An Editorial Conundrum

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is to be welcomed as a way of overcoming the limitations of narrow specialization and the blinders that inevitably follow from immersion in a particular discipline's worldview. To that end, the Journal of Folklore Research explicitly welcomes submissions from scholars in related fields, as our stated mission is to provide international forum for current theory and research among scholars of folklore and related fields. This goal carries a pair of demands: first, that folklorists must remain open to approaches from other disciplines; second, that folklorists think hard about how they can best convey their work so that scholars in other fields will take heed (a task that may include making explicit our own disciplinary assumptions). An article that appears in the current issue, Ouroboros as an Auroral Phenomenon, presented an interesting challenge to your editors and especially to our commitment to interdisciplinary research. In this article, Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs and Anthony L. Peratt draw upon research in plasma physics and astronomy to present a novel hypothesis for the motif of the cosmic worm ouroboros, who constantly eats his own tail and is related to the Midgard Serpent (motif A876) and Leviathan (A876.1). This mythic motif is both ancient and widespread across the world, and the authors seek to answer one of the oldest questions that has plagued folklorists, namely, how does the same motif come to be found in such widely scattered places? Since the paper drew upon both comparative mythology and astronomy/physics, we sent the paper out for review to both folklorists and scientists. The folklorists considered the topic interesting and the treatment of comparative data valuable; these concerns form the bulk of the article. Regarding Van der Sluijs and Peratt's concluding arguments about the origin of the ouroboros image, the folklorists disclaimed knowledge of the science but were intrigued by resonances with, if not resurgences of, nineteenth-century themes in comparative myth study: