not likely to exist either.

DR. JAGENDORF: In these modern stories which I collect I find that there is sometimes an indication of the social situation and sometimes there is none whatever. I have found stories about lazy women in all parts of the country and there seems to be no trouble for stories of that kind to take roots everywhere. Perhaps fifty per cent of the stories which I find repeat themselves all over the country, irrespective of cultural situations. On the other hand there are certain places where special types of stories flourish. I have been interested, for example, in the dislike in Rhode Island particularly of stories of the witch hunter. They make fun of the man who goes out to find who is a witch.

CHAIRMAN: In a number of European countries there are stories about policemen. But when one comes into central Europe there are few such stories. One could immediately say that here is a cultural difference. This may come from the great deference to official authority in central Europe.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: When you have stories that were collected with a minimum of social background, you can sometimes by content-analysis find reflections of the culture. This is something that both Krohn and Aarne discussed when they spoke about substitutions that were made in stories because of differences in custom or social background. In certain stories this reflection of culture is very interesting. I remember an African version of a story in which the third or youngest son goes out after his two older brothers have failed. Now ordinarily he marries one girl, preferably the youngest and most beautiful of the princesses. But in Africa after his conquest he ends by marrying all three of the girls since in African cultures the more wives you have the more successful you are. I don’t think any American or European version would permit the hero to marry all three of the girls. Dr. Benedict, by the way, points out that in Zuni you don’t marry all the girls either, but in their folk tales the hero always does marry them, and she suggests that you have some kind of day-dreaming, a kind of fantasy.

CHAIRMAN: Mr. Halpert points to a very intriguing question, about the existence of elements in folklore which do not function in the culture. There seem to be two suggestions about such folklore. One group would suggest that this folklore does not need to reflect the actual cultural background. It merely represents a stage of culture which is dead, and it is nothing more now than a survival ; or that it is the result of diffusion. Others are interested in the questions of day-dreaming and wishful thinking, and they are tempted to explain everything that doesn’t make much sense in terms of the culture as expressions of submerged, subconscious forces. One can sometimes explain a good deal in this fashion, but it is also very easy to invent an over-ingenious explanation.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I should like to suggest that some light may well be thrown on this subject by a study of the Gypsy tales. A very excellent Swedish collection of Gypsy folk tales was taken down a couple of years ago from people now living in Sweden who had lived there for many years but who had wandered through most of the countries of Europe. As you work through this collection it turns out that you will not find the slightest trace of any influence of Scandinavian stories. For the greatest part of these tales you find exact counterparts in a collection of Gypsy stories from England made a generation ago and taken down mostly from Welsh and Scotch-Irish tinkers. It seems to me rather astonishing that a man like this Swedish Gypsy should have preserved a quite distinct tradition—one which was also found among the Gypsies of Great Britain. This was true even to the construction of the same incidents in the tale. Of course they had international types which would have occurred anywhere, but in the arrangement of the incidents, in the way in which the young man will approach the royal house and so on, and the selection of brides, all of this belongs in a distinctly traditional Gypsy strain. Even in the style, they would use a very curious manner of storytelling. Each of those present would tell a chapter, and when his turn would come he would leave off the communal work and take his part. This seems to point to a distinct social communal background for this branch of stories.

And there was another interesting point. You will find in Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales that the Gypsy stories there are partly found also in a collection taken down in Ireland. This Irish collection was taken from tinkers in Dublin. It turned out that the British Gypsy tales were more closely related to the native Irish-Celtic stories than were the Swedish Gypsy stories to those of Scandinavia. Again I could not explain it, but we think perhaps that the tinker Gypsies were in closer relation to this general social background in the British Isles than were the Scandinavian tinkers to the regular Scandinavian public. Of course there is a very active association between the traveling people and the farmers of our northern country, but I think the Gypsies always seem to be a people apart. And their tales seem to be a part of their general social life. The stories among the Gypsies seem not to be very much dependent upon the individual storyteller. There is one interesting case of an old storyteller, dead now some fifteen years, whose stories were recorded on two different occasions with an interval of twenty-five years. There was scarcely the change of a phrase between these two sets of records. I happened to know this man, and his ideal of storytelling was to tell a straight story in straight words. That is the main point, and the background of that Gypsy custom as well as of the Irish manner may perhaps be some ancient semi-literary tradition. Both of these cases seem to point out the fact that the way in which stories are told is to a large extent dependent upon the general situation, the structure, and the ways of living of the people among whom they are told.

MR. MARUYAMA: To revert to the question of formulas in folk tales, I feel that the beginning and end formulas, at least of our tales, are not the projection of social content of any kind. It is just like a picture with a frame on the outside, so these formulas indicate that what we have is a story. I think that is the only meaning that the folk-tale formula has, and I do not believe that folk tales furnish a reflection of the social structure of any particular time.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: When we say that we expect the reflection of the culture in a story, that certainly does not mean that in every folk tale we are going to get changes to fit the culture entirely. We must remember that the folk tale is a literary form and that there is a large element which keeps its shape and is handed about without change. We may call this the archaic element if we wish. It is not always necessary in an American story to substitute for the fairy prince one of the members of the upper class who happens to run an automobile factory.

By and large, it seems to me that we have more than, one kind of storytelling style. There are areas such as Ireland where there is every attempt to tell the story in exactly the same way from occasion to occasion. It is a somewhat professional performance, and according to the rules of the game the professional teller should tell the story in the way he heard it before. There is, therefore, a minimum of opportunity for substitution for things directly out of the culture. As against that, the American and English storyteller rarely tells the longer story. There is also a tendency for us to tell stories that are supposed to have been true, and the storyteller is very likely to add local touches in order to make it more amusing and to make it seem more true to life. With this attempt at verisimilitude, the door is open for all kinds of local interpolation and substitution of the known for the unknown.

There is another question which is easier to ask than it is to answer. Why are certain stories told? If the story does not reflect at all, what are the purposes it serves ? And here we are faced with the whole question of the purpose of literature itself, because many of these stories simply serve as the literature of the people who listen to it.

