why do we study folklore?

Why Do We Study Folklore?Author(s): Violet AlfordSource: Folklore, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Dec., 1953), pp. 473-483Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1257873 .

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WHY DO WE STUDY FOLKLORE? BY VIOLET ALFORD

A paper read before a meeting of the Society on November 19th, 1952 IN an unguarded moment I agreed to some such title as that given to my paper of tonight-why do we study folklore? I think I descry four main reasons for so doing.

The strongest reason seems to me to be the sense of continuity. Most of us are interested in carrying on things in our own English way, accept- ing changes as they inevitably creep in if we must, but in any case carrying on. Consider our Civic traditions, our Lord Mayors' coaches, our City trumpeters; consider our Law traditions, the wigs, the robes, the stiff bouquets; consider our regret-widely spread-when ancient families are compelled to break the continuity of life in their own ancient homes, and must open these to crowds of strangers and these strangers themselves often express their sympathy. Remember too our pride in famous ships and regiments and in such occasional splendid ceremonial as a Coronation. The age-long continuity of such Christian religious rites simply clamours for study of the much longer continuity of pre-Christian religious rites from which the former have never wholly disentangled themselves. Here then we plunge straight into the living stream of folklore without pausing to ask ourselves why we do so.

A second reason is a simple one-curiosity. Can you imagine a person who, all unprepared, comes into sight of the Cerne Abbas Giant, the Berkshire White Horse or the lorn and sinister stone avenues at Carnac, so little curious that he will not be compelled to enquire into the meaning of these overpowering objects? The answers to his enquiries will be local folklore. If his curiosity is strong enough he may also, on a lowlier level, say to himself " Why do we go through such curious manoeuvres when we see the new moon? Why is it lucky to have a dark man as your first- footer and why is it unlucky to marry in May? These are the sort of questions asked and answered in the correspondence columns of the papers by amateur folklorists. Just the other day a letter in my local paper kindly explained that King Alfred's nails-the wooden nails or wedges used at Bridgwater, should really be King Alfred's sails, regard- less of traditional boat building on the Parrett and the unshaken local folk memory of twelve hundred years. On such occasions one's critical mind spurs on curiosity. One says " I cannot believe that. Let us find a better answer to our strange and often foolish beliefs and doings "

473



474 Why Do We Study Folklore? A third reason is necessity. A history student comes up against some

popular movement he does not understand, seasonal fighting, fighting between town factions or mass depression as when the Scoppio del Carro fails in Florence.

A fourth reason-and the effects of this are easy to see-is a seasonal urge which requires us to do certain things at certain times. Children and countryfolk are the most affected, townsfolk become less and less sensitive to the urge. On the Continent, and through Spanish influence in Latin America, the urge of Carnival is, I should judge, the strongest in the year, its effect on the population much more apparent than that of Church festivals. In many places the Midsummer urge runs it close. So strong is the Carnival urge in some Alpine places that it takes men out in the bitter cold to run, literally run, from the Sunday before Lent to Ash Wednesday morning. With immensely weighty cowbells tied on their backs they run from farm to farm through the snow, all day and all night, only returning home to sleep and eat when they can run no more. Then out again, run again, the great cowbells clanging through the night. I have heard them, hour after hour, and have marvelled at the urge which -ompels so hard, so unspectacular, so unrewarding a fetching in of Spring. In England now we seem touched by two seasons only, Christmas and Guy Fawkes' Night. We really do feel this autumnal urge. All Souls', All Saints' Days show it by faithful visits to the cemeteries and church- yards, the flowers lain on the grave-though even so much less markedly than on the Continent, and-curiously-by the devotion to Bonfire Night. In every back garden fireworks pop and fizzle, little boys' Schools make this an occasion and certain towns feel the urge so strongly that it brings out two thousand Bonfire Boys at Lewes and nearly as many at Bridgwater, and the Bristol City Corporation itself has built two magnificent bonfires on Clifton down, the countryside is dotted with blazes on a thousand hilltops and on a thousand village greens. The fact that the historical Gunpowder Treason and Plot coincided, by a mere four days' extension, with the ancient autumnal cycle stretching from All Hallows-All Souls'-All Saints' to Martinmas gave new life, a new excuse for celebrating the ancient, perhaps I may here use the word primitive, fire festival connected with the decay of nature and with the Ancestral Dead. This fourth reason is, of course, so firmly linked to our sense of continuity, religious continuity, continuity of performance, continuity of our own age-long combined memories, that my first sug- gested reason for the study of folklore merges with the last.

