Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography by Gillian Bennett; Paul Smith

Review by: Jacqueline Simpson

Folklore, Vol. 105 (1994), pp. 118-119
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118
travellers' accounts, Juliette Wood is concerned with that
ultimate boundary (or is it a threshold?) between life and
death and the way in which it has also shaped our "cultural
attitudes about the spatial organisation of the world"; the
concept of thresholds and boundaries in religion is captured
by Roy Porter (old Testament and early religions in the
Near East), Theo Brown (metaphorical interpretation of the
Devonshire song "Widdecombe Fair"), Karin Kvideland (the
customs of sin-eating on the Welsh border), and Ruth
Richardson (popular rites between death and burial).
Although the speakers/writers range widely in their
choice of application of the central topic, there is less
diffusion in this collection of papers than might have
asserted itself. That very "real" boundaries and thresholds
can serve as stimuli for the creation of narrative responses
and the enactment of rituals is perhaps not an innovative
thought per se, but such reflexes are in this volume shown
to have undergone actualisations not yet fully explored, or
uninvestigated altogether. Similarly the eschatological
symbolism of spatial and temporal bounds in our lives has
been demonstrated to be present in both theological
exegesis and the interpretation of less obvious profane
situations and expressive elements in our culture. Katharine
Briggs would have been pleased with this collection of
papers produced by member of "her" club.
W.F.H. Nicolaisen
University of Aberdeen
Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Play-
ing Games. By Lawrence Shick. Buffalo, NY: Prome-
theus Books, 1991. 448pp. ISBN 0 87975 693 5. ?10.95.
I am sure I share with most modern day godparents the
experienceof watchingapparentlynormalchildrenturninto
grotesque monsters as they abandon you once again in the
Tomb of the Lizard King or somewhere between a haunted
volcano and the Labyrinth of the Slave Lords. Any medi-
evalist who hasn't played Dungeons and Dragons with an
eight year old has missed out on a profoundly humbling
experience. Lawrence Shick has produced an encyclopedic
guidebook to role-playing games listed according to subject;
the category Fantasy, for example, is further divided in the
Ancient world, Arthurian, Oriental, Sword and Sorcery and
Other. Shick defines a role-playing game as one which
contains rules for "quantified interactive storytelling." The
distinguishing feature of these games is that the player's
own choices and creativity, working within the limits of a
"quantified" character, actively contributes to the develop-
ment of the game. The reliance of these games on "tradi-
tional" characters and situations applied in this very
modern form is itself of interest to folklorists. So too are the
attitudes to role-playing games, and related forms such as
computer games, which see them in varied terms, every-
thing from expanding the imagination through traditional
narrative situations to morally corrupting by encouraging
young minds to identify with the powers of darkness. The
book is intended for the games-playing enthusiast and is in
no sense a study of the games, but it does include a brief
historical introduction, and it attempts both to organise the
vast amount of data and to identify and define the genre.
Juliette Wood
LinacreCollege, Oxford
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Reviews
Gothick Guides, Aylesbury, Bucks: Shire Publica-
tions Ltd, 1989, 1992. Gothick Cornwall. By Jennifer
Westwood. 70pp. ?3.95. Gothick Norfolk. By Jennifer
Westwood. 48pp. ?2.50. Gothick Hertfordshire. By
Jennifer Westwood. 52pp. ?3.95. Gothick North-
amptonshire. By Jack Gould. 64pp. ?3.95.
These short "gothick"guides invite the reader to "follow
the flying bat" to places associated with legends, murders,
disastersand magic within the area designated by the title.
Despite the flying bat and the oddly-spelled adjective,the
guides are well researchedand provide a welcome bridge
between the academic study of folklore and popular
interest. The format is that of a gazetteer in which each
place name is followed by a short summary of the traditions
associated with it and details of location. The summaries are
free of speculation about pagan rites or the reality of
supernatural phenomena and, because of this, are more
likely to remain current than many guidebooks. There are,
in addition, plenty of photographs and illustrations to catch
the reader's eye.
