Folklore Society Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...London WC1E 6BT (Tel.: 0207 387 5894). Dorson , 1968; A. R. Wright , Folk-Lore 39 (1928), 15–38; Allan Gomme , Folk-Lore 63 (1952), 1–18; Sona Rosa Burstein , Folklore 69 (1958), 73–92; E. O. James , Folklore 70 (1959), 382–94; Katharine M. Briggs , in Animals in Folklore , ed. Hilda R. Ellis Davidson and W. M. S. Russell (1978), 4–20; J. R. Porter , in Folklore Studies in the 20th Century , ed. Venetia Newall (1978): 1–13; Davidson , 1986: 143–7; Folklore 98 (1987),...
regional folklore Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...a regional or county basis, including Henderson's Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England ( 1866 ), Burne's Shropshire Folklore ( 1883 ), Udal's Dorset Folklore ( 1922 ), while the Folklore Society's project to reprint earlier printed material, the County Folk-Lore series, was organized on similar lines. In post-war Britain, the major Folklore of the British Isles series published by Batsford ( 1973–7 ) and individual items such as Tongue's Somerset Folklore ( 1965 ) and Sutton's Lincolnshire Calendar ( 1997 ) show...
children's folklore Quick reference
A Dictionary of English Folklore
...folklore . This, or child-lore, is the generic term used to refer to children's own folklore, as distinguished from folklore-about-children or folklore taught to children by adults (e.g. nursery rhymes ). Children as a social group clearly have a very wide range of cultural traits and material, which mirror the adult world, but the fact that much of their learning is done through informal channels, and that they have genres, such as games and rhymes, which are lacking in the adult world, makes them a particularly rewarding area of research for the...
folklore Reference library
Dictionary of the Social Sciences
... Primarily the cultural products and traditions of peasant or other premodern societies. Folklore entered the English language in the mid-nineteenth century as a translation of the German Volkskunde , and much of the early study of folklore followed the German example in searching for the premodern origins and authentic cultural traits of national ethnic groups. These agendas have faded from the mainstream of anthropological research, and subsequent theories of folklore have tracked with most of the major variations and shifts in twentieth-century...
Folklore Quick reference
A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion
... The notions, tales, fancies, legends, proverbs, magic and superstition , which stem from the people rather than the learned circles, although the Jewish teachers often have recourse to these. There is a good deal of folklore in the Bible and the Talmud and some of the folk-customs eventually found their way into the Codes . The folklore of the Jews is obviously indebted to folk-beliefs current in the various civilizations in which Jews lived. These were taken over, often in their original vocabulary, but generally given a Jewish...
folklore Quick reference
World Encyclopedia
... Traditions, customs and beliefs of people. The most prevalent form of folklore is the folk tale . In contrast to literature , which is transmitted through written texts, the folk tale has an oral basis and is transmitted mainly through memory and tradition. Often the tales take the form of myths, fables and fairy tales. The best-known study of folklore is Sir James Frazer 's anthropological study The Golden Bough ( 1890...
folklore Reference library
Megan Price
The Oxford Companion to the Photograph
...folklorists and photographers endeavoured to preserve what they saw as valuable remnants of the old traditions. English folklore began to emerge as a subject worthy of study and research, encouraged by the foundation of the Folklore Society in 1868 , the introduction of scholarly journals such as Folklore (f. 1890 ), and academic conventions like the 1891 International Folklore Congress in London. Members of the Folklore Society included archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. From the 1860s, many amateur and professional photographers...
folklore Reference library
J. A. Sharpe
The Oxford Companion to British History (2 ed.)
... . Despite the presence of what might be described as folklorists avant le mot , such as William Camden ( 1551–1623 ) and John Aubrey ( 1626–97 ), folklore as a discipline really became established early in the 19th cent. Its immediate origins are in German scholarship, with the works of the brothers Grimm being of central importance, the coining of the English term ‘folklore’ being attributed to W. J. Thoms ( 1803–85 ) in 1846 . By the later 19th cent. folklore was an established, and in many ways scholarly, field of study. Its practitioners...
FOLKLORE Reference library
The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion (2 ed.)
... , popular traditions, including beliefs, customs, ritual practices, music, songs, dances, legends, and tales, originally oral but no longer exclusively so since the spread of literacy. Jewish folklore comprises traditions that are specifically cultivated and practiced by Jews. In a community spread around the world, these traditions also inevitably reflect the influence of the respective environments. The bearers of so-called “high” culture, whether literary, philosophical, theological, or halakhic, have tended to regard folklore as a debased or lower...
folklore Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (4 ed.)
... A modern term for the body of traditional customs, superstitions, stories, dances, and songs that have been adopted and maintained within a given community by processes of repetition not reliant on the written word. Along with folk songs and folktales , this broad category of cultural forms embraces all kinds of legends , riddles , jokes, proverbs , games, charms, omens, spells, and rituals, especially those of pre-literate societies or social classes. Those forms of verbal expression that are handed on from one generation or locality to the next...