There can hardly be a better example of love of continuity than the



Why Do We Study Folklore? 475 planting of the Meiboom in the rue des Sables in Brussels. This is not a Maypole but a live tree, one of those arbres d'honneur often seen on the Continent, which is planted on the Eve of St. Lawrence in August, St. Lawrence being the patron of the Compagnons who plant it. Records of the planting begin in 1213 so the Compagnons maintain but 1311 is more certain. A ritual stealing of the Meiboom by men from Louvain seemed as though it were becoming a traditional part of the ceremony. Once they succeeded and really carried it off, but somehow another tree was obtained on the spot and duly planted. Now Louvain has renounced this robbery. The same thing occurs at Lanreath in Cornwall where men from two near-by villages come every year in an attempt to steal the Lanreath Maypole. Sometimes they come in armed cars, that is to say in old army trucks to carry off the 64 feet high pole. But Lanreath sends out spies to deflate the tyres and thus keeps its May. Another example of ritual stealing is the stealing of the small fir trees which mark out the dancing place for the Baccuber-one of the two still existing Sword dances in France. This led to bloody encounters from the I8th century onwards, and now they watch them all night in the hamlet of Cervibres where the dance takes place. But they themselves have to steal them out of tho forest. During the last war the ceremony of planting the Meiboom naturally was kept very quiet but it never ceased. I have seen a photo- graph of a handful of people, chiefly women and children, faithfully planting a meagre bush in place of the soaring poplar, shielding it with bicycles, while two German soldiers walk disdainfully by.

We have a parallel instance of faithful continuity in our Padstow Old Hoss. He was carried out by the women during the last war when no men were left capable of doing so-a tremendous physical effort for a woman- because, they said, if May Day was not celebrated the police would have the right to stop it altogether. Ritualists today often have this idea.

There surely are other reasons for our study, one reason overlapping another, as always. This first one, continuity, ramifying as it does and must into ancient religion and practice, Christian religion and practice, into the whole foundation of our social life, is far too vast to elaborate now. I would like however to try to follow out my less serious proposals and to begin with curiosity because that was what drove me to folklore and even to prehistory.

My first introduction to our English folk dance was the sight of some rather small children, 9 to 12 year-olds I should say, dancing a few Morris dances to admiring parents. There were boys and girls, they were much too small for virile men's Morris, they pranced like ponies raising their



476 Why Do We Study Folklore? little knees almost to their little chins. Yet when those jingling bells and those quite unknown yet always known tunes, thudded out on a piano, came to my ears, something within me said " Nothing shall prevent me learning about this." Bad as the presentation was it struck such a re- sponding chord of Englishness in me that it seemed already to belong to me. I next took a look at the programme. The names again struck the chord, Bean-Setting, Shepherd's Hey, Trunkles and the rest, but on reading the explanation of this new treasure-" The bells represent the horsebells of the Moors, the handkerchiefs the waving Moorish turbans," my critical mind awoke. " That is rubbish," it said and charged me to find out. I have been finding out ever since.

Nearly 2000 years ago Plutarch felt that same sort of curiosity and amongst his other questions asked " Why do they not take wives during the month of May? " The best answers he could find were that May was the month for offerings to the dead and that the Flaminica was forbidden many things and had to wear mourning during May. In his Civilisations Traditionelles et Genres de Vie Monsieur Varagnac proposes a more valid set of answers, demonstrating the suddenly important place of the young, unmarried girl in village life in May. This age-group is protected by and largely in the power of the corresponding age-group of young, unmarried men, a social arrangement well known during the middle ages when, says Monsieur Varagnac, it was practised as 1'Amour Courtois and brought a great amelioration to manners-though hardly in the villages one would think. It spreads over a very much larger zone of at least West Central Europe than the Franche Comt6 where he studied it. But I know of others, the Grisons for instance, where it grew to such proportions that the poor girls could hardly call their souls their own. Their names were drawn by lot, the young man who drew a name becoming that girl's cavalier and guardian during Carnival, at fetes and at balls throughout the year. The rules of 1773 show what authority the young men's con- fraternities assumed. " Elles doivent s'appliquer 5 marcher dans la rue avec une bonne tenue," not step out " as though they were striding a valley, nor trot along on their toes as as though the street were paved with eggs." And to make certain of their submissiveness " As for the girls they owe above everything respect and obedience to their tutor."

