belief legend

What Is A Belief Legend?Author(s): Linda DghReviewed work(s):Source: Folklore, Vol. 107 (1996), pp. 33-46Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260912 .Accessed: 06/06/2012 09:19

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Folklore 107 (1996):33-46

RESEARCH PAPER

What Is A Belief Legend? Linda Degh

Abstract As contributor to the mistakenly conceptualised concept of "belief legend," I want to survey the historical antecedents and the circumstances that at a certain stage prompted researchers to identify this category, formerly classified as mythical or demonological legend. This was the time when legend scholars began field-collection, experiencing the profound attachment of narratives to living local folk religion. After decades of meticulous field observation, which has led to the accumulation of a more dependable stock of legendry from diverse national, subcultural, occupational groups, it becomes clear that folk belief is a part of any legend, therefore there is no need to maintain the term "belief legend." Belief is the stimulator and the purpose of telling any narrative within the larger category of the legend genre; it is also the instigator of the legend dialectic. The current confusion caused by the whimsical application of terms such as "truth," "rationality," "belief," and "believability" in scholarly legend interpretations, should caution us to avoid making biased, outsider's judgements instead of presenting the viewpoint of tellers and audiences.

Preamble

In the experience of folklorists, tellers state, explain, interpret or at least imply their personal attitude toward the belief content of the legend they tell. Atti- tude toward belief is the essence of the genre and can be expressed in diverse ways; whereby identical contents-variants of the same legend type, may likewise be developed differently, depending on diverse interpretations of similar extranormal experiences of individual tellers. This peculiarly pivotal position of belief in legend makes all legends belief legends.

I made this statement in the revised edition of Folktales and Society (1989) following my return to the village of Kakasd eighteen years after the first edition of my book appeared. There I was able to take stock of current legendry composed of a handful of mass-media-inspired UFO and revenant stories, the old and un- changed stories I knew, and their rejuvenated versions, adapted to a technologically advanced environment: village streets were now paved, electricity had been introduced, and people drove cars and motorbikes, and owned bathrooms, televisions, radios and tape record- ers. From my first visit almost forty years earlier, I could follow transgenerational continuity in legendry. Being interested primarily in the art of storytelling and the folktale repertoire of the villagers, I knew little before this last visit about the intricacies of a network of folk religion based on deeply devout Catholicism. I discovered only then, and understood retrospectively, traditional community belief in black and white magic, en- acted by the custom of ritual cursing and countercursing as a formal Roman Catholic Church ceremony, and attested case by case in whispered- around legends. The belief that disease and death oc-

curs as the consequence of a sinful curse and divine punishment answering prayer still permeates the religious belief of the villagers (Digh 1995, 341-57).

I should have realised that "belief" is an unneces- sary epithet preceding the term "legend" when I proposed a systematic study of the role indigenous belief plays in legend formation (Degh 1963, 73) and continued to use the term "belief legend" after my discovery of predominantly supernatural narratives on the American urban-industrial scene.

In my often quoted conference paper, "The 'Belief Legend' in Modern Society: Form, Function, and Re- lationship to Other Genres" (Degh 1971, 55-68), I reported for the first time the amazing stories of ordinary people about encounters with revenants and the tragic outcome of extranormal horrors in the collection of my students at Indiana University. In another paper, "Neue Sagenerscheinungen in der industriellen Umwelt der USA" (Digh 1973, 34-51). which I gave at a legend conference in Freiburg, Germany, I further elaborated the concept and the nature of supernatural belief oriented legendry, expressing my excitement over an unexpected wealth of stories that played an important role in the life of youngAmericans, unknown to me and others experiencing legends in Europe. At that time, continental European folklorists were insen- sitive to legends other than what old villagers re- counted; most of them still are.

Characteristically, my search for variants of the "Sto- len Grandmother" legend, which I first read in a Bu- dapest newspaper in 1962 and heard often thereafter in personalised versions, resulted mostly in succinct abstracts because the fellow folklorists who sent them to me did not recognise as folklore the stories they heard from their urban-elite friends. It is true that sev-

34 Linda Digh

eral scholars took the trouble to glean ghost or horror stories from local newspapers and other popular prints and manuscripts,' to increase the number of variants of field-collected "authentic" oral texts they analysed comparatively, but they did not feel them worthy of attention concerning context and textual accuracy. My continued fieldwork in rural and urban Europe, Canada and the United States, however, gave me new insights into the legend as text, philosophy and behaviour; as personal, communal and mass performance; and as indicator of the transformation of the social world in the aftermath of the Second World War. My experience in collecting from representatives of diverse cultural groups, not theoretical presumptions, convinced me that no distinction of a separate category of legends as "belief legends" (belief tales, urban belief tales) proposed by folklorists is justifiable because belief is inherent in all legends. In fact, legend contextualises and interprets belief.

In what follows, I will clarify my position by sur- veying the history of the "belief legend" concept and its uses in the writings of folklorists, showing how useful the term was in genre identification and classification attempts but how it has outlived its usefulness in our time. I will discuss belief not as a folklore genre as some folklorists have claimed (Gwyndaf 1994, 228), but as the ideological foundation or core of the legend. I will suggest that juxtaposition of belief and knowledge-that is, religion and science-can be en- lightening because in their dialectic ambiguity, as parallel opposites, both play important roles in the legend process. Finally, I will show the futility of the current legend name-giving inflation and propose to study the legend as one unified genre according to one unified scholarly inquiry instead of the continued addi- tion of more subcategories.

During the past years, the question of the relationship between belief and legend has been raised by many. Whichever related topic interests folklorists- religion, belief, superstition, custom or ritual-they inevitably end up using legends they have collected in support of their arguments. But there is little collaboration between folklorists to build upon each other's findings. Groups of scholars work on different planes side by side, without acknowledging each other's con- tributions. For example, a group of four authors ex- perimenting with the reflexive approach to belief discuss religion rather abstractedly, and not being able to bring new insight into the discussion, end up with the modest proposal to replace established terms with new ones (see Western Folklore 54 [1995]). Another largely unnoticed contribution, Robin Gwyndaf's native ethnography provides an exemplary model, documenting continuity and the processes of modernisation of traditional folk belief in Wales, from field collected customs and legends (Gwyndaf 1994, 226-60). On the other hand, Leea Virtanen reported, surprisingly, the total demise of belief legends in Finland because peo-

ple's mentality has changed under the influence of modern urbanisation. According to contributors to the Finnish Folklore Archive, electric lights have dispelled the fear of ghosts lurking in strange places after dark (Virtanen 1992, 225-31). An entirely different situation: ghost stories living in everyday conversation, led to Gillian Bennett's plea to resuscitate the terms "belief legend/belief story" (Bennett 1989). The problem with these, and other current discussions of belief and legend, is that while authors raise important questions, they keep restating and rephrasing what we already know, and remain entangled in the web of termino- logical rhetoric-arguing the salience of name-assign- ment to legend subcategories without a logical attempt at definition. Isn't it time to join forces and try to define the legend at long last? Isn't it time to stop specu- lating on the many personal meanings of a qualifier (like "contemporary") and start identifying the elements that make a legend a legend, the elements present in all legends and absent from all other folklore genres? The master concept "legend" has fallen victim to diligent subcategory creators, and the controversy over the meaning of the working title of a subcategory is being given undue significance.

