SYMPOSIUM I

The Collecting of Folklore

FIRST SESSION

Chairman: Dean Stith Thompson

CHAIRMAN: It is a great pleasure on behalf of Indiana University to welcome the distinguished guests who have come here to discuss certain problems in folklore. Most of you have been here already for a week attending the International Folk Music Conference, and you have already become acquainted with our University and with many of the members of our faculty. I hope that you have begun to feel at home and that all our arrangements here are such as to make you happy in the short time you are staying with us.

The conferences we are beginning this morning are somewhat different from those we had last week. There will be no prepared papers. In only one or two cases will anyone actually use a manuscript and then it will be largely as a reminder of points he might otherwise forget. Generally speaking all our conferring will be done extempore, and in that way we shall hope to have a very free discussion which may bring out points that otherwise might not receive proper attention.

These four symposia have been arranged so as to alternate throughout two weeks. The present symposium will come on Monday and Wednesday mornings for the two weeks. The other symposia will come at other times so as to get all of the discussions started today and tomorrow. It is hoped that anyone who can stay only a few days will in this way participate in at least one session of each of the discussions. The general plan will be to have someone assigned to make an opening statement about the aspect of the subject we hope to discuss at a particular time* This morning, since we are expecting to discuss the organized collecting of folklore, I have asked Mr. Sean O’Suilleabhain of the Irish Folklore Commission to make an opening statement based upon his experiences that have been so fruitful in Ireland. It may be well at this point, before he begins, to remind you of the outline of the discussion as proposed in our program.

Organized Collecting. (a) Mapping of field for collecting. 1. Bibliographies of collecting already done. 2. Maps of promising groups and areas, (b) Centralized collecting. 1. By archive staff. 2. By regularly employed field workers. 3. By university faculties and students (under university supervision). 4. By amateurs under central direction. 5. Through school children. Amateur Collecting. (a) Means of training amateurs. (b) Use of questionnaires and guide books, (c) Preparation of these guides. Recording Techniques. (a) Notebooks and methods of note taking, (b) Shorthand and phonetic writing, (c) Sound recording. 1. Discs. 2. Wire. 3. Tape. 4. Sound films,

MR. SEAN O’SUILLEABHAIN (Irish Folklore Commission, Dublin, Ireland) : The writing down of folklore in Ireland began a long time ago, a thousand years ago, when the Norse raiders paid their visits to Ireland. The monks in the monasteries at that time decided that they ought to write down everything possible of the historical tales and songs. As a result of their labors we have in Ireland one of the richest bodies of early literature in Western Europe. These tales and manuscripts are still available. The oldest book we have is the Book of the Dun Cow, which is dated at about 1100. This is a tremendous compilation running to hundreds and hundreds of closely written manuscript pages in the Irish language of that time, which we call middle Irish.

Now, the act of writing down folk tales—that activity in which we are most interested now—was largely in the hands of individuals at the end of the last century and the early part of this. An American, Jeremiah Curtin, visited Ireland and through the aid of an interpreter wrote down a fairly large body of folk tales. These are available in the well-known book Hero-Tales of Ireland.¹ A book on Curtin himself has recently been published in the United States. We also had a folk-tale collector, William Larmanie; we had a man named Patrick Kennedy; and then perhaps the greatest of them all at the end of the last century and the early years of this was Douglas Hyde, who became the first president of Ireland. In fact Professor Delargy, my superior, tells a humorous story of how, long ago, at the end of the last century, a young Irishman came to the States and traveled around lecturing, not upon politics or any such thing, but upon a much neglected aspect of Irish life, the Irish fairies. And he did his lecturing so well that the fairies decided that they should do something for the young man and eventually they got him the Nobel prize. This was William Butler Yeats, the poet. Some years later he was followed by Douglas Hyde, who toured the States talking about Irish folklore and again the fairies were grateful, and they got him the first presidency of the Irish Free State. Professor Delargy himself was recently honored by the Swedish government with the Order of the North Star, one of the chief honors which the Swedish government gives. He too is thankful to the fairies.

I said that the writing down of Irish traditions was due to the Norsemen who visited us a thousand years ago, and the writing down of Irish traditions in modern times is again due to the Norsemen, who come in a different guise. Dr. Carl Withelm von Sydow of Lund came to Ireland about 1920, and Dr. Reidar Christiansen of Oslo came at about the same time. They both visited Ireland in succeeding years and learned the Irish language, which is the key to Irish folklore. They met Seamus Delargy and inspired him to get something done in Ireland for the collecting of our lore, because in Ireland and in the west of Scotland you have the last traces, as one may say, of a Gaelic civilization. If you look at a linguistic map of Ireland today, you will see that the Irish language has been driven back along the western rim of the country, along the Atlantic Ocean, and the folk tales and folk traditions in Ireland flourish mainly in the mouths of Irish speakers. Well, Delargy got to work and in 1926 he started a society, The Folklore of Ireland Society, and since then each year they have published a journal called Béaloideas, which is our word for folklore. It means a mouth and knowledge of tradition. This journal has been appearing since 1927. I must tell you that Delargy had a very hard time to arouse any interest either among the people or among the officials in his task of writing down Irish tradition. In 1930, however, he got a grant of a few hundred pounds from the government and a folklore institute was organized. It was not until 1935 that the Irish Folklore Commission, for which I work, was finally set up. We were given a grant of £2,500 each year, which was a fairly large sum of money at that time. Ahd I, who had been for ten years a primary teacher and had done some part-time collecting to help Delargy, was then a student in University College. Delargy sent me to Sweden to Dr. Åke Campbell in Uppsala to be trained in archive work. There I went and spent three months and learned the most of what I know now about archiving. Our problem at home, when I returned in the summer of 1935, was to get field work underway. We didn’t look around among the university students to act as collectors, for we have found that any attempt we have made in Ireland to have university students do collecting has been largely a failure. We looked among the fishermen along the coast, and to young primary teachers who had not yet got positions in schools, and from them we picked our collectors. Because they were of the people they had not been spoiled, as we say in Ireland, by university education and by city ways. Because anyone who does go among the people must go among them as one of themselves and have no high-faluting nonsense about them. He must become as they are and talk to them in their own language.

By degrees we were able to build up a full-time staff of collectors numbering nine. They were all Irish speakers and we brought each of them in turn to our office in Dublin, where we trained them for a week. We equipped them with Ediphone machines and these machines, which use cylinders as you know, we have found excellent for our work in Ireland. Each collector was equipped with one of these and five or six dozen cylinders which we sent to him by post in strong cardboard boxes. We would then visit with him when he was starting and, as it were, open up the district for him. I remember in 1936 I went down to Connemara, in the west of Ireland, to get a new collector of ours, Frank Burke, to start his work. I remember well on a Sunday morning after Mass that Burke and I visited an old storyteller, a man who had not a word of English. We took him to the taproom of a pub and there I took out Stith Thompson’s The Types of the Folk-tale² and started with Aarne-Thompson No. 1. I started questioning the old man and his replies were of three kinds. He would say, “I never heard that story,” or he would say, “I heard that story but can’t tell it,” or, number three, he would say, “I have heard that story.” And we had a break for lunch at about one o’clock for an hour, and by six o’clock that evening I had listed 250 folk tales which the man was able to tell. Then we had to stop. We sent our collector Burke to him and he worked for two years and recorded all those tales, and on a subsequent visit I made a list of 200 more tales which he had and we recorded all those with our Ediphone machines.

Now he was a good storyteller, but he was by no means unusual in Ireland. We have a full-time collector now in Scotland, Calum Maclean, a native speaker of Scottish-Gaelic from one of the islands near Skye. He has been working for the past three years with one man and one of the most unusual things about some of the hundreds of tales he has recorded from him is that some of them run into six hours of telling. And that does not mean that two or three folk tales are fused together into one tale, as often happens in Ireland and Scotland. They are individual heroic tales which run into six hours.

As I say, all of this is passing away very, very swiftly in the picture of Gaelic civilization in Western Europe. We have just come in the nick of time, the greater part of our traditions have been lost, but at least we have saved a fairly large body which will give a picture of what it was like at one time.

We have concentrated our collecting in the Gaelic-speaking parts and in the partly Gaelic-speaking parts, because, as I said, it is there that the folk tales are found in the greatest measure. But we have not actually concentrated on folk tales; we are equally interested and perhaps more interested in the social history. I have issued two guidebooks for our collectors; one of them was in Irish, the first one in 1927. It was only about 120 pages, based upon the Swedish system of archiving, which we have adopted in Ireland. That was used for three or four years until I put together a larger one in English called Handbook of Irish Folklore,³ which our collectors have used since. They use it intensively. They take chapter one and work through it as well as they can and on to the very end, so as to get as complete a picture as possible of the whole social and cultural life of the district as known to the people among whom they work. Not all people in a district are storytellers or tradition-bearers, as you know, but I can say that in a single parish in Galway— which Dr. Christiansen would know very well—in that parish I think you have more good storytellers than you have in all the rest of Western Europe today. It is really amazing that everybody from the age of twenty up is an active storyteller, but, as I say, this is dying out very, very quickly. Immigration, first of all to the United States and then during the war to England, has taken a great toll of the population from the Irish-speaking parts of Ireland. The young people no longer sit around the firesides at night as they used to do to listen to the tales. They are more interested in the local dance hall now, because the local dance hall has replaced the crossroads dance to a great extent, and the whole traditional picture is breaking down.

We equip our collectors, as I say, with Ediphone machines and cylinders and we also supply them with standard notebooks. The paper we use would be about twelve inches by nine. I have brought along an example of our standard notebook with me. At the head of each tale we get the collector to paste in a gummed slip which has the heading “Irish Folklore Commission” in Irish and then the county, the barony, the parish, the name and address of the collector, and then he fills in the gaps, “I wrote down this tale (or song, or proverb, or whatever it is) on such a date from the telling of such a man, age so and so, who lives in such and such a town. He was born and; reared in a certain place—this is very important, because it may perhaps be in another part of Ireland; he or she heard the story, tale, or song from such and such a person who was born and reared in such a district so many years ago.” Now that bit of information at the head of each item gives you, as far as can be known from that particular tradition-bearer, the history of that particular item. We also get our full-time collectors to keep a diary, for that is very important. One of the greatest sources of information we have in Ireland is the ordnance survey books, which were made about a century ago by three men, John O’Donovan, Eugene 0’Curry, and George Petry. They went around about a hundred years ago and took down all the place names of the country and recorded material of very great importance. But the greatest importance lies in the diaries kept by these men, because these diaries give the atmosphere in which the work was done. Now we are doing the same thing and are asking our collectors to keep a diary.

The collector works like this. In the early days he had a bicycle on the back of which was a carrier in which he carried his Ediphone machine. On the front he had a special carrier for the box of records, and if he found he could not cycle to the house of the storyteller he would at least cycle as far as he could and then perhaps carry the Ediphone and the records over the fields and fences to the house. There he would work for a few nights during the week and it would be no trouble for him to fill a couple of dozen cylinders in a night. As you know a cylinder will take only about 1,200 words. Then he would go back to his home or lodging and there during the other days of the week he would sit for many hours and write down from the cylinders. Eventually the diaries and finished manuscripts would be sent up to us in Dublin.

Owing to the nature of the work, as you can see, the diaries would fall into two types. The days when he was writing at home he would just mention that in a couple of lines. But, on the nights he went out to visit an old storyteller for the first time or do recordings, he might devote perhaps twenty or thirty pages of his diary to a description of the whole atmosphere of the house, how he went there, who gathered around, who were in the house, how he questioned the old man, what kind of person he was physically and otherwise, and tell how he got the tales recorded. Now those diaries will, I think, be of great use later when our tales will be published. We also supply our collectors with ordnance survey maps, so that for each district they will put down a dot or a cross pointing out the glens, the valleys, and so on, which they have covered, and after a year we can see what areas are still to be tapped in that particular district.

In Ireland we have had very hearty cooperation from the museum authorities. Unfortunately we have no folk museum or open-air museum in Ireland, though we have been campaigning very, very hard for many years after we had a view of what has been done especially in Scandinavia, I may say I am delighted to see the excellent work of that kind which is being done here. Unfortunately we are still striving to get one established. Nevertheless our collectors have always kept their eyes open for objects which they could gather and either send them along to the museum or take them there themselves.

As I have said we had nine full-time collectors at one time; then during the war, when our grant was cut from £4,500 to £3,500 a year, we had to cut down our staff to about three full- time people in the field. Now we have five. Those who are interested in folk music will be glad to know that for five years we had a full-time collector of music and songs working throughout the country. He used the Ediphone recording machine or else noted down the tunes by staff notation which he had adapted to Irish needs. (I know nothing at all about folk music myself.) And then in later years Professor Delargy received a present of a Presto recording machine from the Edison Company in New York and we have used that extensively throughout the country. A good lot of folk music has been collected in Ireland for the past hundred years, but nevertheless our collector during those five years was able to record fifteen hundred pieces of music and songs which had never been recorded before. Unfortunately he had to leave us about three years ago. We couldn’t pay him as good a salary as the Irish radio was able to pay him and he left us and went over to them. All these collections of music are still unedited and unpublished.

The three collectors that we have in Ireland are working in the Irish-speaking district, and one whom we appointed six months ago is working in the Six Counties, that is, the northern part of Ireland which is under the northern government. He is a native of County Armagh, and he is working in Tyrone. We have also a full-time collector in Scotland. This is the young man of whom I spoke a moment ago. He is a graduate of Edinburgh University and he came over to Ireland to do an M.A. thesis. He was in Ireland during the war. His grant from Scotland ran out and he had to take up a very, very curious job: He worked in a factory which made perambulators. He was putting in the same screw for about three years until they ran out of screws; then he had to come back to us. He had worked for us part-time during his holidays collecting tales in Connemara, and he came to us and we took him on full-time. He worked in Connemara for a year; then we took him into the office for six months and trained him there, and now for about three years he has been collecting in the west of Scotland. You will think it strange perhaps that a folklore commission in Ireland should have collecting going on in Scotland, but nothing is being done officially in Scotland, though indeed several well- meaning attempts have been made to get a folklore institute going in Scotland. Again there is the difficulty of securing money from the government. But we are as interested in the Gaelic and indeed the Lowland traditions of Scotland as we are in our own, because the Gaelic traditions, especially, are part of the same stream as our own. Now, Maclean has sent us in thousands of pages of manuscript, and he is still working very hard among the outer Isles. He has also worked on the mainland, especially in Argyle, and we hope to keep him on as long as it is necessary. We have promised our friends in Scotland that we will immediately make available to them microfilm, or photostat copies of all the material which we have collected in Scotland and place it at their disposal as soon as a central archive is established there.

Now as regards the salary which we have paid our collectors, it may seem very small to you in America perhaps. They started off in 1935 and 1936 with only £150 a year. That would be about $450, which is in any case very small. Now they get £350 a year. They buy their own cars out of that—secondhand cars can be got in Ireland at a rather cheap rate—and they get a nightly allowance when they are out away from home, and mileage rates for all the travel they do. Now that covers the full-time collectors. Of course, I will be ready to answer any questions whatsoever on matters which I may not have covered in this brief resume.

In addition to the full-time collectors we have about fifty part-time collectors. These are people who are occupied daily at their ordinary jobs. They may be teachers, workers for our farmers in the country, clerks in shops, young secondary students in school, or anything of that kind. We have these people collect in both English-speaking and Irish-speaking districts in their spare time. Again we supply them with standard notebooks and with the slips I spoke of and pay them at the rate of about five pounds for a notebook of ninety-six pages. This depends of course upon the value of the material and the manner, good or bad, in which it is done. We do not have the same control over these part-time collectors, who work very much as they please, as we have over the full-time people. But in general I may say that these part-time collectors have been excellent, because we do our best to pick them carefully.

We have in the west of Ireland one man—I don’t know if Professor Thompson met him when he was in Ireland—an ex-policeman, who is a native speaker of Gaelic, but he cannot write it. He writes English very well, having been in the police, and he learned a kind of very florid English which is used in official reports: “at’7:30 a.m., I proceeded . . .” and this kind of thing. But even apart from that he is really a most unusual man. He gets up every morning at six o’clock while the house is quiet and he writes for half an hour or an hour before the others get up. He writes down the traditions which he has heard in the district. And he has now filled for us ten thousand pages of manuscript written in copperplate hand; we are always saying what a great pity it is that we haven’t in Ireland somebody like John Buchan, who could write a good historical novel based on this man’s work. He is perhaps unique in Ireland, but we have several other people much like that. We bind a huge volume of about eight hundred pages and send it to these people and they may take a year or two to finish it. Then we pay them fairly well for the results of their work.

Now a third method of collecting, apart from the full-time collectors and the part-time ones, is the use of the questionnaire. That we have found very successful in Ireland. Up to date we have sent out forty-five questionnaires. We issue them in both Gaelic and English. V/e send out to each one of our correspondents, of whom we have five hundred at the moment, blank paper, gummed slips, a copy of the questionnaire, and a stamped envelope for the return of what they write down. Most of the correspondents who answer these questionnaires are national school teachers, that is primary teachers. They do their work voluntarily and receive as payment only a free copy of our journal, Béaloideas, each time it is issued. We have also made them honorary members of the Folklore Society of Ireland. Now that questionnaire system has worked very successfully. As I say, we follow a kind of definite plan. We have now covered the festivals. Occasionally we send out a special questionnaire. For example, the other day a correspondent from Lund in Sweden wrote to us. She is writing a book on the slaughter of horses—the use of horse meat and how the slaughter of horses is carried out, what is done with the horses that are found dead in the streets, and that kind of thing. Now the matter doesn’t apply very closely to Ireland, but still we are sending out the questionnaire to about fifty or a hundred people just to help her. A German, Dr. Hans Hartmann, came over to Ireland in 1937 and spent two years with us there preparing a book on customs and beliefs associated with sickness and death in Irish tradition. He learned Irish like an Irish speaker. He spoke it fluently, and we sent out three or four questionnaires for him. During the war he published his first volume, on sickness and death customs, in Ireland. He is now in Gottingen University and is working on his second volume.

A very unusual type of collecting was done in Ireland which we may perhaps call our fourth method. In 1946 we got what we thought was a brilliant idea—that if we could get the school children in Ireland to help in collecting, a great lot of areas would be tapped which we would never hope to cover by our full-time or part-time collectors. For small though Ireland is, it has many a house and many a glen to which you would never go if you were collecting. We interviewed the educational authorities in Dublin and found them very amenable to our suggestions. Then we had to win over the teachers. They have an organization, the Irish National Teachers Organization in Dublin. We interviewed their executive council and they too were very helpful. They were slightly suspicious of the scheme, because, as you know, in Ireland and perhaps everywhere else the school inspector is the bane of the teacher’s life. So what we had to do was to try to get this scheme of collecting going on in the schools so that the inspectors would not find fault with the teachers, that the teachers would not suffer in any way as a result of this scheme. Now the scheme worked in this way: You know that in the primary schools the children for half an hour now and then during the week are set particular compositions to write in the language of the home, or the language of the school. In Ireland it was Irish and English. Now we got the notion that the scheme would work in this way. I drew up a little booklet of suggested compositions on folklore topics asking certain questions. This was printed by the department and issued to the schools. I think I have brought some copies with me in my bag. And when the composition day came around, or a day or two before it, the teacher took for example the Christmas customs just when Christmas was coming on. He read out the questions, wrote them down on the blackboard, the children would copy these and then when they went home they would question their people or the neighbors, and after a few days they would write down in school in the form of a composition the customs, beliefs, and tales which they had collected. The Department of Education issued to each school, about five thousand of these in twenty-six counties of southern Ireland, and for each school an official notebook in which the teacher or the best writer among the children transferred some of the best material which the children wrote in their notebooks. Each of these large books would be about two hundred pages. Moreover we insisted that we should also get the twopenny copies which the children had written in, because ninety per cent of the material in them is transferred into the official notebook. I remember at the time when these notebooks came in to us, the newspapers were making jokes that we were getting thirty tons of folklore. It certainly did weigh about thirty tons, but in any case we have those hundreds of thousands of twopenny copies. Who would ever go through them God only knows, but in any case they are there for preservation and for later use.

We occasionally get gifts of manuscripts from people throughout the country, and a lot of people do work for us voluntarily.

Up to date, since 1935, we have been fairly successful, but we are still very far from the end of our work. We have at the moment about a million and a half pages of manuscripts, good, bad, and indifferent. As I say, that school material written by children, which comes to about three or four hundred thousand pages, has to be taken at its proper value; but at least it will give us some idea of the traditions in the district at a particular time. We find that in our questionnaire work we are always racing against time, just as in our collection work. For example, we are just preparing a questionnaire on tinkers. The tinkers are the type of Gypsies which we have in Ireland. We are sending out a questionnaire about them, since they have a secret language which we call the Gypsy Cant. We find that when we ask our five hundred correspondents to send us information along the lines of the questionnaire, in many cases they write in and say, “Oh, what a pity that you didn’t ask us this five years ago, when Mary or Patty or Sean was alive. He knew all that.” One is always up against that, especially in Ireland I think, because in Ireland we are tremendously influenced on the one side from England and on the other side from the United States. We have a common language now with both, and immigrants going back to Ireland, the newspapers being sent to Ireland, the radio, the film, and all such things are breaking down our whole tradition. But in any case we have done that much work.

Before closing I think I should refer to the fact that our field collecting has now taken on a new phase. We have a Presto recording machine, with two turntables, and we have our own recording van which we take around the country. We have a special man in charge of it and he can take this van to any house in the country where there is a road. There is a long lead, and we can take the microphone into the house and put it beside the fire just beside the storyteller. We have made five thousand recordings in the past two years of folk tales and prose narratives as they are actually told. These I think will be important later on when traditional storytelling has died out in Ireland, as it undoubtedly will within the next hundred or two hundred years. These records we hope will remain.

I should like to get advice while I am here from experts as to whether the disc, that is the gramophone record, is preferable to the tape or the wire. We have a wire recorder, but we don’t use it very much. We have no tape recorder, but as I say we should be very glad to receive advice on that matter later on.

This is just a very brief resumé of what we are doing and undoubtedly there will be questions and suggestions and perhaps criticism of how we are doing it and I shall be very glad to hear about this.

CHAIRMAN: I think the best way to proceed is to have questions on Mr. O’Suilleabhain’s talk and any comments that are suggested by it.

DR. ALBERT B. LORD (Slavic Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts) : You didn’t say anything about photographs. Didn’t you take photographs of the singers also?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Oh yes, each of our collectors is equipped ¡with a camera, and sends us all the negatives, which we print ourselves. We have, I think, about ten thousand photographs now. Although some thousands of these would be of people and the collector at work, others would be about the life on the roads, types of houses, and objects, and arts and crafts.

DR. LORD: Another question occurs to me about the singer himself. Do you find it necessary to pay any of them money or to give them rewards in kind or in some other way?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Well, the singers and storytellers as a rule are usually only too anxious to give the material. I think that perhaps only one in a hundred would ever think of getting paid, but we do at Christmas send all our storytellers presents of four ounces of tobacco. We help them in many ways. For example, for those of them who are blind we get radio sets or help them to get the blind pension. We help them in many ways by getting posts for their children and whenever they come up against government departments we try to get the department on the telephone and secure a grant for the building of a new house or the like. But we never, never give them money, and indeed it is correct to say that ninety-nine per cent of the cases never expect any money. We have found that that is one of the pleasing things about the work in Ireland, that the country people seem to realize instinctively that we are doing something important for them, and that for the first time people have come to them to write the traditions which have been handed down from their forefathers. They have felt very much pleased to hand over the material.

DR. ÅKE CAMPBELL (Landsmåls och Folkminnes Arkivet, Uppsala, Sweden): In Uppsala, as you know, we have worked mainly with written collections. It is only during the last ten years that we have any proper gramophone equipment and a car to go around over the country. We also have a machine that we can carry when we must leave the car and go out on paths. Of course, we have many such villages, and especially so among the Lapps—places that cannot be reached by roads, so we must have a portable machine. We now find ourselves in the position where we have to choose where we shall put the most of our money and time from the point of view of the staff, upon the gramophone recording or the writing? I do not have any clear idea about how you are working in this particular respect. In your archive do you spend a good deal of time in transferring the written material or do you keep a good deal of it on the discs?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: No, the disc recording which we are now doing is simply a follow-up of the work which our collectors have already done. We are doing this in order to preserve on the disc the method and manner of storytelling. These are stories which have often been recorded, perhaps ten years ago on the Ediphone, but as you know the Ediphone is really a poor method though we have found it very successful for field work. These recordings on discs are for preservation and they can be written down later. We have only the one copy of each at the moment, and very often people come in to us at the office and say, “We would like to hear how a certain story is told.” Well, the way we manage that is that we cut one copy of about twenty records—that would be songs, tales, and so on, tunes, fiddlings, pipe music, and we just play these twenty copies for visitors. The other five thousand we never touch at all. They are for preservation.

DR. CAMPBELL: Now that means that you still continue to collect by means of the Ediphone and now and then you choose certain collectors and certain storytellers from whom you take disc recordings. Now what about the trend of the work at present? The proportion of that done with Ediphone and of that directly written down?

MR, O’SUILLEABHAIN: That is perhaps an important point which I should have touched upon. Our collectors use the Ediphone machine for anything which has a set form. That would be for a tale, or a song, or a longer piece of prose narrative, but the collectors naturally are always using their pens and pencils to record proverbs, and prayers, and short accounts of all kinds. Neither is exclusively to be used at any time; they go on together continuously.

DR. CAMPBELL: Well, you see in our case there are many hundreds of things we collect on discs and afterwards when we get back home we expect to transfer them into written form. But we have found that it is very hard to transfer them when we are in Uppsala. It would be much easier to write them down from our gramophone discs if we were in the country itself. Where do you do your transferring work, in the archives or in the country?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Well, the position at the moment is that we have not transferred anything at all from the gramophone discs to paper. But as far as the Ediphone machine is concerned, that was always done in the lodging or the home of the collector.

DR. CAMPBELL: Are they doing that all the time?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Our collectors are busy at this all the time in the country.

DR. CAMPBELL: What I had in mind was especially how long a time generally goes by after you have collected the Ediphone record before it is written down?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Oh, they do it the same week or the same fortnight because otherwise the cylinders will not be free to be sent back to us. We pare all the cylinders, you see. We kept about two thousand of them until we got our gramophone recording machine, and then we transferred the voices and tales of storytellers who are long since dead. We conserve these voices on the gramophone discs. They are not very clear, but they are clear enough to understand and to give you a very good idea of how a particular storyteller told his tales.

We are also carrying out an interesting experiment. Dr. Robin Flower, the keeper of manuscripts in the British Museum, came to Ireland and learned Irish. He was a very well-known Medieval scholar. He went to the Blasket Islands, to the west of Ireland and the nearest part of Ireland to America. He came there with a recording machine, an Ediphone, back in 1916, and he worked with one of our greatest women storytellers in Ireland. She is still alive. From her he took down a couple of hundred folk tales. He took the phonograph records back with him and unfortunately he never transcribed them. He went to work in the British Museum and he had many tasks there. When he died after the beginning of the war, his manuscripts were transferred to some place in Wales, I believe. At his death he left us his recordings and it is interesting that we now have Flower’s records of the folk tales from the Blasket Islands taken down between 1916 and 1920, and the same recordings which our collectors do daily from this same woman. These recordings will be studied by someone later on to see how a storyteller changes over the years in manner and matter.

DR. CAMPBELL: Does the storyteller have any possibility of checking what the collector has written down from the Ediphone?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Yes he can have it if he is interested, but on the whole the storyteller usually has no more interest in it. What happens is this : Very often there are gaps which have to be filled. Then we always send our collectors back. Usually this is attended to before the record is sent to Dublin, but if it does come to Dublin with gaps, we immediately send it back to the collector and have him go and question the man again. After the material once comes to Dublin, the collector has no particular control over or interest in the material. It is recorded faithfully ; for the first four or five years we used to check every record with the manuscript in the office to see that the collector was recording and transcribing properly. That was, of course, very necessary at the time because the collector wasn’t used to the machine.

DR. CAMPBELL,: There is a considerable difference between your work and ours, not so far as the legends and folk tales are concerned but when one has to study thoroughly and in detail the method of tar-making or something like that. Very often I have found when I returned to the man whom I had asked he would say, “I forgot to tell you about this and that,” and then many details come to him. I think it is different with tales and legends.

CHAIRMAN: Dr. Campbell, about this matter of pay : Will you say a word about that? Do you pay or not?

DR. CAMPBELL: Well, we have different methods. These depend upon the different historical developments in Sweden and also upon the habits of the different Swedish archives. In Uppsala we now and then have paid for manuscripts, but this pay is very small. The most any of them can earn is between five hundred and a thousand crowns a year, perhaps $150 to $250. You see we have no full-time collectors. All our collectors are half-time or something like that. They are generally school teachers, sometimes priests. There are some farmers, some workmen, and lumbermen, who answer our questionnaires, and they work when they have any free time. In the northern part of Sweden the farmer, for example, has free time in the winter and he will then send in material.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Do these part-time collectors work on questions sent out by you or do you allow them to collect just anything they want to?

DR. CAMPBELL: I expect to speak on that question this afternoon. We have some collectors who are rather well trained. These are half-time, as I have just said. Now and then we try to get quite new collectors who are not trained. We sometimes, find that these collectors who really know nothing about folklore have excellent suggestions to give us, fresh points of view, and we welcome these suggestions. They are frequently experts in some kind of work or they have a special knowledge of particular groups of people, and they can, therefore, suggest to us new subjects for investigation.

CHAIRMAN: I had in mind, Dr. Campbell, the situation of thfe collector and the informant. Does the collector pay the informant or the storyteller?

DR. CAMPBELL: There is some difference in the various peoples we work with. For example, when we send a collector to the Lapps, we often pay five crowns a day to them, because you see the Lapp has to make a trip on skis or take his reindeer with him for a considerable distance to come to the village where the collector is and usually we pay him. But as far as our collectors are concerned many of them are their own informants and if they use their relatives or their neighbors and people they know, we will not pay for them. They come at their own cost.

MISS MAUD KARPELES (International Folk Music Council, London, England): May I say a word about the payment of informants? It would certainly be a mistake to lay down any hard and fast rule about it, because conditions do vary so much in different countries and also in different regions. My own experience is confined to England and to the United States only in the southern Appalachian Mountains. We have found in England that it is well to leave some small token, but I think one always had to make it clear that this is not for buying of the material; it is only a token. There are really two points, one is as Dr. Campbell says that very often you are taking up a man’s time so you give him something in return for the time you have taken up from some sort of gainful employment. And then the other thing is that just a small sum is regarded as a token of appreciation, a sign that you do value the material. But I think you have to be very careful not to give the impression that you are buying information. And you also have to be very careful not to pay big sums, because if you do, immediately, I think, the people become very suspicious and think, “Well there is more in this than I thought, and I shall ask for more,” and I have always found, and I think Professor Sharp found in England, that a small offering is a sign of appreciation and will help to get more songs. But now here in America I found it very different; I remember in Newfoundland once I was collecting some very good songs when a woman who was extremely poor—I mean miserably poor—after a good deal of persuasion did accept something, a dollar or whatever it might be, but she did it very reluctantly. Within a couple of hours she came around to the hotel where I was staying and asked to see me. She returned it and she said, “I am sorry, I can’t take it. I really should pay you,” and so I think one has to be very careful and to use the very best judgment he has as to whether payment is going to be acceptable or not.

PROFESSOR GEORGE PULLEN JACKSON (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee) : This matter of pride is very strong. Collectors and people who want to give a little something have often to be very sly about it. For instance, they have two or three bags of tobacco and they just can’t have that stuff around. Won’t the storyteller relieve him of the duty by accepting just a little of it? I have used many schemes like that.

CHAIRMAN: Dr. Christiansen, what about the payment in Norway? Will you discuss that a little?

PROFESSOR REIDAR TH. CHRISTIANSEN (University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway) : It is hard to make definite statements of general value because conditions seem to vary a great deal. In Norway the collecting of folklore is a matter of at least a hundred and twenty years’ standing. It is carried on by the universities as a sort of central organization. The universities have a certain amount of money, comparatively small in your estimation perhaps, but you will have to remember that Norway is very small and the number of people very restricted. The universities have something like three thousand crowns for the collecting work, and every year we make an announcement from the university that if people wish to bring their collecting we will examine their work. We have quite a number of these applications and from year to year we start slowly building up. We are able to choose which people will make real contributions and we also can find out who cannot. In the present year I think we have ten or fifteen active collectors. We appropriate this money according to the district in which the people work. Those people who go to the north need more money for transportation than the people who work in the south, where they are closer together. We actually pay them, but the pay is very small. They send in the originals or the written copies, but they keep any right to publishing or any other kind of economic rights for a period of ten years.

The collectors are mostly school teachers and students from the university. We have found that these people make the best collectors.

CHAIRMAN: In America, unfortunately, we have an extremely difficult problem to work with. This is the mere matter of size and complexity. We have made a beginning in the Library of Congress. I wonder if Mr. Lomax, who has had so much to do with building up the folklore section of the Library of Congress, has something to say.

MR. ALAN LOMAX (New York City) : In America thus far we have been engaged merely in scratching the surface. At the Library of Congress we began with the notion of just recording as fast as we could from the area where we felt we could get the best material. Thus we did, for the first few years, what you might call a sort of tourist job in hitting the high spots, in finding out where things were, in showing that there was a real treasury of popular music in this country. Material came in so quickly that with a staff of one and a part-time secretary even cataloguing did not go on. And I am afraid I must say that this is still the situation, because now this material comes in not only from many corners of the United States but from Latin America as well, because the archive has become a center for the whole Western Hemisphere. We get material now all the way from Argentina to Alaska.

For my own part, after a number of years of collecting ballads of various kinds in a number of languages and in a number of regions in the United States and the West Indies, I came to something of the same method that Dr. Christiansen has outlined. It seems to me that after a time it is somewhat vain to continue the casual approach to folklore. After you have got your five thousand ballads or your thousand or five thousand tales you find that you did not know too much about what you were working with. I have taken for myself the approach which Dr. Christiansen suggested, that of merely turning the job over to the informant. Actually in the field I began to say to people, “There is a great history that remains to be written, the history of the life of ordinary people, and it is up to you to write it. Here is a recording machine; I will run the recording machine and you write the history.” It works surprisingly well, because the talented storyteller or singer is generally a very good talker and is something of an intellectual in his own way, and I found that this presented a challenge to the people which they were delighted to accept. They would lean back and talk beautifully for days, nights and in some cases for over a month. The life history in America is sort of a legend in its own way and is well worth recording.

About the problem of paying the informant: I have never had this actually to come up. People say to me that they would like to help me along with my work, that I look as if I needed help. And I tell them that I am taking up their time and that I would like to make it up to them. There was never any question of dignity being involved; none of us in our situation was more dignified than anyone else. If the informant liked to drink, I drank, and if he liked to acquire a salary, I haggled with him very hard and very seriously, but we fought over it as equals. So the material came in on the basis that the informant wanted to give it.

I think that all of us here in America, in listening to the men from Ireland and Scandinavia tell about their systematic approach to their collecting, feel like small children and are very, very envious, because we have state’s rights, are fanatics, are people who are very much afraid of the Federal government. I could tell you a long story about the way in which our entire appropriation for the folklore work in the Library of Congress was cut down because we proposed to collect some itinerant songs. I think that more progress is now being made on the basis of state and local enterprises which feed into the central archive in the Library. It is a great pity that, as the material comes to the Library, there are not yet funds available for cataloguing and classifying it as it should be. It is just stored and only a certain percentage is published in the form of records.

The most important thing in breaking down the atmosphere of hostility and apathy toward folklore on the part of the learned circles has been the emergence of the recording machine. When we began to get out good folk records, and there were machines designed for this job, we published American folksongs and church music. We brought the material alive, so to speak, and there began to be an interest in many, many quarters where before there had been apathy. Wherever the recording machine has gone there has been excitement, excitement which doesn’t yet have much to do with scholarship, but which will provide the opportunity eventually for scholarship. We have yet to make our map in America, if it is ever possible, in the folklore field. We are just at the beginning and we also share with the Irish and others the terrible feeling that our old people are dying with the material. We are also very glad to see new material growing up all the time. I started at one time just to keep up with the new material which I see growing in my own specialty, of folk songs in English, and I haven’t ever been able to hear all of them.

PROFESSOR EVELYN WELLS (Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts) : We hear a good deal about the effect of listening to the radio as destroying the habit of singing oneself. I would like to ask Mr. Lomax what he thinks about that. Since you ran the Columbia School of the Air for a time, Mr. Lomax, do you think there is a positive side? Is there anything added to the lives of the people who listen to the radio, and is there also any way of tapping areas that the collector cannot otherwise get to?

MR. LOMAX: I think I know why that question was asked. One of the best informants in New England was discovered by radio. Mrs. Carrie Grogan, who lived on an island off the coast of Maine, heard one of my broadcasts and wrote me a letter. I didn’t find it possible to visit her, but she eventually came all the way to Washington with a hamper full of very beautiful ballads of English, Scottish, and Irish origin. When I was on the air I collected a good number of songs and I think that every singer who has had a program has also had the same experience. It rouses ambition in the breasts of young people who want a career for themselves, and they take a guitar and begin playing songs. They sing songs. In every college and every school there are a number of people who want to be popular singers of folk songs. They may begin by imitating the more popular and unauthentic singers, but eventually they will find their own way to good songs. Radio has one other effect, and that is that in its own localities there is a good deal of independence and there are many opportunities for many local singers to begin to develop themselves. I suppose there are tens of thousands of this kind of singer around the country. They tend to follow certain patterns, but if there were not these outlets by which they could make their living and there was not a chance to sing over the radio, these people would not be singing at all. They would only be listening. I think, therefore, that radio has great advantages. It also has disadvantages because these singers get the notion that the so-called popular songs are actually more popular than the folk songs.

End of Session

SECOND SESSION

CHAIRMAN: AS this program was originally arranged, the following heading and subheadings were put under the general caption of organized collecting. The heading was the mapping of the field for collecting; the subheadings were bibliographies of collecting that had already been done and the mapping of promising groups and areas. I suggest that today we open up this whole question of mapping. I am certain that in this country too much collecting has been done merely because a person happened to come from a certain place. There has been no systematized collecting that I know of. We have been dependent upon the enthusiasm of amateurs, and that enthusiasm of course has usually originated in the home, or around a college where these amateurs were. There has been no over-all plan for our collecting. The nearest I think we have got to any organized plan is in Detroit. I am very sorry that Dr. Thelrna James of Wayne University could not be here. She has always been one of the most important persons we have had in our Folklore Institute before this, but unfortunately she had an automobile accident recently and, though not critically injured, she can’t come. Now in Detroit there has been this matter of mapping the district, a preliminary mapping of things that should be done.

In Detroit I think we have the best example of urban folklore collecting to be found almost anywhere. There may be others in Europe that I don’t know about. In Detroit we have a large industrial city to which the automobile industry has brought hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of the world. I am under the impression that there are more Poles in Detroit than in any Polish city, and I am thinking about the situation even before the war. And there are people of nearly all nationalities that one can think of in Detroit.

Some years ago Miss James began to have students who attended her class in Wayne University from these various groups, and she began to interest them in collecting the folklore of their own people. I haven’t discussed this matter in detail with Miss James for three or four years but when I last heard about it she was having collecting done on recording machines in nineteen different languages in Detroit. And most of this was being done by students of the nationality in question. I feel certain that the very fine collection of Armenian material done in Detroit is probably more extensive than anything that has ever come out of Armenia itself. Similarly there are fine Polish, Italian, and Finnish collections that I can think of.

Miss James finally came to the point where she felt that she could not depend upon such students as happened to turn up in her courses, and she has at last mapped out the area from the point of view of the ethnic groups and the possibilities of folklore collecting. It is that kind of thing that I had in mind when I suggested the mapping of promising areas, and I want to throw that question open now for discussion to see how much of that kind of work has been done in the past and especially what is the best way to proceed with it. Frankly I don’t know the way to go about it. I don’t know how to tap the proper sources of information. Does one go out into the community and ring door bells, or can one use reports, or what can one do in making this preliminary mapping? I am sure that some of you have had experience in this type of work. I had a feeling when I was in Ireland that the collecting which was done there was not without some system. Could you talk on that point a little Mr. O’Suilleabhain?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: There are, as you know, two big linguistic areas in Ireland: the area in which Irish is spoken and the area in which only English is spoken. In the Irish- speaking areas most of the people speak both languages. We concentrated on the Irish speaking areas in Ireland because it was there that the native traditions were best preserved. Folk tales can still be obtained quite easily throughout any part of the Irish-speaking area, the same with legends and songs and the like. We found that the folk tale does not survive for any great length of time when it goes over into English. In the six counties which are politically known as Northern Ireland you have almost exclusively an English-speaking people, except for a few small Irish-speaking groups hidden here and there in the mountains. We never had a full-time collector in that area but now we have a man taking down this material. The people in the northeast of Ireland come, to a certain extent, from Scotland so that the material he is collecting is partly old Irish and partly from the lowlands of Scotland.

In the southwest of Ireland we have a Palatine area where people came in from the Palatine area on the continent some hundreds of years ago. We still find there some of their customs and superstitions, and the man who partly made those recordings you heard last night comes from that particular part of the country. He had gone around there and collected traditions, the house types, and a great deal of music. He has also collected implements and some of the crafts which they use, but this is really only one of the very few exotic groups which we have in Ireland. The people are more or less a unit in the whole country.

In the very southwest part of the country, in County Kerry, the people are something of my own type physically; as a rule they are dark, and it is thought that they belong to one of the earliest population groups that ever came to Ireland. We do find there certain customs and superstitions which are not to be found in any other parts of Ireland. Just a few years ago we sent out a questionnaire all over the thirty-two counties, that is in both southern and northern Ireland, concerning the feast of Saint Martin. Now that feast falls on the eleventh of November, and over a good part of the country on the ninth or tenth of November a strange kind of ritual still takes place. In celebration of the eve of the feast each family will kill a hen or a cock or a lamb as a sacrifice. The blood is sprinkled in the four corners of the house and a cross of this blood is put on the forehead of each member of the family. The next day the flesh of this bird or animal is eaten as a kind of feast and a common legend in Ireland is that Saint Martin was ground to death in a mill, and therefore no mill wheel should turn on that day. And it is true that until fairly recent times no miller would work on Saint Martin’s feast day, nor in the old times would a wheel of any kind turn on Saint Martin’s day.

Now the story told about the killing of Saint Martin is very, very curious, and probably has an origin far away from Ireland. It is said that when Saint Martin was in Ireland—by the way he wasn’t an Irish saint at all (there are four Saint Martins altogether) but he was supposed to be coming to Ireland on his own feast day—he apparently had his own feast before he was killed. He was traveling around Ireland and he came to a mill where a miller was grinding away and Saint Martin said to him, “Maybe you shouldn’t grind at all, for this is my feast day.” And the miller promptly said to him, “Why should you have a feast day of your own? After all, didn’t all of the saints have a feast day just ten days ago?” (the Feast of All Saints). So promptly he took Saint Martin by the neck and threw him into the mill and ground him up.

Now that is the story that is told, and the origin of it I imagine to be something like this: It is a purely harvest festival which was celebrated in Babylon and in the Middle East. There are descriptions of how the women of Babylon sat and wept as they ground their grain, because the god of the harvest who had given them food was being ground between the millstones. Now there was a Saint George of Cappadocia, whose coat was brought to England by the Crusaders. He became the patron saint of Cappadocia, and the very same story was told about Saint George. When the Crusaders brought Saint George’s coat to England they may have also brought over the idea of the god of the harvest. I won’t pursue this further but I feel very certain that here is a far traveled custom.

Now when we sent out our questionnaire we got in six hundred replies and we made a map showing the distribution of this blood-shedding cult, and we found that the very southwest of the country had no knowledge of this custom. They apparently had never practiced it. Similarly in the northeast of the country they had no knowledge. It was possible to map this whole custom very easily. This is simply one example of how distribution maps help us to start collecting our folklore.

CHAIRMAN: If I may interrupt for a moment let me suggest that in another symposium we are going to discuss the question of distribution maps. What I had in mind for the present discussion is the question of preliminary maps, which will act as memoranda to those who are sent out to collect. Here and there appear promising fields for folklore work and frequently the collecting has been done rather well. The kind of memoranda that I have felt we need in the United States should attempt some kind of consistent mapping of all of the promising fields for folklore rather than leaving it altogether to chance.

PROFESSOR J. RUSSEL REAVER (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida) : In trying to collect rather systematically the materials which the people of Florida have I have received some help from the state historian, who was very thoroughly acquainted with most of the groups scattered throughout Florida. Also, I would suggest that any person who wishes to make a beginning of mapping out a state territory might consult such a thing as the Federal Writers’ Guide which was prepared some years ago by the Federal government. In those state guides there is without exception, I think, a general chapter on folklore or folk tradition. This should give one a general starting point and some indication of the national groups represented in the frontier or pioneering section of the state as it was gradually settled and of many other peoples from all over the world who have come in later. Briefly, in Florida, for instance, there are certain areas which are quite distinct. In the northern part of the state we have a Polish colony. Then farther down along the Gulf coast at a place called Tarpon Springs (many of you have heard of it, I suppose), we have a Greek colony. Now these Greek fishermen do sponge fishing at that point, and they have tales and traditions and customs associated with that activity. On the Gulf coast at Tampa there is a concentration of Spanish people who for many years have worked in the tobacco factories there. In the eastern or Atlantic region of the state one might mention the Minorcan group in and around St. Augustine. These Minorcans are associated with a certain amount of Greek influence also, because the people from the island of Minorca first came with a group of Greeks. A Greek band which was interested in setting up a colony in the St. Augustine region brought in many Greek family names and place names and certain lingering traditions which are blended with the Minorcan element there.

CHAIRMAN: We want to try to keep to the central matter of how you make the maps and I think we will not have time to go through all the distributions in the country.

PROFESSOR REAVER: Well, in making the map of the state, I have dealt in a preliminary way with these points of concentration. In Florida we probably have a general mingling of people much as you would expect to find in almost any state of the Union. But there are certain particular concentrations, certain peculiar communities where descendants of Europeans and sometimes Asiatic groups are apparently living together in great numbers. In trying to do the field collecting, therefore, I made a special point of getting to know people who might give me leads to particularly good storytellers. Preliminary mapping is done on the basis of what seems to be the apparent concentration within the state, then through letters, and sometimes through personal preliminary visits. In this way you establish yourself in a community so that you may get introduced to the proper people. After the preliminary mapping is done, of course we always have the problem of how to make proper contacts with the groups. The Minorcans present a special problem, and I think the same thing would be true with the Seminole Indians in southern Florida.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON (University of Kiel, Germany) : In preparing for a folklore study in any country the most indispensable thing is the mapping of all the material already collected in that territory. Only in such a way can we see the part of the territory where nothing has been done, the part that must be explored. In Estonia we have had some valuable experiences in that direction. When about sixty years ago Dr. Jacob Hurt began to collect Estonian folklore by means of his questionnaire, he received a huge amount of material, texts of tales, songs, riddles, and so forth. And his collections continued to increase from year to year. Then there came an Estonian student, Oscar Kallas, who had the idea of mapping the material collected and he found that only about twenty or thirty of the hundred parishes of Estonia were represented. All the rest was blank. Kallas was interested in folk songs—the old songs, for in Estonia there are two categories of folk songs, the old and the new. When he found that for the greater part of Estonia the old songs were entirely lacking in the collection, he organized a series of expeditions, with the help of the Society of Estonian Students. Collections were made of songs, not only the texts but also the melodies, in the whole territory of Estonia, but now when you examine, for instance, the great edition of Estonian folksongs, Eesti Rahvalaulud, there are only two volumes of this collection, as it is not complete. I am sorry that Kallas collected only folk songs, not folk tales and other materials. Then in Latvia we have the same thing. There is a huge collection of old Latvian songs, and all Latvians are very proud of this collection. There are thousands of these songs, all of them very short, and there are six or eight huge volumes. The trouble is that now when one speaks to a native Latvian about collecting songs, he says they have all been collected.

DR. LORD: I have also found that it is very necessary that we should map out areas that have not been covered. Such an area, for example, is northern Albania. I think in those cases the only way one can proceed is to make a preliminary survey trip through the district and to take notes of what one hears on such a trip. Later, one may return to those places in which he may expect to find material.

CHAIRMAN: I understood from Mr. Delargy that the Irish Folklore Commission had received a great many leads toward good informants from the school children. He indicated to me that this seemed to be about the most valuable part of the work the school children had done in connection with that large program of collecting which we have already mentioned. Is that true, Mr. O’Suilleabhain?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Yes, that is true. The main value of the school collections for us was that they covered different parts of the country, to which we could never send our full-time collectors or even our part-time collectors. As small as Ireland is, it is very large when you start trying to collect everything. Although we may send a full-time collector into an Irish-speaking area such as Galway and do have some personal contacts there, it is nevertheless true that for many parishes we have no person to introduce us. What we do there is that we take part of the forty or fifty school volumes which we have received from that area and we go through making a list, first of all of the men who were teachers of the children, and then looking through the folk tales and songs and so on, and making lists of the informants who gave them. We have been able to use these school books as preliminary introduction.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: In Norway we started with a preliminary map of what had already been found. We have about 806 small districts roughly corresponding to parishes, and we wrote out an account of what each of these districts already had for folk tales, local legends, songs, riddles, proverbs, and the like. So you could see at a glance what had been collected in the different territories. Partly this was done to help the local historians. Our idea was, if possible, to get information from every one of these parishes in the country. I don’t think we ever succeeded. We did get in something like six hundred accounts, but I feel certain that we never got complete information from all over the country. It is, of course, a question of having assistants enough, and sufficient money. But if we work along these lines, we may be able in the end to cover the whole country. The main point is the importance of starting with a good catalog of what has already been accomplished.

MR. LAURLTIS BØDKER (International Folktale Archive, Copenhagen, Denmark) : In Denmark I think we are working in much the same way as in Norway. We have made card indexes and have arranged these by parishes. In this way we try to get hold of all the material which is available.

MISS KARPELES: Is there any publication on the techniques of mapping? I wonder whether there is any recognized system which could be adapted to individual needs?

CHAIRMAN: That is a very excellent question, and I think that some of you who have made maps can give us suggestions. I am looking for light on this whole question of mapping. Specifically, what does one do? Does one make a pin-point map, or does one try to make a colored map, or does one take a large map and write in on the map, or what is the best way?

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: In Norway we simply take a large map of the country and merely for surveying the available information we mark in the proper parish the number of items which have already been collected.

CHAIRMAN: Professor Erixon, have you some suggestions on this matter from your experience in Sweden?

PROFESSOR SIGURD ERIXON (University of Stockholm, and the Northern Museum, Stockholm, Sweden): Only to say that we have registered all our parishes and that we have some material from all of these parishes in all parts of the country. We, therefore, have a very good survey of our parishes. We are continually at work with mapping. On these we make records of our collectors in the various provinces and what they have accomplished. And we are also able to see in our maps where material is lacking.

CHAIRMAN: On your maps do you have any special indication of the areas which have not been touched, or do you have any areas of that kind?

PROFESSOR ERIXON: Yes, we often have such areas and we try to indicate them on our maps.

MISS FRANCES GILLMOR (Dept. of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona): It occurs to me that in the far west we have a problem which has not been mentioned here at all; that is the very shifting type of the population. This is something that is going on all the time. When we start collecting we don’t start with areas that have been collected in for centuries, or from families who have been settled in that area for more than two generations. It is the unusual family that is able to trace its line back in the locality farther than the grandfather. The settlements from the east came in after the Apache warfare in the eighties. Before that the population was, of course, Indian. We have, therefore, our Indian tribes, and then the Mexicans coming in from the south. These are the only ones that can trace a long ancestry rooted in Arizona. So, except for the Spanish influence, we are starting with a group that has recently come into the area. We find them still moving, so that when we want to map out what is to be done we have two leads. We have clubs such as the Chinese Club, the Polish Club, the Serbian Club; that gives us one approach. And clubs are somewhat interested in collecting their own folklore. We can also go at it by industries, because certain nationalities have followed certain industries. We find, for example, that the Serbians and the Cornish people have followed the mining towns. We find that the Basques have gone to the sheep country in northern Arizona. Industries, therefore, provide us a certain lead. Besides that, we have worked through the schools. Our organized collecting headed up by the interdepartmental folklore committee at the University of Arizona makes its first approaches to the various parts of the state through mimeographed letters to the schools. Some schools in particular have been interested in going ahead with this and have made very elaborate collections. One school I know interested their children in doing a genealogical study of the people in their small town and putting large family trees on the walls of the school so that they found in their own families, for example, that they had an Irish grandfather who was a cousin of this Irish grandmother, or somebody else’s. And that at a certain point this Mexican trace came into the family, and so on. They found some interlocking there in the families, and they got a picture of the national heritage in the community. They began collecting from their own families in these nationalities. We have no map now, but we do carry mentally some idea of it. We must make a map. We could carry the idea of what is available in national background other than Mexican and English through these various approaches I have mentioned.

CHAIRMAN: I hope that our guests from abroad will realize that we have a very special problem in the United States, that of size and complexity. We have thousands of counties in the United States, and up to the present mbment we have been proceeding very largely from the local situation, that is from certain universities and from certain states and certain individuals. That means that in some sections absolutely nothing has been done because there are no local enthusiasts to carry on the work; no one has started it. I have been trying to interest some organization, perhaps the Library of Congress, in beginning a preliminary map of possible collections, and that is one of the reasons we have put this material on the agenda. I want to be certain how important our other folklorists feel this matter to be. At present one finds put about possible areas of collection in a purely casual way. Several years ago, for example, a teacher came into my office and told me that he was a Serbian, and that he had been collecting Serbian folklore in a little town in a coal-mining area north of Terre Haute. Now this was in a small village, and none of us had any idea there was any possibility of collecting folklore in that village. How can we in any systematic way find where such groups are? Are there sources that a map maker could use? I know that many universities around the country have students in folklore, and it would seem to me possible that, for one thing, we could get the help of these students toward the studying of certain areas and the mapping out not only of the various ethnic groups but the possibilities of collecting from the older American population.

MISS KATHERINE M. LOVE (University of Texas, Austin, Texas): The Agricultural Extension Service has a representative in every county in the United States, and with a very few exceptions every state is well organized in this respect. These workers know the ethnic groups very well, and I think that this is a primary source that any of us could use. We should consult the county agent. There are some 3,300 counties listed now by the Agricultural Extension Service.

CHAIRMAN: Now that is a most excellent suggestion, and it is one of the things that I have been wondering about.

MISS GILLMOR: One of the most fruitful sources for the forwarding of our work in Arizona has been the interdepartmental folklore committee at the University of Arizona. We have in this representatives of the Spanish, Anthropology, Music, English, and Agricultural Extension departments, and also the Library. In connection with the agricultural work some of the 4-H clubs have collected folklore in their communities.

MISS KARPELES: I am wondering how far the press can be used as a means of approach. I am thinking at the moment of that famous collection of Gavin Greig’s, Last Leaves of Traditional Ballads & Ballad Airs⁴ Now he started that almost entirely through the press. It was very skillfully done. I think it must have been a weekly paper, but he wrote short articles about the songs, and then they would have songs sent in to him because of the tremendous interest which he had aroused. Then, later, he would follow these up by personal collections.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: In Estonia the questionnaires were sent out through the newspapers. Only reprints of these newspapers were sent and thus the press was the principal means of getting in touch with the people.

