Presidential preferences - Presidential Address Given To The Folklore Society March 2002

Folklore, April, 2003 by W.F.H. Nicolaisen

When, after my second presidential address in London last year, I first mentioned the potential title of my third, it was not just the allure of alliteration that had suggested it to me--although there had been that, too, of course--but chiefly a thematic appropriateness for someone who at that time was about to spend a year reflecting on both the substance of, and the strategic approach to, a presentation that would, he hoped, satisfy him personally as well as do justice to his office as seventy-second president of this Society. In my first two addresses (Nicolaisen 2001; 2002) I had concentrated on aspects of the two fields of research that have, separately or jointly, dominated my scholarly activities for over half a century, since my student days under the folklorists Walter Andersson and Kurt Ranke on the one hand, and the Indo-Europeanist Hans Krahe on the other--folk-narrative studies and the investigation of names, particularly place names. I thought that such emphases on my major academic preoccupations were expected of me and, as far as I can judge from subsequent friendly comments, this appears to have indeed been the case. But what of the archer who has only two strings to his bow or, more appropriately, only two arrows in his quiver but who is required by convention to aim at a third target, equally desirable but strangely elusive? Well, what of him when he is not even sure of his metaphor and might better have conjured up a hunter pursuing a third deer? Or whatever else one is supposed to shoot at with a non-existent arrow?

Well, it occurred to this archer/hunter/president to seek inspiration from some of the seventy-one archers/hunters/presidents of this Society who had been in this position before him, ever since the founding of this organisation in 1878. How had they coped with the task that confronted them once or twice, or even three times during their tenure as head of the Folklore Society, whether hyphenated in its title or not? What had they chosen to offer their audiences on these special occasions; what had been--and here we finally come to the projected title of today's musings--their "Presidential Preferences?" How had especially those who lived their lives in my grandparental or even great-grandparental generations--the founders and early shapers and nurturers of a society that, parallel to many sister organisations in those fertile decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, had come into being to permit focused and structured attention on this fledgling child, Folklore, on this innovative discipline and subject of which the naming identifier, the creative inventor, who had rescued it from its ensnarement in classical terminology and thinking (William J. Thoms, 1803-85), was still among them and was rightly regarded by them as the real founder of the society they now served--how had these forerunners, who had been elected to preside over the regular meetings of this new learned body, channelled their ideas, their enthusiasms, their nudgings into that peculiar form of human communication, the "Presidential Address?"

As those who have also held this office and have ex officio had to meet this challenge in the fairly recent past will, I am sure, willingly confirm, this event that we call the "Presidential Address" is without a doubt a very special phenomenon with its very own characteristics, demands and expectations. In many respects, it is a lecture, of course, and it is comparatively easy to disguise it as such, as I tried to do in previous years, but it is also, and perhaps the speaker is more conscious of this than the audience, a kind of rare opportunity for the president to have it his/her own way after a year of mostly co-operative, sometimes competitive, committee discussion and decision-making, in honest but not always easy endeavours to administer the Society on behalf of its members. During the rest of the year, there are the other officers of the Society, the committee members and the administrative staff ready to be consulted in their various supportive roles, but when the AGM comes along and the president gets up and sees all the expectant, shiny faces, the decision as to what to say and how to say it is completely his own, always with an almost contractual view towards creating, in this space between speaker and audience, this instructive, entertaining, informative, at times hortative, persuasive, but never bland communicative event, the annual "Presidential Address"; which makes even greater demands on all participants, speakers and listeners alike, when it is a farewell address at the end of the statutory three years in office but at the same time--and this asks for an almost Janus-like awareness of things future as well as past--a farewell address of the first presidency in an as yet almost brand new century and millennium. It sounds almost like an intolerable burden, does it not; well, intolerable is perhaps too strong a word but the combination of all these factors requires that all participants--speaker, listener, reader--be gentle and tolerant with each other so that not too many eyebrows will be raised and faces still shine at the end of this special occasion.