I am not going to add to the interesting, but sterile and redundant, speculations on the term "contemporary legend" triggered by Heda Jason's warning against interpretation before collection and classification (Jason 1990, 221-3) because I have already stated my case (Degh 1991, 17-18), and do not feel persuaded to change my mind. In my understanding, "modern," "urban," or "contemporary" legend-as it was named by the Sheffield seminarians-are all good insiders' working titles, useful for identifying certain legends and legend-like accounts collected from a variety of communicative sources as they emerge and gain cur- rency and temporary relevance to social groups within the time frames of our collaborative efforts. Evidently, to characterise a time-honoured genre as "contemporary" is too vague, general, subjective and narrow; such characterisation will outlive its contemporariness within a generation, if not sooner. The interpretation of the term is speculative, abstractedly theoretical, dif- fering from one person to the next, while they repeat well known characteristics attributed to the legend proper by generations of scholars in diverse constella- tions. This is true of the last three definitions in a recent issue of Folklore: (1) a "contemporary legend" nar- rates events which purportedly occurred within a temporal horizon felt as contemporary by participants in the narrative event" (Pettit 1995, 97); (2) "normal behaviour pattern and unusual action"... "Contemporary legends sit somewhere between mundane, everyday experiences and the extraordinary, but with an unusual twist (Smith 1995, 99); and (3) "the teller has claimed that the alleged event is contemporary with himself or herself: that it has happened within a few weeks or months of the date of telling" (Simpson 1995,

What Is A Belief Legend? 35

100). Do these authors suggest that the same story may be called "contemporary" legend if the teller claims that he or his father or neighbour witnessed the event, but should be called "historical" or some other name, if it refers to long ago or to no date? Is "contemporary legend" characterised by narrator's time setting in itself? And if so, what is the scholarly benefit of creating such a volatile category? The more suggestions are made to keep the simplistic term "contemporary" alive, the less convincing it becomes. There are more stable and crucial indentification markers to acknowledge.

To return to Jason's critique, I support the "unusual" Anglo-American approach to legend outside traditional peasant communities. The democratic toler- ance in gathering, the bold and unconventional inclu- sion of "any legend that is circulating actively" (Brunvand 1991, 107) had never been practised in Eu- rope before; and in spite of its obvious drawbacks, was, and is, the only reasonable approach to living legendry. Legend-in-the-making can be isolated only from the assemblage of all pertinent data bearing some semblance to legend or indicating the potential of becom- ing legend-information that earlier was deemed inauthentic, alien, fake, corrupted or rewritten. This inclusive approach is in clear opposition to the selec- tion of exclusively oral, "authentic" texts, a rule of the past. Dealing with a functional, multimedia processed and global form of folklore, we can no longer merely apply principles grafted for the study of relatively stable, selfcontained agricultural communities.

The observation of the emerging novelty cannot wait until analytical categories and classifications are set. Like other traditionalist readers of Foaftale News, Leander Petzoldt has also misunderstood the reason for the unselective notation of non-oral legends by Anglo-American authors. Singling out Brunvand as the "most eager multiplicator" of stories (Petzoldt 1989, 125), Petzoldt has criticised the use of materials from the mass media and Brunvand's monitoring of corre- spondents in creating a legend circulating process by professional and amateur folklorists (ibid., 26-7). Since the time of the Grimm brothers, it has been common knowledge that, nolens volens, folklorists stimulate and influence the folklore they study; how can contemporary legend scholars be blamed for the modern mass media's increased demand for sensational, appealing, titillating stories? Every shred of proto-legend is important in this polyphonic, multimedia circulation. Credit is due Anglo-American legend scholars for discovering legends on their own turf-legends produced and sustained by and for all social classes and groups, and for shifting the focus from the past to the present socio-economic and political realities behind the texts. Beyond the way legends have been collected, a difference in topics, contents, informants and audiences has been manifested, not so much because of some racial- ethnic Anglo-American predilection toward supernatural and horror stories, but because the technological

transformation of society and its effects on human life have been symptomatically reflected most prominently in legendry, and in America earlier than elsewhere in the western world. This is why, following the Second World War, similar legends began to crop up, first in the most industrialised countries of western Europe, then in others as modern industrialisation progressed. When continental European scholars joined the Anglo- American team and began to report, and later publish, their newly discovered local legends, a striking similarity was noted. Mass media imported, borrowed, relocated and popularised known American legends, but beyond this, the transcontinental dissemination of fears, uncertainties and supernatural beliefs endemic to the alienation of modern urbanites established new local crops of identical narratives. In other words, the globalisation of concerns produces cultural variables in a strikingly similar new body of international legends discovered and interpreted by the contextual approach first in the United States. There is a definite continuity here, as the growing number of international researchers join the collaborative body of the Interna- tional Society for Contemporary Legend Research and publish their homegrown versions.

Belief "Belief legend" as a term has a long history. It hails back to the first folklore empiricist's observation of informal conversations of European villagers on the occasion of legend telling. Looking for prose narratives other than the intensively studied magic tale, scholars soon realised that the legend, more than any other folklore genre, is ideology sensitive, rooted in the local system of folk belief. Therefore, the visiting investigator-often native ethnographers-could best observe, identify and describe legends at casual community gatherings where beliefs were sure to be a topic of conversation. It was also found that legend does not have its own reserved occasion for performance as do artis- tic entertainments such as tale- or joke-telling, ballad- singing, dancing and mumming; there are no planned "legend sessions," only unpredictable, spontaneous tellings. Thus, direct questioning of chosen individuals to solicit legends leads nowhere. Friedrich Ranke was a pioneer in speaking about the "Biologie der Volkssagen" in 1926. He felt the need to relate living legendry to the ruling belief system, the locally forged ideology of folk religion, to understand its place in everyday village life. But he was convinced that the teller's positive belief in the truth of the legend, not the desire to submit his viewpoint to public discussion as we have found, was the essence of the genre.

It is common knowledge that the human being is, by nature, a homo religiosus, who by compulsion constructs personal variables of the established Church canon in which he or she has been indoctrinated by public education. It is also common knowledge that

36 Linda Digh

religion is socially constructed as people interact with family members, friends, and acquaintances: "they learn to see the world from the vantage point of those particular interactions," as social psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihilyi has observed (Csikszentmihilyi 1993, 59). Following Ranke, collectors of village narrative repertoires--Otto Brinkmann, Gottfried Henssen, Matthias Zender (Brinkmann 1933; Zender 1935; Henssen 1955) and others in the 1930s and 40s--explored manifesta- tions of underlying belief commonly condescendingly conceptualised by most academic folklorists as "superstition." In fact, the discovery and scientific analysis of belief-related narratives by Ranke's followers contra- dicted the overall practice of abstracting formally similar items of "superstition" from field collections of legends, and to order and classify them for local, regional, national and international indexes and encyclopaedias, irrespective of their diverse cultural meanings and functions. Such sourcebooks and indexes are too numerous to list; it will suffice to mention the oft quoted giant, the ten-volume Handw&rterbuch des deutschen Aber- glaubens (1927-42), by the Swiss, Hanns Bdichtold- Stdiubli.

In the United States, the collection of superstitions was second only to that of ballads; these were the two areas most popular with pioneer folklorists. The collection of "Popular Beliefs and Superstitions" in Frank C. Brown's North Carolina Folklore (Vols 6 and 7, 1961 and 1964) was a model for the first generation of Ameri- can academic folklorists. Local archives stored such collections. In the spirit of the German philological school, Wayland Hand spent a lifetime excerpting, clipping and mounting belief items on 3 x 5 cards, creating categories for an encyclopaedia of "American popular beliefs and superstitions," without theoretical clarifi- cation to justify distinction between belief and superstition. These terms are still used as synonyms in folklorists' parlance. Generations of students learned the skill of reducing elaborate legends to their skeletal essence, giving only the experienced fieldworker an idea of what precious materials had been lost. But if a study of "belief" was the purpose of collecting, not only was belief detached from its social world by the deliberate destruction of the text told by individuals, but the re- moval of the indicators of its cultural, temporal and social context resulted in unspecific, indistinct, human universals, useful at best for the grist-mill of the psy- choanalyst in search of general functions of the mind.