MR. LOMAX: I should like to change the direction of the discussion for a moment and suggest some very tentative ideas which I have had on this whole matter of folklore study. The classical folklore scholars have gone on the assumption that they achieve a kind of objectivity in relation to their material because they have applied to it certain esthetic criteria from their own culture. They pick and choose and criticize the material on the basis of the criteria of their own social group which they regard as fixed. Now this I do not regard as a proper basis for a science, if we are discussing how to make folklore a science or at least more scientific. The folklorist or the social scientist has, it seems to me, a very different kind of relationship to his material and to his field from that of physical scientists. A physical science does not merely describe and classify valued parts of its field but assumes an ability to do something in relationship to this material, especially to establish certain rules of procedure in relation to it. It says of the material, “If we set up certain groups of conditions another group of conditions will ensue.” Now so far the discussion about folklore here has revolved entirely around a descriptive kind of folklore in terms of versions and variants and possible relationships with cultural, psychological, and social factors. But my own personal experience is that I have never had the feeling that I understood what was going on inside any particular kind of folk culture other than I happened to be in contact with unless I myself had a participant relationship to it. Folklore is a carrier of human emotions and you cannot measure these emotions objectively. They are something that you have to experience. You have to have a relationship to the material not merely as participant observer but as an active participant in order to know where the emotionally heavy accents are distributed through any story or any song.

Until you have made this relationship of active participant in the folk material it seems to me that you have not even made the beginnings of what we call a science.

MRS. DANIELLI: I agree with what Mr. Lomax says, that folklore does carry human feeling. But I think he rather exaggerates; it carries other things as well. Folklore carries human thought, it carries human invention, and it carries many other things in addition to human emotion. The great value of having folklore students work in many countries is that every country has its own contribution to make to these various studies.

MISS KARPELES: I should like to quote a single sentence from Tylor’s Primitive Culture :¹⁶ “There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he must be who will sympathize with it, while he must be without who will investigate it. It is our fortune that we live near this frontier line and can go in and out.”

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I think there is only one point on which I would disagree with. Mr. Lomax. I don’t think most of us can really identify ourselves completely with another culture. I doubt if we can ever be total participants, but I think we will be participant observers and that, of course, is still a very important part of understanding the folklore of any group.

Up to the present time we have very few collections of folk tales that give any indication as to audience response. We make a real advance when Dr. Voegelin takes down the gestures of the storytellers and tries to explain why people laugh. It is not always easy to tell why people laugh or what people find funny in a story. Sometimes a, thing you think is extremely funny is something that the storyteller takes for granted, and sometimes the thing he will roar about you don’t understand. The trouble is that you don’t know enough about the culture, nor enough about the attitudes and feelings the people have toward what is being told. We certainly need a great deal of work on this aspect of folk material. In some places I think it probably cannot be done any more, but I believe there is still a great deal of room for field work that will include taking down the attitudes, observing very carefully the informant and also the responses of the audience. One thing that will help with this sometimes is a simple questionnaire. If one asks the storyteller, “What does this mean?” frequently one can get some response, particularly if the questions are made out very skillfully. Then again there is the mere matter of observation of the response and of attitudes.

MRS. AILI K. JOHNSON (Flint, Michigan) : I do not believe that we can always place ourselves completely in the culture of any other people. One of the barriers to this kind of participation is merely that of age. Working with the Finnish people in northern Michigan I find when I am getting a story, for example, from a group of old men, they will laugh at a certain point in the story. Now this humor is absolutely unintelligible to me until I have taken it down and noted that it is humorous and so on, and then I take it to an old grandmother whom I know. She will explain to me the little point in the culture that existed fifty or sixty years ago but no longer exists. You cannot identify 3^our- self completely with the background of any group.

PROFESSOR DAVID BIDNEY (Indiana University) : I should like to comment on the points that Dean Thompson raised concerning the connection between tales and social conditions. It seems to me that if one differentiates properly between types of tales he could draw some kind of parallel. If we accept Malinowski’s contention that myths served in part to validate a culture, I think that would mean that insofar as we are concerned with genuine myths there is bound to be a one-to-one correlation between the types of myths which are found and the socio-cultural conditions which they are intended to validate. On the other hand, insofar as we are dealing with folk tales pure and simply, where the interest is primarily on the story, then I think it would be extremely unlikely that you would find any one-to-one correlation between social conditions and the folk tale.

DEAN THOMPSON: I hope I have not overstated my point about the lack of relationship between a tale and the social background. I merely meant to state that the particular story I happened to be working on has produced negative results. I have little doubt that there could be other types of tales that would show a considerable correlation between the social background and the tale itself. Whether this would be based upon the distinction between folk tale and myth, about which I am not at all clear, would remain to be seen. I do not feel that we have sufficient data to dogmatize as to what is a tale and what is a myth. I have taken the point of view that one has first of all to determine just what the situation is before he can approach the question of why that situation exists. Now I suspect that if I had not actually taken the trouble to trace the “Star Husband” tale around, I would certainly have assumed first of all that the tale would be very well known in a place that was interested in stars. I find that no such correlation exists. I might also have debated as to whether this was a tale or a myth. I doubt whether the distinction between tale and myth can be properly drawn on the basis of the relationship or lack of relationship with the social background of the people who tell them. But the only way to tell whether a particular tale will be received by a particular culture is to see whether it has been so received. We cannot profitably speculate on whether they would be so received.

Now we have discussed style somewhat in this symposium, as well as social function. We can talk a good deal about it all but I must say that as a teacher I have been blocked a good deal because of the lack of what seems to me to be adequate methods for these studies. I don’t believe that these things should be approached in a purely impressionistic manner. We have to work out some kind of method that, for example, beginning students can use. Here is where I would welcome some very practical help. I should like to be able to tell a student who wants to study style in a particular group of folk tales exactly what he should do and how he should go about it. Of course, I know a few simple things about beginning formulas, end formulas, runs, and so on, and I know that one could make out a list and count how many times the word king is mentioned, the so-called content analysis, but I have not seen that that gets one very far. This practical matter of the study of style in the folk tales is something on which I at least need a good deal of help.