MISS LOVE: In Texas we have the problem of a vast amount of territory. The collecting thus far has been mostly of cowboy tales and of Latin American material, and some from other groups. So far as I know, only three of us have been at all interested in the German groups, of which there are a great many. They came in after the Revolution of 1848 and lived very much to themselves. When we started out to find anything about these people, the only way we could discover even where they were living was to look up the old newspapers. Formerly there were a great many German newspapers, but now all but two are long extinct. Through locating these old papers we could find where the people had lived, and through the history of the German group which had been written as a doctoral dissertation we could find out something more. Our only approach was to go to the places where the people had lived in the past and’then be sent from relative to relative throughout the country. In that way we could map where they were.

PROFESSOR HERBERT HALPERT (Murray State Teachers College, Murray, Kentucky): As far as newspaper and radio work is concerned, a certain amount has been done in this country. For example, Lowell Thomas a number of years ago started telling tall stories on his news broadcast. The result was a collection of tall stories which is one of the most valuable in the country, because he included the name and the location of all informants and all people who sent in versions of these stories. The texts themselves were rewritten but we have what amounts to a distribution map of the tall stories in America which came as a result of his radio work.

A number of newspaper columnists have done a considerable amount of collecting through their regular columns. In Kentucky we have Gordon Wilson who has about fifty or sixty newspapers on his string. He has a weekly article, unfortunately from my point of view it tends to be rather antiquarian—nostalgic, the good old days kind of thing—but he does get material from his informants. Alan Trout, in The Louisville Courier Journal publishes regularly a large number of folk tales, folk songs, proverbs, riddles, and the like. As a topic gets started, people begin contributing, and he has I think enough material for a master’s thesis for someone, just sorting through the things that have come in to his daily column. In the southwest and the south, Ray Wood has a column appearing in a number of papers in Texas and Arkansas called “That’s not the way I heard it”; I understand he has about 1,400 pages of materials: folk songs, tales, children’s rhymes, and almost anything, including obscene material for which they very carefully note “Please do not use my name if you ever use this material.” An interesting thing is that a sportsman’s magazine, Field and Stream, first started collecting tall tales, and then unfortunately they went over to the Burlington Liars Club kind of thing and gave prizes to people who invented the best tall stories.

PROFESSOR W. EDSON RICHMOND (Indiana University): A very valuable source for preliminary mapping in this country, which I think no one has mentioned, is the mapping already done by the Linguistic Atlas, which I believe will eventually cover as far west as Illinois and throughout the deep South.

MISS KARPELES: Could we hear more about that Linguistic Atlas? I mean where could one consult it?

PROFESSOR RICHMOND: I think that Mrs. Kurath is standing up and can say a good deal more about it than I can.

MRS. GERTRUDE KURATH (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan): It is my husband who is directing this atlas and so I happen to know that they do have material from Illinois and that they are planning to raise funds to publish this material. After that they plan to go on further west and actually to complete what is to be a Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. But this, of course, is more than a life’s work and for the moment there is already the very difficult financial problem.

CHAIRMAN: We have, Miss Karpeles, all of the published material in connection with the Linguistic Atlas now in our library and you can very easily consult it there.

This discussion has certainly not been brought to a real close. Perhaps the most we have done is to suggest that for countries and groups that have not done so, it is very desirable that we start doing our folklore collecting in a rather systematic way. And that in order to carry out the systematic collecting perhaps the obvious thing is the mapping out of our field so as to see what has already been done, and what must be done in the future. As far as our American situation is concerned, it seems to me that much of this mapping can be a part of the work of promising students. It is the kind of thing that students can be entrusted with, because it is different from the making of a final distribution map. If a slight mistake should be made it would not be fatal at all. The map would always be suggestive for future collectors.

Now because Mrs. Kurath is not going to be here later, I am going to make a rather violent break in the program. Later in this symposium you will notice that we shall be talking about various kinds of techniques. One particular type of collecting technique that offers some difficulty, certainly to the layman who doesn’t know about the matter, is the way in which folk dances can be recorded. Mrs. Kurath has consented to talk to us about her way of recording these folk dances.

MRS. KURATH: I will try briefly to give some general idea of the problems that confront the worker in folk dance notation. It is very difficult unless you are familiar with the technique of the dance, and that is just what ethnologists and folklorists are now beginning to realize. You need a specialist to record even the simplest dance; it is not adequate to say merely that they danced in a circle. For any real value you have to be just as detailed as in any other field.

My system of notation is based entirely upon practical experience. I know that there are systems that are wonderful for the modern dance, and I am familiar with these, but they are extremely complicated. In noting folk dances and Indian dances especially, we must have clarity and simplicity, and we must also be able to do it speedily. We need to have this material available to ethnologists, to people who are not specialists. They ought to be able to read it so as to make some sense out of it and to be able to use it when they are in the field. These notations should be of great value, because I am the only one in this field and I simply cannot go everywhere. It is a pity if someone finds an excellent and unusual bit of folk dancing which is not very difficult and he cannot at least make a simple recording of it. And it can be done very simply. The idea of taking it down speedily is important, because at times you have only the time that the dance is going on in which to transcribe it and get it down on paper, and you will never have another opportunity to do it ; so you have to have a system that is shorthand.

The ideal thing, of course, would be to participate many times in the dance yourself and not always just to observe it, and that is sometimes possible. In the last two years I have been working under rather favorable conditions. I have been able to return time and again to participate in the same ceremonies among the Iroquois Indians, and also to work with informants on steps and on the symbolic background of their nomenclature, and on many things that do not appear in the course of the ceremony as you are observing it and taking part in it. One great difficulty is that you are not supposed to take any notes during thé ceremony. Note taking has to be entirely a matter of memory so that after a participation of a whole day, for example, you get only a very general idea. I did sometimes emerge from the Long House which is, of course, in the dark and where it would not do you much good if you did want to take notes. I have gone out when I could and have taken down some notes. When I have had my car close, I have gone over and taken some notes on the sly, but it all has to be done very quickly. I don’t want to put anything over on them, of course, but my real friends are in favor of my taking these down. It is simply that during the ceremony the leaders and the people on the whole don’t like to have anybody taking notes.

If you actually learn the dance, it is all very fine and you can write it down, but when you check with an informant you will find that there are really many difficulties. The Indian cannot exactly teach you a step. Perhaps he can teach you a fundamental step, but even that is not easy. The best things are the variations and that is the thing which cannot be reproduced except in the ceremony itself. So you have to take part and know how to arrange the variations in themselves, and have to be able to take these variations down. It is also very hard to get from the Indians a full account of the symbolism and the stories back of the dances. All of a sudden one of them will shut up like a clam.

The thing to do is to engage them in casual conversation, and before you know it, just by chance you have come upon something very important. Children are helpful. I have taken my children, my son particularly, and they make friends, and then the children when you take them on a picnic may tell you things that their grandmothers told them. And you get some very interesting points. These children are the future generation of dancers and when you get their confidence that will be a great help.

As far as my system of notation is concerned, I must tell you that it is still defective and that I am still working on it. I have been trying to improve it during the four years of field work, and I know that I have made mistakes which I am trying to correct. The method has been gradually built up by trial and error.

One element of the system I have based on the human figure. We have to have symbols to indicate the movements of the feet and the different parts of the body. [Mrs. Kurath at this point drew diagrams on the board and explained them; the diagrams and explanation follow.]

An angular silhouette of the human figure is the foundation. Figure 1 shows such a silhouette as seen from the back. For a complete choreography each section of the body would have its symbol, in its proper space on a staff. Just now we will show only a few symbols for movements of the feet. The left foot is shown in heavy lines in Figure 1; then in Figure 2 it is placed in relationship to motion in space, that is as a bird’s-eye view. The dot to the right represents a step to the right; the one on the left a step to the left; the one on top stands for forward motion; the one at the bottom for backward motion. Then there are the diagonals in between.

Figure 3 shows a few of the symbols, from bottom to top: a man, a woman, the flat foot, half toe, heel, a step, a slide sideward, a slide forward, a brush, and a hop. These are placed on their proper side of a line. The symbol for the right foot in this illustration would be on the right. The central line can be extended into a diagram showing the ground plan. The remaining three illustrations show examples.

Figure 4—Sauk Victory Dance: Woman faces right, to center of circle. Left foot slides left, right foot steps left, joining the left foot.

Figure 5—Iroquois Shuffle or Stomp Step: .Man faces forward. Right foot slides forward, left foot slides forward to join right foot. To the right is shown the position of the musical score. Above this—jump-hop-jump on both feet, hop on right.

Figure 6—Yaqui Deer Dance Step: Man faces forward. Right half toe brushes diagonally forward and right, pound right heel; left half toe steps right, pound right heel.

(I demonstrated the steps.)

Such simple symbols can be learned and used by a field- worker with little dance training, as well as by dancers.

(I passed around some publications containing articles which applied these symbols, in combination with the music. These publications were the Journal of American Folklore and the American Anthropologist. Since then the symbols have been applied more extensively in the Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, No. 149 and No. 156.)

CHAIRMAN: This matter of notation of dancing is something that I know nothing whatever about. But I was very much interested in Brazil to find that they were beginning a rather systematic collecting of dances, that is indigenous dances, of the state of Sao Paulo. And they were sending out sound trucks with movies. They were able at that time to make a record with sound and also with pictures of the dances, but they had not yet worked out the technique of coordinating these. To what extent such a coordination may be feasible for the development of their archives I don’t know. To what extent, Mrs. Kurath, has that kind of thing been done, that is motion picture with sound?

MRS. KURATH: I am much in favor of it. I regret that we do not have more of these motion pictures and photographs of the dances. There is a great technical difficulty in getting all around the dance to see from all points of view. There are two techniques for this. In the old one you set up a camera and then take the dance from one angle and see it just as an observer would see it. I think that is the best method for ethnologists. But nowadays there has also been developed the artistic method of moving the camera around and getting shots from above and below. All this would be very fine and sometimes it works, but here we must say that we are mixed up with a tabu, just as I mentioned about this matter of taking notes. You aré not permitted to take movies of any of the ceremonies. All the atmosphere of the ceremony would be lost, and the participants would become self-conscious. The ceremonies often will be changed and at any rate it will not be the entire ceremony. I think that Dr. Barbeau’s movie which we had the other night was a really remarkable piece of work, but he had persuasive powers. He brought these Indians up to Ottawa. The movies were not made on the reservations; they would not have it. So he brought a group up to Ottawa and reconstructed the set and had them go through the dance for that special purpose. They would do sections of the dance, just a few steps of it. It really takes a choreographer to get the entire ceremony. I think that perhaps the most valuable part of the dance would not be available to the photographer.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: We have done some recording of certain types of folk dance in Ireland. We have the mummers, which I think have come to us from Wales and England, and they are found in the south of Ireland. These mummers not only dance but they speak pieces, often twenty or thirty lines, telling who they are supposed to be, what they have done, and so on. And they start the ceremonial dance. Now we sent our gramophone to record them and also sent out a camera two years ago where we made an hour-long film recording one of these dances. And we also took a record of the people speaking their parts. We had no difficulty whatsoever, and there is no tabu on recording during the dance.

MRS. KURATH: It is a pity that the films cannot do for the dance what the phonograph has done for the songs. I appreciate that when I transcribe the Iroquois songs which they are recording. And I don’t have to sit for hours getting an informant to give me his songs, and when they are recorded they are permanent. I think it is remarkable the way in Ireland you have the free cooperation of the informant.

MISS KARPELES: I have done a good deal of dance collecting myself, so that I feel that I ought to try to contribute to the discussion. Actually it is such a technical thing that I think it would be useless at this juncture to go into it very closely. I think that one is usually able to devise one’s own notation for a particular kind of dance, and all that I have done has been based upon a system of notation that Cecil Sharp devised. The difficulty is that I am not sure when I note a dance that people who are not familiar with that type of dance will be able to reproduce it. I am also not sure from what Mrs. Kurath has told us whether her system of notation could be applied to other systems of dance. It seems to me that at the moment we have not worked out any international system of dance notation such as we have in music. I remember that in Paris there was a gentleman who had devised a system of dance notation. I had to be the guinea pig. I was put on the platform and had to do some dance steps. His students were sent out of the room and afterwards they had to come back and see whether from his notations they could reproduce the movements. Well, I did one of the simplest movements in our English country dances, but I think the experiment took about twenty minutes, and even then these pupils did not get the rhythm exactly right. In this matter I think we have very largely to devise our own symbols for certain motifs, certain directions, certain steps, certain gestures, which occur over and over again in the dance, and I think these you have to describe very fully. I am very glad that Mrs. Kurath always connects her notation with the music. That is the most important thing, that the notation of the dance correspond with the musical notation, so that you can see how the rhythm goes.

MRS. KURATH: Miss Karpeles has brought out a very important point, namely that we have to agree upon some notation. There should be some way in which folk dancers could get together and agree. But I think it may be generations before that is settled. Perhaps the point is to find out what is most useful now. As far as the American Indian dances are concerned, I have words for every style. I have tried it on various folk dances and I think it works very well. I am sure that it would not work for the Balinese dances, for instance, where everything is largely hand and finger movement. It is too simple for that. You are quite right that the complete system should have symbols that are applicable to everything. I feel that perhaps the system of movement for the upper body could be developed from my system, but I have not gone into it sufficiently to work it out for that type of dance.

MRS. MARY DANIELLI (English Folk-lore Society, London, England): I was very glad to hear Mrs. Kurath and Miss Karpeles on this subject. I did want to ask a question about a situation in Madagascar. There the dances are entirely different from the Indian dances, and also from our country dances. The movements, at least in some of the dances, are very largely of the hands with rather minute sorts of gestures of the fingers. I was going to ask whether that could be recorded on the system suggested ? Secondly, whether another feature could be recorded. Many of these dances in Madagascar are purely ritual dances done for certain festivals. One in particular is concerned with the festival where the bones of the ancestors are taken out of the tombs, wrapped in fresh cloths, tied on poles, and a dancer then, one at each end, takes these bundles and dances very vigorously around the tombs of the ancestors. There are many other movements, lifting the poles over their heads, over their shoulders, down to the ground, and so forth. I don’t know whether it will be possible to record all of this action by your system, or whether the different emotional tone of dancing in different countries can be conveyed by the system. While very active, Malagasy dancers have a timidity and grace of movement that contrasts very sharply with the dances Mrs. Kurath has shown us.

MRS. KURATH: You could not show the objects in the choreography. You could show the movement and show photographs, or mention the fact that they hold the object, but it would confuse the issue if you showed paraphernalia. I am sure that paraphernalia can be indicated sufficiently well without being actually a part of the notation.

CHAIRMAN: Unless someone has something he wishes to contribute now, we have only fifteen minutes, and perhaps we should move back into the regular rhythm of our symposium. I believe we have already discussed the matter of mapping as much as we probably need to do this morning. We have, I think, come to the conclusion that preliminary mapping is a very desirable thing, and that perhaps every country and every section has to work out its own system or its own means of getting information, and that it would be a desirable direction for future research in countries that have not attempted any preliminary mapping.

Last time we discussed something of the centralized collecting, particularly the relation of the collecting to the regularly employed field workers. But we did not discuss at all the question of collecting by the actual archive staff. I don’t know that that needs any special discussion, but it may well do so.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: I think I should mention that we not only collect by one person alone going into the country but also we have teamwork, and often this teamwork is very important. A group of people work together and this is especially so in our investigation of villages and communities. This is extremely important for the social aspect of folklore research. In our institute in Stockholm where we deal with the whole life of the people we find that this teamwork is very good for our collecting.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I am speaking now merely upon hearsay. But I have heard that the Russians have carried the matter of organized field work to a far greater extent than most of us can report. I have been told that an expedition will consist of a folk-music specialist, an anthropologist or ethnologist, an archaeologist, and someone who is trying to find out about the history of the community. The expedition may contain from six to sixteen people. They have a photographer along, a technician for the recording machinery and the like. There it seems to me we have an ideal that it might be well for us to work toward in America, but I don’t know if we Americans work in that same way. Occasionally the Library of Congress has sent out recording vans, and Ireland has apparently also had success in that kind of thing, but the idea of a real mass attack upon an area is something that we have not done.

MISS KARPELES: It seems to me that such a mass attack might well destroy the important intimate relationships with the collector. He needs always to keep the personal touch with his informant.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: In Ireland we had occasion about ten years ago to do a rather intensive field survey of that kind close to Dublin in mountains where the hydroelectric scheme had been carried out on a large artificial lake about twenty miles long. The result of this was that fifty or sixty farmers had to be removed from the floor of the valley and their houses were flooded over. Before that took place we arranged in Dublin to have some archaeologists go out from the University College and a team of us from the Folklore Commission also. Some photographers went out with us and for two months we paid about ten visits, especially on Saturdays and Sundays, and we made a fairly exhaustive covering of that situation. I remember in a number of the houses in the valley we found some of the names which we were surprised to find so close to Dublin. In many of the chimneys I remember we found the legs of animals hanging. That is practiced commonly in Ireland where cattle die of a disease called the black quarter and it was quite common in such cases that people cut off the leg joint of the animal and hung it in the chimney. There are some recordings from the people of the district giving the history of their homes there, and we have also I suppose about a thousand pages of texts which were taken down, a great many customs and superstitions and local legends, photographs and all that kind of thing. And there was a graveyard in the valley which had to be dug up and the remains moved to a higher level. We took photographs of all that. Of course we must say that as a rule our collectors work individually in Ireland,

MR. BØDKER: In Denmark we do it in this way. Each year the National Museum selects a special topic and students are sent out to collect the materials, on buildings and so forth, in the area. They do not find folklore there, however, because folklore has disappeared from Denmark two or three generations ago.

PROFESSOR REAVER: Mr. Bødker, do you find that the objection which Miss Karpeles has raised holds true in the Danish situation? Do the people in the villages seem to resent being descended upon by these outside investigators who go about asking questions? Or do you find that they are willing to cooperate regardless of the number of people who come at one time?

MR. BØDKER: As a matter of fact I don’t know, but I think the answer is yes and no. Folklore in Denmark has been practically all collected by individuals, so that that is probably the best way to collect it, but some of this teamwork has been successfully carried on.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: In Sweden we have no difficulty in this matter. We come to a village where we are already friendly with the people. When we investigate a village we have to take along a photographer, an architect who can take measurements of the houses and furniture and can make a plan of the community; we must have also a specialist in social matters, and in implements and agriculture, and then also a regular folklore specialist. This is the common type of expedition. We can ordinarily manage this with three students and a leader. The largest of our expeditions would have seven to ten persons but that is not very common. We do our interviewing with the people in the evening when they cannot go out to the fields.

