Festivus for the Rest of Us

Happy solstice season! Here are some books to leave under the Festivus pole of your loved folklorists:

• Singing for the Gods: Performances of Myth and Ritual in Archaic and Classical Greece - Barbara Kowalzig. Oxford Classical Monographs, Oxford University Press.
• Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic - Theodore Ziolkowski. Cornell University Press.
• Observations on Popular Antiquites [2 Volume Set] -John Brand and Henry Ellis. Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge, Cambridge University Press. Reprint of 1813 edition.
• Magical Treasure Hunting in Europe and North America: A History - Johannes Dillinger. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic, Palgrave Macmillan.
• Anteros: A Forgotten Myth - Craig E. Stephenson. Routledge.
• Body, Boots and Britches: Folktales, Ballads, and Speech from Country New York [2nd Edition] - Harold Thompson. York State Book, Syracuse University Press.
• Mexican Border Ballads & Other Lore - Mody C. Boatright, ed. Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Southern Methodist University Press.
• Alexander the Great: Myth, Genesis and Sexuality - Daniel Ogden. University of Exeter Press.
• The Holy Grail: History, Legend and Symbolism - Arthur Edward Waite. Dover Books on Anthropology and Folklore, Dover Publications.
• An Introduction to Japanese Folk Performing Arts - Terence A. Lancashire. Soas Musicology Series, Ashgate.

November Spawned Another List of Folklore Books

I was either going to go with the vague Morrissey pun today or something about "November Rain," but, hey, have you seen a picture of Axl Rose lately? Not holding up that well, that man is.

• The Lore of the Whare-wananga: Or Teachings of the Maori College on Religion, Cosmogony and History - H. T. Whatahoro. Cambridge Library Collection, Cambridge University Press.
• The Archaic: The Past in the Present - Paul Bishop. Routledge.
• The Jewish Dark Continent: Life and Death in the Russian Pale of Settlement - Nathaniel Deutsch. Harvard University Press.
• River Jordan: The Mythology of a Dividing Line - Rachel Havrelock. University of Chicago Press.
• Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters - edited by Bob W. White. Tracking Globalization, Indiana University Press.
• Le leggende della terra toscana - Carlo Lapucci. Edizioni Polistampa.
• Der Mythos von der Weisheit Agyptens in der franzosischen Literatur der Moderne - Michael Bernsen. Grundungsmythen Europas in Literatur, Musik und Kunst, V&R Unipress.
• Der Konigin Luise-Mythos: Mediengeschichte des Idealbilds deutscher Weiblichkeit, 1860-1960 - Birte Forster. Formen der Erinnerung, V&R Unipress.
• Explorations Into Arab Folk Literature - Pierre Cachia. Edinburgh University Press.
• Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination - Paul A. Trout. Prometheus Press.
• Vaccinations and Public Concern in History: Legend, Rumor, and Risk Perception - Andrea Kitta. Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Routledge.
• The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend - a retelling by Peter Ackroyd.
• African Genesis: Folk Tales and Myths of Africa - Leo Frobenius and Douglas C. Fox. Dover Publications.
• Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography - Emily A. Maguire. University Press of Florida.
• Myths and Folk Tales of the Russians, Western Slavs, and Magyars - Jeremiah Curtin. Dover Publications.
• A Handbook of Norse Mythology - Karl Mortensen. Dover Publications.
• From Ritual to Romance - Jessie L. Weston. Dover Publications.

Hasta la pasta!

Friday's Folklore Roundup

It may appear that I only do Folklore Friday on every third Friday of every third month. But that is not true. I sometimes post it on a Thursday. It's half-assed, I know, but I ain't getting paid for it or anything. So enjoy, my three readers!

• The Pennsylvania German Folklore Society of Ontario celebrate their 60th anniversary this year. If there is one thing I love to read about, it is the migration pattern of Germans. I knew about the Pennsylvania German settlements down the Shenandoah Valley, but I did not know that they went North as well. I wish the society another successful sixty years!
• As I type this, the AFS meeting is going on at Indiana University. Back when I was a lowly graduate student I never made it to one of those meetings, but I reveled in hearing my mentor tell me stories about who was drunk at the bar during the meetings. Henry Glassie is giving the keynote this year. I should iterate that Prof. Glassie was never reported as drunk. In fact, I had the honor of being introduced to him by my mentor. It was like meeting a Beatle.
• The JAFL has recently posted a not-too-glowing review of the book "African American Folktales."
• Are you at the AFS meeting? Then tomorrow you can assert folklore's relevancy by attending the discussion of Occupy Wall Street hosted by Jason Baird Jackson and Christina Barr. I spent some time the other day at Occupy Boston and was moved to tears by some of the signs (a folk art if ever I saw one).
• I think the headline says it all: "Materials from AFS Undergraduate Education Project Available." Click if you're interested in that sort of thing - you probably are if you've read this far. I really liked the well-written and well-thought out comment from Robert Bethke. Doesn't he know that the comment sections on websites are for trolling and snark, not intelligent discussion.
• If I was at the AFS meeting, this is the poster I would check out first.
• Lithuanian-American folklorist Jonas Balys has passed away.
• Banjoist Wade Mainer has also passed on.

