. - ~ Volume 9, Number 2 June 1990

CONTENTS

KEITH CUNNINGHAM "I Have no Idea Whether That's True or Not": Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 3-14 JAMES G. DELANEY Collecting Folklore in Ireland 15-37 SYLVIA FOX Witch or Wise Women?-women as healers through the ages 39-53 ROBERT PENHALLURICK The Politics of Dialectology 55-68 J.M. KIRK Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 69-83

Reviews 85-124

Index of volumes 8 and 9 125-128

ISSN 0307-7144 LORE AND LANGUAGE

The J oumal of The Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language

Editor J.D.A. Widdowson

© Sheffield Acdemic Press Ltd, 1990 Copyright is waived where reproduction of material from this Journal is required for classroom use or course work by students.

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"I Have No Idea Whether That's True or Not": Belief and Narrative Event Enactment

Keith Cunningham

A great deal of scholarly attention has in recent years been directed toward a group of traditional narratives told in British and Anglo-American cultures1 which have been called "contemporary legend" ,2 "urban legend" ,3 and "modem myth". 4 This interdisciplinary research involves a series of report­ ings of narrative event enactments including that which is enacted (plot) and how it is performed (enactment) and functions "to entertain and to maintain the ways of the group."5 Contemporary scholarship concerning narrative event performance has, by and large, moved beyond Bascom's description in his classification of folk narrative to the effect that legend is believed by its customary audience and/or performers. 6 English folklorist Gillian Bennett, for example, des­ cribed "the dual nature of legend shifting its position along the axis from fact to fiction. " 7 Bennett also called for "the analysis of actual performances and actual usage"8 as a part of the study of belief Bennett's insights con­ cerning belief. and the methodologies of discourse analysis9 and sociological folkloristics 10 suggest that a continuum is the ideal construct to conceptualise belief on the part of performers toward the plots of the narrative event which they enact. This article demonstrates by analysis of actual narrative event enactments that performers' statements concerning plots they perform range from belief to nonbelief and that, whether or not plots are believed, narrative events are enacted for a number of reasons. Performers' statements of belief in tran­ scriptions of narrative event enactments in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive demonstrate a wide range of stated belief. Performers' beliefs toward narrative event enactments can be conveniently described in terms of a continuum as follows: 4 Keith Cunningham

emphasis on believed performance non believed rather than belief X------X------X Some narrative events are enacted as though they were true. Toelken' s description of his encounter with a person who believed a narrative event plot is justifiably well known: During our friendly discussion of urban belief tales, a university administrator told one he knew of a similar story which was "actually true." . . . He told me of a cement truck driver who stopped home ... To his surprise, he found a strange car there, and being a suspicious sort, ... filled the strange car with concrete.

I. . . pointed out the widespread occurrence of that story ... My acquain­ tance ... became very irate, insisting that we step outside to settle the matter. 11 Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand's similar plot of his encounter with a true believer is also well known: This is a true story. When I was flying to New York City recently, I found myself seated next to . . . a New Yorker.. . My seatmate turned to me . .. "Why are you going to New York?" he asked. I explained that I had written a book about modern folklore, and I was going to be interviewed on a television news program . . . "What' s modern folklore?" he wanted to know, so I put a copy of The Vanishing Hitchhiker in his hands ... He leafed through the pages, .. . but he never seemed to find an urban legend that he had heard of. Then... he spotted this reference ... "A few Pop Rocks . .. were swallowed whole and the internal fizzing killed a child." The boy .. . asked, "Do you know how little Mikey died?" "No, how?" I responded... And so I was told ... how ... Mikey, the one who eats the bowlful of an unfamiliar cereal. . . in the Life Cereal television com­ mercials, had swallowed a handful of Pop Rocks, then taken a drink of soda pop, and his stomach had exploded. "Now that's an urban legend ... ", I declared . ..

"You mean that little Mikey didn' t die from eating Pop Rocks?" ... "Of course ... ", I explained . ..