MR. M. MARUYAMA (Kumamoto City, Japan): We have an interesting example of cooperative collecting in Japan. There is an island called Kushuma, of fishermen, which is between Japan and Korea. Now the Korean government claims that the island is theirs and of course we disagree, for the people on the island are Japanese. To disprove the claims of the Korean government the Japanese government has found the funds to send out about two hundred scholars to this island and carry on an investigation. The group consists of historians, folklorists, archaeologists, sociologists, and of course anthropologists. The investigation is now going on and no conclusions have been reached, but I am sorry that this group concentrated entirely upon Japanese characteristics.

CHAIRMAN: Our time is getting short but I think I should not leave this discussion without calling your attention to an interesting example of teamwork I ran into in South America. Largely, I think, through the influence of Professor Paul Rivet, who spent the war years in Bogotá, a folklore institute had been established there, and in the autumn of 1947 they did send out into certain areas of Colombia—among the indigenous population—a team of workers. One of the men was interested primarily in folk art forms, and then there was a folk dance specialist who made, by the way, a very interesting illustrated, animated map of Colombia based upon folk dances. There was also a linguistic specialist who studied the language of the group, and a man interested primarily in tales and mythology. I later talked over this whole matter with Dr. Acuna, who was on the expedition and who was in Bloomington the next year. He considered the experiment very successful and told me that they intended to go to other districts in future years.

End of Session

THIED SESSION

CHAIRMAN: In our discussion of mapping folklore possibilities it has become clear that at least here in the United States we have not done all that should be done. I notice that as we travel around a state like Indiana we will find here a German group, there a Swiss group, and in another place an old American group, and even in some spots a few relics of American Indian tribes. Especially in the large industrial centers like Gary and East Chicago there is a whole medley of nationalities. These have not really been mapped out. Even if we made cartographic records of what has been collected these would really be for only two or three items and all the rest would remain to be done. The folklore mapping of a state like ours would be a tremendous task and I don’t know exactly the best way in which it should be undertaken. I have been hoping that someone who had experience in making such a map would tell us about it in some detail.

BR. CAMPBELL: There is one point in connection with our archives in Sweden which I believe has not been mentioned here. You see, our archives have to do both with folklore and dialect. We are working very closely together in these fields and have done so from the very beginning. This is the historic development of our work in Sweden. I am just wondering if in a state like Indiana, for example, you have any dialect maps telling what languages or dialects are spoken in different places. Can you, for example, tell from such maps how the language has been affected by the fact that people have come and settled here from various parts of the east coast and from other parts of America? Can you also tell from the linguistic maps about the distribution of ethnic groups ?

CHAIRMAN: From the point of view of the ethnic map I think nothing has been done. There is, however, in process of construction a dialect atlas of the English-speaking part of our people. Such an atlas has already been made for the whole of the New England states and for other places. Gradually this dialect atlas is extending to the Middle West. We are just organizing the machinery for collecting the dialect material for the state of Indiana. This is probably not the kind of dialect study you have in mind at all since this study will be based upon a selected list of words or ideas. It is also an atlas of pronunciation. The dialect atlases also go into the question of certain concepts. How is a certain tree called in this part of the country, and the like. Such a dialect atlas as we are working on is not at all so extensive as you have in process in Sweden, and I think it would not form as good a basis for a folklore atlas.

MISS KARPELES: Are your local or state historical societies doing any work on this matter? Especially in regard to the various waves of immigration that have come into the state?

CHAIRMAN: In Indiana our most helpful group has been the State Historical Society but I think it has not interested itself in this particular thing. The nearest they have undertaken is a study of place names. But this place-name study is still in the planning stage.

MISS GILLMOR: I don’t want to start on the collecting activities that have been done in the Patagonia school in southern Arizona just now since I plan to talk about that later, but I think it is worth-while mentioning that a teacher who was in charge of that collecting began her work with the study of a special vocabulary of the cattle industry, which was the main industry in that county. This is a border county, so that the vocabulary brought together were words both in Spanish and in English and also showed influences of an Irish settlement in that area which came in at the time of the building of the railroad. There have also been influences from the later “dude” ranch period, when some of the cattle ranches became rural hotel centers for visiting eastern people.

DR. CAMPBELL: But she didn’t put any of the material on any map?

MISS GILLMOR: No, she did not. The county is very small and is full of people scattered all about.

PROFESSOR ALFRED SHOEMAKER (Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania): As far as my particular problem is concerned, I am interested in the Pennsylvania Dutch. When I came out to the Midwest, as I drove out here from Pennsylvania, I could always spot a cultural area that was settled by the Pennsylvania Dutch because of the folk architecture. This is especially true of the Pennsylvania Dutch barn. Wherever you come to an area where you have a peculiar type of barn you know that it is Pennsylvania Dutch at least in influence. I was wondering how material culture through the Midwest is an indication of the various ethnic groups?

MR. MARUYAMA: Today in Japan if we want to find a promising area for folklore study we look into a particular index which lists the villages according to whether they have any bus or other means of transportation. The so-called “no wheel” villages are our best ones for collecting folklore. This is a very simple index but for us it works out very well. I imagine that this would not be adequate for Europe or America.

PROFESSOR CHRISTIANSEN: As for going places which are cut off from the rest of the world and finding the best folklore there, that doesn’t quite hold true in my country. We have often found that in very isolated places where there may be only two or three small farms there is less folklore than in more densely populated areas. I think the explanation may be partly that, after all, folklore is a tradition and is not an individual thing but is dependent upon a kind of settled community. I have been in communities where there was a continuous stream of cars along the highways and a number of tourists but you needed only to get out of the city and come to a farm and you would find an old-fashioned community of peasants working along the same line as they had done for a long time. On the other hand I have been out to a remote valley among people who live among themselves and they seem to be so much occupied with the daily strivings of life that there wouldn’t be much time left for anything else. But in the open country in Norway where more people live together, you will find that much folklore is still alive in spite of all modern life coursing through. Not even the radio has been able to kill it off. I don’t think, therefore, that isolation is any workable index as to where one is likely to find folklore.

MISS KARPELES: I should like to corroborate that. Cecil Sharp says that in England his experience was that the most fruitful area was not that of isolated families in the country but rather the small towns.

CHAIRMAN: About our own state here, I have some difficulties when my students want to go and collect. I am not certain as to what will be fruitful areas for them to try. I think of my own experience. I was brought up in what we call an old American group and there was not much that I hear about in this meeting that I ever listened to as a boy. This kind of tradition simply was not occurring in my group. There were some nursery rhymes but as far as any of the ballads in the Child⁵ collections are concerned, I never heard about these until I went to college. And I have an idea that a good many of the so-called old American groups are like that. Then occasionally you get into another area that is very rich in folklore. I am not sure that one could ever tell before actually trying out a situation whether it was likely to be a good place to collect folklore. Perhaps the most that can be done is to discover likely places more or less by accident but always to keep track of them and thus try to construct a map. I have lived off and on for more than fifty years in the neighborhood of Indianapolis and in the course of those years I have heard about various groups, for example, the Irish- speaking groups in one of the meat-packing houses, and the Rumanian groups in Indianapolis. But such information is purely casual and not at all systematic. I think that in spite of all our difficulties it may be possible to proceed with a certain amount of mapping of folklore possibilities.

Of course you all realize that I am not talking about the so-called folklore maps of America. I suppose you have seen those which have a bucking broncho in certain places and a big lumberman somewhere else and so on. The map makers feel that they must get something characteristic of every state in the union. These animated maps are fun, but they are not of great help for the serious folklorist.

Now, I think we should open up another question which is on our agenda and which we have not yet touched upon. We have talked about the collecting by regularly employed field workers but we have done practically nothing about the use of university faculty and students, especially under university supervision. I don’t know; whether this is a typically American situation or not, but a great deal of folklore interest centers in our universities and the work goes out from the universities. A professor sends his students out and he keeps in touch with his students and does something in the way of supervising.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: In Dublin we have used the university students of architecture. We sent them to old villages, and they worked with our staff making drawings and about a hundred photographs. This we found quite successful. We had another experience that was not so successful. Last year we employed about fifty students to go and collect in the field and gave them instructions for about a week. The results were largely negative. We got back only one notebook from the fifty. The others did nothing at all, merely went out into the country, just lay down under the sun and that is all of the collecting. But I think there is the possibility of getting university students interested in such matters as folklore in medicine. One of our professors of medicine at the University College at Dublin has been interesting his students in collecting popular cures. He is concerned with finding out whether the people have been merely foolish or whether sometimes they have been wise in using these cures. For example, for hundreds and hundreds of years people in Ireland have been using molds for the curing of septic conditions in wounds. They kept a piece of bacon or a piece of bread in a dark, damp part of the house. When anybody had a septic cut they scraped off some of the mold and put it on the cut and it eventually cured the cut. They knew nothing at all about the reason for that, but at least it shows that there was something rational, and although it had been discovered by accident it was successful. This kind of collecting might well be worthy of the attention of university students.

DR. CAMPBELL: For a good many years we have had in Uppsala every spring courses for students who were going out into field work. These were students of Swedish philology, dialect research work. I think a good percentage of all the students who did this Swedish philological work had to go through the courses in folklore collecting. This is still continuing and the students spend about twelve hours and sometimes more in the archives to see how this all works. Then they go out and collect folklore, primarily for the interest of their dialect studies. They write down the folklore traditions, the riddles, the proverbs, the sayings, and the folk tales in the dialect, and they use this for their dialect studies. Our students have to do some of this field work before they can take their examinations. I do get the impression that these students do not always do the best work. Our trained collectors who are not students do much better than the ordinary university students. Still it is important that students learn how to work in the field.

PROFESSOR A. E. CHERBULIEZ (Zurich, Switzerland): In Switzerland we have begun to have a certain amount of experience in this question of field work by students and scholars. In all the four kinds of schools which we have, the primary, the middle, the high schools, and also the popular schools which are given in the evening for people working in offices and so on, we have encouraged the collecting of folklore. But I have found that what Mr. O’Suilleabhain says is true: that to instruct young students, to go and tell them how to go out and collect folklore is a little dangerous. We have had the same results as he. But in Switzerland for some seventy or eighty years we have been in the habit of taking students on excursions of eight or ten days out into the country. The professor goes with his students and during this time there is opportunity for some field work to be organized under the direction of a learned collector.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I have three different kinds of things to describe and they represent different kinds of work which can be done with the university students. The first of these I learned about quite by accident. At Southern Illinois University I was invited to give a general lecture to the Illinois Folklore Society and then was taken around to the various departments. In at least six departments I found there was an interest in folklore work and that this interest was being put to practical use. Professor Mcintosh of the music department gave some extension courses in various parts of the state and taught the people participating to collect songs, play-party games, and dances, and found that the students were excellent collectors once they had learned what they should look for. They were in their own communities and could visit relatives and friends, and they brought him in some very wonderful material. In the French department some of the students worked with the old French settlements in the western part of Illinois. The history department was interested in place-name studies and was allowing” some of their students to give master’s papers on the place names in the various counties. This is an example of the kind of university work done in folklore at that university.

A second type is represented by my own experience in giving courses. I have one course in folklore and one in folk song. We begin by discussing the general problems of collecting. The one term when I failed to discuss collecting at the very beginning, my students got into all of the mistakes that anyone could possibly make. They insulted their informants, they pulled out pencils and pads, and the like. So I have been thoroughly warned, and we discuss the various types of folklore and the various possibilities of collecting. From their own experience they remember a number of things that they have heard about and when they return to their communities, usually on week ends, they bring back collections. I think my student collections are among the finest pieces of work I have seen. And they rate very well along with a number of semiprofessional collections. These collections were brought together in less than a single term. I have found that when an intelligent student gets interested in his material he can get folklore that an outsider would have to work on for years and would probably not even know about.

The third is the oddest experience. I was teaching a class in freshman composition at Indiana University and I thought it might be interesting to see what freshmen could do. I spent two days lecturing on the kinds of folklore and some of the things that would be desirable—what you needed with the material, from whom, where, why, and how it was used—and the students were turning in a collecting report on their material. Of course this was only a small part of their composition work and they were not as well trained as people who have been in the folklore course. Even in that situation a number of them got interested and brought in some good material. I believe that especially in our state colleges students can do work with almost a minimum of training. Obviously the more training they get the better the results will be.

MISS GILLMOR: Our work at the University of Arizona as an organized program started about 1946 and it is the only organized collecting activity that I know of which is going on in the state of Arizona. We started out as an interdepartmental committee appointed by the president of the University. The committee consists now of members from the English department, the Spanish department (since that is the largest language group other than English in the state), the Anthropology department which has had particular interest in collecting Indian material, the Music department, and now the Agricultural Extension department. This latter has been a fortunate addition which we did not have. And we have also added the library which buys the books, a very important thing for us. Our first task was to send out letters to all the department heads asking what work had gone on in their department which might have folklore interest, and also what of this nature they would be interested in seeing undertaken. We got back some very interesting letters and we proceeded to explore the various directions indicated. We found, for example, that the Home Economics department had had some theses done in the cookery of the region, particularly that of the Papago Indians. We found also to our surprise that the Astronomy department was very much interested in legendary material among the Indians concerning climatic changes, periods of growth, and so forth, because the Astronomy department of the University of Arizona has been particularly concerned with the dating by tree-ring studies of the various periods of history of the area. As we proceeded with our collecting activities we get out a little bulletin called “Opportunities in Arizona Folklore.” It was put together by the various members of the committee, each person doing a few pages on his own particular field and suggesting what there was that could be looked for in collecting in Arizona. We also sent out mimeographed letters to all the high schools in the state and copies of the bulletin to the principals of these schools. We asked them to appoint someone in their schools, or if they preferred, to suggest someone in their community who would be interested in folklore collecting and who could be put in charge of that area. Many of the high schools did not respond, but in the resulting collections that have come in there has been a great deal of good material. It has been collecting in considerable quantities in the various schools. I shall want to talk about the work at the Patagonia school on another occasion.

In the course of time we were able to establish a folklore course at the university, a course of one semester in the upper division which I teach in the English department on the types of folklore. In that course we have trained a number of people. In the actual work in the course the student may or may not do collecting. Thus far the collecting which is done during the semester has not been very successful. Although we are a state university our students live too far away to go home for the week ends. For example, if they come from Flagstaff it is a four-hundred-mile trip and the bus connections are very poor. But although we have had little success with collecting during term time, we have found that we have done very well with these students later on. They get interested in the course and then when it is no longer a part of their course work they go back to their own communities and some of them have sent in some excellent work, particularly after they have finished at the university. Perhaps the best example is a girl who was a native Spanish speaker from the little mining town of Clifton. She became interested in collecting a particular group of stories and spent her vacations almost Entirely going from door to door in Clifton collecting these, just because she loved to do it. She has now a very fine collection and has published some of the material. She has included all kinds of things: tales, riddles, proverbs, witchcraft material, and the complete texts of Los Pastores, which are the only folk plays that have gotten into Arizona in their entirety. This is about what has happened as far as our course is concerned. This has spread out into other relationships and has now gone on for four or five years. Our committee published a series of little bulletins consisting of material representing the collecting that has gone on. Two of these bulletins have come from the material collected by the Patagonia school; one of them is a collection of Mexican folk songs done by a woman who lives in Tucson and who got the songs from her own family. Preceding the collection was an explanation of how a particular group had come from Mexico soon after the Gadsden Purchase into southern Arizona and had brought these songs along with them. It thus relates the history of the population groups in the town. We have also a very fine collection of place names but we cannot claim credit for this for our university interdepartmental committee. It long preceded that. We have a good bulletin on place-name material. We have also a study of a certain Spanish-American argot and its social implications in Tucson. This was done under the auspices of the Anthropology department. We have constant theses going on in the various departments and these theses are supervised interdepartmentally. For example, in the English department we have a thesis this year on the Yaqui Indians’ coyote and deer songs. Since many of these texts were very beautiful poems and since the collector was himself a poet, he made some exquisite translations. These were accompanied by a critical analysis done under the combined supervision of the English and Anthropology departments. The study of meaning in each line as depicted by the ritual and the social backgrounds of the use of the word itself were thus carried on from the point of view of anthropology and of literary criticism.

There is a graduate student in Tucson who teaches Spanish in the high school. He is doing his thesis on the romances and other types of Mexican folk song in southern Arizona. This is carried on under the combined supervision of the Spanish and Anthropology departments. These are only a few examples of the combined work of the departments in supervising folklore research in the University of Arizona.

As I said a while ago, we found a great deal of dead wood in the mailing list of our folklore committee. For that reason we have tried to appoint active collectors as corresponding members of the University committee. We gave these collectors little certificates, and they feel that they have official connections with the University. What they collect comes in to the university archives. Anyone who sends in anything at all through these corresponding members, we call associate member for that year only. But our regular corresponding members are permanent members. The University always stays in the center in a supervising capacity. It encourages the collectors, publishes as much material as it can, and encourages publication elsewhere. The most effective work is being done by graduate students or by people who have taken our undergraduate courses.

CHAIRMAN: It seems to me, Miss Gillmor, that you have probably effected a tighter organization in Arizona than there is in any of our American universities. I hope that our guests from abroad realize that the work done by our university people is always out of pure enthusiasm and that no special budget is authorized for it.

MISS GILLMOR: The budget is a delicate point. As a matter of fact I must say that our university administration has been most helpful, most responsive, and is interested in the whole work. We have never had to fight for what we get. The administration encourages us to do even more than we are doing. They have intimated that we might have some travel funds for summer work if we want them but we have not yet applied for any. We know, however, that they are with us. Our budget is organized at the beginning of each year and we have to make specific requests for such things as recording machines and filing cabinets. The administration has also encouraged me to ask for a lighter teaching schedule, but I have not yet done so.

CHAIRMAN: It is very interesting how this has worked out in Arizona. Many of our universities I think are like ours; they are enthusiastic about folklore in a vague way but they need someone to produce a plan, and if a good plan is produced money will be available.

MRS. DANIELLI: I have been much interested in listening to Miss Gillmor’s discussion, particularly as to what she has to say about the influence of the university courses on the later work of the students. We have been trying to do something of this kind in the Folk-lore Society in England. Even before the war we had a committee for discussion of how we could get students interested in the Society. Now within the last year this committee has again become active and we are trying to see if we cannot get students into our work on some kind of interdepartmental basis. We want to give a special program of lectures for the students with the idea of training them in folklore so> that they later will contribute actively to the work of the Folklore Society.

Of course, our problem in England is rather different from that in America. We have an enormous amount of written material already. There are large numbers of small local societies in England, not working in any coordination with one another,» and many of them are publishing small journals or bulletins of folklore. There is a great deal of material here not only from these folklore societies but also in natural history societies^ historical societies, and so on. Now, our problem is really to get this material worked on and coordinated. Our idea is that university students with the necessary knowledge and training are perhaps the right people to undertake this work.