CHAIRMAN: As to the suggestion about style, we might well continue to think about it and start our discussion next time by an exchange of views as to how we can get at stylistic problems. As to the other suggestion I think we will all agree that a study of the diffusion or geographic distribution of a story or group of stories, or even of some stylistic elements, is a very good check on what otherwise might be a misleading interpretation of folklore material derived from the cultural background. Sometimes it seems that a given story makes good sense in its particular setting, but it occurs also in various other places where it does not seem to make such good sense. The student here is likely to go to one extreme or another, just as he is in all cultural- historical problems. When items are distributed over huge areas we may become interested in the geographic spread and forget all about the cultural settings. Or we may have our minds so much on the cultural settings that we forget all about the geographic spread and the lack of correspondence in many places.

PROFESSOR C. F. VOEGELIN: It seems to me that this matter of the study of style is not too complicated. If students are working, for example, with Turkish tales, they can find out the style for the Turkish language when spoken in normal conversation, and then they can see the way in which the syntax of folk tales differs from the syntax of ordinary speech. It seems to me that the study of literary style is as simple as that.

To Mr. Lomax my question is this. When you want to be a participant in the folklore narration which you hear, which folklore narration do you pay attention to if they are multiple? I was thinking of Tubatulabal Indians where on the one hand we’re told tales with animal actors, and when food is being served this food is entirely pre-Columbian types of food. The next day they will tell you a tale about the king and a princess and they will indulge their personal fantasy and will speak about modern types of food, for example, oranges. In other words, we have pre-contact foods and the post-contact foods. Is it possible to enter into a participant relation on both these planes ?

CHAIRMAN: I think there are two questions directed to two individuals. Dean Thompson would you take the first question?

DEAN THOMPSON: In the study of folk-tale style I have always taken the position that I am interested in successful folk-tale styles. Now the question is, what is successful? Is this the style that pleases me or someone in my culture, or the style that pleases the people to whom the tale is told? I assume that the successful folk-tale teller is the one that pleases the people to whom he tells stories. It seems to me then that the first thing one has to do in making a study of the style in the folk tale is to find what style attains success not from my point of view but from the point of view of the people who listen to it. That means that for every group you have to work out a kind of standard of what they like. I believe the study of style should include studies of value, but they ought not to be our values. But from the point of view of the value of the people who listen to the thing we ought to be able to say of a tale, “This is good, this is not very good, this is excellent.” Now I don’t know about this linguistic approach which Dr. Yoegelin suggests. It seems to me that in the end we would get a description without any value content whatsoever.

MR. LOMAX: This brings up something that I did want to say and maybe it will bear upon what Professor Voegelin is thinking about. It seems to me that it would be practically impossible to become a participant in a culture that has a primitive language which you cannot speak. The problem I was raising was I think a very simple one. If we ourselves are able to use the material inside the culture situation in a perfectly normal way, then we will begin to get a closer idea of the values and emotional content of this material. Now when you come to a primitive culture you raise a very serious difficulty and I think this is one in which the folklorist who is concerned with cultures that are not so primitive has a great advantage. He is dealing with a culture that he already knows fairly well and feels pretty much at home with. Within a few months at least he can go in and become a participant, with a good knowledge of the language and with some fundamental ideas of the emotional and psychological assumptions of the group. This I admit you cannot do with primitive peoples. Perhaps if you went there and stayed long enough and went hungry with them you might approach it.

End of Session

FOURTH SESSION

CHAIRMAN: As we begin our fourth and last session of this symposium it is clear that we shall not be able to coyer all the topics that are stated in our agenda. Some of them we discussed last week at the Folk Music Conference, and some of them we shall have to let go. You will recall that during the first session we discussed the general concept of folklore, and tried to come to some agreement as to what the area of folklore was. In the second we discussed the historic-geographic method. In the third we intended to discuss the social and cultural backgrounds, but we also talked a good deal about style. Perhaps we still have a good deal to say about style, and we shall lead off with that subject. If we can finish that in half an hour or so, we will return to some of the points of view that have come up during the past sessions. Also some of the audience who have not had a chance to speak will have an opportunity today to present some of their ideas.

On the question of style I have asked Dr. Lord to give us an opening statement. He has worked very intensively with epic poetry, that is the Yugoslav heroic epic poetry. In that subject, as well as in the Homeric studies to which he will no doubt refer, we can see the application of a special method of stylistic analysis which can make our thinking rather concrete. I am sure, from what I know of his ideas, that they will be stimulating for the study not only of the epic songs but of the tales and of other kinds of folk songs.

DR. LORD: In introducing a discussion of oral vs. written style, one must obviously begin with some statement as to what we mean by style. There seem to be two general concepts of style with which we are all familiar. First, one can look upon style as a conglomerate of individual traits or characteristics making up a total impression. This concept is not objective enough for scientific study. One can, however, be more precise and call style the form of thought as expressed by man in words. This is precise enough to allow us to analyze the formal matter within the broader statement of style. I do not mean to reject the broader interpretation entirely, but for our purposes it is too subjective. I am, then, in this presentation, going to be concerned with form rather than with content, because I feel convinced that it is form rather than content which differentiates oral style from written style.