Evidently, "belief" cannot be collected, only conjec- tured by the culturally alien scholar. Belief is invisible, inaudible, part of local cultural heritage hidden behind acts and narratives. It lives in the minds, not on the lips of people; it is a convention, inherited and tacitly shared by a community's membership, composed of individuals who participate in shaping and internalising the belief. Everyone in village X knows that one should not pick up a rag or a horseshoe or a matchbox if it lies on a crossroads, because it may have been placed there to

confer a curse; that frogs should be avoided as potential witch familiars and that the handler may get warts by touching them. This common understanding need not be stated. It is in latent memory storage until an actual event calls it back to life; when harm is done, countermeasures must be taken. A hex sign attracts only the stranger's attention, not the native's. When folklorist Carla Bianco showed me the Rome market where her mother used to buy foodstuffs, she pointed out the horn suspended from the top of the booths. "Tell us, what is this for?" she asked a vendor who was busy slicing prosciutto with a sharp knife. "Don't you know?" the woman glared at her with deep disgust-she had known two generations of Carla's family. The native folklorist had to explain that she had asked only for my enlightenment because it would be more convincing if I heard it from "the folk." This is how I received an authentic instruction about the jettatura (evil eye).

For the uninformed folklorist, the only way to dis- cern underlying belief is to participate in community life and to look for manifest forms in daily activities. This way it is easy to identify belief behind the elaborate performance of magic and the pertaining narrative account that may be verbalised in the form of legend or magic tale.

Speaking of belief as traditionally developed ideology, reference can be made to Csikszentmihalyi's understanding of the evolutionary history of humans' extrasomatic storage of information contained in the folklore of our ancestors:

Legends [he writes] encapsulated centuries of useful experience in a few rhymed lines, proverbs, or caution- ary tales. The young members of the tribe no longer had to learn only from their own experiences what was dangerous and what was valuable in their environment, instead, they could rely on the collective memory of past generations, and possibly avoid repeating their mistakes. The knowledge helped them to achieve a certain amount of control over the environment. [Further- more, he continues] Legends did not just convey useful information they also passed on an enormous amount of irrelevant details, or details that make sense only in certain specific historical situations. This is inevitable because anyone who wants to pass on a per- sonally experienced truth usually cannot distinguish the essential element of that truth from its incidental features (Csikszentmihilyi 1993, 57-8).

But I see these seemingly irrelevant details as flexible enough to become crucial in furthering the legend process that authorises transmitters to switch focus and promote incidental and irrelevant details to the essential, and demote essentials into inessential obscurity, in response to both social change and personal creativity.

Fieldworkers are in a difficult position as they delve into the mentality of a local community. They have to rely on earlier collectors' information preserved in professional archives and literary sources, most of which are incomplete and biased, unlikely to meet the high


standards of accuracy required by modern folklore scholarship. At best, old files can give us a general idea about folklife, and highlight some prominent stories or customs that might be explored, and open the way to discovering more complete variants. But it is a frus- trating experience that, by following the rules of systematic fieldwork approach, folklorists end up by collecting the variants of the already known, without finding what remained hidden, because the unanticipated, the unexpected, the not-yet-known keeps escaping attention. Unless an accidental occurrence brings them in touch with an emergent manifestation of belief, folklorists row their boats on familiar waters towards pre- dictable destinations.

A particular event made me realise how hard it is to learn about the unknown. At the time I was working on the first edition of my book Folktales and Society which was to be published in the folklore series of the Institut fir deutsche Volkskunde in Berlin. The Institute's direc- tor, Wolfgang Steinitz, distinguished folklorist and spe- cialist in Finno-Ugric, Slavic and German linguistics, accompanied me to the village of Kakasd, the settle- ment of ethnic Szekelys from the Bucovina which I in- vestigated in the book. It was an unusually hot late spring, without any rain. The dry soil was hard to break up for planting, and people feared crop failure. Along with two other folklorists, we arrived at the house of the Andrisfalvis. Uncle Gyuri, the storyteller, was in- side, while his wife, village comedian Erzsi Matyi, bus- ied herself trying to plant onions in the arid soil of the backyard vegetable patch. As we went through the kitchen door to greet her, a flock of clouds gathered above us, causing a sudden downpour. What we saw made us stop in awe. The rain filled the cracks of the dry soil as the planting woman buried the onion seed- lings with the handle of an axe. One by one, she started to draw a circle with her index finger around each, flex- ing her knees and bowing in slow rhythm, almost touching the ground with her head while chanting a monoto- nous, wailing pentatonic prayer with a refrain, "O Holy Virgin, Mother of God." She seemed to be in a trance, not noticing us while she performed, tearfully suppli- cating the divine powers. We realised we were eyewit- nesses to a ritual rainmaking ceremony that outsiders never see. We stood there, frustrated, totally unpre- pared, without a tape recorder or a camera to capture the performance, watching the numinous moment un- wittingly experienced. It was only a brief episode; the rain stopped, and we retreated into the kitchen to dry ourselves. Regaining her composure, Erzsi returned from the yard and cheerfully greeted us, offering re- freshments. Casually, I mentioned that we saw her planting and singing something that we did not hear clearly, would she please tell us? "What did I mean?" she asked in return. "Didn't I know all of her songs already?" "Not this," I insisted. "Could she repeat it?" "O that," she said, "that was a hymn from the hymnal, nothing special." And she started to recite three hymns,

none of which showed any resemblance to what we had heard. She honestly tried but could not give an account of her recital.All my efforts failed; I never heard it again from anyone else, and even local folklorist Adaim Sebestydn could not explain this magic chant, informed by belief.

If we speak of "belief" in the meaning of the folklorist, as a disposition, as an underlying mental attitude or behavioural pattern that manifests in audibly or vis- ibly observable texts as generic ingredients of a belief system, amounting to a (local or subcultural) religion, we can also relate these beliefs to pertinent legend types, like motifs to pertinent types. But before we can speak about belief in relationship to legend, we have to make it clear that we mean here religious belief, not general belief. General belief is understood as trust in the veracity of someone's information, "as disposition to re- spond in certain ways when the appropriate issue arises, like our belief in the dependability of our neighborhood cobbler" (Quine and Ullian 1970, 49). There are many definitions of homo religiosus, the holder of theological belief: belief in the existence of God, immortality of the soul and moral government of the world, and the seeker of salvation by faith, trust and obedience (Bellah 1970, 4). Religion is related to the condition that humans live in uncertainty because they cannot fully know and com- prehend the world around them, live in social relationships that limit their natural instincts, and are left to digest their own unanswered questions (Dux 1982, 158). But we also have to speak of homo sapiens: it is equally as normal for humans to seek scientific knowledge by exploring observable regularities of cause and effect in the real world.