Exelsior!

Hey, here are some folklore books

Time for the round-up of folklore books appearing this month. I wants to read them all, I tells you.

• Living Folklore, 2nd Edition: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions - Martha Sims and Martine Stephens. Utah State University Press. "Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications, and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication."
• Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Curriculum - ed. by Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer. Paperback edition, Utah State University Press. "Through the Schoolhouse Door offers a collection of experiences from exemplary school programs and the analysis of an expert group of folklorists and educators who are dedicated not only to getting students out the door and into their communities to learn about the folk culture all around them but also to honoring the culture teachers and students bring to the classroom."
• Tama in Japanese Myth: A Hermeneutical Study of Ancient Japanese Divinity - Tomoko Iwasawa. University Press of America. "Informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, Iwasawa shows that the concept of tama lies at the core of Japanese religious experiences."
• Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture - ed. by Jes Battis. Lexington Books. ". . .addresses the role of adolescence in fantastic media, adventure stories, cinema, and television aimed at youth. The goal of this volume is to analyze the ways in which young heroic protagonists are presented in such popular literary and visual texts."
• Wise Woman of Kildare: Moll Anthony and Popular Tradition in East of Ireland - Erin Kraus. Paperback, Maynooth Studies in Local History, Four Courts Press. "Moll Anthony of the Red Hill was a woman who allegedly had supernatural powers which enabled her to make potions which could cure paralysis, fits, strokes and other sicknesses in humans and animals. It was said she got the gift from the fairies."
• Literature and Literary Bundle RC: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion - Jack Zipes. Paperback, Routledge Classics. Woo-Hoo, I love this book (especially the section on Disney) and I love Jack Zipes! "As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children?"
• Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New Englands Vampires - Michael E. Bell. Paperback, Wesleyan. From PW's 2001 review: "Bell strives laudably for responsible scholarship, and the book is as much a critique of myth transmission as it is a tale of one man's vampire hunt."
• The Sea Their Graves: An Archaeology of Death and Rememberence in Maritime Culture - David J. Stewart. New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, University Press of Florida. "Based on a study of more than 2,100 gravestones and monuments in North America and the United Kingdom erected between the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, David Stewart expands the use of nautical archaeology into terrestrial environments."
• The Native Tribes of South-East Australia - Alfred William Howitt. Paperbac, Cambridge Library Collection - Linguistics, Cambridge University Press. "A. W. Howitt's classic two-volume study, first published in 1904, investigates the organisation, practices and customs of the indigenous peoples he encounterd during his forty years exploring Australia."
• Codex Chimalpopoca: The Text in Nahuatl with a Glossary and Grammatical Notes - John Bierhorst. Paperback, University of Arizona Press. "In this companion volume to History and Mythology of the Aztecs, John Bierhorst provides specialists with a transcription f the Nahuatl text, keyed to the translation, and a linguistic apparatus to help elucidate it."

With this latest blogpost, I proof, yet again, that blogging ain't writing!

Summer of Folklore Books!

Looks like I took the summer off from blogging! It was completely unintentional, of course, but these things happen! I will start off my re-blogging efforts by listing some of the more interesting and significant folklore books that appeared this summer:

• Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend, and Law - James George Frazer. A blast from the past, brought back - and at ninety-three bucks, kind of expensive. I have a problem paying that much for stuff in the public domain - especially when the abridged version is free at Google Books.
• The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book: Singin', Praisin', Raisin' - ed. by Joyce Breen, Casi Best and Foxfire Students. One of my first exposures to folklore was when I found an original Foxfire book on my aunt's bookshelf. I'll probably be on the lookout for this one.
• British Traditions, Arizona Folklore, Mythological Canines, et al. - Looks like you can buy bound copies of Wikipedia articles. Who exactly is the target market for this? I assume that if you can click your way onto Amazon, you can brave the big bad internet and surf on over to Wikipedia. Profiting off of free information really gets my goat!
• Tales of Old Essex - Adrian Gray; Tales of Old Hertfordshire - Doris Jones-Baker; Tales of Old Sussex - Lilian Candlin. New editions of tales from the English countryside. Other collections too numerous to mention include tales collected from the regions of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Suffolk, etc..
• Images of Women in Arsi Oromo Folktales, Folksongs and Proverbs: Critical Analysis of Images of Women in Folklore - Ahmed Dedo. A look at the folklore of Ethiopia from the perspective of the portrayal of women, and how this portrayal runs counter to official ways of raising the profile of women in that country.
• Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Storytelling - Laura Simms. This seems a little too touchy-feelie for me, especially with it's genitally evocative cover. But I might give it a try, because I am interested in the phenomenon of contemporary storytelling.
• Myths, Legends, and Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature - edited by Daniel Anlezark. Part of the Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series. A Festschrift dedicated to John McKinnell, this collection includes essays with a strong linguistic and archaeological bent.
• Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture - Simon J. Bronner. I am looking forward to reading this wide-ranging study from one of my favorite contemporary American folklorists.
• Race, Oppresion and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Carribean Tradition - ed. by Christopher Moreman and Cory Rushton. This book might be worth checking out, especially as it may help explain the current explosion in the popularity of Zombies in American Hipster and Youth culture (I feel like such an old writing that sentence)!
• Albanian and South Slavic Oral Epic Poetry - Stavro Skendi. Memoirs of the American Folklore Society, V44. (1956) Literary Licensing, LLC, offers bound reprints of many books of interest to the armchair academic - including many editions of the "Memoirs of the American Folklore Society." They are kind of pricey, but legit - unlike those shysters selling wikipedia articles. I am still mad about that. This service might be most beneficial to those without access to academically-inclined used bookstores. There seem to be many 'publishers' on Amazon with similar business models.
• An Epoch of Miracles: Oral Literature of the Yucatec Maya - Allan F. Burns. Ooh, this looks promising. A performer-centric collection of contemporary stories from Yucatec Maya.
• Continuity and Innovation in the Magical Tradition - edited by Gideon Bohak, Yuval Harari and Shaul Shaked. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture.

Been a while, and I am feeling kind of rambunctious! Might be Tropical Storm Irene beating the rain against my storm windows. I am going to publish this post before the whole town of Boston goes dark.

Kindle and Folklore

I have long been a proponent of Googlebooks - among the millions of already-scanned books there are a lifetime's worth of books of interest to the folklore scholar.

Another resource that expands the resources of the folklorist without access to a university library is the Amazon Kindle store. There are thousands of public-domain books available for free download through the store. I received my Kindle for Christmas over a year ago, and I have filled it with dozens of folklore books.

A quick keyword search for "folklore" generated 90 free downloads. Most of the books date from the turn-of-the-last-century (late 18oos-early 1900s), but still are great reads. Many of these are duplicated in the Googlebook archive - but it is nice to have them formatted for the Kindle.

Some of the highlights available include Ralston's "Russian Fairy-Tales," "Storyology" by Benjamin Taylor, Gomme's "Folklore as an Historical Science," Charles Skinner's series "Myths and Legends of Our Own Land," and Andrew Lang's "The Clyde Mystery."

April Showers Bring a Pile of Folklore Books

The Yankees and Red Sox are in the 7th inning - but I am so devoted to the art of folkloristics that I am updating this silly blog. Here are the books coming out this month of interest to us like-minded people.

• Hungarian Classical Ballads and Their Folklore - Ninon A. M. Leader. Paperback edition of book originally published in 1967.
• Georgia Through Its Legends, Folklore and People - Michael Berman, Ketevan Kalandadze, George Kupaladze and Manana Rusiesvili (eds). No information on Amazon about this book, but those surnames definitely suggest that this book is about the nation of Georgia rather than the state :)
• A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World - Robert Bringhurst. Second Edition. Part of the series "Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers."
• Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt - Joyce Tyldesley.
• On Greek Religion - Robert Parker. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology.
• Native American Legends of the Southeast: Tales from the Natchez, Caddo, Biloxi, Chickasaw and Other Nations - George E. Lankford.
• Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue Between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings - Vanessa Joosen. "Fairy Tale Studies" series.
• Amish Folk Tales and Other Stories of the Pennsylvania Dutch - C. Eugene Moore.

Beware the Idles of March

Yeah, I'm lazy. It's taken me three weeks to get around to updating the March batch of folklore arrivals in your bookstores. If I were to find a bookstore well-stocked enough to have all of these titles, I just might have to move in!