The method of stylistic analysis mentioned by Professor Herzog was first used without any idea of analyzing an oral style. Milman Parry in his work on the Homeric poems began with a study of the use of the traditional epithet in the Homeric poems and of the influence of the hexameter on the choice of the epithet. He did not realize at first that the style which he was analyzing was oral. But as he compared the Iliad and the Odyssey later with other epics he was led to see that their style was dependent on the illiteracy of the poet. Thus he was drawn to the study of oral epic in order to understand the way in which Homer had composed his epics. The collections of oral epic already in existence at that time were not well enough controlled for stylistic research, and Parry found it necessary to make a collection of his own. After he had begun to reason about the causes of the regularity of the formulas in the Homeric poems, Parry wrote:

It is of course the pattern of the diction which, as in the matter of the authorship of the style, proves by its very extent that the Homeric style is oral. It must have been for some good reason that the poet, or poets, of the Iliad and the Odyssey kept to the formulas even when he, or they, had to use some of them very frequently. What was this constraint which thus set Homer apart from the poets of a later time, and of our own time, whom we see in every phase choosing those words which alone will match the color of their own thought? The answer is not only the desire for an easy way of making verses, but the complete need of it. Whatever manner of composition we could suppose for Homer, it could be only one which barred him in every verse and in every phrase from the search for words that would be of his own finding. Whatever reason we may find for his following the scheme of the diction, it can be only one which quits the poet at no instant. There is only one need of this sort which can even be suggested—the necessity of making verses by the spoken word. This is a need that can be lifted from the poet only by writing, which alone allows the poet to leave his unfinished idea in the safekeeping of the paper which lies before him, while with whole unhurried mind he seeks along the ranges of his thought for the new group of words which his idea calls for. Without writing the poet can make his verses only when he has a formulaic diction which will give him his phrases all made, and made in such a way that, at the slightest bidding of the poet, they will link themselves in an unbroken pattern that will fill his verses and make his sentences.¹⁷

So Parry selected Yugoslavia as a field in which to collect material for formula analysis. He himself was not able to carry out this analysis, because he died very shortly after returning from the collecting trip. But others have continued his work. We have analyzed the style of oral epics with special emphasis on three points: first on the formula, the regularly recurring line and phrase; second, on the phenomenon of enjambement, the way in which lines are joined together ; and third on the regularly recurring passages of the types which are familiar to all readers of Homer and which Mr. O’Suilleabhain mentioned as “runs” in the Irish heroic stories. In working with the Yugoslav epic we have analyzed songs from a single singer and then songs from a single district. One must obviously have a fairly large body of material for analysis to meet with any kind of success. In addition to the Yugoslav epic we have also analyzed the Homeric poems, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, and similar epics from the past.

Our work with the formula proceeded on the basis of the definition of the formula which Parry has given us, as a word or group of words regularly used to express a given idea under given metrical circumstances. Our first step was to determine what the length of the formula was. In the case of epic poetry this was easy enough. The length of a formula was the length of the line and of the parts into which the line was divided. Thus, in the Yugoslav epics where the line contains ten syllables which are divided by a caesura after the fourth, there are either ten- syllable whole-line formulas, or initial four-syllable formulas, or final six-syllable formulas. In the Homeric poems the pattern is more intricate. The Greek hexameter is longer than the Yugoslav line and it is broken at more places. There is hence greater variety in formula length. In Beowulf the situation is simpler. The Anglo-Saxon line has four stresses, each hemistich containing two. Here the formulas are either a whole line or a half line in length.

After deciding the question of formula length, one then begins the task of counting the number of times which a given line or phrase occurs in the body of material chosen for analysis. Generally one finds a fairly large number of formulas which are repeated over and over again. After all, they must be repeated at least once in order to be considered as formulas, according to the definition. By an underlining of these elements in any given passage the formulas can readily be seen. But when this has been done, there remains a group of lines and phrases which are not underlined. What is to be done with these? They look like formulas, they sound like formulas, and yet one cannot find any other instance of their use. If one analyzes further those formulas which one knows to be formulas, one discovers that besides length and thematic content, or meaning, they have two other kinds of content. They have a rhythmic content and a syntactic content. It will then be noted that the rhythm of the formulas is the same as the rhythm of those phrases which one has not been able to find repeated, and the syntactic patterns are the same in the formulas and in the other phrases. It is these basic patterns which caused those phrases which were not formulas to look and sound like real formulas. They are then “formulaic.” We cannot actually underline them as formulas; yet they fall into the same pattern as the formulas, and this gives us the right to call them formulaic. If one were to analyze a larger body of material, one would very likely find that these are formulas also. They can be underlined with a broken line. There will probably still be some lines left which will not be underlined in any way; we must call them “non-formulaic.”

In the Yugoslav material we found that more than fifty per cent of the lines were formulas, that another forty per cent were formulaic, and that less than ten per cent (actually about one per cent) were non-formulaic For the Beowulf and for the Homeric poems the percentage of non-formulaic lines is somewhat higher, namely fifteen to twenty per cent. The reason for this is that we just do not have enough material for analysis; after all, Beowulf has less than 4,000 lines. In written style, on the contrary, the non-formulaic lines predominate and those which might be called formulaic or formula are comparatively few. Such analysis is, therefore, a test for oral style, and in the case of epic poetry it has worked with great success; by that method we have been able to prove that the Beowulf and the Homeric poems are oral compositions, that they are, in other words, the result of oral processes of composition rather than the result of written processes of composition.

The second characteristic of oral style of which I wish to speak is enjambement, that is to say, the way in which lines are joined to one another. When the end of the sentence coincides with the end of the line, there is no enjambement. But when the end of the sentence does not coincide with the end of,the line the enjambement takes place, and it can be either periodic or unperiodic. Periodic enjambement means that it is necessary for the reader or listener to go on to the next line to finish the idea. If, for example, the subject is in one line and the verb is in the next line, the enjambement is periodic. On the other hand, if the thought comes to an end at the end of a line, but the sentence continues into the next line with additional ideas, the enjambement is unperiodic. For example, the line “Sultan Sulejman arose early,” could have a period after it, but when the next line continues “In Stambol, that white city,” the enjambement between the lines is unperiodic, because, although a thought is complete at the end of the first line, the sentence is not yet complete and something new is added in the next line. Parry noticed that in Homer unperiodic enjambement was very frequent, but that in the Argonautica periodic enjambement was much more frequent than unperiodic, and he concluded that this also was a characteristic of oral style. He wrote:

Homer was ever pushed on to use unperiodic enjambement. Oral versemaking by its speed must be chiefly carried on in an adding style. The singer has not time for the nice balances of unhurried thought: he must order his words in such a way that they leave him much freedom to end the sentence or draw it out as the story and the needs of the verse demand.