"OK, then .. . how did he die?"12 Both Toelken' s and Brunvand' s accounts could be matched plot for plot by most narrative scholars who present analysis to the general public through Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 5 teaching or writing. A text in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive clearly shows narrative event performed as believed: Informant: Well, actually-! had heard about this sort of thing happening to other people. But-I have a friend who had come to Northern Arizona University, left Northern Arizona University and went to San Diego when the hockey team folded. And-he used to call my roommate and I at like two or three in the morn­ ing-and we'd like talk for hours. And finally one day-we were like-you better get off the phone-your bill is gonna be outrageous. And he told us, "Oh, don't worry about it. It is somebody's else's credit card number." Collector: (laughing) Oh, my gosh! Informant: And we like-no way. But he'd call us several times a week always late at night and always from a pay phone. And it was a pay phone near his work-not by his home so that he would get into trouble. Collector: Right. That's probably smart. Informant: So, then we went to that pay phone, and of course we went to San Diego, and the credit card number was written on the booth. Collector: Oh, my gosh. Do you think other people were using the number also? How did he get the card to begin with? Informant: I don't know. But-somehow these guys would get these credit card numbers and use them. Collector: You mean that this was a group of guys? Informant: Yeah. It wasn't just him. It was him and half that school (USIU). Collector: What does USIU stand for? Informant: U.S. International University. Collector: So it was a whole bunch of people. Informant: Oh yeah! And you know it was out of control. And it was funny because we met this one guy who was from Saudia Arabia or something like that-I forget where he was from. But he said that one time he had a credit card number. He was really rich and just down there to go to school, and he got a phone bill that was $22,000. Collector: Oh, my God! Informant: His parents just paid it because it was no big deal to them. Collector: You mean-$22,000 and his parent just paid it? (Outraged!) Informant: Yeah, and the next month it was even worse. They didn't even stop the calling card or anything like that. Collector: Well, that was really stupid. Informant: Pages and pages of bills. So--finally he and his parents went to the phone company and explained their situation. Collector: Did they get their money back? Informant: Yeah, and my friends never got caught. As a matter of fact-as far as I know, it may still be going on.13 6 Keith Cunningham

The assertion, "as far as I know, it may still be going on", is an assertion of belief, and the assertion is in keeping with the rest of the enactment. Neither collector nor performer seemed to have any doubt that the narrative event plot which they enacted was true. Some narrative events are enacted with very little apparent concern about whether or not they are true. A large group of texts in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive form a cluster of narratives which by their per­ formances assert a middle ground toward belief: A good friend of mine who was a beautician had heard this story from one of her clients . .. A very prominent business man owned a large automobile dealership and had a roving eye with the women. His wife had lived with this for several years, and she was getting tired of it. One night after he went to bed, she decided she would get even and stop his running around for good. She took a whole tube of super glue and put it on his private area. Needless to say, the man was in a difficult position since super glue hardens immediately. He had to be admitted to a hospital and have surgery. It wasn't long after this happened that super glue remover came out on the market, and we often wondered if the manufacturer of super glue had heard this story and decided they should invent a remover. The super glue served her purpose. She had gotten revenge for what her husband had done. 14 In the bulk of the narrative event enactments in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive performers give little indication as to whether or not they personally believe or do not believe the plots they are performing. The ascription in the "Super Glue's Revenge" plot to a beautician's client is a variation of the friend of a friend ascription noted by Rodney Dale.15 Since the emphasis on performance is greater in some narrative event enactments than the emphasis on truth or untruth, the question of belief is often ignored or asserted only in terms of friend of a friend ascription which gives an illusion of truth but does not insist on it. Some narrative events are enacted as nonbelieved: OK, urn- my husband told me this story, and he heard it from a new guy who came to work in his office, and my husband really believed it, and when he told me, I believed it, too. I guess his friend Jim knew a couple, and they had gone on a vacation, and they had taken their small dog with them to Hong Kong, and they had the dog on a leash, and they tied it up in front of the restaurant, and then they went in, and they ordered something off the menu, and they didn't understand what they had really ordered, and they ate their dinner, and then after they had eaten, they went out to get their dog, and their dog was gone, and they started looking around, and then they went back in the restaurant, and when they asked Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 7

