Link Roundup

England - The Land Without Folklore?

Folklore and Mythology Catalogue: Its Lay-Out and Potential for Research

Balkan and Carpathian Links of the Mythology of the Peoples of the Caucasus

Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance

Folk Research: A Query and a Critique

The Relationship between Oral and Literary Tradition as a Challenge in Fairy-Tale Research: The Case of Finnish Folktales

Female Warrior Ballads

 

Source: Historie der Engelsche zee-roovers (1725)

The Warrior Women Project is a database for English-language ballads depicting female combatants. Most of these texts are known to us because of Dianne Dugaw's extensive archival work for her book Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (1989). As the book shows, this trope was flexible, appearing in all types of modes. A sampling of ballads proves this:

Mary Ambree is one of the oldest of these ballads. Three thousand enemy soldiers surround a troop. Amidst battle, the sergeant dies. His lover swears revenge, donning a helmet, grabbing a sword, and leading her men into the fray. She's betrayed by a member of her unit, but prevails.

The Valiant Virgin has an unusually strong homoerotic element between the disguised heroine and her lover. An heiress loves a farmer but her father wants her to marry a wealthy man. He has the farmer conscripted. They become a soldier and a surgeon mate, respectively, aboard a vessel. After returning home, they learn her father is dead, and marry.

Susan's Adventures on a British Man of War skips the courtship period to jump into the action. A man is called to sea; his lover follows. The endure menial labor, harsh weather, and deadly battles until they arrive home.

William and Harriet is a largely romantic narrative with a tragic ending. A daughter and father argue over her romance with a farmer. The man decides to have the lad drafted. The lovers join the navy together, with the girl disguised as a boy. A shipwreck strands them on an uninhabited, uninhabitable island where they die.

The Female Cabin Boy, Or the Row Among the Sailors parodies the idea of a woman pretending to be a man. An adventurous maiden enters a year-long position on a boat. The captain learns the truth and gets frisky with her. She gets pregnant. Everyone celebrates.

Jack Munro gives roughly equal attention to wooing and warring. A girl in love with a sailor joins him in a war with Germany. She does well. She reveals her identity to her lover and they are married. When they return to England, she reunites with her parents and even the queen is amused by their situation.

The Transmogrified Witch

Tales about witches are popular in European folk narrative traditions. "Hansel and Gretel" tells of two abandoned children beset by a cannibalistic woman in a gingerbread house. Baba Yaga in "Vasilisa the Beautiful" is also a flesh-eating enchantress living alone within a dark forest. But there is an arguably more widespread story: that of the sorceress who morphs into an animal to make mischief.

Werewolf of Apchon (1590 - 1611)

The Severed Hand: I (1851)

The Severed Hand: II (1852)

Beer Cats (1863)

Auvergne Witch (1865)

The Witch Girl (1873)

Witches of Thurso (1877)

Hunted Hare (1879)

The Miller and the Cat (1883)

Witches of the Inn (1887)

Island Insect (1890)

Georgian Mill Witch (1894)

The Cat Which Lost a Claw (1896)

The Brothers who married Witches (1899)

The Doe Witch (1909)

The Weaver's Wife and the Witch (1911)

Various versions (1913)

Cat on the Lap (1914)

The Woman-Cat: I (1917)

Woman-Cat: II (1921)

Woman-Cat: III (1922)

Woman-Cat: IV (1923)

Sop, Doll, Sop (1925)

Cat Witches (1926)

Southern Witch (1926)

Witch of Laggan (1926)

The Witch and the Overseers (1928)

Vernon Castle Witches (1929)

Cats and the Occult (1933)

A Witch in the Form of a Black Cat (1934)

Swarm of Cats (1938)

The Witch-Cat Woman (1942)

Review: The Heroine with 1001 Faces

 

The Heroine with 1001 Faces is an examination of women and their stories from antiquity to the twenty-first-century. It has an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. Each chapter covers multiple, frequently overlapping topics, but the material can be divided into five broad categories: Joseph Campbell’s writings and legacy, female characters in classical texts (e.g., Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses), the silencing and discrediting of women, curiosity (etymology, connotations, artistic representations, etc.), and female writers in fiction and real life. Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic Languages and Folklore and Mythology, is theoretically well-equipped to write a monograph about heroines. In actuality, her work is an mixed production that provides uneven information about its subjects.

For instance, Tatar possesses an impressive knowledge of literature and folklore; she identifies a direct reference to Homer in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (49), an allusion to The Thousand and One Nights in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (107), and draws parallels between Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (272 – 273). Her expertise extends to the biographical parts of Anglophone literature. She quotes successful authoresses who were self-deprecating or disparaging of each other's work: Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, George Eliot, Sylvia Townsend Warner (136) and Agatha Christie (224). Tatar's educational background also enables her to notice the shortcomings of higher institutions. Harvard courses in English and American Studies left out popular books like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and L. M. Montogomery’s Anne of Green Gables (175) while the Oxford English Dictionary misidentified Raymond Chandler’s story, “Bay City Blues” (1937), as the earliest literary use of the term “private eye.” It was used previously in Carolyn Keene’s 1930 novel, Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn (207 – 208).