I have carried out this same sort of analysis in the Yugoslav material. Again, unperiodic enjambement was very frequent; as a matter of fact, the results not only confirm the findings in the Homeric poems but confirm them almost too emphatically. In the Homeric poems periodic enjambement was found in about twenty-five per cent of the material analyzed. In the Yugoslav material it was noted only about ten per cent of the time—less than half as frequent. Thus the Yugoslav material is even more unperiodic than the Homeric poems.

Finally, and very briefly, the theme must be mentioned. This is much too broad a subject to treat in any detail here. The theme, the recurrent passage or the recurrent story element, performs the same function in the composition of the poem as a whole that the formula performs in the composition of a verse. One singer told me, when I asked him how he learned a new song, that he did not learn the song word for word but that he learned the “plan” of the song. That meant that he learned what the major and minor themes in the song were. Then from his store of thematic material he could compose the song according to the plan of the major themes.

In other words, one can analyze thematic structure in the same way that one analyzes formulaic structure ; that is by determining what the major and minor themes are in a given song, and then searching through the singer’s repertory to find the number of times thè passages recur. It will thus be found that those recurrent themes occupy the major portion of the songs, in the same way that the formulas occupy the major portion of the verse.

To summarize then: In studying oral epic with a mind to distinguish it from written epic, the factors which we have found of most help thus far have been the formula, which involves a study of the line; enjambement, which involves a study of the way in which one line is linked with another ; and the theme, which involves a study of the structure of the poem as a whole.

We have not yet carried our analyses nearly as far as we should. There is a great need for further analyses of this sort. We feel confident that this is a right method for epic poetry, because it has the sanction both of literary stylistic research and of field collecting which has concentrated on understanding the singer and his performance. To the best of my knowledge this method has not been applied to folk tales and ballads. I believe that it may be a valid technique for the study of these as well. Naturally, adjustments would have to be made, particularly in the case of folk tales. In them the restrictive element of the meter is lacking. So the first task in analyzing the folk tale from this point of view would be to determine what the length of a formula is. Once that is determined, the rest of the analysis would not be difficult. It would be necessary to analyze also ordinary speech, filled as it, too, is with “formulas.” One could proceed from an analysis of the formula patterns of ordinary speech to an analysis of those of written stories, and then conclude with a study of the patterns of the folk tale. It is a challenge.

CHAIRMAN: It is very tempting to wonder whether some similar type of operation, perhaps not so extensive, is at work in the composition technique of other types of songs or of folk tales. We all know that in the tales there are initial and final elements which are formulas. These are recurrent, but in the body of the folk tale their role seems to become less important. But there is an area between the so-called formulas and what seems to be the free composition of the material which we ought to investigate. We should like very much to know what is the real technique of the way in which tales and songs are composed or recomposed and I think for this question the type of analysis which has been suggested is extremely interesting.

DR. ERMINIE VOEGELIN: I have made some unsuccessful attempts to study the material which follows the initial formulas in American Indian tales, I have laid this aside, but now I shall go back to it and try to do something more with it along the lines which Dr. Lord suggests. I think we shall not be able to do a great deal with American Indian tales before we have more conversational text material taken down for purposes of comparison. I have come to feel that I am working merely on initial and final formulas and that the material in the rest of the tale is simply eluding me. I shall certainly go back to these studies with a renewed interest.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: Professor H. M. Belden, who classified large bodies of Missouri folk songs, was able to classify his ballads very successfully, but when he came to the love songs he found that he had to give up any real classification. The only thing that he could find was that these were combinations of the same patterns, pairs of lines, or quatrains. Any student of folk songs has found that a very large part of a song is made up of these patterns and formulas. Similarly in the folk tale there are all kinds of commonplaces and formulas which seem to be both pleasurable to the audience and a help to the storyteller.

DR. LILJEBLAD: As you probably know I have worked with two tribes of American Indians and have taken down their tales in text. There are certain kinds of formulas that they are very fond of. A favorite formula with one of the best taletellers was to finish a section with a four-stressed pattern. When this taleteller could gather all he could say into a simple clause with a four-stressed pattern he preferred to do that. This excellent informant who was regarded as a highly esteemed taleteller stuck to this particular rhythmic pattern always, whereas people who were regarded as less skilled fell into the general conversational style in their storytelling.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: At the beginning of a Russian folk tale there are nearly always formulistic lines. Then throughout the story at various places there will be special formulas that keep recurring. The hero calls his magic horse, he commands him to appear, there is the description of the house of the Baba Yaga which is constantly turning around so that the hero can’t enter, there is a constant formula as to the way in which the hero commands the house to stop turning. Sometimes there are so many formulae in a prose tale that it becomes almost like a song.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON (University of Abo, Finland): Also in the Russian bylini—the Russian epic songs—there are very, very many formulas.

DEAN THOMPSON: I am wondering if we have here a test that could settle some difficult literary problems ? There is, for example, a question as to how far Beowulf really is popular or is the work of some literary man—monk or someone else. Could we get some approach to the amount of the popular and the amount of the literary in a particular document by such studies ? I should be rather optimistic about trying such methods. It seems to me that if we ever got around to a good understanding of oral style, or the style that lives on in an oral tradition even when it is material of definitely literary origin—if we can ever work out stylistic principles of this kind—we can in many cases detect the spurious in folklore. It might very well be a good test of the genuineness of folk tradition.

MR. CHARLES SEEGER (Pan American Union, Washington, D. C.) : I must confess to a dismal ignorance of the novelty of this view in the world of speech criticism or if you wish to call it literary criticism, but it bears a close resemblance to some forms of music analysis. We have both the formula and the formulaic. The formula is very well-known, but now about the formulaic: we should say that it had the metrical pattern of the formula with a tonal differentiation, or it had the tonal pattern with rhythmic differentiation. It seems to me, therefore, that the same general kinds of analysis can be applied to melodies as to the texts and in that way you could unify your analysis of the song. This process might be very fruitful.

