Fortean Studies I

Folklore, Annual, 1997 by Jacqueline Simpson

Two long articles are likely to be of particular value to folklorists for the massive documentation assembled in them. One, by Mike Dash, concerns "The Devil's Hoofmarks ... the Great Devon Mystery of 1855." Most of us will have heard of this, but nobody has hitherto rounded up such an array of contemporary press reports and subsequent interpretations; this is undoubtedly the definitive presentation of material relating to this episode, to which anyone who now wants to suggest an explanation will have to refer. The second is by Sven Rosen, and concerns an unpublished manuscript compiled by a Swedish cleric, Joan Petri Klint (d. 1608), in which he recorded hundreds of portents which he thought were sent to announce wars or other public calamities, or maybe even the end of the world. They included comets, mock suns, weird clouds, auroras and visions in the air, monstrous births, extraordinary animals, rains of blood or fire or corn, and similar events; often he made sketches, many of which are reproduced here. As Rosen rightly says, such things were being reported and interpreted all over Europe, often with a politico-religious slant: British parallels are frequent two generations later, during the Civil War, and we are grateful to be given this international perspective upon them.

Michael Goss is also concerned with "Strange and Wonderful News" from seventeenth-century broadside ballads: judgements of God upon sinners, apparitions of devils and ghosts, an adder that crept into a woman while she slept on the grass and bred in her belly, earthquakes, signs in the sky, monstrous births, and so on. But his discussion goes beyond mere listing; he is concerned to point out the intrinsic unreliability, repetitiveness and moralistic purpose of such "news," and to warn Forteans and others against accepting it at face value as evidence that something "wonderful" had indeed occurred. He compares the methods of the old ballads with current tabloids and contemporary legends, and concludes by stressing the different approaches of the Fortean (who is primarily concerned with literal truth or falsity) and the folklorist (who views the reports as narratives with messages).

The volume also includes exerpts from Charles Fort's unpublished autobiography: cryptozoological discussions of the giant octopus (Michel Raynal), various weird bats (Karl Shuker), and the luminous owls seen in Norfolk early this century (David Clarke); a group of articles on Chinese topics by Steve Moore himself; a suggested explanation of alien sightings in terms of certain optical illusions which occur in polarised light (Anne Silk); and an account of Paul Kammerer"s theory of "seriality" as an explanation of coincidences (John Townley and Robert Schmidt). A rich and varied menu, where everyone can find something instructive and enjoyable. We look forward to future volumes.

Jacqueline Simpson Folklore Society