Folklore on Googlebooks

Google Books is awesome. Browsing through it is like visiting a well-stocked library. Over time more and more books are becoming available for full perusal, which is definitely a welcoming development. I have stocked my personal elibrary with dozens of folklore journals and books (most dating from over a hundred years ago). Going through those works you can stumble across some real gems.

I am currently going through the 1908 issue of the journal Folk-lore. The articles I have read so far have been doozies. The President's Address by M. Gaster is a must-read if only for it's unflinchingly purple prose.

Reading old journals is a great method of gauging the academic zeitgeist of the era. Take, for example, W. Crooke's "Some Notes on Homeric Folk-lore." Granted at the time academics were still actually hashing out the idea of The Iliad and The Oddyssey as being products of an oral culture, and there was still an argument over the whole issue of authorship of Homer's epics. But this article attempted to place the arguments into some sort of context, but the context Crooke placed it into was heavily (I mean heavily. . .) influenced by Frazer's The Golden Bough. We get the scattershot approach: going all over to place to Egypt, the Indus Valley, Samoa, Celtic lore, Norse lore, and I am leaving out tons of other examples. It makes for great - if excruciating - reading.

I just finished reading a Manx fairytale in the Collectanea section of the journal, which humored me to no end, even though the collector made many decisions a contemporary would never make. It stil lmade for great reading.