CHAIRMAN: This seems to me to have a very special and very suggestive implication for music. When we speak of cadence in music that really means a little formula, a short rather stable element that has a tendency to keep recurring in the same composition. This is like a certain way of beginning or ending a story, and so it is possible to translate a little musical terminology over into the study of the tale. Now in folk music, which is comparatively simple, what is our unit? The musician is tempted to say that the musical phrase for the text line is the musical unit, and will look upon it as a possible frame for a musical formula. While this sometimes causes difficulties, we often find in folk music that a given musical phrase which shows up in one song also shows up in a number of others. We can call this a formula, and we get the same kind of picture that we have been hearing about here in folklore texts. I think this is a very challenging thing. I wonder how far we can apply it in folk music, where we have comparatively simple construction principles, as against, let us say, much of cultivated music?

MISS KARPELES: This idea is so new to me that I can’t think of anything very valuable to say about it just at the moment. I must confess that I am very ignorant about this type of study. I am not very clear exactly what Dr. Lord means by formula and the difference between it and formulaic. Is it a question of rhythm, or is it a question of the actual text of the words, a combination of words which recur? The combination which recurs is the formula, and I imagine the formulaic, then, is something which keeps the same sort of ideas only with a slight variation.

DR. LORD: Well, it is not only the rhythm of sound but also the rhythm of thought in the sense of a syntactic pattern as well as a rhythmic pattern.

MISS KARPELES : I would say almost certainly that this is an avenue that we could explore in music because, as you know, so much of folk song is made up of stock phrases.

MR. LOMAX: I wonder whether Dean Thompson’s suggestion couldn’t be at least made the basis of this supposition, that the degree of oralness in an oral tradition can be measured by how much it is composed of formulas. This would certainly be true in relation to our two main folk traditions in English in this country. As everybody here knows, Negro folk songs are made up very largely of floating lines or couplets or even stanzas. You can say that there is no such thing as a Negro ballad in the sense that there is a White ballad. A Negro ballad may have a story line of one kind at a certain point and the next time the same singer sings it, it may be turned into a completely lyrical song and the stanzas shifted about entirely. Negro singers on my records very often announce after having sung a song that this song was composed by Mill Jones, that is by himself. They feel that literally they have put the song together anew every time they sang it. Now one additional point: If the folkliness or genuineness of a folk style is to be determined by how oral it is, then it seems to me there must be some connection between the number of formulas that occur and the degree to which the role of composer can belong to any person in the group or perhaps to the group itself.

MR. SEEGER: Perhaps I did not make myself clear when I spoke just a moment ago. I meant to say that Dr. Lord’s analysis seems to me quite new for literary analysis but it is what we have been using in music for years, as Dr. Herzog knows. It is one of the things that makes any of us very suspicious, let us say, of Mr. Niles’s “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” If one sings through those four phrases he finds no formulation there at all. There are four different phrases and this is a thing you would never meet in folk songs.

One of the reasons that I jumped up all of a sudden was that I saw in what Mr. Lomax said the possibility which I have been looking for in these meetings now for nearly two weeks. This is the approach to the question of what we really mean by composition. I suppose this would touch off, of course, our old controversy about communal composition and individual composition because in this sense, when you have a high percentage of formulas, composition is literally true in its etymological sense, it is com-position—putting things together. In music in the thirteenth century they put things together in that way. They would fake one folk song, a street song, a Latin Gregorian piece of plainsong, and through the skill of the composer they would put the three together and make something that could be sung by three voices, and they used the word composition thus, in the sense of putting things together that were already given. For that reason I should like it if you allowed Mr. Lomax to say something a little bit more definite than he did a few days ago about his theory of group evolution of a tune.

MR. LOMAX: What I am speaking of might be called social composition, so as to avoid the bad odor of the older term communal composition. It seems to me that folklore may well come into being and keep refreshing itself continually by the reorganization of old formulas. But where can you begin to find the actual starting point of a folk song? I wonder if Dr. Lord ever found the actual starting point of any of his pieces exactly, or wouldn’t he have to say that at some point the singer used ten thousand formulas in a slightly different way, so that the new composition was made up more of materials which belonged to the whole community of singers than it did of something that belonged to the singer himself? It seems to be the very touchstone of folk art as opposed to the art of the schools, that the composer represents a group, that he reorganizes his material, and that he is a very, very unimportant person here in the group. In this way we do have a kind of group composition.

CHAIRMAN: I should like to suggest that what Mr. Lomax has been speaking of is that which Mr. Phillips Barry called communal re-creation. He spent some fifteen or twenty years discussing and demonstrating this technique. This was different from the old concept of communal composition in which, for example, each of us here in this room would contribute a line. Mr. Barry meant communal recomposition, communal recreation. In this process, the individual singer reshapes the material which is traditional, which is floating around in the community, and his own personal originality is very much in the background, as against the literary creator who often feels that the important thing he is doing is uttering his own personal expression and bringing entirely new ideas.

PROFESSOR J. RUSSELL REAVER (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida) : Our recent discussion it seems to me has probably been on the right track, but I believe that we should take warning as we think of this problem that there are degrees of independence with which even the literary artist must work. We must not conclude that he has complete independence. He also uses many formulas which are determined either by the literary criticism which is authoritative in his day or even by certain social interests which are dominant in his intellectual circles. We have to be very careful in the use of such comparisons when we try to distinguish between the literary artist and the folk artist. This would perhaps be a good place for Dr. Lord to let us know what he thinks of our various comments and perhaps to answer some of the questions which have been raised.

DR. LORD: I shall take the last one first. The conventionality of a traditional style appearing in seventeenth or eighteenth century writing was not overlooked by Parry, and there are ages in which a literary style is particularly conventional, but whether you would speak here of formulas or not is a different thing. I don’t believe such styles would fall into the larger pattern of formulas such as we have been discussing. There is the problem of discussing the formulaic patterns within the work of a single writer, and not a great deal has been done with that.

