The folkloric roots of science fiction

There are a lot of claimants to the title of inventor of science fiction - Hugo Gernsback, Mary Shelley, and more. But although it hasn't always been seen as a distinct, special sort of fiction, telling stories that incorporate an element of presently-impossible technological achievement and imagining speculative worlds has been part of human civilization forever. Many of the early stories, however, are folklore rather than speculation, and so we don't usually consider them when we discuss the emergence of the genre.

Lady Charlotte Guest and the remaking of Celtic mythography

The sources known to us today which give the earliest legends known from Wales are the opening four sections of the Mabinogion, the work now often regarded as the canonical compilation of old Welsh myths and legends. These four "branches" tell of heroes who were once worshiped as Gods, and in a straightforward voice reminiscent of the Icelandic Sagas they present the ambitions, triumphs, and betrayals of these characters. But the history of the Mabinogion - and even of the idea that there is such a book - reveals far more than just what tales were told in high medieval Wales.

The Ongoing Arthurian Revival

Nineteenth-century Romantics are a major source of our current understanding of the Matter of Britain. Their involvement has codified the versions of the stories now most often thought of as "canon" by enthusiasts of the legends, smoothed out the conflicts between different stories, and thus leveled off a lot of the detail of interest to the historical folklorist that's found in the early sources. But their interest is also why the Matter of Britain is well-known at all - today, few people other than enthusiasts of medieval history or French literature can tell the story of the death of Roland, few who haven't studied the classics could give you a summary of the life story of Alexander the Great or any part of the history of pre-Homeric Thebes, westerners know the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Journey to the West only if they study East Asian culture in at least a little bit of depth, but King Arthur has been on Broadway twice, riffs on the story can draw big box-office crowds in part by trading on how they differ from the classic story, and as much as it departs from the traditional plot, the BBC's Merlin can still expect the audience to feel like a significant moment just happened when an episode ends by revealing a child character's name to be Mordred.

Kings of Pre-Roman and Sub-Roman Britain

Nearly all of our knowledge of the history of the Britons during the Roman and Sub-Roman periods comes from chronicles written by historians writing during the medieval period. This is a problem, because these chronicles are laughable at best.

Burns, Modernity, and the Folk Process

We've seen examples many times before of artists who rework folkloric material in a literary manner, to suit their own preferences. I myself have done so many times, both in condensing the longer ballads I translate into performable versions and in taking things I know from multiple sources and deriving a version which I eager to perform. On this blog, we've seen at least two examples of one of the most prolific poets to make extensive use of this tactic: the 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns.

Pagan Survival Hypotheses

Cecil Sharp, in collecting English sword dances, proposed that they were a continuation of pre-Christian fertility rites, and that the mock execution of the captain (who often wears fur) in many was a memory of ancient animal sacrifices. It's not uncommon to see it suggested that the Easter Bunny reflects the fact that eggs and rabbits were both symbols associated with an early Germanic fertility goddess named "Ostara," from whose name we get the modern English word "Easter." James Frazer's The Golden Bough posits that Germanic sacral kingship, as practiced in early England, was remembered in the poem "John Barleycorn." The "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" signs are frequently said to relate to how Roman emperors signaled their wishes at gladiatorial games. And the list goes on.

No, no, and no! Sword dances originated in the fourteenth century, the hare as an Eastertide symbol in the sixteenth, and "John Barleycorn" in the late fifteenth century at the earliest - and, in those early versions, he doesn't undergo the resurrection that inspires Frazer to connect the alleged folk practice with his dubious category of "life-death-rebirth deities." The thumbs-up connection is actually reasonable, except that the modern gestures come to us from later paintings which seem to have misinterpreted the written descriptions of the ancient versions, and of course we no longer use either in a way that literally calls for somebody to die violently. In truth, the supposition that modern folk customs so often preserve accurate memories of ancient practices otherwise forgotten is pure Victorian fantasy.