The two kinds of beliefs were identified by folklorists as the kernels of two separate legend categories: Glauben- and Wissensagen (belief and knowledge legends) (Rdhrich 1958, 665) that is, memorates and chronikates (von Sydow 1948, 87), to characterise legends about supernatural encounters as opposed to legends about real historical events and heroes. These neatly balanced categories devised in the tobacco and caffeine scented armchair of scholars, far from the field, have failed to work because it is impossible to deter- mine categories on the grounds of whether their claim is belief or knowledge, imaginary or factual, because all legendry is rooted in the domain of extranormal, metaphysical ideology. Even the seemingly rational horror stories contain coincidences of irrational, supernatural dimensions, and the so-called historical legends have no valid historical sources. These stories were lifted from their historical context and relocated into an anachronistic and mythical environment. Neverthe- less, the juxtaposition of belief and knowledge, religion and science, turned out to be productive in dealing with the growing body of legendry in the technological age.

Indeed, during the last decades, the world has been inundated by a staggering body of mass media treated legendry based on supernatural or extranormal belief

38 Linda Digh

claiming to be cleared and authenticated by scientific research and knowledge. With daily appearances on TV, radio and in the printed media, spokespersons of pseudo-scientific and scientific establishments have gained tremendous popularity and have contributed to an unprecedented boom of traditional religious belief. If prestigious authorities-like Harvard psychia- try professor John E. Mack-become serious about UFO aliens (Willwerth 1994), they are actually joining theologians in the assertion of the popular spiritualist belief in guardian angels among us and are lending a hand to the evolution of a new complex of age-old traditional legendry. Likewise, the latest, but now declining, chapter of American satanic conspiracy legendry consistent with the Christian Church doctrine was supported by theologians as much as by learned health profession- als, psychiatrists and psychologists. In consideration of the scientification of religious belief through the in- stitutionalisation of legends by the so-called occult or borderline sciences, as well as by religious establishments and cults focusing on the practice and spread of distinct kinds of belief phenomena, it becomes neces- sary to deal with the semblance of dichotomy between religion and science in the thinking and behaviour of people when they tell, listen, and react to hearing legends, and as they form groups and develop ritualised practices. As the two kinds of beliefs are intimately related, often inseparably intertwined, confused, and in conflict with each other, belief-any degree thereof between positive and negative extremes-becomes the lifeline of legend communication. The controversy between these two worldviews is the trademark of the legend; it emerges from the natural human uncertainty about the nature of things which both science and religion try to resolve.

Nobel-prize-winning physiologist, Robert W. Holley, said that, "Religion deals with the 'unknowable,' science with the 'knowable.' Conflicts arise when people think something that has been 'unknowable' has become 'knowable"' (Holley 1992, 179). Questioned about his thoughts of the concept of God and the existence of God, Holley answered:

I consider the existence of God as "unknowable," and therefore part of one's religious view. There is a great deal to marvel or wonder about in the universe. Whether one wants to attribute the marvelous things to the existence of God depends upon one's nature and experience. Such a belief appeals to some people and not to others. Since it is unknowable, I think it should be a very personal matter (Holley 1992, 180). I hope I have made my position clear: any legend

researcher needs to focus on the attitude towards belief expressed by individual participants in the legend process to gain insight into the dialectics by means of which believability, the purpose of any legend communication, are debated.

Speaking about belief as the core ingredient of legend, I do not mean unspecific, general, informal conversations about life and death and the beyond, that

may be called in a general and unspecified way "religious" by ethnographic observers. The currently mod- ish reflexive interviewing and description in the field may have its virtues as an attempt to reduce biased judgment of data rather than looking down at the sub- ject from the researcher's ivory tower. David Hufford is correct in noticing "serious inadequacies in the study of belief," but what he and his co-authors offer does not "help such reform" (Hufford 1995, 3). On the contrary, they add more inadequacies. While promoting cultural relativism, these folklorists become more con- cerned with their own reaction to encountering research subjects than with the belief they were supposed to study, and end up presenting ethnography of them- selves and their own speculations. While they are critical or ignorant of what others have done, all authors except William A. Wilson speak about folk belief or religion abstractedly, not in data-based concrete terms (Wilson 1995, 13-22). Time after time, they forget what questions they promised to address, and explicate their own opinion of what folklorists do wrong. For example, making the charge that folklorists "maintained an extremely problematical terminology and conceptualisation of the religion they study," Leonard Primiano does not offer another conceptualisation; he merely proposes to replace the term "folk religion" with "vernacular religion" to remedy a "scholarly misrepresen- tation" (Primiano 1995, 36-52).

This style of reflexive approach does not eliminate the "us, the rational scholars; they, the believing folk" conflict typical in interviewer-interviewee relationships, but allows unrestricted discussion of general methodo- logical problems, blurring the intended focus.

I do not feel it safe to rely on my own instincts and speculations about the substance and nature of belief in a community. Rather, I accept the commonsense guid- ance of existing conditions and describe observed events from the viewpoints of the community's repre- sentative individuals. Every community is a universe in itself, the vantage point from which the outside world is being judged. To quote Csikszentmihailyi again:

Cultures can inculcate their values and worldviews. Most human groups believe that they are the chosen people, situated at the center of the universe. They believe that their understanding of the world is the only one that makes sense (Csikszentmihilyi 1993, 59). The religious ideology, worldview, principles and

concepts of faith, worship, piety, and rules of morality and sociability of western society were established and are still dominated by the Christian Church. From the early Middle Ages on, the Church has set the rules of education, law and governance. Society has been shaped by religious institutions, and in the course of time struggles for power and dominance have split up the one and only Christian Church into innumerable denominations. Ritual practices and legendry have nev- ertheless continually reinforced underlying belief throughout the western world including Europe and


North America. The same legends have persisted from the early Middle Ages up to this day. The parallel preva- lence of identical legends in literary, legal, theological, historical, medical and geographical documents and in ongoing oral tradition shows the tenacity of these stories. Variation in the basic plots are reasonable adjust- ments to environmental and ideological changes that enable them to stay relevant and survive. Modern legends still are based on Christian education according to the Bible, which remains the basic source of knowledge and belief on all levels, irrespective of denomina- tion or personal choices in western society. This knowledge admits the pious, the unbeliever and the sceptic to a homogeneous cultural platform that enables everyone to participate in rites of passage and calendar festivals, to appreciate arts and literature, to distinguish right from wrong, and to cope with the notion of mortality. If we want to study the legends of the members of a community, we have to define their interpretation of belief as they define it comparatively with the ca- nonic religion from which it was derived.

Folklorists regarded belief manifested in legends as some sort of archaism, a primitive worldview, an un- critical, naive scientific interpretation of observed reality. As outsiders, they surveyed legend telling communities with an air of superiority, assuming that the narrators of these absurd stories (in which average people, not epic heroes, experience supernormal or absurd encounters without leaving the landscape and climate of ordinary life) must believe what they narrate. Schol- ars were puzzled by the peculiarities of the legend, so different from the magic tale in which the hero is the only real person representing our point of view, sur- rounded by, and related to, irrational landscapes, people, animals and objects as featured by Liithi's Allverbundenheit concept (Liithi 1975, 330). This contras- tive conceptualisation of reality in legend and tale was convincingly introduced in Lutz R6hrich's classic book Mdrchen und Wirklichkeit (Rdhrich 1974) arguing that identical narrative motifs are elastic enough to accom- modate the message of both genres. But folklorists have been slow to recognise that the painstaking, factual depiction of the situation serves the purpose of authen- ticating the narrative. As an essential stylistic feature of the legend it serves the purpose of its telling. The elaboration of details erroneously convinced early fieldworkers that tellers and listeners truly believe the legend they tell. Narrators were expected to articulate vestiges of the belief system of an archaic pan-animis- tic world; any scholars judged narrators' hesitation in admitting personal experience as evidence of the ero- sion of archaic values and the demise of folklore. And because Ranke convinced his followers that positive belief is the essence of legends, collectors routinely asked their informants whether they believed what they had just recited. What an arrogant, condescending definition was the one crafted first by Ranke in 1925, that legends are, "popular, objectively untrue fantasy stories told for true and presented in the simple style of

an experience report" (Ranke 1925, 4). How can the visting scholar know what is objectively true or untrue and for whom, and whether the contextualisation of the content means "telling for true," when identical legends may contain other tellers' doubts or disbeliefs? This authoritative definition, based on archaic village research, still persists among contemporary legend scholars whose informants (not ignorant folk anymore) may be as well educated as they are. We should be aware that the religion-based stock of supernatural belief is stronger than the power of enlightenment and dominates today's emergent legendry as much as ever, and is shared by bearers of all social, educational and economic classes.