Folklore Reference library
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable (19 ed.)
... The traditional beliefs, customs, popular superstitions and legends of a people. The word was coined in 1846 by ‘Ambrose Merton’ ( W.J. Thoms ) ( 1803–85 ), editor of the Athenaeum and founder of Notes and Queries . He described the word as ‘a good Saxon compound’. See also athenaeum club...
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The Oxford Companion to the Brontes
...folklore . Tabitha Aykroyd remembered when ‘fairies frequented the margin’ of the Haworth beck (Gaskell Life , 1. 82). The Brontës learned much folklore from her and from their reading. Charlotte refers playfully to ‘fairishes’, elves, brownies, and sprites, but, like Branwell, she also knows about the ominous Gytrash or black dog, vampires, deceptive marsh-spirits, and Banshees. Wuthering Heights is haunted by the presence of the other world: the unquiet spirits of the dead, Cathy's belief that she is unable to die, Heathcliff's agonized pleas to her to...
Folklore. Reference library
Simon J. Bronner
The Oxford Companion to United States History
...Folklore. Folklore consists of cultural expressions learned through oral tradition and custom, typically enacted in social settings. Types of folklore prevalent in America include legends, beliefs, rituals, crafts, food, and architecture. As a lasting record of social expressions, folklore has been an important source of historical evidence for analyzing perceptions and attitudes of groups identified by region, race and ethnicity , religion , occupation, age, and gender , among other categories. Folklore often provides essential information about groups...
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The Concise Oxford Companion to Irish Literature
... . A very rich body of folklore survives in Ireland, owing to the country's position on the western periphery of Europe, an innately conservative element in Irish tradition, and the importance which that tradition attaches to oral narration. Irish folk narrative may be divided into the following categories: native hero-tales of mythical or literary origin; adaptations of international folk-tales; oral legends which purport to describe occurrences in ordinary life; and numerous minor forms such as verse anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. The...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought
...tell who will rescue us in times of trouble. That much of this folktale mirrors the social and spatial structure of a typical Ohafia-Igbo village should not be taken to mean that a folklore item has to parallel the realities of the life. Most folklore items do not. In most instances, folklore items are symbolic expressions that do not say all that they have to say at once. Folklore genres such as the proverb, “The frowning of he-goat does not prevent him from going to the market,” often have multiple meanings and demonstrate the complexity and sophistication of...
folklore Quick reference
A Dictionary of Public Health (2 ed.)
...folklore Beliefs passed on from one generation to the next, often throughout many centuries, especially in preliterate cultures, that include many ideas about folk medicine . Pharmacological research has shown that some aspects of folk medicine and healing are effective, but it is difficult to discern whether they originated by chance or by application of empirical observations that may have been made in the first place many centuries or even millennia ago. ...
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The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States
...modernity also had much to do with the recognition of the discipline of folklore. As noted earlier, William Thoms invented the discipline of folklore in 1846 by coining the very name, “folk-lore,” and defining the object of that discipline. Yet in defining the field and object of folklore, Thoms also clearly pointed to modernity as a contrapuntal force existing in complicated tension with folklore. Such tension also informs the existence and practice of Latino folklore, although with two important qualifications relative to Thoms's English...
folklore Reference library
Oxford Reader's Companion to Hardy
... . The omnipresence in Hardy 's fiction and poetry, from the early novels through to Winter Words , of references to popular folk customs, beliefs, and traditions is a direct reflection of his deep interest in and intimate knowledge of the folklore of the South-West of England. Presented with a consistently meticulous attention to the accuracy of ethnographical detail, descriptions of the traditional mores of the people of Wessex combine to produce a realistic image of the disappearing world of rural England—‘a fairly true record of a vanishing life’...
Folklore Reference library
Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
...area that is gaining acceptance and attracting study in academic circles, family folklore is a crucial recent addition to the body of African American folklore. Certainly much of family folklore before the nineteenth century involved tales of Africa. After the end of the legal slave trade in 1808 , with far fewer native Africans in the United States, tales began to focus less on life in Africa and more on the Middle Passage and life under slavery. African American family folklore contains an abundance of one kind of hero tale: the slave who resisted. Both men...
Folklore Reference library
Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present
...advanced general understanding of the considerable extent to which African American folk culture influenced mainstream American culture. Verbal Folklore. Traditional African American culture can be divided into three main categories: verbal (oral) folklore, customary (behavioral) folklife, and material (physical) culture. The most extensively studied aspect of black folk culture is African American verbal folklore, notably folktales and folk music. Blacks have long told sacred and supernatural tales—such as creation legends, ghost stories, folk sermons,...