MISS KARPELES: Mrs. Danielli has not mentioned the manual their society has for folklore collectors.

MRS. DANIELLI: We do have a manual for folklore collectors which I believe is still a quite good work. There is also one, of course, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute but that is mainly for students working in anthropology. We have the material, we have the means I think for doing active collecting, and active collecting is still going on. We are trying to make contacts with people who are doing this collecting.

Although our Society has no university connections at present, it is true that the larger part of our membership is from university people and we have subscriptions to our journal from university libraries all over the world.

One form of collecting which is being done today is by the British Broadcasting Corporation, who are sending people out to collect material for their programs. We are trying now to get into some sort of contact with these collectors.

MISS KARPELES: I understand that a new edition is being got out of the collecting handbook by the Anthropological Institute. I have looked at the old edition and it seems to me that there is much in it that would be of great value to folklore collectors. I would also like to say that the International Folk Music Council is preparing a manual for collectors of folk dance, folk song, and folk music generally. I don’t know exactly when it will be published but I hope perhaps about the beginning of next year.

CHAIRMAN: Before we leave this general subject of the use of university students for collecting I hope to hear something from Professor Shoemaker.

PROFESSOR SHOEMAKER: In my folklore courses, of course, we work the same way that Mr. Halpert does. Each student is responsible for a term paper. I have found these particularly successful when dealing with culinary culture as well as in the fields of other material aspects of culture. I have one very good student who has studied the traditional barn of the Pennsylvania Dutch. On the whole my reaction after two years of work and several hundred term papers is that they fall into two categories, either good or bad. There is nothing in between.

CHAIRMAN: I hope we may now pass on to another aspect of our subject, the collecting of folklore through school children. The school children that I have in mind, of course, the intermediate and primary children, present an entirely different problem from the university student. We must differentiate our discussion here from that of folklore in the schools used as a part of the curriculum. This nearly always refers to published collections of folklore which can be adapted to the teaching in the schools. What I had in mind, however, is the actual use of school children for bringing in folklore. Mr. O’Suilleabhain the other day told about the wholesale use of children in Ireland. And, if I am correct, one of the great uses of school children which he found was the discovery of good informants. The school children furnish excellent clues for the trained field worker later.

MR. JASIM UDDIN (Dacca, East Pakistan): I think there is a great danger from collecting folk songs through the schools. Whenever we send out anyone to collect folk songs we find that it makes a great many complications and I think that you need training in the collecting of folk songs just as you do to be a doctor. One is so likely to hear a folk song incorrectly. The village people often do not pronounce every word distinctly. It also happens frequently that the meaning of a song is known to the singer and that the collector has great difficulty in finding what it is all about. In the collecting, therefore, we must depend upon persons who are trained to collect. I am afraid that in some of the places those who are in charge of the training of folklore collectors don’t really know about what they are doing. They want quantity and not quality. We have to be very careful that the collectors do not change the material and work it over. This only brings in complications.

CHAIRMAN: I find myself in great sympathy with what Mr. Jasim Uddin has said. When I was in South America several years ago in one of the countries I found that there was a Division of Culture of the Ministry of Education which has to do with folklore. They had placed in charge of this folklore section a young poet who had no training whatsoever in folklore. He was interested in getting good poetic versions of the folk songs and was using his own critical approach in deciding what was good. If the material which came in looked good he published it, but if it seemed to him not worthy he threw it out. He was also sending out questionnaires to all the teachers in the country and was finding that these teachers sent back what they thought he was expecting. I believe that this situation has improved there. It may be that one has to learn only through mistakes and I believe that in several of the South American countries some good work is being done through the school children.

MRS. AILI K. JOHNSON (Flint, Michigan): I agree thoroughly with Dean Thompson and with Mr. Jasim Uddin. I would like to point out the value of folklore collecting in the schools themselves in a country like our own. This problem may not exist in South America or in India but in the United States we have school children in one classroom of many races and many nationalities. Some of these children are of the first and some of the second generation of foreign-born parents. And there is a feeling of tension and nervousness, a feeling of not belonging, of being ashamed of their heritage, and if the folklore collecting is done sensibly and with no special attention paid to the actual results I think we will find that it is going to serve a very useful purpose in the schools. Now I have observed in Flint, Michigan, for example, that when teachers send the children back from the classrooms into their homes for material in the neighborhood, it gives the children a desire to know something about their parents, who have come from the southern mountains or from Poland, and the children are no longer as ashamed of the language and of the habits of their parents as they were. They are proud of knowing proverbs, or songs, or stories, and I think possibly that that is the real advantage of trying to collect in our high schools and elementary schools. I have been particularly interested in one of the eighth grade English teachers who has just discovered folklore and is anxious to know more about it. She has found that it is of great value to the students themselves. She makes no particular use of that which she collects. What is brought in is of very great interest in the social life of the community in a place with as mixed population as the city I live in.

CHAIRMAN: One of the most successful users of the results of collecting from school children has been Professor Walter Anderson. I shall be glad to hear from him about the results of his experiences.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I am going to describe a special method of collecting oral traditions through school children that was elaborated by me and was applied first to the Yiddish, that is the Jewish-German folklore of the Jews of the town of Minsk in White Russia. It was later applied to the Baltic-German folklore, to the Estonian folklore, and at last to the Italian folklore of the small republic of San Marino. In Latvia the same method has been successfully applied to Latvian folklore.

I do not pretend that my method is the only possible one for collecting folklore in the schools. It has its advantages and its disadvantages, but there are certain kinds of oral tradition, for example, the nursery rhymes and children’s songs, where I believe it is the best and most productive method. In any case I have collected by this method more than 1,300 Jewish oral traditions, more than 2,000 of Baltic-German, more than 3,000 from San Marino, and more than 56,000 pages of Estonian folklore. My method is very simple, perhaps a little primitive. I go to the head master of the school, introduce myself to him, show him my recommendations, and say to him, “May I please have one of the forms of your school for a few hours ?” Usually difficulties do not arise.

Then I enter the schoolroom and I ask the children to take a sheet of writing paper and I instruct them about filling out various things at the top of the paper, their Christian name, age, and so forth. Then I begin to ask them certain specific things. I read them a list of the beginning of the most popular or most interesting children’s songs, lullabies, and nursery rhymes and I ask them to hold up their hands if they know these. If they know one, they are to write it on the sheet just in the manner that they have heard it or remember it—not only, of course, the beginning line but the whole thing. The more things they write the better. I keep insisting that they should not copy anything, either from a comrade or from a book and that they should give full information about everything collected. Then I ask them to collect all kinds of things like folk songs, jests, adult songs, riddles, proverbs, superstitions, customs, and so forth. These are more difficult to write down than nursery rhymes but at any rate they are encouraged to bring them in. At the end of the second hour I gather these sheets and arrange them in alphabetical order by the name of the children and take them home. I later bind up all this material into volumes of about six hundred pages each and arrange them properly. In this way I have collected all my Yiddish and Italian material and a great part of my Baltic and Estonian material.

In Estonia I got texts from about 250 schools and this would not have been possible if I had had to collect all of the material personally. Here I made use of questionnaires, but these were extremely short and simple. I think if questionnaires are to be effective they must be as simple and clear as the recipe in a cookbook. I sent these out to the various head masters and teachers of the schools all over Estonia. You will realize that by this method I was likely to receive a huge number of just the most popular Estonian nursery rhymes and children’s songs. Was it senseless to collect this tremendous quantity of such a monotonous material ? I think it was not. I have learned a great deal of the most important things just on the basis of these monotonous texts. I learned to distinguish the typical form of the text from the local ones, from those existing only in one school, in one farm or in one community, and also from the merely individual or accidental ones. I learned to detect folklore boundaries crossing the boundaries of a parish that sometimes coincide with linguistic boundaries. I could observe how local forms of a nursery rhyme are carried by single children into a far distant parish and begin to spread successfully there. In the manner I have described I have collected nursery rhymes and children’s songs but also other things, for example, folk tales. Some of these I have published, for example, 116 tales from San Marino. But here a serious question arises. According to von Sydow’s terminology, the children are usually not active but passive bearers of folk-tale traditions. They know the tales quite well, but they are not at all accustomed to telling them and they can’t reproduce them in the perfect form. Would it not be better to send such children home so that their respective parents or grandparents or aunts could tell the whole story once more so that the children could correctly write down the story and bring them next day to school? This would certainly be better, if the children were obliged to deliver the tales to their teachers as well as they deliver every other school exercise.

DR. MAURICE JAGENDORF (New York City): We have had a very interesting experience in New York State, where we have a junior historical magazine and junior historical societies all over the state under the direction of Miss Mary Cunningham, who is doing a magnificent job. Part of the work of these children, who are youngsters up to the age of fourteen, is to gather material. I have gone through some of it and some of it is good, some bad, and some indifferent, but the point I want to emphasize is that which Mrs. Johnson made a few minutes ago, the enormous value of the collecting of the folklore to the families of the collectors. It brings children and parents into closer relationship. It brings communities closer together, and it always helps in bringing about a better spirit in the communities. In addition we also find sometimes the material is very good in itself.

DR. RUTH ANN MUSICK (Fairmont State College, Fairmont, West Virginia): In my classes in folk literature which I give to teachers of small children I often get from these teachers children’s rhymes, superstitions, folk remedies, ghost tales, and so forth. This material has come secondhand from the children. Some of it is interesting and good and some of it is without much value. I also get some material sent in as a result of a column which I publish in the paper. Here it is often the parents of children who have tried to collect folklore who send in the material.

MR. BØDKER: We have worked in the same way that Dr. Anderson has and have had some good results in Denmark. Our work has been through what we call folk high schools. The leader of the folk high school asks his pupils to take certain questionnaires home with them through the vacation. When they get back to school after the vacation these questionnaires have been filled out and we add them to our general archives. In this way we have received a considerable number of local traditions and local legends.

MR. MARUYAMA: Do you find, Dr. Anderson, that boys or girls are the best informants, generally speaking?

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: Their parents.

MR. MARUYAMA: I myself have found that the girl students in the lower high schools are best, though of course I use both boys and girls. We don’t use these children as informants but as rather leading us to the people from whom we can get folk tales. The grandfather and grandmother tell these tales to the children and in order to collect these real folk tales we ask the old people to tell them to the children and meantime we write them down.

CHAIRMAN: The question has been brought up as to whether there may possibly be some difference between the boys and girls in the matter of their value as folklore informants,

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: In general girls know their nursery rhymes and the children’s songs better than the boys.

CHAIRMAN: The question has also been brought up as to whether for other things than tales and songs the children may actually be very good.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: They are valuable for folk songs only in regard to the text, but not the melodies.

PROFESSOR HALPERT: I agree that in general in the collecting of folk songs children are not reliable for the tunes, though occasionally you will find a child who has learned a song tradition very well. Several of the teachers in my classes say that they have collected some very interesting material from their students, but they have not yet brought it in. Several of them have tried tying folklore into their various class projects. I had, for example, a very ingenious teacher once who had been doing a great deal of work collecting various kinds of things that she tied into her class in English composition. She wanted to teach the students that one puts a comma after a dependent clause when it precedes an independent one, and she knew that all the children knew autograph rhymes. Now, many of these rhymes travel in writing but many of them are known only orally. She got her students to make collections of these autograph rhymes and then the student went to the board and while⁴ another student would recite one, the most interesting ones were put on the blackboard. After it was written on the blackboard she would then say, “Now let’s talk about the punctuation.” She taught them the use of the comma and they had a wonderful time, she said. They learned how to punctuate such rhymes as:

When you get married and live on a hill,
Send me a message by Buffalo Bill.

In another class where they were discussing animals she made a very large collection of the names of all kinds of domestic animals. She had long lists of names given to cows, dogs, horses, canaries, and pet goats. I don’t know of any other collection in the United States of that kind which matches hers. She has, in the same way, collected a great deal of legendary material in connection with her history class.

A teacher who has had some training and who has some imagination can apparently do some actual collecting and yet not feel that she is turning the course into a collecting course. She is carrying out the requirements of the curriculum but is using the material which the children themselves know.

DR. LORD: Milman Parry in Yugoslavia, at one of the small villages, made use of children between nine and fifteen in collecting his folk songs. This was largely among Moslem women, the songs being largely sung by them, and the young children who had just learned to write were sent to their homes to write down from their mothers and aunts and grandmothers whatever songs they knew. Parry collected some ten thousand folk-song texts in that manner. As Professor Anderson says, though, there are many duplicates and some of the children tended to copy from one another. But in spite of all this, there is some very valuable material, sometimes as many as forty or fifty variants of a single song.

CHAIRMAN: In Mr. O’Suilleabhain’s report the other day one of the things which he did not touch on, and on which I am not very clear, was the preliminary instructions or training that was given in connection with sending out material to the pupils in the schools.

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: No instruction was given to the children. We worked the scheme entirely through the Department of Education. Their first problem was to get the good will of the teachers. There are about twelve thousand teachers in the primary schools in Ireland but we used only the children of the fifth and sixth standards, that is from eleven to fourteen years of age. And only the principal teacher in each school was involved. First of all we brought the Executive Council of the Teachers’ Organization together in Dublin and won them over so that they would get the teachers to throw themselves into the scheme. Then I drew up a little booklet which was published in Irish and in English for every department. It contained folklore suggestions for about forty different compositions. It asked questions, for example, about the festivals, about riddles, proverbs, and songs. We didn’t cover superstitions, because we thought that in some cases the parents might object to their children getting acquainted with these superstitions. The parents often feel that these had better be left to die out. But when the booklets were issued to the schools with an official letter by the department, Mr. Delargy and I went around the country nearly every Saturday and Sunday speaking to the various local branches of the teachers, In that way we gave lectures to every teacher that was involved in the scheme. This would take the form of a talk by one of us and then questions by the teachers for an hour. The scheme worked in this way: The teacher would have a composition on Tuesday and Thursday, and a day or two before he would suggest some of the topics to the children. Especially if there were any festivals going on they would have the children inquire at home about the festival and about any stories connected with it. Then when a composition day came the children wrote down in the copy book the accounts that they had received from their family and other informants. Then the teacher got the best children in the school, that is the best at writing and spelling, to transfer this material into the standard notebook which the department issued to each school. As you see we haven’t any very close connection with the individual children.

CHAIRMAN: The training then is primarily the preliminary preparation of the teacher?

MR. O’SUILLEABHAIN: Of the teacher, yes. It was impossible to get in touch with half a million school children.

CHAIRMAN: In South America I came across a practice in both Peru and Venezuela which we do not know here. The teachers come together for a convention for a week or ten days in midsummer. Now, in both of these countries the new interest in folklore has brought it about that there is scheduled a series of lectures on folklore for these teachers. The ones for Peru have been published, that is the lectures given four years ago. In Venezuela these lectures were going on when I arrived.

The difficulty about these lectures, it seems to me, was the fact that in Peru various important people were called upon who did not know a great deal about the subject. Two of the lecturers, however, did a very good job and I think that their influence will carry on. In Venezuela the whole series was given by one man and the difficulty there was that this man was interested exclusively in folk song.

I think we have probably talked ourselves out pretty well on this subject of the school children. We have a little time left and I think it is probably the proper occasion to bring up a related subject. What kind of training, whether in the university or in some central place, should be given to the well- meaning amateur collector? A person writes in, as you have all experienced, I know, “I am interested in folklore; I should like to collect folklore but I don’t know just how to go about it.* How shall such requests be treated? What can we do? Of course one thing that we can certainly do is to prepare some kind of collector’s manual for such people. Another is to proceed as I have just mentioned for certain countries in South America, that is to bring amateurs together in some central place for a kind of indoctrination. What then shall we do with the amateur who has nothing except enthusiasm to start with and yet who wants to collect folklore? Shall we simply say, “God bless you, go ahead and collect,” or shall we do something more constructive for such people? Professor Hudson, do you have something to say on this?

PROFESSOR A. P. HUDSON (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina): Not very much that would be particularly edifying; some of it might be amusing.

CHAIRMAN: Well, we might stand a little amusement, I think.

PROFESSOR HUDSON: Your summary of the kinds of questions you get sounds very familiar. I have received scores—hundreds —of them from teachers and from club women who want to study folklore. I usually take the requests seriously. I try to send them some material that may be available to illustrate what folklore is, since many people have a very vague notion about it. Although they know a great deal of folklore, they are like the old woman who was pleased to discover that she had been speaking prose all her life. I try to send these people some kind of material and a little bibliography if I think they have a library available to them. Of course this happens only in the larger towns and cities. I tell them how to go about getting their material. I tell them that they have to know a few songs, proverbs, riddles, and that sort of thing. I exemplify the material in order to make the collectors know what to ask for from informants, and I try to emphasize the importance of obtaining all that is possible of biographical information about the informant. I try to get them to find all they can about where the songs have come from. I have got some rather interesting results from that sort of suggestions.

I remember a teacher who wrote me a letter of that sort and I emphasized the point with her and then she told, me about an experience that she had had. It illustrates the very interesting functional associations of the material which the children know. She said she was a country school teacher teaching her first school far off the road in rural Mississippi. This was many years ago out in the wilds and she was much frightened by an announcement by the County Superintendent of Public Education that he was going to make a visitation to her school. It was customary then, as it still is in the rural schools, for the children to give a little performance in recognition of this visit. They would do a little flag waving, and dancing, and sing a little song, and make little speeches, and put on little plays. Well, she said she couldn’t think of anything to do and she was frightened to death at the prospect of the visit. At the noon recess she noticed the children playing a game. They had played this before but she hadn’t paid any particular attention to it. In one corner of the school yard under an oak tree was a little girl standing on a box and she had a rope around her neck. The rope was over a limb of the overhanging tree and a boy about her size had one end of the rope. She said she heard this spoken by the little girl on the box:

Hangerman hangerman, slack your rope,
Hangerman, hangerman, slack your rope and wait a little while.
Yonder I see my father coming, riding many a mile.

You all know this song. It went on through all the series of relatives until her lover came up and the ballad concluded. “Well,” she thought, “that is the very thing I want. That will make ja, nice little play, a nice little show for the county superintendent.” But she felt there were some things about it that needed polishing up a little bit. She called the children in for a rehearsal one afternoon after school shortly before the county superintendent was to come. While she was rehearsing the children in their little act, a friend who lived in the neighborhood and knew the people and the mores of the folk walked in and said, “What in the world are you having those children do?” The teacher said, “Well, this is a little play we are going to put on for the county superintendent.” The friend gasped and said, “‘Honey, honey, honey, for gosh sake don’t put on that play. Don’t do it for the county superintendent. It will ruin you sure.” And the teacher said, “Why? It’s a rough little play, but the children know it and it looked interesting to me.” Her friend said, “Well, you don’t know about this country. You don’t know about this county superintendent. You see, a good many years ago he got into a political quarrel and had to kill his man, and it took all of his money and all of his family’s money to save his neck from being broken.”