Juliette Wood
Linacre College, Oxford
Contemporary Legend: A Folklore Bibliography.
Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith. New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1993. 340pp. ISBN 0
8240 6103 9.
There are over 1100 entries in this excellent bibliography,
which is good going for a field where work only began
some thirty years ago, and whose definition and boundaries
have been so much debated. It is all the more impressive
because the editors, for reasons of space, excluded newspa-
per items and also material from related areas such rumour
or UFO lore. The 1100 items chosen constitute a central
corpus of texts and discussions in this remarkably active
area of folkloristics,and we must be very grateful to Dr
Bennett and Dr Smith for their energy and expertise in
assembling them.
There are useful comments to each entry, and a detailed
General Index which will give researchers necessary clues
through the labyrinth; by using it, one can track down texts
and discussions of individual legends, or broader thematic
groupings (e.g. tales involving animals, subdivided into
pets, snakes, spiders etc.; tales about cannibalism, conspira-
cies, corpses, etc). The largest number of references occur
under the headings Blood Libel, Bosom Serpent, Contamina-
tion, Satanism and, inevitably, Vanishing Hitchhiker. This,
of course, reflects the degree of scholarly interest in these
topics, not necessarily their prevalence in society; one hopes
that Blood Libel, at least, is rarer in the field than its eighty-
eight entries might suggest.
As Series Editor, Professor Alan Dundes contributes a
Preface which unfortunately shows him to be unfamiliar
with the terminology of legend studies. He talks of an
"occasional" overlap between the categories "local" and
"migratory" legend (p. x), when in fact many migratory
legends such as The Sleeping Army or The Sunken Bell are
invariably found attached to specific places and/or persons,
i.e. told as "local." More seriously, he objects to the term
"contemporary legend" as liable to "instant obsolescence"
Reviews
(p. xi), because today's tales may no longer be told fifty
years from now. This is a major misunderstanding. The
crucial point of a contemporary legend is that its teller
claims the event has occurred very recently; it is the event
and the teller that are (roughly) contemporary, not necessar-
ily the teller and the scholar who studies the tale. Thus
scholars of today can recognise "contemporary legends" in
Victorian novels; conversely "contemporary legends" of
1994 can still be labelled as such by scholars of 2044, even
if by then they are no longer in circulation. It would be very
sad if Professor Dundes's ill-founded cavils shower confu-
sion in the minds of readers of Bennett and Smith's pains-
taking and very valuable compilation.
JacquelineSimpson
FolkloreSociety, University College London
Telling Reality: Folklore Studies in Memory of
Bengt Holbek. Edited by Michael Chesnutt. Copenha-
gen Folklore Studies 1/NIF Publications, no. 26.
Copenhagen and Turku, 1993. 294 pp.
When the news spread of Bengt Holbek's death on August
29, 1992, it was met with incredulity, dismay and deep
sadness. Only a little more than a month earlier he had
moved among us at the Congress of the International
Society for Folk Narrative Research in Innsbruck where,
after giving one of the plenary addresses in his customary
lively and penetrating style, he had spoken of his intended
early retirement at the age of sixty and of all the work and
pleasure he had stored up for himself in the years to come.
Now it became painfully clear that this profound and
imaginative scholar who had already given so much to folk
narrative research, and could have been expected to contrib-
ute so much more, had not even been allowed the comple-
tion of the sixth decade of his life and that his retirement in
the usual sense of that term would never come. A col-
league, outstanding in his influence on the profession, and
a good friend to many of us, had gone.
It is symptomatic of the stature of this extraordinary man
that not much more than a quarter of a year had passed
until, as part of the collegial grieving process, a memorial
symposium was held at the University of Copenhagen
where Holbek had served the profession for twenty-two
years, and that on this occasion colleagues and friends from
many countries gathered not only to reminisce about Bengt,
but also to read papers in his memory. These papers have
now been gathered in a volume published under the joint
auspices of the Department of Folklore at the University of
Copenhagen and the Nordic Institute of Folklore in Turku
(Finland), making them available, as an act of commemora-
tion as well as celebration, to the many who knew him but
could not be present in Copenhagen last December.