Why do folklore collectors (not mental health carers) insist on asking, "Do you believe it? Is it true?" The question itself provokes distortion. In the first place, belief is fluctuating, hesitant and selective, not consistent or absolute. In the second place, the informant has many reasons not to tell what he or she really believes. Even with the best intentions, the given conditions, relationships, personality features and momentary dis- positions make any disclosure of belief/! disbelief/! hesitation improvised and insincere, therefore useless for research. The fluctuating mental states of tellers and responsive audiences can be discerned from the spontaneous performance, without asking embarrassing personal questions impossible to answer (Becker and Geer 1957, 28-32).

Here is an example to illuminate the complexity of contradictions in the presentation of a legend. It reveals the uncertainties surrounding legend experience, the experiencer's need to try interpretations and resolve troubling questions.

This story, known throughout Indiana, often told in conjunction with visits to Wayne Pruitt's grave in the Orange County cemetery south of Bedford (see Clements 1969, 90-6), provokes the ambiguous feelings of the presenter characteristic of natural legend telling.

"Did you hear about the chain in Prospect, Indiana? Again, I don't know all the details, 'cause I don't really pay attention to these stories (laughter) but ... 'cause they tend to spook me (laughter), so I kinda ignore them. Again, I'm not sure how many years ago this was, ... a while ago but this man was accused for kill- ing his wife, strangling her with a chain. And, I don't believe he was actually convicted of the crime but he died before his innocence could be proven. And on his deathbed he supposedly told someone in testimony to his innocence that this tombstone, ... there would appear a chain in the shape of a cross that would join link by link. And anyway, this chain did appear and it came on the side of the tombstone and ... where it would cross. And lots of people made the trip to see it. And after a while vandals got to it, you know, and they had to replace the tombstone, ... entirely. And now the chain is there on this new tombstone also. And this one, my friends took me up there to see and I actually saw the links on the stone. Now, I don't know if the ... comes back but they told me they do if you stay all night.

40 Linda Digh

And there is also another story ... that some profes- sors from I.U. has gone to see this. And I'm sure this is total fabrication. But when they went to look at the tombstone to make sure that nobody has taken a chain and pounded it into the stone, or, you know, to alter it in some way. And they could not find any evidence that this would happen. And there was one person who totally believed in this, the spirit coming back, and another one said this is just the doing of another prankster. And as they were leaving Prospect, as the road winds down backwards, and as they were driving, this car came out of nowhere behind them, and it was speed- ing up, and came closer, and closer, and run them off the road. And this person who did not believe, this one was driving the car. And when they found the car, the person who did believe in the story was totally uninjured, and the person who did not, was dead.And there was a logging chain wrapped around his neck. So ...

Here the story ends, accompanied by lots of nervous laughter from the audience of some forty students. The narrator was Debbie, a twenty-one-year old journal- ism major at Harper Residence Hall on the Bloomington campus, 31 October 1989. This legend consists of three parts: the introductory personal statement, and two selfcontained legends interlinked to illustrate the superiority of religious belief over knowledge. The first story, a fabulate, is appended by a didactic memorate. The innocently accused man is exonerated by divine intervention which makes a miraculous sign appear on the gravestone, but the sign is ridiculed and destroyed by unbelievers. The raconteuse begins with an apology for her scanty knowledge of the account. The formu- laic modesty, however, means also that she does not want to be identified as gullible, attracted to "these stories"; she is aware of the fact that public opinion does not condone supernatural belief. Her apology is under- scored by her nervous giggle as she admits that not paying attention does not mean that she ignores these stories. On the contrary, she is scared of them because they spook her. After this presentation of ambiguity, she puts the main story at a distance, in a depersonalised manner as if she were trying to recall the details told to her by an unnamed person. She even uses the word

"supposedly" when telling about the testimonial appearance of the chain on the tombstone as evidence that the man had been innocently accused. Describing graphically the formation of the chain "in the shape of a cross"--a known motif of an exemplum mirabilis-she argues for its veracity by reference to "lots of people (who) made the trip to see it," as pilgrimages to a lat- ter-day saint's shrine, similar to the legend trip of young people in anticipation of a supernatural manifestation. A new episode reports the miraculous reappearance of the cross on a newly erected tombstone after the original had been destroyed by vandals. Here, the tone of the rhetoric of the legend changes from fabulate to memorate. The narrator saw the new chain on the new tombstone because her friends took her there. This time she did not refuse to pay attention: "I actually saw the links," she tells us, turning herself into a voluntary eye-

witness. But again, she hesitates to say if the chain is still there and refers to others who told her that "it comes back if you stay all night." She does not say it, but it is implied that the chain appears in similar cases, when visitors perform certain rituals. The second legend confirms the miracle story of the innocently accused man and warns against the profaning of divine justice, although, right at the beginning, the narrator indicates her own disbelief by interjecting, "I'm sure this is total fabrication," confusing her audience about the point she is making. This memorate is a didactic story about the victory of religion over science. Some rationalised (negative) variants of this legend attribute the appearance of the chain to the softness of Indiana limestone to prove scientifically that no divine interference has occurred-someone just threw a heavy iron chain on the grave marker and that made the dent. As I was informed by authorities in the stone industry, this is a pseudo-scientific belief statement (an "anti-legend") because not even the soft oolite can be dented this way. In this story, a religious person and a sceptical scientist investigate the cause of the miracle. The one who does not believe trivialises it as prankster's trick with a chain, and is punished by strangulation with a chain (does the mobile chain on the grave marker perform the ex- ecution?), after a phantom car runs their car off the road as they are departing. The scientist who believes was "totally uninjured-" "when they found the car."

Seventeen legends were told that night, inspired by my talk, the hot apple cider, candlelight, pumpkin pie and spooky paraphernalia. After the people began to trade stories, I did not utter a sound nor did the two graduate folklore students who came along. This variant illustrates the religious nature of underlying belief and the ambiguous attitude narrators express in accord- ance with legend dialectics. Compared to other re- corded variants of this legend, it also illustrates the uniqueness of the meaning of each variant. In this case, the last part, the punishment of the agnostic professor adds a new and strong warning against disbelief.

Legend and Belief Now it is time to return to the concept "belief legend" as it was defined by folklorists at a time when distinction had to be made between the two basic narrative genres-the legend, referred to as "true story" by native European villagers; and the Mdrchen, what they called "a lie" in appreciation of the creative fantasy of tale tellers. That was the time when practising fieldworkers and comparative text philologists realised that both genres are based on a common belief system, a common monotheistic cultural knowledge, as is convincingly documented by Stith Thompson's Motif In- dex. The motifs, the smallest components of traditional narratives-E334.2. Ghost haunts burial spot; E384 Ghost summoned by music; G269.5. Witch causes haunted houses, and so on-can be regarded also as statements of belief, expression of worldview, charged attitudes and op-


positions between fantasy and reality, the knowable and unknowable, life and death. It was no absurdity when legend scholars proposed to apply the MotifIndex num- bers for legend classification.

