Narrating names

Folklore, April, 2002 by W.F.H. Nicolaisen

Our detailed preoccupation with personal names in traditional tales (and there are, of course, other stories which narrate names like Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Snowwhite and Rosered, Rapunzel, or Little Thorny Rose [the German equivalent of Sleeping Beauty]), our preoccupation with personal names in folk tales and our previous references to acartographic, nameless landscapes in the Marchen may have created the impression that named places are not to be found in the creation of spatial pasts in any narrative genres in the folk-cultural register, but such an impression would certainly be misleading.

Contemporary Legends

If we return to the genre which was at the centre of my presidential address last year (Nicolaisen 2001)--the contemporary legend--named locations are in many of them essential props in the establishment of their veracity or, at the very least, their believability. If a woman shares a table in a coffee shop called Crawford's in Union Street in Aberdeen with a Pakistani whom she mistakenly and embarrassingly accuses of having stolen her biscuits, or if a fried rat is served in a specific Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in Sheffield, or if cats' skins (not used for disguise by princesses, by the way, but pointing to the serving of suspicious foreign food) are seen outside a certain Chinese restaurant in Binghamton, N.Y., or if a young man is said to have been deliberately infected with AIDS in a well-known Spanish holiday island, then the degree of believability of these stories is greatly enhanced. If something happened in a precisely named location then it is difficult to deny the truth of the account. In contemporary or historical legends of all kinds, and not just in their aetiological variety discussed earlier, place names play a crucial role in preventing such stories from becoming so vague as to be bordering on the untrustworthy: a doubting "it may have happened this way but there is no proof," instead of a convincing "you may not believe this but it is really true," which does not lose its persuasiveness even if the claim is also made for a similar event having happened in a similarly precisely named location elsewhere. It would be an exaggeration to say that all legends narrate names but they certainly depend on them greatly in their narrative structure and strategies.

Names in the "Doric"

And finally, as they say, for something completely different, in a "postlude" which I hope will transfer, for a few minutes, this room in the Warburg Institute in London into a little corner of the Scottish north-east from where I have travelled to fulfil the duties expected of a President of the Folklore Society. Ever since moving to Aberdeen in what is misleadingly termed my "retirement," I have, in almost a hundred monthly columns in a regional magazine called Leopard (after a figure in the Aberdonian coat-of-arms), discussed a large variety of aspects of the place-nomenclature of the Scottish north-east, among them, and that might be relevant in this context, the informal facets of that nomenclature which do not appear on any official Ordnance Survey map or on any map published by any mapping agency. The primary aim of this has been the compilation of an inventory of place names in the regional variety of Scots, the so-called "Doric." This goal has not been easy to achieve since there is a clear and understandable reluctance on the part of readers to provide in written form names which are normally only used in oral tradition, as a sort of "folk-toponymy." Among the more interesting examples are The Broch for both Fraserburgh and Burghead, the Blue Toon for Peterhead, Foggie Loan for Aberchirder, Skite for Drumlithie, Steenhive for Stonehaven, Fittens for Whitehills, Sloch for Portessie, The Doup for Nethermuir, and Cyaard Cyack for New Pitsligo. Among these popular alternatives are completely unrelated names and also those which simply display the local pronunciation, a category which is expectedly the most numerous in the responses which I have received.