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!