• Myths, Legends & Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature - Daniel Anlezark, ed. Part of TONIS: Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series. This is a festschrift for the professor John McKinnell of Durham.
• The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myths in Greek and Roman Times - Adrienne Mayor. A study of mythological stories as recognition that monsters once did roam the earth.
• The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature - Victor H. Mair & Mark Bender, eds.
• Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I - Sara Libby Robinson. From the series Out of the Series.
• The Myths of the Gods: Structures in Irish Mythology - Alan Ward.
• The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual Myth - Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych. Cornell University Press's series "Myth and Poetics." A study of the Bedouin poetic cycle the 'qasidah,' which has long served as a profane parallel to the Qur'an.
• The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India - Stephanie Jamison. Paperback edition, which is also from the Cornell series "Myth and Poetics."
• Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast - Jay M. Smith. In the 1760s in rural France, a legendary beast terrorized the local population, this is the story of the legend and the facts.
• Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore - Benjamin Radford. A study of a more recent monster.
• Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome - E. M. Berens.
• The Essential Asian Folklore Collection - Various. Well, it does say 'essential,' so it better be on your shelf soon! :)
• Folklore and Legends of Rochester: The Mystery of Hoodoo Corner and Other Tales - Michael Keene.
• Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900 - Cynthia Eller.
• The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age - Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson. Reprint of the 1964 Rede Lecture.
• Dostoevsky and the Russian People - Linda Ivanits. I saw Prof. Ivanits give a guest lecture on Dostoevsky and Turgenev in grad school, and I found myself disagreeing wholeheartedly with the premise of her lecture. However, she did write one of the greatest books on Russian folklore, so this book is still a must-buy! (I think the Rusalka on the cover of "Russian Folk Belief" would make a kick-ass tattoo!)
• You Did What in the Ditch?: Folklore of the American Quilter - John L. Oldani.

As an aside, if you are ever in the Boston area, these used bookstores have a pretty good selection of academic folklore: McIntyre & Moore, Brattle Books and Commonwealth Used Books (both locations). Always worth checking these stores out.

Folklore Friday

Why folklore on Friday? The alliteration, silly. And I have Fridays off from my day job.

• Vadim Rossman discusses how contemporary Russian anti-semitic writers are using misinterpretations of Russian folklore - in particular overplaying the role of the "Khazar Yoke" in Russian history - in an article entitled "Discussion of Gumilev's Theory By Russian Nationalists" from the collection "Russia Between East and West." I particularly appreciated the analysis of the bylina "Ilya Muromets and the Yid," which I had either previously overlooked or had never seen before (you know, because of the Jews!).
• Are you a student and/or a scholar? There are a bunch of prizes up for grabs! The Richard Reuss prize is awarded to the best paper on the history of folklore studies. The Raphael Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology is for the best unpublished paper in said field. The deadlines are approaching!
• It's a couple of months old, but the wonderful blog New England Folklore has an interesting post about the Loup-Garou!
• I wrote my master's thesis on jazz narrative in the prose of Toni Morrison and Vassily Aksenov. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this book that combines my love of Toni Morrison and folklore! This blurb from the site is a ton more succinct than I can ever be:

  • Forms of rhetorical indirection that appear in the context of folklore, such as signifying practices, masking, sly civility, and the grotesque or bizarre, come out of the mouths and actions of these writers' magical and magisterial characters. Old traditions can offer new ways of discussing issues such as sexual expression, religious beliefs, or issues of reproduction. As differences between times and cultures affect what "can" and "cannot" be said, folkloric indirection may open up a vista to discourses of which we as readers may not even be aware. Finally, the folk women of Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin open up new points of entry to the discussion of fiction, rhetoric, censorship, and folklore.
    

Alan Lomax on Fresh Air

I am as far behind in my podcast listening as I am to updating this blogarooni. A few months ago Fresh Air re-broadcast Terry Gross's interview with Alan Lomax.

It was a pretty good interview - I am a fan of Ms. Gross's interview style. While not the infamous Gene Simmons interview, they did touch upon some controversy.

Terry Gross calls Lomax out on attaching his name to Ledbelly's (and others') songs. In my opinion, his answer reeks of disingenuity. It makes me wonder if anyone has seriously reproached Pete Seeger for his copyright shenanigans. I've had some professors really express a dislike for Seeger (and other popularizers of so-called folk music). It might be more reflective of the split between academia and the artist - artists make money by performing and actually creating and academics make their money by commenting and babbling on about someone else's work.

Check out the full NPR interview here.