Tatar demonstrates less knowledge of Greek and Roman texts. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad are praised for retelling The Iliad and The Odyssey from female perspectives. Ovid’s Heroides did that centuries earlier and broached themes present in the retellings, like Penelope’s frustrations with Odysseus. Tatar doesn't mention Heroides, thus missing an opportunity for comparative analyses of all three and showcasing their unique features. Tatar also neglects to mention the “Homeric Question” – a longstanding debate about the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The topic is worth considering since she expresses concern about the “unsettling sexual politics and gender dynamics in myths, epics, and stories from times past” (15) and it might have influenced her thinking to know that multiple bards, in different eras, shaped the texts. Additionally, she may have had thoughts about Samuel Butler’s argument that a woman composed one of Western culture’s canonical poems. 

Tatar also falters with regard to gender-nonconforming figures. Female warriors like Joan of Arc, Scáthach, Judith of Bethulia, and the Amazons are referenced (26) but assessed collectively rather than individually, resulting in errors like her assertion that Amazons are chaste and virginal, despite Queen Hippolyta marrying and having a son, Hippolytus. Other fighting women -  Mulan, Banu Goshasp, Li Chi, and Bradamante - go unmentioned even in a section titled “Warrior Women” (257 – 262). Likewise, transgender characters like Tiresias, Iphis, and Caeneus appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses, yet Tatar never mentions them despite discussing the text extensively and her admission that trans and nonbinary identities are becoming mainstream (268).  

The epilogue describes the book as an effort to "acknowledge, credit, and memorialize women, real and imagined, from times past" (288). From that perspective, Tatar covers an adequate number of characters and people. But the depth and breadth of Heroines is undermined by omissions that reduce it from a representative study to an introductory text.

Link Roundup

 Are Folklorists Studying the Tales of the Folk?

Sensationalist Scholarship: A Putative “New” History of Fairy Tales

The Teacher and the Taught: Structures and Meaning in the "Arabian Nights" and the "Panchatantra"

Folklore's Nature and the Sun's Myth

Some Unpublished Correspondence Between William Forsell Kirby and William Alexander Clouston

Review: Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World

Kathleen Ragan’s anthology seems like a triumph of folktale scholarship. She compiled 100 individual tales (rescuing some from obscurity), adhered to folkloristic standards by faithfully reproducing the content and wording of the texts, and provided cultural context in the endnotes. However, the anthology displays a multitude of editorial oversights that hinder its full potential.

Ragan herself lamented the "dearth of South American Indian stories," citing the limited availability of English language materials as the cause. However, the sole SAI tale she included - "The Magic Eagle" - came from Genevieve Barlow's Latin American Tales, which featured another female-centered story: "The Search for the Magic Lake." Moreover, Johannes Wilbert and Karin Simoneau published a twenty-four volume series called Folk Literature of South American Indians, which was completed six years before Ragan's debut anthology.

Another shortcoming is the inconsistent information given in the commentaries. Sometimes they summarize the plots while highlighting aspirational traits the protagonists have. Others give short biographies of historical figures. Occasionally, they contain personal anecdotes or describe Ragan's feelings about a story. This could've been remedied by focusing on folkloristics. For instance, "Whuppity Stoorie" provided an opportunity to discuss the AT Index (later ATU) and other variants of tale type 500 like "Rumpelstiltskin" and "Tom Tit Tot." Similarly, "The Pigeon's Bride" could've mentioned Motif D350, "Transformation: bird to person." Information about the tradition-bearers (name, age, gender, context, etc.) could also have been added whenever such data was available.

The inconsistencies extend to the content of the tales which infrequently contradict Ragan's stated motive for creating the anthology: "In the scarcity and poor quality of heroines my daughter was constantly told 'you don’t exist, you’re not important.' I love my girl too much to let her listen to that." Thus, she sought folktales in which “The main characters are female and they are worthy of emulation.” If so, then why include abusive protagonists? “The Three Sisters and Their Husbands, Three Brothers,” depict women manipulating and publicly humiliating their spouses; "The Fortune-Teller," cons men into paying for a fraudulent prediction; “The Innkeeper’s Wise Daughter,” violates her prenuptial agreement and abducts her unconscious husband; “Molly Cotton-Tail Steals Mr. Fox’s Butter,” centers a thief, who encourages violence against her patsy, and causes a years-long family feud; “The Close Alliance: A Tale of Woe,” the protagonist accuses her husband of laziness, insults his intelligence, and dismisses his fear of the tiger; "A Calabash of Poi" has a goddess ruin a household's crops because the residents offended her; and in “Moremi and the Egunguns,” the protagonist escalates nonviolent raids into a war and commits human sacrifice. While these characters are outnumbered by heroic ones, Ragan never acknowledges how they are incompatible with her standards.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is among the best folktale anthologies ever published. It's representative sample of international folktales is rivaled by few other books and this alone make the book required reading for general readers and folklorists.

Spooky Tales

 

Halloween is coming! Some people will be taking their children or younger siblings out trick-or-treating. Others will be handing out candy (preferably not laced with poison or razors). But for anyone staying indoors and ignoring the sounds and pranks of the kids, here are horror-flavored folktales to keep you up:

The Soldier and the Vampire

Bluebeard

The Tailor and the Corpse

Sop, Doll, Sop

The Three Cows

The Wolf

Bonus: The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (1989) by David J. Hufford