the host if he had seen the dog, the host told them that they had been served their dog, that they had eaten their dog and (laughs) apparently it's the custom in this city for the customers to bring the dog that they plan to eat and tie it up outside in front of the restaurant, (laughs) so I was really surprised to hear about this. 16 What is particularly interesting is that this reporting of a narrative event enactment records a transition from belief to nonbelief and that the col­ lecting process itself caused the transition. The performer says that she believed the plot when she first heard it; being asked about the story in the collecting context seems to have been what made her feel that it was not true. The most significant comment on belief in the telling is the use of the past tense. Folklorist Barre Toelken considered the question of belief on the part of performers of superstition and customs associated with superstition among Oregon occupational folk groups17 and concluded: "(a) ... some people actually believed them"; 18 " (b) performances ... are conscious articulations of 'knowing the ropes"'; 19 "(c) performance allows for the expression of an otherwise unacceptable idea or action";20 "(d) performance may actually serve as a dramatized metaphor or euphemism for shared concems";21 "(e) performance may be an enactment of recognizable codes of politeness";22 "(f) performance may be hyperbolic or ironic";23 "(g) performance may allow for the open expression of community values or proprieties";24 "(h) performance may provide a guide for dangerous circumstances";25 "(i) per­ formance may ... in fact be concentrated expression of peer group experi­ ence. " 26 Toelken postulates eight reasons for the performance of custom which may function whether or not the performer states belief or nonbelief as a part of performance, and the eight are also reasons for narrative event enactment. As Toelken and Brunvand's descriptions of encounters with believers and texts in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive demonstrate, a number of narrative events may be enacted because of belief. A number of the reports of narrative event enactments in the Archive seem to have been enacted for one or more of the other reasons Toelken suggests for the performance of custom. One function of the enactments of narrative events reported in the Archive is to demonstrate and affirm group identity by demonstrating and affirming a knowledge of the appropriate narrative event enactment conventions and vocabulary: 8 Keith Cunningham

There was a Mexican family going over the mountains to San Diego when their car broke down. A passing motorist stopped to see if he could help and ended up taking them to a nearby phone in Pine Valley. He explained to them that if they dialed nine eleven someone would come and help them fix their car. So the Mexican family went to the phone, put the coins in, and started to dial the numbers. The man looked at the phone and hung up. He said something to his wife in Spanish. She said something to him in Spanish, and he picked up the phone and started to dial again. After he dialed the nine, he looked at the phone and hung it up again. Someone standing nearby waiting to use the phone asked him what the problem was. The man said he was trying to dial the nine eleven number but was having some difficulty because he could find the number nine but not the number eleven on the telephone.27 The narrator's group identity is asserted in this narrative event enactment by the plot concerning a foreigner who fails to understand the logic and refer­ ences of Anglo-American technology. What Toelken wrote of performing custom is thus true of narrative event enactment also: "performances (or meaningful nonperformances) are conscious articulations of "knowing the ropes" of sharing a deep-level membership in an esoteric group."28 A number of the reports of narrative event enactments in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive function, as Toelken noted of superstition, to "allow for the expression of an otherwise unacceptable idea or action":29 Well, there was this guy who was having an affair with his secretary, and his wife found out about it. The guy decided to leave his wife and take off with his secretary. Wait, I'm not sure if he left his wife for good or just took the secretary on a business trip. But, anyway, the wife got a call from her husband, and he asked her to sell his car and send him the money. So what she did was put an ad in the paper for the car for urn, like only $25 or $50; I'm not sure the exact amount, but it was super cheap. Okay, so she gets a call about the car, and the guy was really skeptical, you know; he thought it must have been a typo or something. So anyway he looked at the car and found nothing wrong with it and bought it for the $25 or $50, whatever the price was. The wife sent the money to her husband and then got a call from him asking where the rest of the money was. She just laughed and said, "That's it sucker; you never told me how much to sell it for."30 This narrative event plot is a montage of unacceptable behaviours: adultery, revenge, and taking advantage of people in distress. Toelken wrote of superstition that one of is major functions is to serve as a "dramatic metaphor or euphemism for shared concerns."31 Scholars including Brunvand32 and Fine33 have demonstrated that narrative event enactments may also have the same major function Toelken noted, and texts in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive illustrate the fact: Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 9

Well, Yuhas's friend was at a party. Everybody was flirting around, and then when the party was breaking up, people were going home together. Yuhas's friend picked up this girl and took her to a hotel room. I guess they got it on. When the guy woke up in the morning, the chick was gone. He got up and went into the bathroom. On the bathroom mirror the chick had written in lipstick, "Welcome to the world of A.I.D.S.". I guess he didn't know her name or anything.34 The possibility of contacting A.I.D.S. from heterosexual activity is a shared concern of sexually active adults in general and quite possibly sexually active American college students in particular. Many students undoubtedly share concerns about the "world of A.I.D.S.". Since the narrative plots in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive were almost all elicited by narrative surveys conducted by university researchers and students, they all, in a sense, as Toelken wrote of belief, "may be an enactment of recognizable codes of politeness":35 Okay, this is the "Fart in the Dark", and that's about a man who has a lot of trouble with beans; I mean every time he has any, he farts. So his wife had made him promise he wasn't gonna eat any. And one day it's his birthday, and he's walking home from work, and it's a long way between his house and where he works, so he's going by this shop, and he smells these beans. And he figures, well, if he eats them now, by the time he gets home, he will have already, you know, finished what he's doing so, ah so he has these beans, and he's walking home, and these are really potent beans, and he gets home, and he still has his problem, and he walks inside, and his wife she goes, "Tell, I have a surprise for you", and she takes him, and she blindfolds him, and she put him-walks him into the dining area and sits him down at the table, and she says, "I made your favorite dinner, and I'm gonna go get it, and I'll be back in a minute." Well, he well, she leaves, and when he hears her leave, he figures its safe to go ahead, and ah, he has this giant fart-it was bigger than any he's ever had in his life, and he's sitting there swishing the air trying to get the smell to go away. So his wife comes in, sets the dinner down, takes off the blindfold, and all his friends are seated at the table. 36 The collecting assignments which resulted in the transcriptions of narrative event enactments in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive were possible only because of codes of politeness in that they require performance on demand. This reporting is a particularly good example of narrative event enactments reflecting codes of politeness because an essential element of the performance is built on the general discomfort associated with using the word "fart" in polite conversation. Toelken said of belief, "performance may be hyperbolic or uon1c 10 Keith Cunningham humor", 37 and the description is also true of narrative event performance. A rather clear theme of most of the cruise control legends is the perceived lack of knowledge: This rich Arab sheik came over to America. He was an oil baron, and he bought this really cool custom van with everything in it. You know, bar, television, sofa, and even a cruise control. When he bought the van, the salesman told him that if he set the cruise control, the van would "drive itself." Well, the salesman only meant it as a figure of speech. So he' s driving down the road and decides he's gonna fix himself a drink. So he sets the cruise control and goes to the back of the van, and the van runs off the road, and the Arab dies. What's so great about this story is that it was my uncle who sold the Arab sheik the van. Ha Ha!38 The fact that in this transcription the performer claims it was his uncle who sold the sheik the van is ironic, and irony or hyperbole are also a part of the reason for the performance of the previously noted narrative event enact­ ments "The Credit Card Number" and "The A.I.D.S. Story". There may be more than one reason why any given narrative event may be enacted. Many narrative event enactments, as Toelken wrote of beliefs, "allow for the open expression of community values or proprieties. " 39 A number of narrative event enactments in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive seem to be primarily concerned with the expression of values or proprieties:

