"The Rules of Folklore" in the Ghost Stories of M.R. James

Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Jacqueline Simpson

The two tales to which James gave Scandinavian settings ("Number 13" and "Count Magnus") date from 1899-1900 and 1901-2 respectively (Cox 1986, 136), but I hope to show that the Danish influence continued throughout his years as a ghost-story writer.

It is instructive to consider why Evald Tang Kristensen was so exceptional among folklorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, for this helps to explain his importance to James. First, his material included a vast number of local legends (sagn) and personal-experience narratives, many of them concerned with the supernatural and firmly rooted in actual beliefs. It was to these that James went when seeking parallels for his medieval Yorkshire manuscript, and they could have supplied many of the "rules of folklore" which he wished his own ghosts to follow, confirming the authenticity of the more fragmented British material. Secondly, unlike most folklorists of his time, Kristensen insisted on publishing tales in the plain language his informants used, without embellishments; true, he smoothed out the broken sentences and false starts which surely occurred, but he kept close to the Jutland idiom, including turns of phrase which jarred on the sensibilities of the educated classes, and pleading with his readers to accept "this simple and true-hearted quality" in regional speech (Kristensen 1876, iv-v).

This must have appealed to James, who appreciated vernacular styles. One reason he relished the records of seventeenth-century State Trials was that there alone, in his view, one could find "the unadorned common speech of Englishmen" of that period (Cox 1986, 144); he would have recognised the same quality in Kristensen. "Count Magnus" includes an inset anecdote told by the Swedish innkeeper to the English hero, which is a superb imitation of Scandinavian oral narrative style (besides being, to my taste at least, one of the most impressively grim passages he ever wrote). The Jutland style is spare, bleak, understated, swift-moving, and given to a species of sinister imprecision at moments of crisis which can sound astonishingly Jamesian - "something was scrabbling at the door and fumbling with the handle" - "sometimes people would see something come running from that field and down to the farm at night" are phrases from Kristensen (1897, 471 and 419), to set alongside James's "Mr Gregory woke once or twice during the small hours and fancied he heard a fumbling across the lower part of his locked door" ("The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," James 1970, 161) or "she thought she saw something all in tatters with the two arms held out in front of it coming on very fast, and at that she ran for the stile, and tore her gown all to flinders getting over it" ("A Neighbour's Landmark." ibid., 529).

One of the most striking features of James's style is the interplay between the leisurely, mildly pedantic phrasing of the preliminary narrative and descriptions, reflecting the persona of the donnish "antiquary," and the rapid glimpses of horrific concrete details at the climax, vividly but tersely expressed, and never overexplained. Kristensen's volumes could have supplied many models for the latter kind of effect, and the technique for achieving it, at a time when other folklore collectors almost always smothered their material in verbiage.