Now to go on to other things for a moment, I think we are apt to consider this as much too mechanical a process. The use of these formulas is not a mechanical process in the mind of the singer. This is something which has taken him some twenty years to become familiar with, so that he is not just mechanically adding one formula to another. This is a process as natural to him as breathing is. He moves with great ease in the formulas. He thinks in formulas even when he is speaking in prose, and he frequently lapses into formulas of verse. One great scholar when he noticed this said that the singer plays with the formulas as we play with cards. But it is not, I think, quite as mechanical or as conscious an effort as that.

As to what Mr. Lomax said about the group as opposed to the individual, I think we have a paradox. Everything in the poem belongs to the group, but the poem itself and the formula in which it happens in a particular performance is the singer’s. Every item is the tradition. But when a great singer is sitting in front of an audience, his music, the expression of his face, and his particular version of the poem at the time is his. By the method of .analysis which I have talked about I have been able to point out the individualities of style. I can tell whether a song which is given to me belongs to this singer or to that singer.

CHAIRMAN: Some mention has been made of the possible applicability of this type of technique to folk tales. We have found that it is difficult to make progress in the study of style in folk tales after we have talked about beginning and end phrases, runs and the like. Now as we make more and more sound recordings it seems to me that it would be possible to pay strict attention to the manner of delivery. In our printed texts all we have are the conventional punctuation marks and this, of course, is the work of the editor. In oral delivery, however, there are definite segments although they do not have equal length. Would it not be possible in a rather systematic way to study the pauses, the rise and fall of the voice at various places, and see specifically how this style differs from that of the ordinary conversational language? In all this, as Professor Voegelin said the other day, the linguist may be of some help to us.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: I should-like-to offer some observation on that point from a study of that kind which I have tried myself. Now, the origin of this study came in a discussion about whether there was any real Norwegian folk-tale style. Many of us felt that there was certainly a very characteristic and very fine ancient Norwegian folk-tale style, and we wondered if we might not be able to find a folk tale where the story kept to a relatively definite pattern. We chose a folk tale for which we had some fifty different versions and we selected the final pas-i sage, that is to say the climax of the story. We found that not only as concerns the contents but also as to the way of telling the story these were very, very much alike. But there were curious differences in type. Following these differences in type and trying to trace these stories to their origin, it turned out that about fifty per cent of them could be traced to definite storytellers. And of these again some ten or fifteen to particular famous old storytellers of about eighty or a hundred years ago. We were fortunate enough to have very minute accounts of their lives and their way of storytelling and the like.

We would find some very interesting differences in these great storytellers. One of our best raconteurs with a repertory of about two hundred tales died about ninety years ago. She could neither read nor write but she had a curious way of remembering things, a very definite manner of storytelling. In another part of the country, the northwest, you will find quite another manner. Here the sentences are left further apart. You will see in the storytelling” that the teller will fill in gaps with gestures, with significant pauses. Now all these tellers differ in a very marked way in their language from the regular dialect and from the everyday sequence of voice. They sit about comfortably at a party and are definitely playing a part in the social life. This also will bring us to the point which has been mentioned, about the relation between the ordinary daily speech and the speech of narrative. These taletellers are not professionals but they are actually artists in the oral tradition. It would be very interesting to know what is at the back of their minds.

You can follow the influence of such great storytellers. As to this woman I spoke of, we have stories recorded from her grandchildren and you can recognize her style at once. It is, of course, extremely difficult to say exactly of what this resemblance consists.

We seem to see here a case of an individual style persisting through a very long time. We can follow these along traditional lines, and as they go back one person learned from another. Now these do not go back more than say to 1700 or 1750. There were no printed versions before 1830. It seems to me that these studies of individual styles make almost invalid any idea of a homogeneous oral tradition. To be sure there is a very definite limit in the choice of sentences and phrases and cliches and so on, but still at the same time the tale is primarily due to the imagination of an individual in the group. When this is imitated it is acknowledged by subsequent generations to be an imitation of the individual. I feel that the fact that you can detect such an influence through several generations is proof in the main that a folk tale is the work of an individual and is not made up by a group working together.

CHAIRMAN: It is obviously going to be impossible to conclude any discussion of the important things we have brought up before the end of this session. We have only some twenty or twenty-five minutes left. I see that Professor Halpert seems to be all primed to speak.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: When we began our discussion as to what folklore is, our attention was called to many definitions in the new folklore dictionary. We found, of course, that these definitions belonged to general groups. There were the people who said that folklore should be restricted to oral literature. This group, which follows Professor Herskovits, consists primarily of anthropologists since the anthropologists are dealing with all of culture and they feel that the folklorists should confine themselves to the study of oral literature. Then we have the European school, which takes up all aspects of folk life, and we have in America a number of people, interestingly enough literary people, who now want to include folk life as well as oral literature in their sphere of discourse.

I want to propose a way of looking at all of this. What I have to say is nothing new and most of the ideas have come from various people with whom I have discussed it. In approaching the question of what is the area of folklore I am going to assume that we do have such things as communities which individual folklorists can study. There is a region, an area let us say, unified by the same ways of work, by language, by living in the same physical surroundings, and by being in contact with each other. Now let us look at this community always remembering that there are many communities and that there is interaction on that community from outside and that there is also action the other way from the community to the outside. Now such a community can be the subject of investigation. A tourist can go through that community and the only thing he will see on the surface may be that people dress a little differently. And if he stops to eat he may see that their eating habits are somewhat different. If he is somewhat more observing he may notice that the barns have a different shape and he may notice something of the town layout. This is all the surface visitor-tourist is likely to notice, unless there are folk festivals or other ways of opening up the community to the outsider. This I would call the outer circle.