In return for this obedience should they fall down in the street ces messieurs must run to pick them up.

In Eastern France the drawing of names took place about Martinmas, when the night assemblies for winter work, spinning and knitting, began. All along the Pyrenees also these are the occasions for " making



Why Do We Study Folklore? 477 marriages ", that is for singing traditional verses which link names

together. When they meet in the barn in the Catalan Pyrenees we hear " Marry, marry! Matteas of the Hill farm with Anna of the old Mhs."

and at the other end of the range, from the great kitchen of a Navarrese farm, comes a lovely air

" Paquito, handsome young man and well set up .. ." to which he replies with an improvised verse to the girl who sang to him. On the French side of the mountains Zamari Churia, the White Mare, bursts into the barn where picking the maize from the cob is going on. The White Mare is composed of two young men bent double with a white sheet thrown over them. The second one clasps the first one round the waist to support himself, the first one leans on a farm fork, the prongs forming the mare's ears, a maize plume its tail. This creature runs at the girls and assigns them to young men-but Basque girls are much too independent to be told how to walk and otherwise behave. To return to Monsieur Varagnac, who lays down that May was the month of emancipa- tion from tutelage for these meeker girls of the zone he studies. The authority of the young men slackens and the girl, after undergoing a test of behaviour, assumes this great importance in village life. The test is the planting of mayboughs before their doors as a public judgement on their oehaviour. Birch or fresh, light greenery for girls who are approved by their tutors, alders, nettles, weeds and even-in Switzerland-a " May letter " for those who are not. The letter, kindly pointing out in rhyme her faults, is pinned up on her door. The same treatment is applied by extension to girls who grow a little old for the youthful marriage expected of them-25 or thereabouts-. One such test of character I have seen, not in May but in early spring, in Carnival, at the top of the Tech valley in French Catalonia. At one point in the festivities a procession of young things in Carnival dress is led to the fair ground by a Lord and Lady- the Man in Woman's clothes-and a man carrying a plank. On the broader end of this plank or post is painted a girl's face, simpering and innocent looking over a sheaf of lilies. On the reverse side something else. The three officients face the procession and each couple in turn comes dancing up towards them. The man with the post presents the innocuous side to the advancing girl who kisses it and dances back with her partner. After a few couples have duly done this an agitation spreads through the crowd. Heads crane, a murmur begins. Up comes an elegant Columbine in short, fluffy skirts, handed forward by her partner. The post is

2H



478 Why Do We Study Folklore? suddenly swung round and there is a leering devil's face for the girl to salute. The eagerly watching crowd has been known to call out " Hit her hard! " More extraordinary still is the cool way in which Columbine flounces round to receive a resounding whallop behind from the plank. This is the Bail de la Posta, the popular justice of Prats de Mollo.

In May then, after she has undergone the test of the maybough, the unmarried girl in some way (this is not very clearly postulated) holds the welfare of the village in her hands. In some places one is projected from the group and becomes La Pucelle, the virgin, independent of her male guardian and dedicated to the common good. Monsieur Varagnac implies that all this was part of the social order of the Gaulish village. But as the young men's group rules social life far out of his zone, in northern Spain, in both the Catalonias, Cantabria and the Basque Countries we should, I think, put back the foundations of such an order from Gaul- ish to the late Neolithic village.

Christianity then substituted the Virgin for the village virgin and presently, especially in France, May became le Mois de Marie, organised by and dedicated to the girls who decorate the special altar and act as Prieuresses, Rosibres, Pabourdesses or whatever their local name may be. They are then too important, too sacred to be forced from their freedom, in or out of marriage, and May remains the month in which marriage is best left unsought.

Although it gives one plenty of highly interesting material and although it has a good deal more to recommend it than Plutarch's answers, to me this is not wholly acceptable. To me this answer to " Why is it unlucky to marry in May? " remains not proven.

Let us look further at my third proposed reason-necessity. I imagine a historian compelled to seek the explanation of some event, some phase of religion or manners. He comes across that passionate description by the Monk of St. Trond of the people of Tongres, rushing out of their city on a long ago day, to meet a disorderly country procession coming from the forests. People surged about a central object, a home- made ship mounted on wheels; respectable Tongres housewives casting away all shame, loosened their hair, clad only in their shifts, two hundred together danced round the ship shamelessly. One thousand people of both sexes ", wrote the Monk," celebrated into the middle of the night, making a noise as though they were drunk."