The astonishing, certainly the pleasantly positive, result
of a sad necessity is a collection of papers which do Bengt
Holbek proud and which would otherwise not have been
engendered in this form; in their posthumous tributes the
eighteen authors vicariously allowed him to make one last
and lasting contribution to the kind of studies he loved. The
somewhat paradoxical juxtaposition Telling Reality is a most
fitting title for this volume which, while understandably
unable to echo fully the nature and atmosphere of the
symposium itself, nevertheless leaves the reader with the
clear impression of individuals striving to do their best in
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119
honour of one of their own. There is not one contribution in
this collection with which Bengt would not have been
pleased. The book's title echoes the title of Birgitte Rorbye's
paper in which she takes a sympathetic look at Holbek's
own writings and scholarship that she sees as a "multi-
levelled narrative." Jean Pio's personal reminiscences, John
Lindow's "Notes on Bengt Holbek's Interpretation of King
Lindorm" ("Transforming the Monster"), and the extensive
bibliography of Holbek's publications edited by Michael
Chesnutt also speak directly to the honoree's own work, but
whether one takes Bengt af Klintberg's analysis of "The
Parson's Wife" (AT 755), Hans-Jorg Uther's account of "The
Bremen Town Musicians" (AT 210), Reimund Kvideland's
comments on "The Study of Folktale Repertoires," Gun
Herranen's investigation of "A Blind Storyteller's Perception
of Reality," Michele Simonsen's "Remarks on the 'Reflection
Theory' as Applied to Folktales" (as a specific instance of
the study of the relationship between folktales and reality),
Ulf Palmenfelt's contribution to an "Understanding of Folk
Legends," Minna Skafte Jensen's observations on "The Fairy
Tale Pattern in the Odyssey," Brynjulf Alver's exposition of
Axel 01rik's famous epic laws of Folk Narrative," Lee
Haring's conceptualisation of "The Folklore of Hurt," Ines
Kohler-Zulch's thoughts on "The Story of the Nails of the
Cross," Michael Chesnutt's survey of "The Demise of
Historicism in Nordic Folktale Research," Leea Virtanen's
provocative questioning "Is the Comparative Method out of
date?" or Lisbet Torp's examination of traditional music and
dance in Greece, not one of these authors omits to acknowl-
edge or confess to Bengt Holbek's seminal influence-
several of them call it "inspiration"--on their own ap-
proaches and way of thinking, in agreement as well as
disagreement. First and foremost among his publications
cited in his PhD thesis Interpretationsof Fairy Tales: Danish
Folklore in a European Perspective, published as Folklore
Fellows Communications, no. 289 (1987), but "Games of the
Powerless" (English version 1977), "The Social Relevance of
Folkloristics" (1978), and "Tacit Assumptions" (English
version 1981) also appear to have been particularly influen-
tial. Such acknowledgements are not just the customary
homage paid to the recently deceased; piety of this kind
would have been inappropriate for someone like Bengt
Holbek. They rather reflect the genuine gratitude of those
whose scholarly and personal lives have been touched by
the honoree; more than anything else, more than even the
cumulative substance, it is this continued presence of
Holbek himself that gives the volume under review its
persuasiveness and direction. What else can one say but
"Mange tak, Bengt."
W.F.H. Nicolaisen
University of Aberdeen
Proverbs are Never out of Season: Popular Wisdom
in the Modem Age. By Wolfgang Meider. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. xviii +
284pp. Bibliography. Index. Illus. ?25.00 hb.
One would have thought that after more than fifty (!) books
and a host of other publications on the subject, even "Mr
Proverb" might have run out of something new to say but
one should never underestimate Wolfgang Meider, doyen
of paremiological studies and indefatigable editor of
Proverbium.The book under review-dedicated to his late