Legend and life: "the boyfriend's death" and "the mad axeman."

Folklore, Annual, 1998 by Michael Wilson

In fact "The Mad Axeman" is a useful example with which to investigate this phenomenon, precisely because it is sometimes told as true, and sometimes as untrue. According to Boyes, "these legends articulate, and to a great extent validate wishes and fears" (Boyes 1984, 64) and to Brunvand, "the story reveals society's broader fears of people, especially women and the young, being alone and among strangers in the darkened world outside the security of their own home or car" (Brunvand 1981, 11). This is certainly the case, and when the story is told and believed as true, the articulation of those fears transforms them into cautionary messages. Brunvand says that "... a story like `The Boyfriend's Death' simply warns young people to avoid situations in which they may be endangered" (Brunvand 1981, 11). When Jayne Tucker heard the story in the late 1960s she also interpreted the story as being loaded with an implicit warning about "this man up on the Moor as this threat to good clean girls."

On the other hand the story is often told as not true--or rather the truth element is not given any great weighting--and in these cases, when the story is told for entertainment purposes, the violence and the gruesomeness are exaggerated beyond the realms of credibility into the grotesque, and the story begins to become humorous.

In her essay "Legend: Performance and Truth," Gillian Bennett tackles exactly this issue. In her analysis of the same legend as told by two different narrators (one story told as true and one as untrue), she concludes that in the case of the non-belief tale, "the aim of the storytelling seems to be to arrive at the punchline and get a quick laugh" and that "likelihood and local colour are both sacrificed for dramatic effect" (Bennett 1988, 22). An application of these theories to my own fieldwork collection will often bear out the truth of her assertions,(6) and what may be additionally significant here is that it would seem that male storytellers have a greater propensity to exaggerate and tell the story for entertainment (i.e. as untrue) than female storytellers (Wilson 1997, 202-4 and 207-8). This is not to say that females are more gullible than males, or that males are not capable of telling or accepting the story as true, but it may be that there is a gender difference in the meanings with which the storytellers endow their stories. Male storytellers seem more prone to tell the story for laughs or to disgust their audience, whereas female storytellers seem to prefer to warn and scare. In fact it could be that male storytellers tend to focus upon the central male character (the killer), whilst female storytellers concentrate upon the central female character (the girlfriend/wife).

Of course, we must tread carefully here because we are dealing with incomplete data--how the story is told and the meaning of the text depends as much on the identity of the audience and other para-performative influences as on the identity of the storyteller--but this again ties in with Jayne Tucker's experience. She gives great importance to the single gender identity of her own social grouping: "... at that age I didn't mix with boys, you know, it was a peer group of girls and there was all this sort of giggly, girly talk about a mad axeman up on the Moor."