This is a genre de vie unsuspected indeed by our history student. It was of course an astonishing recrudescence of paganism for the year 1133, but when he learns that the ship was seen in Cologne not long since and is seen



Why Do We Study Folklore? 479 every year in northern Switzerland he learns to accept it at its folklore value. He will learn of the Ship of Fools at the great Nuremberg Schem- bartlaufen ; of the Leafy Fools fighting the wintry figures which manned it and that these Leafy Fools fight winter still.

He is reading the fourteenth century in France and comes upon the so-called Ballet Ardent. He questions why, instead of a conventional Court Masque, CharlesVI and 5 noblemen, dressed up as Hommes Sauvages with frayed linen to look like hair stuck on with pitch, indulged in such wild behaviour at the remarriage of a widowed lady-in-waiting that they set themselves on fire and all perished but one. Then the ancient tradition of Charivari is brought to his notice, but if he supposes a mere survey will suffice he will find himself enwrapped in one of the strongest and most widely-spread customs still practised in Europe. To find the first literary reference to it we must again turn to Plutarch. To find one of the latest- and most disastrous-we can read the "Petite Gironde" of May I950-two killed and one wounded, one hanged himself and the village silent in face of the questioning police. To see one of the more innocuous we go to the New World, to Louisiana or to Oklahoma, where wedding guests in- delicately hurl baby dolls into the window of a honeymoon couple.

The student of prehistory has as much need-more need-of folklore. He is studying barrows, barrows all up and down England. Has he any notion of the folk memory concerning these? Does he know of the traditions rich and thick, with which popular beliefs have endowed them? Does he need living confirmation of archaeological conclusions? He can find some worth hearing in ballad and folksong. Such instances of age old memories safely preserved in song are, to me, marvels, for surpassing the tales of fairies, of princesses turned to stone, of Knights who go down to the river to drink at midnight, dealt out by guide books and sometimes by the people themselves. These tales sprang up in the middle ages, it would seem, but a more vivid picture can be found in song. A young man went to his father's (or more probably an ancestor's) grave mound to beg the magic sword buried with its owner. There was other treasure too, just as archaeology has found it. But the son replied

I want nor gold nor silver plate Nor coin from out thy grave, But all to win a lovely maid Sword Birting come to crave.'

An arm came up through the mound like the arm from the lake holding another magic, named sword;

1 Prior. Ancient Danish Ballads. I86o.



480 Why Do We Study Folklore? He gave him Birting from out his tomb

The hilt into his hand " Grasp it with firm and dauntless mood

And thee shall none withstand."2

Another young man goes to seek not a sword but counsel from his dead mother. He beats on the grave mound and from the rich store within she gives him a magic steed, a sword, a key and a tablecloth with which to set free his enchanted maiden. And our student has confirmation, deeply sunk in the minds of the makers of the ballad, of the woven pieces of cloth with selvedges found, to give one instance, in the barrow at Borum in Jutland.

The custom of burying his arms with the dead man was still carried on when the Robin Hood Ballads took shape:

And set my bright sword at my head Mine arrows at my feet, And lay my yew-bow at my side ...

These were his last wishes as he slowly bled to death in that mysterious manner apparently by his own desire. In one version of The Unquiet Grave, Sweet William's Ghost was buried with three maidens at his head, three babes at his side and three hell hounds at his feet. Which again only confirms the find in a barrow at Egtved, also in Jutland, of the bones of a child, cremated and presumably sacrificed to or with the dead woman there buried. The human contents of Sweet William's grave carry us back a great deal further than the burial of arms-so far back that folk memory can surely go no further.

Our student of prehistory will find himself up against strange signs, swastikas turning into the form called the Oviphile sign with which Basques protect their tombs and their sheepfolds; wheels and discs, flaming as they roll down hillsides on Midsummer eve, flaming as they spin through the air off a snowy hilltop, lit from an early spring bonfire, or static on door lintels and tombs-and if he wishes to get some under- standing of these will have recourse to folklore over and over again. The sign on the doorposts of the Children of Israel for instance, to ward off the Angel of Death, is thought to have been the pentagram, a potently magical figure, but does he know that, like the Ship on Wheels, it is still in use? It is folk song again that conserves it for us :

Ibid.



Why Do We Study Folklore? 481 I'll sing you five 01 What is your five 0? Five is the symbol at your door, Four are the Gospel Preachers, Three, three are the rivals, Two, two are the lilywhite boys Cloth6d all in green O, One and one is all alone And ever more shall be so.

