Explore Folklore

Folklore, August, 2004 by W.F.H. Nicolaisen

Explore Folklore. By Bob Trubshaw. Loughborough: Heart of Albion Press, 2002. xxii 196 pp. Illus. 9.95 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 1-872883-60-5

Bob Trubshaw's Explore Folklore is the first volume in a series for which such titles as Explore Mythology (by the same author), Explore Fairies, Explore Green Men, and Explore Holy Wells and Springs are also planned. According to the publishers, the book is designed to bridge the "huge gap between scholarly approaches to folklore studies and 'popular beliefs' about the character and history of British folklore."

It becomes clear after the first few pages that the readership whom the author wants to encourage to "explore" folklore also includes professional scholars. This is particularly noticeable in the first four chapters, which address themselves to theoretical and methodological aspects of the subject, whereas the eight chapters that follow are devoted to the various subject matters of the discipline: folk narrative, contemporary folklore, modern folk narratives, folklore and belief, folk customs and festivals, folk dance and drama, folk song and folk craft and art--not unlike the series of topics that one might include in the curriculum of an introductory course in folklore studies. In fact, in that respect Explore Folklore differs little from previous approaches, most of them admittedly North American, which answer the request for a definition of what folklore is by a list of the components which folklore comprises. Most of these substance-related eight chapters make satisfying reading. Certainly, serious enquirers, after carefully reading them, should have a good idea of what folklorists study, although they may not necessarily have been informed about how they go about it. Nor is it made perfectly clear whether Trubshaw's observations apply to the whole of Britain, since Scotland and Wales, although not neglected, are referred to only occasionally, sometimes in rather curious contexts. For instance, Trubshaw, quoting one of the most significant illustrations in the debate concerning the validity of transferring oral tradition into print, misinterprets Dave Harker's correct reference (Fakesong, p. 70) to this incident (Hogg's mother told him [Sir Walter Scott] to his face: "ye hae spoilt them awthegither ...") and reduces it to a bland statement ("As one Scottish collector's mother told him ..."), hardly doing justice to two of the most significant figures in Scottish literary history. Talking about misunderstandings, in his fully justified praise of "the passionate and kindly Scot, Hamish Henderson" (p. 152), he follows this laudatory assessment with the observation that "his School of Scottish Studies survives his recent death," and thus perpetuates the implied myth that Hamish was the founder of the School. For the sake of correctness, it has to be stated that while the School was founded in 1951, Hamish, after some short-time field-work and transcription assignments, did not join the School as a regular member of a team of "Research Fellows" until 1955 (See Obituary, Folklore 13 [2002] 266). Hamish was, of course, a highly influential presence in the growth of that School.

The author is well aware of the problems caused by summarising summaries for the immediate purposes of his book; such problems are most noticeably attached to the first four chapters that, in addition to an "Introduction," are devoted to a "History of British Folklore Studies," "Folklore Theory," and "Problems with 'Popular' Folklore." Trubshaw quite rightly points to the much greater incidence of theoretical work in North America, but tends to underplay theoretical efforts in the British Isles. For example, very strong impulses for the study of Contemporary Legends have come from Britain, particularly from the Proceedings of the annual conferences at Sheffield University in the 1980s, as well as such later spin-offs as the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research and its journal, Contemporary Legend. Folk drama, too, has a strong base in Britain. In both these areas of research there are close cross-Atlantic links.

It is good to see that Trubshaw is encouraging the application of theories and methods from other disciplines to the study of folklore. He has, among others, Cognitive Linguistics in mind, but it is worth remembering that ideas developed by structural linguists have already been employed in folklore studies by Dundes (although with a curious reversal of the emic and etic concepts) and some ideas developed by sociolinguists by Nicolaisen. Reader (or audience) response-based notions had been entertained by students of folk narrative decades before they reached literary scholarship. The Scot David Buchan examined the structure of ballads first from the viewpoint of the work carried out by Albert B. Lord in the Balkans (The Ballad and the Folk, 1972), and later systematically applied Propp's theories concerning the Morphology of Fairytales to different categories of ballads (it should be pointed out that Trubshaw's comments on Propp [p. 20] contain a misunderstanding, as the only date of publication he mentions is 1968--the year in which the second English translation was published--whereas the Russian original was published in 1928; it is therefore misleading to speak of "a number of Propp's contemporaries in the 1970s," as Propp died in 1970). Not dissimilar is the error regarding Kaarle Krohn, the Finnish folk-narrative scholar whom Trubshaw locates in Germany, presumably because the original of his Folklore Methodology (1971) was published in 1926 in German. Much of the international folklore scholarship in those years was conducted in German.