While "lie" translates as fiction, "truth" does not necessarily mean that people believe the legends they tell, but rather that legends are about what real people experience within their own topographically delimited territory in the real world. The real world is the refer- ent of the legend. It is presented before the legend event begins and after it has ended; life is restored to ordi- nariness. Ordinary landscapes, ordinary people are featured, engaged in their daily routines when, according to theologian Rudolf Otto (Otto 1958), the sudden in- trusion of the ganz andere, the numinous, the tremendum and the fascinans as a religious experience occurs and transforms the world of experiencers for a moment. That moment is the encounter of the mortal and the immortal, the rational and the irrational, as folklore theorists Gotthilf Isler, Max Liithi, Gerhard Heilfurth, Hermann Bausinger and others have asserted.

The incorporation of legend motifs, or full legends, into magic tales, and the transformation of legends into tales and tales into legends, appears as ideological recastings, connecting and contrasting the objectified fictitious world of the tale with the real, supernatural realm of everyday. In a tale, a real person (like us) makes a labour contract and performs chores in an extranormal world-the lowly hero tends and grooms the horses of the seven headed dragon up on the top of the sky-high tree (AT 468)-just as would be expected from the village horseherd.

During my student years in the field, I learned that villagers considered legends as information about experienced human encounters with the supernatural world, in opposition to the general opinion of academic folklorists that these "superstitious stories" are based on erroneous beliefs that characterise the separate reality of backward villagers. Some proposed using the native term "true story," general among European peasantries (Dobos 1978); other proposals included the use of the vague term "traditions" or "folk-talks," or "folk-conversations," stressing the informality of their telling (Hegediis 1946; 1952). References were made to men's evening gatherings in the pub, at homes or communal workplaces, where general conversation brought up a miscellany of legend-like stories. The terms "beliefs and belief stories" were also used to identify supernatural scary stories popular in rural and urban cir- cles (Dobos 1986, 170-90).

During the early 1960s, when I became interested in the legend, I accepted the term "belief story" or "belief legend" as suggested by Aurdl Vajkai (Vajkai 1947, 55- 69) in his superb description of the legend cycle of herdsmen of the Bakony woods region. Herding, an important, hereditary trade, gave privileges and respect to herdsmen, ranking high above agriculturalists. As the story goes, the herdsmen made pacts with the Devil in order to perfect their herding skills and to make them-

selves indispensable to their employers (Degh 1965b, 231-8 and 335-7). As outdoor men, living in nature all the year round, they were recognised "folk-scientists, healers and philosophers" as well as eminent tellers of legends. Vajkai's "belief stories" were first- and second- hand personal experience accounts. He pointed out that belief had created and integrated the whole cycle of narratives that gained popularity both in its entirety and in its parts. He saw nothing accidental in the fact that this fusion of belief and personal experience made a strong core of unity to shape the episodes of the story. Frequent repetition, elaboration of details, and personalisation stabilised the texts like those of popular ballads or tales. He was dealing with widespread pres- tige-promoting stories of competing clans of herdsmen, stories that displayed the content stability of fabulates while maintaining the personalisation of memorates. The idea "belief story" or "belief legend" was appealing to me because eighty per cent of Hungarian folk legendry fitted the category known as mythical or demonological (see Hand 1965) or supernatural. In my earlier works, I used this term also to describe less stable, less coherent, fragmentary variants. In fact, I also applied the term to episodes or motifs, with or without narrative elements, that appeared in independent usage in my experience, because they also were compos- ite parts of a complex of which the analytical category of a legend type could be pieced together (Degh 1965a; 1971).

This was the era when members of the European legend commission discussed the classifiability of legends. Realising that the same story had only a handful of relatively stable, complete, elaborate and coherent versions and that the rest-hundreds or thousands- exist and function in what the outsider may see as in- coherent bits and pieces, they soon gave up trying to create a typology. Fieldworkers should have realised that functional documents of living culture are harder to pin down than the appealing, but petrified, skeletons of the past, and that to explore the extent of the legend as a specific genre, they need to turn to the present dynamics of emergent bits and pieces of legendry shaped by innovative bearers of tradition. But instead of starting in-depth field observation of legend processes to find characteristics that truly distinguish the genre from other folklore genres, they looked for those that dissociate legend from legend. Subcategories were identified, names assigned to each, according to diverse esoteric and exoteric organising principles and worldviews, based on one arbitrarily chosen feature judged as prominent in disregard of others. For example, the legend about the chain on the tombstone quoted above could be identified arbitrarily as contemporary legend, cemetery legend, ghost story, adolescent legend, religious legend, and memorate with equal justification. Would this mean that the variants of the same legend need to be placed in separate categories?

Whoever found a handful of legends in the library or among a group of schoolchildren proposed a new

42 Linda Digh

name that characterised more the investigator's than the bearer's interest. The hairsplitting exercise of dis- criminating between categories and subcategories, as- signing names, and determining "analytical categories" began early and is still going on, as if modern authors would be persuaded to invent new terms for their new collections in line with the fashionable trends of other disciplines. New terms are also a risky business because they often turn out to be the reinvention of the wheel. Confusion and chaos is created by the many terms because: 1) they pertain, not only to the complete narrative, but to its close kin, parts and ingredients; 2) the terms often are synonyms not easily translatable into English from the language of their origin; and 3) no distinction is made between heuristic, operational and temporarily useful, and more stable naming. Beyond that, titles may be assigned by scholars or by the bearers and can indicate topic, content, main character, the witness, style, mood, place, time, or purpose of telling. Robin Gwyndaf's listing of superstition categories A to J (227-8) confirms Leopold Schmidt's observation that "the domain of the legend is as large as the totality of folk culture, one can say no part of it, from settle- ment and house, to proverb and saying exist wihtout being touched also by the legend" (Schmidt 1963, 107).

In agreement with Gillian Bennett that the prolifera- tion of contradictory usage of terminology has lately increased the confusion surrounding the genre (Bennett 1989, 291), I feel it is time to stop seeking more legend subspecies or potential legend ingredients, because doing so undermines the likelihood of an agreeable compromise. Collaborative effort is needed to find the common denominator that makes legend a legend, whether it be long, short, fragmentary, demonic, horri- ble, disgusting, comic, grotesque, entertaining, first or third person, rural, urban, oral or printed, believed or not believed.