February Folklore Finds

Another month gone by, and another stack of folklore books to explore:

• In Grandmother's House: Thai Folklore, Traditions, and Rural Village Life - Sorasing Kaowai and Peter Robinson. A memoir, but filled with traditional folklore from Thailand.
• Six Mi'kmaq Stories - Ruth Holmes Whitehead. Small collection of stories from the Native American people originally from the Nova Scotia region of Canada.
• Eve of the Festival: Making Myth in Odyssey 19 - Olga Levaniuk. Published by the Center for Hellenic Studies. A discussion of myth-making as communicative device in the Odyssey.
• North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy: As Sung in the Backwoods Settlements, Hunting Cabins and Lumber Camps of Northern Pennsylvania, 1840-1910 - Henry Wharton Shoemaker. Reprint of a 1919 collection.
• Little Red Riding Hood and Other Classic French Fairy Tales - ed. by Jack Zipes. Paperback. Seriously, anything with Prof. Zipes's name on it is worth checking out.
• The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama - Lord Raglan. Dover Books on Literature and Drama. A low-priced reproduction of Raglan's classic study (which has not aged all that well, if you're asking me).
• The Polar Eskimos - Erik Holtved. This looks very interesting - the book itself gives off the appearance of a standard ethnography, but it is actually a collection of stories, storytellers and variants from the native population around Thule, Greenland, collected in the middle of the last century.
• Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition - Alison Butler. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic.

The stack just keeps growing!

Folklore Books for the New Year!

Happy 2011 - it's about that time to preview the books that are arriving in the first month of the new year. As always, there are one or two books that really excite me - for such a small discipline, at least there is always something new to keep up with.

• Folklore/Cinema: Popular Film as Vernacular Culture - Mikel J. Koven. Paperback.
• Far North Tales: Stories from the Peoples of the Arctic Circle - Bonnie Marshall & Kira Van Deusen. World Folklore Series.
• Alan Lomax, Assistant in Charge: The Library of Congress Letters, 1935-1945 - edited by Ronald Cohen. American Made Music Series.
• Jerusalem: Arab Social Life, Traditions and Everyday Pleasures - Subhi S. Gosheh. Paperback.
• Going to the Well for Water: The Seamus Innis Field Diary 1942-1946 - edited by Rionach Ui Ogain.
• Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories - Romila Thapar.
• Mythology in the Middle Ages: Heroic Tales of Monsters, Magic and Might - Christopher R. Fee. Praeger Series on the Middle Ages.
• Explorations into Arab Folk Literature - Pierre Cachia.
• The Uncommon Sense of the Immotal Mullah Nasrudin: Stories, Jests, and Donkey Tales of the Beloved Persian Folk Hero - Ron J. Suresha.
• Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology - Alfredo Lopex Austin.

Folklore and Google Books

Google books is a blessing to us 'independent scholars' who have trouble sneaking into the Widener library! For giggles I did a search for books with the term "folkloristics" (full view books only). Here's what came up on the top page:

• A Flowering Tree: and other oral tales from India - A. K. Ramanujan. Edited with a preface by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. University of California Press, 1997. Anthology of stories from the Kannadigas of South India which were collected from the 1950s through the 1970s. The title essay includes a list of collectors and informants. Ramanujan is a towering figure in the study of Indian folklore and a recipient of the MacArthur grant.
• "From Cairn to Oven: on the use of ethnological documents in interpreting remains of historical structures" - Kristiina Korkeakoski-Vaisanen, Journal of Estonian Archaeology 6/1, 2002.
• American Folk Medicine - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1976. Collection of essays from the 1973 UCLA conference on American Folk Medicine.
• The Hmong: 1987-1995. A Selected and Annotated Bibliography - Compiled by J. Christina Smith.
• "Interview with Prof. A. K. Ramanujan" - T. N. Shankaranarayana and S. A. Krishnaia. In Indian English Poetry: Critical Perspectives by Jaydipsinh Dodiya. Sarup & Sons, 2004 reprint. Two of the hits on the first page concern Prof. Ramanujan.
• American Folk Legend: A Symposium - ed. by Wayland D. Hand. University of California Press, 1971. Essays presented at the 1969 UCLA Conference on American Folk Legend, including essays by Dundes, Paredes, Dorson, Degh, Yoder, Brunvand, Toelken and Hand. Oh to be a fly on that wall :) Two Hands in the first page as well.
• Allegorical Speculation in an Oral Society: The Tabwa Narrative Tradition - Robert Cancel. Modern Philology No. 122, University of California Press, 1989.
• "Science in Folklore? Folklore in Science?" - Dr. Alan Dundes. The New Scientist, Dec. 22-29, 1977.
• Armenian Folklore Bibliography - Anne M. Avakian. University of California Press, 1994.
• Folkloristics: An Introduction - Robert A. Georges & Michael Owen Jones.

An interesting grab-bag of items with a few gems I fully intend on researching further. Like all things google it does take some culling. One of the best things about Google Books - no overdue fines!