Now we have a circle within that. A folklorist goes into the community and has certain special interests in mind. HE will locate people, for example, who will know songs and he will record songs and take them back to the archive. He has got down into the second circle. The folk-tale collector will also get the material, and similarly with all the other branches of folk study, whether oral or not. Some of the people will take back artifacts that can be observed and can be photographed. All these things can be taken away and can be studied individually. The specialist can work with them at home or in his library and he can make significant statements about them. The music specialist can see the relationship of the tunes and the various other aspects that are strictly musical. The man who is studying the patterns of art can work out a number of things in the museum. The folk-tale student can apply his historic-geographic method and he does not need to be living in the community in order to say certain significant things in the study of folklore. So from one point of view we can break our study of folklore down into the consideration of various kinds of specialists, folk- music, folk-arts, folk-tale, and general folk-life specialists. They can take their material out of the community and study it.

But we still have the community there in the center of the circle and it is within this circle that you have the matrix, the interrelationship, the community of people living lives that interact upon each other. These lives form various kinds of complicated relations and have also their expression in art forms both oral and practical. In our study of songs and tales, by style, by tune, by families, and so on, we can, of course, say very significant things, but we must not forget that we are only studying half the picture. There is the community from which these things come. This also has to be studied. I am going to suggest that we have, then, two possibilities of study. We still can have the man who will specialize, without becoming familiar with the field, with field experience. I think that such a person may lack certain insights into his material. But he still can accomplish a great deal without ever having to walk five miles up a hill, carrying the necessary bottle of whisky or a recording machine. Whether it is the folklorist or the ethnologist who wants to investigate folk culture, it doesn’t seem to matter to me. But no one should get the idea that, except from the highly specialized technical point of view he can leave out that central core of the lives of the people, the meaning of folklore to people. As I see it, the two great branches of folklore study are the study of the community and the study of the folklore that the community produces.

MISS KARPELES: Might I ask a question of Mr. Halpert? Could he give us some idea of exactly what is in his mind—he talked of the circle and of that center which is the life of the community. The thing that I find is so hard is to say what is that homogeneous community ?

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I think that any group of people living together for any period of time set up certain relationships with each other, in ways of behaving toward each other or being affected by each other. I think an Army, for example, does that in a short time, or a camp or college campus does it for a period of time, but if you live longer in one place your relationships get more and more complex.

CHAIRMAN: This difficult problem, the nature and unity of the social group, or the community, has been studied in various disciplines. The experiences and findings of the sociologists, especially the rural sociologist, the anthropologist, and the social psychologist may prove to be very helpful to us. Meanwhile we do not want to be mystical or loose about folk and the folk community.

The concept of the folk community takes us back to our initial discussions of the concept of folklore, and to the divergent views that touched upon the definition of folklore, the range of the phenomena it embraces, the relation and balance between different types of interest and study which have contributed to its growth as a science, and the relation of folklore to its various disciplines. These questions came up, time and again, while we discussed more specific problems under various headings. They formed an undercurrent of interest throughout, and we had hoped to devote some renewed discussion to them at the end of this symposium. Since our time unfortunately does not permit us to do so, I should like to offer a few brief comments of my own.

Mr. Halpert reminded us colorfully of the two main types of interest in folkloristic study. In one, folklore is studied primarily as part of the total culture of the group. It may, because of this orientation, cover considerably more than the products of traditional oral literature, it may encompass the entire traditional culture of the group. Abroad, this view has been cultivated very ably and fruitfully especially in the Scandinavian lands and in Ireland, and we in this country can learn very much from this scholarship. In dealing with such a rich area as traditional culture, it has found it useful to employ in addition to the term folklore other designations and concepts, such as folk life, social history, or ethnology, and this variety in terminology does not appear to have created obstacles in the pursuit of constructive research.

In this country and in others, anthropology—more specifically cultural and social anthropology—has been devoting itself for a considerable length of time to the study of culture in all its aspects; the anthropologist’s interest in folklore, which is of long standing, is similar to that of the European student of folk life. Still, he is apt to find it convenient to see folklore as the study primarily of oral literature; a distinct branch of his general field which occupies a special position because, among other things, it calls for the employment of linguistic skills and techniques. He is likely to find it to his advantage to study customs and beliefs in their organic connections with the body of native law, of mores, of religion, which are all integral parts of the social fabric, rather than as marginal areas to the verbally so articulate literary materials the placing of which in the total cultural picture still presents a challenging problem for him. His description of arts and crafts will take its start with an inquiry into the technology of the culture, its inventory of material objects, its economic needs and resources. The anthropologist will tend to cultivate, then, folklore as a primarily cultural study, and assign to it a more circumscribed area.

The other, classic interest in folklore stemmed from the tradition of literary study; it has patiently inventoried and described an overwhelming mass and variety of literary forms and developments in oral traditions. It has developed methods for giving historical depth to oral tradition that has no written historical documentation for its background. But it also adapted to the specific character of traditional oral literature the benefits of literary experience, taste, and sensitiveness, which the social scientist or the student of culture will not have acquired as a matter of training and background. The very magnitude of the tasks which this interest set for itself, and the need for developing special methods of investigation, called for an economy which gave little opportunity for integrating a constantly expanding body of knowledge with the equally expanding body of knowledge assembled by the student of culture. Consequently, in this country as well as abroad many students whose initial ties were with literature also favor the definition of folklore as primarily that of oral literature.

Our symposium was bound to give expression to the variety of ways in which these two main interests and trends in the study of folklore are reflected in our own thinking, and reflect our individual experience. We hardly expected to come to resolutions and agreements, and if folklore has any boundaries, they remain flexible. But we probably all agree that in view of the increasing number and variety of problems we wish to explore, the exact borders of where our interrelated fields meet, or whether and how far they overlap, should not constitute real problems. The student of folklore whose interests began on the cultural level and the student whose interests come from the literary sphere need and complement each other to the same degree, and both are looking for new tools of research and new insight in still other fields, to mention only linguistics and psychology. Our symposium gave sufficient indications of the growing tendency for folklore not to restrict itself in order to define its proper place, but to expand; to gain from the cross-fertilization of diverse interests and scientific disciplines in the same fashion in which we have gained here from exchanging views and sharing our ideas.

End of Symposium