Bennett, the most original and prolific representa- tive of the contemporary legend avant garde, has a strong record in field observation and analysis of supernatural belief-related legendry. Indeed, there are some interesting ideas in her essay, as she reminds us of many modes of conversing about community beliefs. I am pleased that she mentions certain legends (or memorates and other legend-like accounts) that are implicitly belief-oriented, told in the context of "the discussion of a cultural belief complex," and that function as "the exploration of that complex" (ibid., 301). I wholeheartedly agree with her; several of my articles have described the legend as a conversational genre in which participants (proponents) state and debate the nature of their belief in the account. The difference between us is only that I do not see a need to distinguish "belief story" or "belief legend" from the rest of legendry, because the exploration of believability is present in all legends since it constitutes the essential purpose of the genre. The legend-telling conversation, as Bennett correctly states, is informal, often fuzzy, because it is a spontaneous occurrence not prepared like

a storytelling occasion for a featured narrator, as Bennett's transcript also indicates. However, the interview-style case study-the transcript of a thirty minute classroom legend telling of six fifteen-year-old young- sters-is not produced in the relaxed gathering when the proper, sub-logical atmosphere can develop and lead to spontaneous reflections and conversation about supernatural experiences. The interviewer-prompted, artificially staged speedy recital of twenty-five items distorts reality and is unfit for scientific scrutiny. It does not support the renaming proposal nor Bennett's con- clusion; the fact that these items are also legends has been accepted by most legend specialists. The materials presented are ghost stories; that is, classic legends whose popularity fluctuates over time but whose contents constitute the majority of the current legend repertoire of Americans. They give testimony to the current intensification of religious belief. However, to de- pend on schoolchildren's stories to make a general theoretical proposition is misleading. For too long it has been an academic practice of American folklorists to collect legends from students-mostly college age-in their classes or to assign graduate students to collect legends from college, high school or grade school children. Our archives are predominantly filled by young people's first- or second-hand legends. I do not dispute that student groups as occupational-, gender- and age-groups develop their own legend repertoires (see Grider 1976; Tucker 1977), but the lack of collecting from adults re- inforces the misconception that legends, particularly ghost and horror stories, are the critical genre of children and adolescents, and distorts the fact that there is a largely untapped body of legendry circulating among adults who actually enculturate their children into the legend culture.2 The interview-produced conversational legends in Bennett's transcript could have been collected from more articulate adults; more natural legend exchange would be more convincing for generali- sation about legend and belief.

Contemporary legend students can gain from read- ing and rereading the works of earlier authors and evaluate them according to their chronological significance. We have a brilliant and enthusiastic international team of researchers, capable of measuring the devel- opmental trajectory of legend scholarship, sorting out the dated and resolved problems, finding and revital- ising valuable ideas that have remained unnoticed on library shelves. It is time to reverse the work order: we need more data gathering before we can build a convincing legend theory. Much can be learned from the history of legend study, particularly because it developed in close collaboration among specialists as the original literary-philological interest transformed into a sociologically based study of personal creativity.

The term "belief legend/story" first appeared as a heuristic, not as a theoretically established, term. Fol- lowing Vajkai, Dagmar Klimovi, Jaromir Jech, C.V. Cistov, Brynjulf Alver and Otto Blehr submitted their interpretations of the term at the Liblice meeting of the


legend commission of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (ISFNR) (see Fabula 9 [1967]). Along with other commentators, they identified oral prose narratives in the field and attempted to describe and explain the relationship between communal and personal variants of identical contents and their potential transgeneric affinities. Andre Jolles's original "einfache Formen" (Jolles 1930) idea triggered this interest, most fruitful in documenting the transitional nature of living oral tradition (as discussed by Bausinger [1980, 225- 36]), and in forming legend-related expressions such as belief concepts, rumours, reports, cases, experience stories, pseudo-legends, anecdotes, horror stories, and so on. It seems impossible to stop collectors from naming their items as they see it fit; and I would say, let them do it. It is only the comparative analyst who must find the proper place for the piece someone somewhere informally named, and who is not obliged to take such label seriously, in the grand scheme of things.

Bennett's proposition concerning "belief-related genres" follows the suggestion of the reclusive Norwegian folklorist Otto Blehr who distinguished "belief story" from "belief legend" (Blehr 1967, 259-63). Seven years later, Bleir published a book, elaborating further the distinction between belief legend and belief story, a difference that does not deviate from von Sydow's distinction between the depersonalised fabulate and the ego-centred memorate (Blehr 1974). The merit of Blehr's book lies, not in making this distinction, but rather in his excellent fieldwork, his model recording of a treas- ury of legends of a community and, above all, his interpretation of local folk belief as religion, showing the interconnectedness of theology and elite and folk religion as the source of legendry. Bennett is correct that Blehr's belief stories are legends as much as her "belief-related genres and other oddities" are also legends. Blehr's well focused rhetorical questions and treatment of ambiguously used terms revolve around the ideas of von Sydow, his disciples and successors. In regard to Wayland Hand's preoccupation with "belief traditions," Bennett has correctly inferred that "he clearly thought that they were legends" (Bennett 1989, 290). As already stated, Hand used the word superstition, that is, superstitious belief in the sense of:

A challenge to the accepted view of things, whether from a civil or judical perspective, or a dissent from religious precepts and prevailing moral customs. This retreat from authority is accomplished not so much by breaking away from accepted norms of society and of the church, as it is by merely holding fast to older ideas and modes of thought that have all been abandoned (Hand 1981, l:xxx).

But his profound knowledge of beliefs necessarily led to his discovery that "superstitions" (statements of belief) are, "rarely, if ever discussed in a detached way; they are lived and experienced," "Customs often represent the acting out of belief, and memorates and legends illustrate belief in actual examples" (Hand, 1968,

225). The recognition that belief can be expressed in acts and in telling prompted Hand to appeal to his col- leagues for the construction of anAmerican legend classification system long before a feasible collection of texts was assembled. This was the situation when I met him at the first International Society for Folk Narrative Re- search (ISFNR) congress in Kiel. Hand's idea that belief interconnects custom and narrative was appealing to me, and we agreed to start collecting examples to show the intricacies of text variables held together by common belief and to present a joint paper on our findings at the next congress. For years we worked on the project and exchanged materials via airmail corre- spondence between Los Angeles and Budapest. But we ran into irreconcilable differences in our thinking. As a philologist, Hand assembled and constructed units of formally and thematically similar but generically unre- lated beliefs, rituals and legends, taken from literary or archival sources in diverse American regional subcul- tures; while my examples were field observed, identical cases of belief performed both dramatically and narrationally in the same community. I presented my findings at the 1964 Athens congress (Degh 1965a), and Hand put together and read our co-authored paper at the 1969 Bucharest congress which I did not attend. He was correct in looking for the legend in the web of traditions based on belief, but he depended on literary sources, not on personal observation.

To argue here against the use of a category called "belief legend" (Glaubenssage, Glaubensfabulate), "folk belief story" or "belief tale" as a scholarly concept, I have had to discuss a number of seemingly separate issues including ideas of traditional and modern scholars, the formal and the ideological constructs of the legend as a genre and the attempts at characterisation, classification and naming, in the hope of suggesting a platform of collaboration for breaking the present dead- lock and opening a new path toward understanding the legend. Operationally, the term "belief legend" played an important role at the time legends became the targets of ethnographic study, and it was helpful in exploring the multitude of ways religious belief ma- nipulates legend formation. But the lack of stability in belief, as seen in communal and individual uncertainty, causes the fluctuation of practice, and leads to unpredictability of the narrative summary. This condition makes traditional approaches-classification and so on-impossible. The more subcategories, the greater chaos we create.

International folklorists who have learned their trade and are used to the practical tools of the comparative method will be able to analyse this mass of data by identifying content units for general understanding, and find out what they are best qualified to explore: what legends mean to their bearers, and how they affect these bearer's lives.As so many people have stated since W.E. Peuckert's book Geburt und Antwort der mythischen Welt (Peuckert 1965), legends seek answers about the nature of the supernatural world and its effect on people. Our

44 Linda Digh

guiding light should be the inherent belief core and its alterations, because the position of belief varies, not only from person to person, but from telling to telling by the same person under changing conditions. The legend experience is pessimistic, often tragic, even if it can be turned into the absurd, the weird, brutal, cruel, uncanny and grotesque. The underlying philosophy is a painful admission of helplessness and impending defeat. How- ever, by submitting to the inevitable-mortality-the worldview of the legend can interpret tragic outcome as hope and joyous expectation of immortality. All ghost stories are anticipations of a Christian spiritual after- life: if ghosts can return, there is a happier existence beyond the grave; and we will also be able to return. This personal and collective meaning of legends (or negation of it) is more or less inherent in all legend texts, revealed by the dynamics of the legend dialectics.