Ben Jonson mentions it; " Their lights and pentacles ", it is found like the Swastika on Basque tombstones, while in that tourist-ridden, hard headed land of Switzerland an incredibly primitive use is made of it to divert hail, devastating Alpine hail from your own land to that of your neighbour. You cannot learn this piece of magic if you are a second son unless your elder brother dies. If you are a woman you can only learn it in default of men in the family. When it has been solemnly imparted you go into the field at sunrise and unnoticed break off a twig from the nearest green bush. This is the Hagelholz. It must be as long as your hand and have sap rising in it. You turn towards the rising sun, strip off the leaves and tear the twig apart so that it takes the form of the letter T. All metal, knives, shears, must be cleared off the field. Raise the twig in your right hand and walk backwards to the boundary; then, saying the magic words told you,3 you tread an enormous pentagram in a prescribed manner, at each point sticking the twig into the ground. On completion you stick the twig in at a certain place and leave it there; you take up a sod and with your face to the sun you crumble it up letting bits fall on your way, but not on the field. When, during the next thunderstorm the hail sweeps down it will fall on your neighbour's field and not on yours.

The student of the history of Art can date a picture by its style, its pigments and the canvas on which it is painted but its subject may still be inexplicable to him. Who is this crowned personage sitting over the debris of a feast, wine cup in hand, surrounded by rather drunken, grinning attendants each holding aloft his wine cup? A King? Why then are they all laughing at him? Or a painting shows another crowning, a bride this time, a crown held over her head or painted or appliqued on a cloth hung behind her. The student must learn that Bridal crowns were and are a traditional part of village weddings, transforming the bride and sometimes the groom into the King and Queen of the day, as the drinking King of the Bean was crowned King of a night. Our student is a young

S The spoken charm merely consists of the days of the week in the local dialect.



482 Why Do We Study Folklore? man who scorns the name of folk dance. But when confronted with a certain crowded Brueghel canvas he is compelled to study not only a Sword dance, absolutely true to its Hilt-and-Point type, the dancers having reached the figure known as Single Under, but a Country dance for four couples in the form called Longways. The attitudes of these sixteenth-century Flemish dancers are precisely those of a Confr6rie, composed of sedate married couples, with whom I danced the other day at the village of Oostham in Limbur. It is patent that the Younger Breughel was a dancer himself. And I always think of the painter Ramiro Arrue, who, when working on the brilliant strangeness of Basque Mas- querade characters, gravely said " It is not enough to look. One must know." Our student may be surprised at a Knight on a real horse about to slay a village dragon on wheels, and would have to learn that St. George appears all over the Lowlands still slaying dragons, especially at Mons where the monstrous tail-lashing Doudou sweeps the crowds, men hanging on to its tail like clusters of bees, feet well off the ground, yelling their annual traditional yell. He would note the village sports of wrestling- contrary to any known rules, the games of boules with the addition of a hoop to pass through, a boy and a girl riding one of the inevitable Breughel wooden hobby horses (toys) and the Fool tormented by dis- agreeable children. If by this time he has studied his Sword dance properly he might easily take this person to be one of the ritual characters who accompanies the dancers, but on examining more of the Flemish School he would come to the conclusion that this was the village, not the Sword dance Fool. Finally he might disagree with the title " St. George's Day " since the trees are in full, green leaf.

He examines missals, Books of Hours, seeking always his own subject, but apart from the miniatures the marginal decorations are strange and must be enquired into. What for instance are those human figures masked with animals' heads? If by this time he knows where to turn he will find their modern counterparts in the alarming Mari Lwyd, his horse skull rearing in the dusky street ; in the frightful Spraiggele of Oltenbach, Kanton Zurich, who go about in herds, their thin, ghostly heads pro- truding from the sheets which shroud their human bodies, to lap up icy water out of troughs-a most disturbing sight-; in the Schnabelgeiss, the beaked Goat from many parts of the Alps, and he will presently realise how potently magical is a beak, whether it be on a goat, a horse or under the bonnets of old women Schnabelperchten in Austria.

These creatures do not exist solely in the beautiful foliations on margins of medieval manuscripts. They are alive today, as much a part



Why Do We Study Folklore? 483 of a winter genre de vie as the Mayboughs are part of a spring one. As one enumerates them one perceives that all these instances, although divided under different headings for convenient consideration, are but parts of a whole and have led us back to the great and permanent pattern of Continuity.



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