The Place of Folklore

Abstract

In the humanities folklore has won for itself only a small place. This is not surprising because it has not been able to free itself completely from the antiquarian and dilettante tradition of collecting curiosities. Proverbs, tales, ballads, customs, or superstitions are thought to be quaint and are recorded and studied for that reason. In the fifteenth century, Italian humanists brought to Germany the idea of an objective description of a country and had imitators who illustrated accounts of Westphalia and Ulm with local proverbs, stories of ghosts and nixes, wedding customs, and other bits of folklore. A little later Johannes Boemus, who ranged more widely in his Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (1520), and Sebastian Franck, who limited himself to Germany, proceeded more systematically. Franck saw that a knowledge of customs and manners contributed as much as knowledge of political, legal, or ecclesiastical history to the understanding of a people. Such collections of materials had, however, a somewhat nationalistic tinge and did not amount to much more than contributions to ethnography, history, or geography. A similar subordination of folklore to history and geography is seen in William Camden, Remaines of a greater worke concerning Britaine (1605). The second edition of this book (1614) contained the first alphabetical collection of English proverbs to be printed in England and we can therefore call it an early example of the organized presentation of folklore. The making of records continued and the manner of presenting them improved somewhat, but a systematic study of folklore did not arise. At the end of the seventeenth century scientific work that had been stimulated by the foundation of the Royal Society led John Aubrey to make two valuable collections of folklore and the miscellaneous interests of German and other polymaths included it. Divergent as these activities were, they did not reinforce each other and did not establish folklore as a recognized branch of the humanities.