Conversation about belief, the contemplation of human destiny, is on the mind of everyone born into this world. It is the common denominator of all legends. Therefore our field study of legend needs to address and build on the local religious system and its everyday practices. Folkloristic methodology has developed specific approaches for such sensitive narrator-centred depth research. Being a humanistic field, folkloristics is more focused on personal creativity than are related disciplines. We pay special attention to the life, personality and expressivity of narrators as they project their thoughts and visions and articulate their concerns. Thus, our approach to the formulations of legend as a genre, not irrespective of momentary, individual stylistic or content variables, will open new vistas to ethnographic (contemporary) legend study.

In our time, legend study blossoms as we intensify our speculation about legends within easy reach of us. We demand more contextualisation, more authentic recording and interpretive analysis. At the same time, a current legend boom is generated by the collaboration of legend communicators and researchers. Urban legend fashion is our own making: the marketing of texts for popular audiences has broadened the range of consumers and producers, and turned amateurs into expert experiencers. Folklorists obtain more texts for their popular books, yet the bestselling collections do not represent the high level of authenticity we demand in our essays, as if researchers had different standards for theory and for publication. As the number of collections increases and gains new ground in European countries, the quality of texts decrease, lacking context, spontaneity and originality. The published items lack also the freshness of oral narration; they are either rewritten, brief, abstracted versions of oral or written texts but more often than not, clippings and summaries of media sources. There is little variation in the not too large, contingent of well known legend types. Small paperback volumes also add a miscellany of anecdotes, gossip and personal accounts of suspect origin; one

might wonder how these boring stories will re-enter oral tradition after the "urban legend" fashion declines.

There is no danger of the demise of legendry when the currently fashionable themes pass with the specific belief systems that infuse life into them: religious belief and irrationality are still growing and aiming at new peaks. There are more legends-past, present and emergent-at hand than folklorists have ever dreamed about. My recent five months' visit in central-eastern Europe infused me with the pride of a clairvoyant: I had predicted a spectacular boom in supernaturalism as soon as the Iron Curtain was lifted. In print, televi- sion, movies, videos and personal appearances, famous preachers, gurus and occultists spread their doctrines in response to public demand. UFO clubs, spiritualist churches, pagans, shamans and satanists emerge, while fundamentalist religions attract masses of seekers, competing with the restored denominations of traditional religions. A new legendry is in the making and spread- ing among peoples troubled by the consequences of political and economic transformation. From Billy Graham to Uri Geller, people receive encouragement from the sophisticated western countries-the gap closes rapidly, as the former Soviet bloc assimilates the level of folk religiosity of the free world. We have to prepare for a new chapter of legendary fashion as new culture areas are opened and informed by their belief system ripening new stories.

To summarise my reflections on the idea "belief legend." With many asides and detours,which I could not avoid because of my fear of bypassing important related issues, I have argued that I oppose the "rehabilitation" of the "rediscovered" belief stories and their sheltering under the umbrella term "legend" as Bennett suggests. I do not see her proposal as a first step toward "serious attention" providing a "theoretical framework" for this rehabilitation (Bennett 1989, 304) because I do not believe there is a need to retain the distinction implied in such a category. Bennett herself acknowledges that all legends are "belief related genres" (292). What then is the theoretical benefit of the retention of a term that emphasises "belief" as a qualifier of legend without the justification of its exclusion from other legend categories? The preservation of "belief legend" does not eliminate but add to the confusion surrounding attempts to define the genre. My ar- gument is based on sufficiently documented evidence that belief is not simply related in some unexplained, unspecified way to legend but that belief itself is the core, the raison d'etre of the legend as a genre. But beyond belief, all additional components of legend definitions provided by scholars fit the definition of the "belief legend" as well. The term "legend" serves our purpose fine.

Folklore Institute Indiana University, Bloomington, USA


Notes

'Particular mention should be made of ground breaking works that called attention to folk legends in popular literary publications: Albert Wesselski's chapter "Die Formen der volkstiimlichen Erzihlguts" in Adolf Spamer's Deutsche Volkskunde 1:216-48; Walter Anderson's clipping of stories from local newspapers and weeklies; Bausinger's collection and definition of "everyday narration" ("alltagliches Erzdihlen" (Bausinger 1975, 323-30) and Rudolf Schenda's latest attempt to trace the cultural history of folk narration in Europe (1993).

2Gwyndaf's chart illustrates my description of the two kinds of manifestation of belief (cf. Gwyndaf 1994, 230; Digh 1965a).

3Parental influence on schoolchildren's legend repertoire and reporting style is well documented in Halloween legends a schoolteacher volunteered to collect from her pupils upon my request (Digh 1986, 127-72).

References Cited

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Issue Table of ContentsFolklore, Vol. 107 (1996), pp. 1-126Front Matter [pp. 4-90]Society LecturesThe Folklore I Grew up with [pp. 1-3]Witches and Witchbusters [pp. 5-18]

Healing Charms in Use in England and Wales 1700-1950 [pp. 19-32]What Is A Belief Legend? [pp. 33-46][What Is A Belief Legend?]: Reply [pp. 47-48]The Sugared Almond in Modern Greek Rites of Passage [pp. 49-56]Bakhtin's Carnival Laughter and the Cajun Country Mardi Gras [pp. 57-70]"I'd Gie Them A": The Formula in "Geordie" and Other Ballads [pp. 71-76]Mrs Ewing and the Textual Origin of the St Kitts Mummies' Play [pp. 77-89]In MemoriamAlan James Bruford, 1937-1995 [p. 91]Kenneth S. Goldstein, 1927-1995 [p. 92]

Topics, Notes and CommentsChurchill's Speechmaking: A Response to Wolfgang Mieder [p. 93]"Camera, Lights, Action!": The British General Election 1992 as Narrative Event [pp. 94-97]The Ghost of Criticism Past [pp. 98-101]Towards the Demystification of Lawrence Lazy [pp. 101-105]Funeral Flowers: A Response to Drury [pp. 106-107]A Good Saxon Compound [pp. 107-108]

Reviews of Folklore ScholarshipAlan Bruford: A Folklore Bibliography 1965-1994 [pp. 109-110]Review: The Katharine Briggs Award 1995: Judges' Report [pp. 111-113]

ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 114-115]Review: untitled [p. 115]Review: untitled [pp. 115-116]Review: untitled [p. 116]Review: untitled [p. 117]Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]Review: untitled [p. 118]Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]Review: untitled [p. 119]Review: untitled [p. 119]Review: untitled [p. 120]Review: untitled [pp. 120-121]Review: untitled [p. 121]Review: untitled [pp. 121-122]Review: untitled [pp. 122-123]Review: untitled [pp. 123-124]Review: untitled [p. 124]Review: untitled [pp. 124-125]Review: untitled [p. 125]Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]Review: untitled [p. 126]Review: untitled [p. 126]

Back Matter

belief legend

Documents

term belief legend

legend scholars

legend genre

demonological legend

legend type

legend dialectic

folk belief

belief content