There are a great many of these illustrations which might show the same sort of thing, though not so interesting perhaps as that one. One of my students, Miss Margaret Craig, was trying to get her children interested in poetry and was beginning rightly with the simplest kind. She said that there was a boy from a mill family, apparently a dullard, who was not interested in what was being done in the classroom at all. He was interested in machinery and things of that sort, but when they got to working with old ballads she found that he knew a beautiful version of “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter.” This was the only sign of interest that he ever took in his schoolroom. He contributed that song and she got from him the words and music of the text with/some account of the associations of the song in that particular family. Most of my other illustrations would make much the same point. It is very important in training your informants to get all you can about the background and the human association of the material in which they are working.

CHAIRMAN: I have discovered that about two hours is the limit of pleased attention in a discussion like this. We have only just opened up this subject and I propose that the next time this symposium meets we pursue the general subject of the training of the amateur.

End of Session

FOURTH SESSION

CHAIRMAN: In our three previous sessions we have discussed many things and I think have come to no absolute conclusions about any of them. At the end of the last period we had just opened up the interesting question as to what to do with pure amateurs who are enthusiastic and want to collect folklore and yet know very little about it. I think we should continue to discuss that subject for a while. Since this is the last period for this symposium I have had requests that two different kinds of things be discussed. Since they do not belong in this part of our discussion I think it is better that we should continue where we were and then take up these two reports. Professor Walter Anderson has some things to say about his collecting from school children and Dr. Balys about some of his experiences with Lithuanian groups in America.

To return, now, to the question of the amateur. When a farmer, or lawyer or club woman writes in and says, “I am very much interested in folklore and I think there is a great deal of folklore to be collected around me, but I don’t know how to go about it,” what shall we do? Without leaving this question out in the open without any guidance let me suggest that one of the problems that this request brings up is that of a handbook for collectors. We need some book that explains all the various kinds of folklore that are likely to be found in a particular part of the world and that suggests how the person is to go about collecting it in the most successful fashion. As a matter of fact we have no such handbook in America. I know, of course, that the Folk-lore Society in London has a good handbook and in Ireland an excellent one. But I should like to ask the folklorists from Ireland and Sweden, for example, what they would do if a country doctor should write in and ask how to go about collecting folklore. Would you send him a whole battery of questionnaires, or just how would you proceed?

DR. CAMPBELL: In Sweden, of course, it happens just as it does here. Usually when a man of that kind writes to me and asks for help he has already started some kind of collection. It often happens that he wants to write a book. Sometimes it is a school teacher who is preparing a book about his parish. He writes to us for material from his parish and tells us that he has been working two or three or four years on a book about it. If this happens then I write him and say, “Well, that is very good that you have this interest in writing a book on your parish and I will only say that I hope you will not forget the folklore. If you want any information I will send you some of our questionnaires.” If this man is from a certain district I can usually understand what questionnaires will be the first that will take his interest. If, for example, he is from the northern part of Sweden I send him the hunting and fishing questionnaires and the folklore connected with those activities. Or for another district I send him the questionnaires on wood and carpentry. If he is interested I will probably get an answer, “Well I have already taken this down, or I did not think about that but you are quite right, I must put that in my book. I am afraid though there will be little place in my book for such a thing-.” Then I write back to him asking him to send me a plan of his book. I am usually able to suggest how he can cut down on certain parts which he thinks have to be put in the book and can add other parts that he has not thought of adding.

Sometimes I get a question about a very definite thing. A doctor or a chemist may write in and tell us that he is studying the treatment of certain children’s diseases. Have we any folklore about that? I send him what we have and also send out a questionnaire covering this point. We have a series of questionnaires about folk medicine and the doctor then becomes interested. We have had a good deal of success with stirring up interest in this way.

CHAIRMAN: I imagine we have brought the problem pretty well before us now. Here in the United States we do have the special problem of the handbook. There has been a great deal of talk about handbooks but nothing has been done. Everyone has a different notion of the kind of book we should have. Some want just to have a United States adaptation of the O’Suillea- bhain handbook and use the general Swedish system. Some have been much impressed by the great pile of mimeographed material which I have in my office from Sweden and say that we should have a whole series of handbooks. Others want to get out a big five or six hundred page book, and others insist that we should have not more than forty or fifty pages to send out to amateurs. We are all looking for light as to what is the most successful way. I understand from Dr. Campbell that he makes his choice according to the interests of the person concerned. Mr, O’Suilleabhain, what do you do about this? Do you send out the whole handbook or do you make a selection?

MR. O‘SUILLEABHAIN: We come up with that problem a good deal in Ireland. We don’t send out the handbooks at all, since they are too expensive. For our full-time collectors we have had the handbook subdivided into three separately bound sections. It is possible for them to slip these sections into their pockets while they go around working in the field.

Now when a persdn writes to us out of the blue and says, “I have nothing to do and I would like to collect some folklore,” what we do is this. We have a mimeographed list which we call items for the collector. This covers the main heads and subheads of the whole field of folklore. We send that with a notebook and some gummed slips in which they fill out the details about the informant and so on, and then later we send them a personal letter telling how to use the list and say that we will gladly pay them for what they send in. In any case when we get it back and read it through we can see something of the caliber of this particular collector. If he looks very promising we bring him up to Dublin to the archives and pay his expenses there for a few days. If he is willing and able to go on with part-time collecting we instruct him in the details of field work, and if he is especially good we give him an Edi- phone machine and arrange for him to work for the next six months at a regular salary. I would say that about one-third of our collection has been done by such amateur collectors. These collectors vary in type. Some of them may be farm laborers who have something of the flair of a poet and who are interested in old literature or in written literature. We have a lot of people like that in Ireland. Then we get a number of second-rate school students who are at loose ends and who are finishing their secondary school education. They have nothing else to do and they may not be able to go on to the university. They may not yet have a job in a shop or an office and they may not yet have reservations for the United States. So we take them in, and I must say they do work out very well. Their chief value to us is that a great many of them come from the Gaelic-speaking districts of Ireland which are crucial places for us, and some of them from English-speaking parts of Ireland where we can never send a full-time collector.

We also have a good many people to whom we send questionnaires. We bring them to the archives for three or four days and take them in detail through the catalog. We get them to read the works of other collectors and in that way try to broaden their interests. We usually find that that is the difficulty because amateur collectors are ordinarily interested in just four or five different types of things. They may be interested in the storyteller, the song, the proverb, and the riddle, but not at all in social history. Now in Ireland we are extremely interested in collecting the social history of our people, because as I shall want to show you while I am here, our civilization is changing almost overnight in Ireland. We therefore are doing everything we can to encourage our amateur collectors to get all they can about the social history and cultural background of the whole district.

MISS KARPELES: I should like to ask a rather practical question. The International Folk Music Council is preparing a manual for collectors specifically for folk music, that is folk song and folk dance, and the question I would like to ask is this: How far could this be made use of in a general handbook? The scheme of our manual, of course, is a general introduction to the subject followed by general advice to folk music collectors. Now, of course, that is largely advice that would apply to collectors in general, not merely to collectors of folk music. Both kinds of manuals would have to have suggestions about the best method of approach to informants and so on. We go on then to the specific questions of preparation for work in the field. And then there will be a chapter on the noting of songs, on mechanical recording, and the like. There is a chapter on the noting of instrumental tunes and another on the noting of dances. This manual will be ready shortly in the new year. But I don’t know whether it could be combined in any way with the general handbook. Folk music and folk song, particularly the dance, are very specialized things and it might be better to keep this as a special entity and refer collectors to it.

MRS. DANIELLI: I should like to make a remark on the situation in England as regards amateur collectors, because it is rather different from anything that has been discussed here. We have a good many people who want to do amateur collecting, and in fact the great body of our collected work has been done by people who just happened to be interested and who have no special training. Now the basis for this fact is that we have our societies, which I have mentioned before, societies throughout the whole length of England which cover such things as natural history, local history, antiquities, and sometimes folklore. Some of these societies are not very small. The Cambridge Antiquarian Society I think is larger than the Folk-lore Society, but the method pursued is not really a very conscious one. Anyone who writes to us or some other scholars to know about folklore is usually advised to get in touch with his local society. In this way a sort of informal training can be obtained through discussion with other members who already know something about the subject and so encouragement in collecting is given in this way.

[Miss Karpeles and Mr. Halpert discussed the folk-music handbook, and it was agreed that they would look over the matter together during the week end.]

CHAIRMAN: I am quite as discouraged as any of the rest of our American folklorists about the handbook that we are presumably working on. Someone, somewhere, is supposed to be working on a handbook, but nothing really seems to be coming of it.

Now I have arranged for Dr. Walter Anderson to discuss his experiences of collecting from school children.

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I should like to show you what things can sometimes be found by collecting folklore through school children. In a small part of southeastern Estonia there exists a secret cult of a pagan deity which reminds us of the Voodoo cult of the American Negroes, Till the end of the nineteenth century no scholar had known anything about this amazing fact. Pioneers of Estonian folklore had forged numerous old Estonian deities and had created an entire Estonian Olympus. This was purely a part of their imagination, but they had lived and died without having the slightest idea of the existence of that contemporary Estonian pagan god. Suddenly about sixty years ago Dr. Joseph Hurt, the greatest collector of Estonian folklore, received from an uneducated farmer of southeastern Estonia a letter that contained among other things the first written notice about this secret cult of the god, Peko. It was said that once a year there were night festivals arranged in a circle, and that there were many such circles. The idol of the god is kept in the house of one of the worshipers who is every year especially appointed for this purpose. Dr. Hurt was amazed. The name Peko was already well known from the famous list of ancient Finnish gods which had been composed in the sixteenth century by Michael Agricola. But now this god appeared as a real present-day deity in contemporary Estonia. Hurt and other scholars began to search for new notices about Peko and his cult, but this task was extremely difficult because of the absolutely secret character of the Peko cult. No worshiper ever confessed to worshiping him. He always claimed that this was simply slander. Nevertheless for forty years there was collected a series of notices about Peko. These did not all agree.

No one had actually seen the idol. An American-Estonian had claimed that in the early nineteenth century he had bought an idol and had taken it back, so that it was no longer available.

Professor Eisen, another great collector of folklore, began to make use of my method of collecting folklore through school children. He went to a teacher of a grammar school in southeastern Estonia and asked him to inquire of his pupils if they knew anything by oral tradition about Peko? Ten school children answered that they did, and ten papers were sent to Professor Eisen. About eight of these contained interesting details that could, in part, be confirmed from other sources. One paper was peculiarly interesting. A school girl had by chance got to a Peko festival. Among other things she gave a detailed description of the Peko idol itself. She gave its approximate size in centimeters and said the idol was made of wood. In the crown of its head were seven holes for candles, one in the center and the other six around it. The whole report seemed like a mystification. A school girl had admitted to the secret of Peko, to a secret Peko festival, a Peko idol of wood, and every textbook of Estonian folklore said it was of wax. It was true that the American-Estonian had also spoken of a wooden idol but his report was suspected too. And for the Peko idol to act in the role of a candlestick, that seemed impossible.

About a year passed and then Estonian newspapers brought in sensational news. A young Estonian scholar had found an ancient worshiper of Peko who confessed to possessing a real Peko idol. He had seen such idols and he had bought this idol at a reasonable price. He had transported it to the Estonian National Museum. Now what did this real Peko look like? His size was approximately the same as had been given by the school girl. There was a difference of six or seven centimeters only. The idol was of wood and he had on the crown of his head seven holes, one in the center, the other six around it, and in these seven holes there were detected numerous layers of wax separated from each other by layers of dust. The idol had really during many years been used as a candlestick. The little school girl had given the first exact description of the Peko idol.

CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Professor Anderson. I wonder if there are any questions or discussion concerning Professor Anderson’s talk.

I have also now arranged for Dr. Jonas Balys to give some account of his collecting activities among the Lithuanians here in America.

DR. BALYS: I wish to speak about some of my experiences in collecting folklore among the Lithuanian immigrants in this country. Conditions here are partly different from those in the old country. Here we have highly developed industry and big cities, and the working people generally have a high living standard. In Lithuania proper while traveling through the country and gathering folklore, we always looked for poor log cabins and tried there to find old songs and tales, and usually with success. If there was a good-looking farm and fine houses and everything indicated a prosperous farmer, then it did not pay to go in and ask for tales or songs.

Most of the former farmers became miners and mill-workers in this country. But they continued to cultivate their traditional inheritance, mostly folk songs and tales, and I collected a lot of these in two successive summers in 1949 and 1950. My collecting activity was sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Indiana University.

While I was traveling heavily loaded in both hands, a tape recording machine in one, and a suitcase with tapes and notebooks in the other, the people sometimes asked me: “What are you selling?” I answered, “I am selling nothing; I am buying folk songs and folk tales, but I pay nothing for that.” As a rule, nobody asked me to pay for the songs and tales, or for spending time with them. Many people were pleased to hear their own voice played back by the recording machine, and it was easy to convince them that it is important to collect such “trifles.”

How did I find people who know folklore? It was not difficult. Very much help was given by the Lithuanian newspapers. There are two popular dailies and about a dozen weeklies, and mostly the elder generation reads them. I gave them popular articles on folklore and reports about my travels. I always visited the editor of the newspaper if there was one in the city. They had interviews with me and in this way the people were informed of what was going on, and encouraged by editorial notes. Once an old woman looked at me when I asked her about songs and said, “Oh, I see you are the same crazy man who wants to hear songs and tales; I saw your picture in the paper.”

In my turn, I also gave information to the papers about the persons who are good singers and storytellers. I gave short interviews with them, and this proved to be very helpful for my purpose. It is not only professors and doctors who like to see their names printed in the papers; the same is also true with the common man. Here is, for instance, a Lithuanian weekly from Pittsburgh, of July 20, 1950, where you see an interview with me and plenty of names of persons whom I visited and who sang songs and told stories.

A “queen of songs” in her seventies once told me: “Some months ago I read in a newspaper that an old woman sang you sixty songs, and I thought for myself that I could easily sing that many songs too.” And that was true, I got them. Further, I often published in the newspapers some specimens of my collection. I always indicated the singers by their names and addresses, where from and when they came to the United States, and also gave some notes about how interesting this or that folklore item was. This contributed also a good deal to the publicity of folklore.

The priests often helped me to find people who were good folklore bearers, because the Father usually knows his parishioners very well and so was able to give me some valuable hints where I should start my search. (There are about 130 Lithuanian Catholic parishes in this country.) It was important to find one person in a locality who knows songs or tales, and this one indicated others. An elderly lady, for instance, sang me songs for three’’hours and then said: “Oh, I must call Mary, she knows many songs, too.” And she called her by phone: “Hello, Mary, what are you doing?” “I am doing laundry,” was the answer. “Put everything aside and come to me. There is a gentleman who wants to have songs which we sang when we were tending cattle. I sang for three hours and now I am tired. Now come quickly.”

The people asked me sometimes: “Why do you collect all these songs and tales? What will you do with them?” If I would say that the scholars are interested in the matter, that they are collecting them, indexing and looking for motifs, and so on, then they would probably think: “Crazy people, cannot they find any more reasonable work . . .” What I usually said was something like this: “The old songs are beautiful, the old people who know them are dying, their songs must be collected and thus saved.” The people agreed with me: “It is true, the old songs are nice, they are worth preserving. Our youngsters are now singing such terrible songs, always the same, ‘I love you,’ and that is all.”

A good storyteller told me once: “It is pleasant to tell stories when many people are listening. You are now the only one listening and I must tell you a story for an hour. It does not pay for the trouble.” My answer was: “The recording machine will take your words and some day maybe it will be played back on the radio, and many thousands of people will enjoy your tale.” The trick worked.

Sometimes I had a more difficult case. An old woman in Mahanoy City, Penn., was unwilling to sing me anything. I spoke to her for about a half hour, but to no avail. I noticed immediately that she knew many and interesting songs, but she was in such a bad mood and dissatisfied with everything in the world that all my persuading her to sing failed. Finally she told me: “You are annoying me like a salesman.” And I replied: “Please sing me only one song; this will take you merely five minutes, and then I will go.” She wanted to finish the bargain quickly and agreed. Then she started to sing this one song. I recorded and played it back. She was pleased and smiled. Then she sang me ten more songs.

A few words about the selection. It is impossible to record all the songs or stories which you can hear from the people who have so many folk songs. To make a selection is inevitable. How must the selection be made?

Folklore can be considered from two points of view. One is the “archaeological” aspect, as I would call it, and another may be called the “sociological.” By “archaeological” folklore I mean the old traditional lore created and performed by nonprofessional artists without influence of books and the stage. This is the real stock of material for every folklore research. The “sociological folklore” is less genuine and of a more recent date; it is the making of half-educated people and is submitted to a rather obvious influence from books and newspapers, the popular theater and phonograph records. The people use them even to a much larger extent in their free time than the “archaeological folklore.” There are dozens of printed booklets for a quarter or so which contain “popular songs,” sometimes with music notes. Among them we often find some really old traditional songs, except that their melodies are harmonized by semiprofessional musicians and often distorted. About half of such a booklet, however, contains poetry of authors known by their names but never mentioned in any handbook of Lithuanian literature, because they are merely “makers of verses.” There may also be found a few songs by nationally recognized authors, like Maironis or Baranauskas. Some of their poems became very popular and were adopted as “folk songs.”

I always asked the singers: “Where did you learn your song?” I never collected songs which they learned from such popular booklets. On the other hand, I collected such booklets and have already a great many of them.

Once a singer was obviously disappointed and told me: “I know so many songs and you took down a dozen only.” My answer was: “Well, your songs are all very nice, but I have already collected so many songs that many of yours I got earlier from other people.” This was a; lame excuse for rejecting songs of the category labeled with “from printed booklets.”

I also took down variants of really traditional songs but only if there was some difference in text or melody from the “standard type” of that song. The same song in different regions of the country often has somewhat different variants, and they must be recorded. On the whole, the selection is quite a problem, and I think that in a doubtful case it is better to record than to be too cautious.

A questionnaire is helpful. For my last trip I used a questionnaire containing ninety-five rare songs, and I asked the people if they knew them. I got positive answers for about two-thirds of the list.

What are the American Lithuanians singing today? A lot of things. The old traditional songs, the harmonized popular songs (to a very great extent because of the activity of numerous choruses), the poems of recognized and unrecognized national poets, and finally the Anglo-American songs. I wish to give you an example. I have in my hands the program of an annual banquet which was celebrated by a Lithuanian club in Wilkes- Barre, Penn., on April 19, 1942. The program contains not only the advertisements, the names of performers and speakers, but also the full texts of fifty-three songs which are supposed to be sung by all the people taking part there. Among the fifty-three songs we find thirty-five Lithuanian and eighteen English songs.

I have a lot of such printed programs containing texts of the most popular songs. The larger part consists of old traditional songs of the old country which are known to nearly everybody among the Lithuanians. The young people and those who forgot may refresh their memory from the printed program.

CHAIRMAN: There are certainly many interesting things about Dr. Baiys’s experiences. I hope that he can write them up for us sometime. The main project that he is working on is a type of collecting that I have been interested in for a long time. I think yesterday morning I spoke rather perversely, so that one got the idea that I was not at all interested in collecting from the various foreign groups. On the contrary it seems to me one of our great opportunities in America that we have so many large groups of recent immigrants from various parts of the world. It is really a great laboratory for the collecting of folklore here within a relatively small area. From the point of view of one who is curious about the behavior of folk material it seems to me we have an opportunity to study a particular type of phenomenon, that is, what happens to folk material when it is taken out of its original environment and put over into a new one. We have the whole question of isolation from the mother country and what effect that has on the preserving of the material. Sometimes I am sure that it is true that material may be preserved on this side better than it is in the mother country, because after all when one collects the Swedish folklore in Minnesota, if he collects anything at all, he is finding the Swedish folklore of 1870 or 1880. And this folklore has not gone through the same evolution that it has gone through in Sweden. So that does represent a particular and a very interesting problem in folklore. Then, of course, in addition to that there is the mere question of collecting folklore and reconstituting on this side of the water archives that now at least are unavailable to the scholars in the Western World. This is true of the Lithuanian folklore, and I am certain that there are a number of other groups of people that need to be studied in the same way.

We will now have the pleasure of hearing from Mr. Jasim IJddin.

MR. JASIM UDDIN: In our land we cannot go places by motor car, we have to walk. When I was a student one of my professors was interested in me and he managed to get a scholarship from the university so that I could collect folk songs. He sent me to a new place for this collecting. I had to manage to make contacts with the people. I knew nobody in that district and I went to that place, took my seat on the street through which the people were passing. I was writing something. Our people are very curious. They asked me questions but I did not answer them. And then they became more curious. They called other people. One of them would say, “Look, there is a strange man. He is not speaking and he is writing something.” And I kept writing and laughing to myself. Within a half an hour a hundred people had assembled and then I broke silence and began to talk and sing to them. They were interested in me and some of them invited me to their place to stay overnight. I asked who would be able to bring singers to sing for me; I would go to his place. Then three or four persons, each of them told me that he would bring singers and I selected the one who would promise to bring the most singers. And I went there and the singers came in. People came from all the surrounding villages. They had heard that a strange man had come to this village and as you know our villages are very densely populated. Many persons came and they came singing. Then I began to find out from them who were the best singers, because I have learned from my many years of experience that I can get nothing but information from a layman, but that he can always refer me to good and professional singers. From such a gathering I can always find who are the good singers and I go to the house and ask him to sing for me. Now as they are professional singers they are not interested in me, and so I have to agree to pay them a certain amount of money.

You see the village singers cannot dictate any song or any folk tale so that I can write it. They can only sing, so I had to acquire a very rapid way of writing so that I could keep writing as they sang. Sometimes I had to omit portions, and when they stopped singing I corrected these portions and they could help to that extent. Sometimes there were words which I did not understand and then I got from them the meaning of the words. I told the singers that these songs were full of puzzles and that I was going to send them to the university to the big professors who would look up the matter in big books and find exactly what the songs mean. Actually I got the meaning from the singers and it was very simple and easy. This is the difference between the scholars and the people. When I am in difficulty in knowing the meaning of a song I go to the singers themselves.

I can give some personal experiences of how I collect. You see, I even hire singers in our village. The singers make composition extempore, that is they compose songs in a kind of competition. I sometimes enter into competition with them for a whole night and I always arrange that I shall be defeated. And they are always very glad they can help and they invite me to their villages. This is the first stage of my collecting. Then you know that through my literary career I am somewhat known to others now, and when I go to the villages people know me, and even the children who go to school know me by name. When I told these people that I had passed a master’s examination they wouldn’t believe me. They said that I could not pass it. Then someone in the village came to me with his book and said humbly to me, “Sir, I cannot work out this legal problem. Will you kindly work it out for me?” As you know I am a bad student in mathematics and I made mistakes and so my position in their village was most uncomfortable. They thought that because I could not solve all problems, I was false in everything.

Sometimes it so happens that people take me for a detective or for a member of the police. They say, “What is this man about? Why these songs? He is a gentleman and perhaps he is a man of the town. Why does he come? What is his intention of noting down these songs ? He comes as a police detective and will be doing something against us.” In one village I was received by the village chief and he prepared good dishes for me and gave me a good bed to sleep in, but in the night they began to have suspicions in their minds and asked themselves, “Why has this gentleman come to our village? He must be a detective, or he must be an anarchist or something like that.” And they consulted among themselves and one of them said, “We must inform the police station.” And some of them went to the police station and informed them about me. And the police officer told them that they should watch me. In the night I was astonished to see how many people were roaming around and I asked them, “Why aren’t you sleeping tonight? Go on and go to sleep.” And they answered, “No, you are a guest here, we must guard you. We always keep late hours.” My requesting them to sleep made their suspicion even greater. On the following morning the kind officer came and saw me and then he was satisfied and went, but I couldn’t work in that village because the people were all suspicious.

When one goes and tries to get songs from a man he must always finish the song, because that man may never give him the song afterwards. One day I was getting a very nice ballad from one village. Half of it was written down and I was very hungry and I went to get food. In the meantime someone had advised him against giving the song and said that I was likely to do some harm in the future. So he never came again and never gave me the song. When one goes to one of our villages, he must be very truthful, he must not give false promises. I have seen collectors go to the village and give false promises that they cannot fulfill, and then the next time they go they not only make their position bad but they make the position of all other collectors impossible. And you must have a very good character. You must look upon the women as your sisters or as your mothers. In the villages where I go, in our country, you see, people are not so liberal as you are. When we call a woman mother or sister they are very much pleased, and always when I go to a village I call the women my mother and sister. In collecting songs for so many years I have got so many sisters in so many villages and so many mothers that I can’t count them all.

I must tell you about one mother of mine. I went to a village and had no food with me. Now it is not the way it is in your country where you can get food with money. In our villages you have to be entertained by some gentleman or otherwise you can’t buy food in the villages. So I got hold of a young man and told him, “Look here, I am going to collect songs. Can you name anybody from whose house I can get food?” And the boy took me to his place. I went to their house. I spoke to his mother and I called her my mother and she was very generous to me. She was preparing something for me so that I could have a hurried meal. In the meantime some people were coming into the house. Why these people were coming to her puzzled me. I couldn’t understand the matter and she was whispering something in their ears which I could not understand. Then these people went away without talking to me. Then another group of young men came and she was more terrified, and she was again whispering in their ears, and they went away. In about a half an hour I came to understand that she was not what we call a good woman, that she was in a bad profession and I had called her mother. She was concealing her profession from me so that I could go from her house having called her mother and she could conceal from me all through the years all the incidents of her life. I understood this, I didn’t let her know when I left her house. There were tears in her eyes and she told me: “My boy, if you ever come in this direction remember this mother of yours and I shall also always remember you.” When I am alone in my room I sometimes think of that lonely mother in the farthest corner of the village and I know that she is thinking of me and if I ever go to that village again I shall meet her as a mother.

Once I heard the singing of a very great village poet. He was a masterful person and an extempore composer. He could not repeat what he composed but I got many of his songs written in my notebook. When he sang, thousands of people were crying and laughing because he was so impressive as a singer. I told my friends in Calcutta that this man could be brought to Calcutta and he would give a good demonstration. But while we were hesitating the old man died. Later when I was a teacher in the university I heard that this old man’s daughter was a very good singer, and so I made up my mind to go to her house and hear how she sang, I came to the locality some fifty miles away with difficulty, and there was a bazaar. If one goes to people’s houses all of a sudden, they are suspicious and they may not take you very warmly. For that reason I had to be introduced to this woman’s home. How could I do this? In the local bazaar the tailor is the most intelligent man, because he talks to all the educated people for whom he makes garments. So I got hold of a tailor and told him my name and he recognized me by my name. I requested him to introduce me to the girl who could sing very well, the daughter of the old singer. He went to the house and told them about me and they sent a message that I should be welcome at the house. When I got there the girl didn’t come but her old mother came. I sat in the dust at her feet. I called her mother, and told her I had come all the way to hear the song of her daughter, but she said: “You are a foreigner, you are not known to us, you are no relative. My daughter cannot sing to you. If she sings people will say so many things.” I kept requesting her and other people kept requesting her but, although we began asking her at five o’clock it was ten o’clock in the night and she had not agreed that her daughter could sing. At this time the son of the village headman became very angry and he said, “There is your cottage made of straw. Don’t you know that if you are so stubborn I will burn it? This gentleman is a well-known poet and if he goes from your house without hearing the song of your daughter I will burn your house into ashes.” Then the old woman consented and she said, “Yes, I will allow my daughter to sing one song to you, but you will sit in the house and she will sing from forty yards away.” So we all sat in the room and all the gentlemen were with me; they were all sitting and she was singing forty yards away. When she sang this song I was so much elated and my feelings were so wrought upon that the old woman could understand that I was not a foreigner to them, that I was one of them, that I was very near to their mystic culture. So she whispered in my ear, “Tell your other friends to go, you stay here and my daughter will sing to you.” This was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life.

CHAIRMAN: I am sure we are all going to remember with special pleasure these last talks we have had this morning. They have been excellent and the very kind of thing that will, I hope,- take this symposium out of the realm of the purely academic.

As I look over the program as we planned it, I see that we have done something with nearly everything that was proposed. It was quite beyond our hope that we could discuss all of these things and finish them all. We haven’t done so, but we have talked somewhat about nearly every item on it. I wonder if in the short time left us we might not profitably raise the question of recording techniques. We have talked about it a little and we have spent an evening on machines for recording. The one great mystery I have not heard really explored is how anyone with a notebook can listen to someone sing a song or tell a tale and take it all down. I know from office dictating that the secretaries have to use shorthand or a dictating machine or else they don’t get down all I have said. I am wondering, for example, how common the use of shorthand is for taking down tales. I remember that the late Kaarle Krohn told me that he did most of his collecting of tales in shorthand and Professor Barbeau tells me that he has done most of his large collections in the same way. How common the use of shorthand is I don’t know. I don’t know any tale collectors in America who have been using shorthand. Professor Anderson do you know about that?

PROFESSOR WALTER ANDERSON: I have read many of Kaarle Krohn’s texts written in shorthand. I myself can’t read shorthand but they were transcribed for me. I must say the texts were very good. There were no parts missing in the tales. They were written as they were told.

MRS, JOHNSON: Dr. Thompson, don’t you think many American collectors use a combination of shorthand and their own system of combination of key words and so on? I know that especially when I work with Finnish material I translate the common words rapidly into English shorthand and the key words and the important words which have special meaning I do in original Finnish very rapidly or abbreviate them.

MISS GILLMOR: I think that in the collecting among the Mormon people in Utah Mr. and Mrs. Fife have worked together most effectively. Mrs, Fife does know shorthand and she takes down tales. They also have a recording machine, but they work together and a great deal of it is in shorthand.

CHAIRMAN: I think their technique is very interesting. They work together. Mrs. Fife ordinarily takes a position rather out of the center of things. He does the collecting and she hears it in the background and takes everything down in shorthand. That has been a very successful technique for them. Of course there are some limitations for shorthand. Obviously you can’t do much about dialect forms. That is, you assume that the words are ordinarily standard words as to spelling and so forth.

PROFESSOR ADNAN SAYGUN (Director of the Conservatory of Music, Ankara, Turkey): One question. In the villages there are dialect words not in the standard language. Can these be written in shorthand?

CHAIRMAN: I don’t think so.

PROFESSOR OTTO ANDERSSON (University of Abo, Finland): I used some shorthand about forty years ago and now I have great difficulty in transcribing it.

CHAIRMAN: I have had the same experience. I used to write shorthand and now I find that I can’t read my own notes. That is one difficulty.

MISS KARPELES: I always use shorthand when I am noting a word, but I don’t like my shorthand notes to get cold. I always transcribe them, if possible, the same day or the next day. I find that if I leave them too long I am a little unhappy about it. There is this question that I think has been raised before about taking your notes surreptitiously and the thought that it cuts people off if they see you with a notebook. Well, I haven’t found that, because I avoid doing it too soon, of course, and first of all I make friends with the people. But I think you can excuse yourself. I always say, “Well, now I’m sorry I’ve got such a bad memory. I must write that down, otherwise I shall forget it.” I think they quite understand.

PROFESSOR ERIXON: We go out two or three together and some one of them writes.

CHAIRMAN: If you have several people together, such as the Fifes I mentioned, you can have one person write shorthand, and the other people can do the interviewing.

MR. LOMAX: I want to make just one comment on Mr. Jasim Uddin’s talk. It seems to me that his way of collecting is a perfect example of the act of participating with the people, and it is all apparently very good. I found, by my own recent experience, that if I confide my own difficulties and sentiment very frankly and very naively, just as I would with any friend, the response is always wonderful. People can understand it in connection with their own life problems because they are similar if not exactly the same, especially in folk cultures. When you do confide you get confidence back, but if you don’t confide, if you are going to the people to see how much you can get from them without their getting anything from you, then you tend not to get nearly so rich a response. If you think, for instance, “Well, this old lady doesn’t quite understand what she knows; I understand what she knows better than she does and I will use various devices to get out of her quickly her valuable collections,”—then I think in the end you get much, much less of full folklore experience. The interviewer may say, “Well, I am just another poor human being treading this cinder ball for a few short years.” If you really feel that, if you go to them in that way, much as Mr. Jasim Uddin does, you get this wonderful whole of folklore, not just the items,

MRS. JOHNSON: An example of that is the following anecdote. I heard of a Finnish folk poet in a village in northern Michigan and I also heard that he was a bloodletter by profession. But that, of course, was a secret profession and not accepted by many people, so when I went there I confided to him that I had high blood pressure, which is absolutely true. And we sat there and discussed my illnesses for some time, and in the course of that discussion his poetry was mentioned. I said I had heard of his poetry and I spent a great deal of time with him as the result of that. I said I would like to be cupped, but I would like to wait until I had a doctor’s examination. And when I return this summer it may be that I shall be given the benefit of that medical practice.

MISS KARPELES: Might I say something on that? Of course I agree with what Mr. Lomax has said that if you go to the people with any idea that you are a superior person, well, of course the results are poor. You go to learn and not to teach. I think the most direct method of approach is through one’s mutual love of the songs or whatever it is that you happen to be collecting. Just two remarks I’d like to give you. One was by a singer in the Appalachians. He said, “Well, it’s a wonderful thing that we have got to know each other, but don’t let’s forget this is music that has brought us together.” And then another incident—when I was collecting in Newfoundland and I had been spending the whole evening in a fisherman’s cottage talking with him and his wife. We had been exchanging songs and so on and at the end of the evening he turned to his wife and said, “You know, it is a very remarkable thing that a stranger can be so much like ourselves.”

MISS GILLMOR: We all seem to have stories to tell and I will tell one too if I may. This was in Mexico. I had a very curious experience. I had been collecting folk plays in Mexico, having that in-and-out relationship that was spoken of in the quotation Miss Karpeles read last night, or yesterday. In some respects it has been an advantage to be outside of the group. And yet sometimes I have been very curiously, and immediately, and sympathetically within it.

Now when I first started collecting plays down there, it was at a period when church and state were much opposed to each other and there were a great many difficulties in Mexico. When I would go out to a village because I was interested in the folk plays that were being presented on the festival on the particular saint’s day, I was likely to be distrusted because that festival was probably going on in spite of government regulation. The phrase they used was this, “Are you from the government and have you come to regulate us?” And it was really a very great advantage in that particular situation to speak Spanish with the accent that I should love to rid myself of but probably never will. It is perfectly clear when I talk Spanish that I am natively an English-speaking person, but that gave them at once a feeling of confidence. It was clear the minute that I started to speak Spanish that I was no agent of the Mexican government. So that it was really a great help to be outside.

When I go into a village I seek the older people. I found that young people don’t yet have a sense of security in making friends or in talking. That will come to them with the years. I find an old person, either a man or a woman. Someone, as I always say, who has the right kind of wrinkles, the kind of wrinkles that I hope I am developing now and hope I will develop more of later. And I talk to them and they are the ones who notice things. They are the ones who know the maestros of the dance groups, and know who has the scripts of the plays passed from village to village. Then once I am accepted by some older people, the younger people are not afraid of me. The girls don’t giggle when I talk to them, and the boys don’t get smart aleck. Then they have faith in me, too, and they accept me, but the approach has to come through the older people.

The feeling of mistrust that I had to get over is on the part of my maestros who are afraid that I am going to start up a dance group. Now in a way, the maestros are professionals, for when they teach a new dance group their particular play—The Moors and Christians, that I have been collecting—they go to a new village and get a certain payment for it. Well, they don’t want me to set up as a rival professional. When they learn that my interest is purely in comparison and collecting and that I have no intention of putting on this play in competition, then all is well and they are interested in my interest and happy in it. And each dancer will give me this part if it is one where they don’t have the scripts together, and one will help me put the parts together so that I will know exactly what happens in it, Their interest and their cooperation has been complete in that respect.

Now I must tell a story similar to that of Miss Karpeles. In one village outside of Mexico City, an hour and a half drive possibly, I went one Sunday with some other people. It was simply a Sunday afternoon drive and we were chatting with the people in the village. I learned that a fiesta was going on later in the week, and I came out alone in my car that day to that fiesta. During the day I really made headquarters at the house of the family I had met the previous Sunday afternoon. They were most gracious and kind to me. I would spend a long time in the churchyard. When I got tired I would go back and rest for a while at the house of my friends. I had lunch with them, chicken and mole, and coffee—a very delicious lunch, and when night came on I was going back into Mexico City. I went again to this house that had really been my headquarters, to this family that had been so very nice to me and thanked them for their hospitality during the day. And then I discovered to my astonishment that the young wife, the daughter-in-law of the older people in the family who was saying goodbye to me was thanking me. And she had tears in her eyes as she said, “You came to us without fear.” Well, there was nothing to be afraid of, it would never have occurred to me to go with fear and yet somehow they found themselves curiously happy in the fact that I had come alone to that village.

CHAIRMAN: As our time runs out we have come to a good human note—certainly an appropriate ending to our talk about collecting the tales, songs, and traditions of the people.

End of Symposium