This is a babysitter tale once again. It always went around school that this happened to someone- same story with a different girl' s name substituted in. Well, the babysitter invites her boyfriend and another couple over, and they start doing some "hanky panky". One couple is downstairs on the couch, and they have all their clothes off making out. Heavy duty! The babysitter is upstairs with her boyfriend in bed making out. They are in the master bedroom. The people she's babysitting for-their room. All the kids are asleep. Upstairs they can't really hear anything. They don' t know when the car pulls up into the driveway. But the couple that's in the living room see the headlights of the car in the window. They rush out and don' t have time to yell upstairs to the babysitter. The parents don't see her, but they hear some noise upstairs in the master bedroom. They walk upstairs and catch the babysitter and her boyfriend. Needless to say, she never babysat in that town again.40 This narrative event plot clearly functions to express common values and proprieties. The girl's tragic flaw was not her babysitting per se, but the punishment was that she was never allowed to work again as a babysitter because of her violation of community sexual values and proprieties. Narrative speech event performances, as Toelken wrote of belief, "may provide a guide for dangerous circumstances":41 Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 11

This is a story that my grandmother told me twice when I was a young person. She said that one time there was a young working woman at a hospital, and this woman got off work real late at night, and she went out in her car in the parking lot, and it was real dark, and she got in her car, and she was going to go home, and she was starting her car, and then she drove out of the parking lot and urn­ she noticed that there was another car in the rear view mirror, and so she thought it was kind of, it looked like it was following her, and so instead of going straight home, she took a right and then she looked back in her rear view mirror, and that car was still there, and she took a left. No matter which direction she went, the car stayed right behind her, and so then she pulled up in front of her house, and that car pulled up right behind her, and she didn't want to get out of her car because she was really afraid that someone was going to hurt her, and so she took off in her car downtown, and she drove up to the police station, and she parked in front of the police station, and she looked in her rear view mirror, and that car was right behind her, and so then urn-the guy got out of that car, and he walked up, and she was really scared, but the police-she was right at the police station, and the police came out at the same time, I guess, and urn-then that guy told the police, he said, ''I've been following this woman all over town because before she got in her car tonight, I saw someone else get into the back seat of her car", and I guess there was a crazy man in the back seat with an axe, and she didn't even know it, and so all this time, the man who was following her was really protecting her, and I guess it's true because my grandpa still tells me the story.42 Many narrative event enactments serve as cautionary tales illustrating the terrible things that can happen if recognised safety precautions are not followed, and so does this plot. The narrative event performance "The Hook" is often fondly remembered by adults as a plot whose performance was an enjoyable part of youth: The story we always heard around the campfire was that this young couple was out after a date, and they had gone somewhere and were out parking. They were on a hill or away from town a ways. And they were listening to the radio when a special bulletin came on the radio that a man had escaped from a nearby prison and that they should be very cautious and he was very dangerous and they should beware of him. They should not try to do anything but call the police because he was so dangerous. And the way they could know it was him was he had a hook on one hand. His hand had been cut off for some reason, and he had a hook. So the couple heard this, and she got real nervous and said, "I want you to take me home. I just don't like being out here alone." And he said, "Oh, he's not going to be out here. We're safe." And she said, "No, I'm not comfortable. I want to go home." So he said, "OK, I'll take you home." So they drove all the way home, and as they got in front of her house and he went around to open her car door,-I forgot to say it was in the summertime and so their windows were partly down­ So as he started to open her door, he looked, and the hook was caught on the 12 Keith Cunningham

door frame-what do you call it?-the door jamb of the window. He had been getting ready to reach into the window when the car pulled away and pulled his hook off.43 "The Hook" stories, as an episode of the American television programme "One Day at a Time" demonstrated, are often recalled in the form of narra­ tive event performance with a plot describing the story in terms of its enactment. In other words they are fondly recollected stories about the telling of stories and are often framed with performers' comments such as, "This is the story we always heard around the campfire." By including information about the customary performance setting, narrative event enact­ ment serves, as Toelken wrote of the performance of custom, as "concen­ trated expression of peer group experience.44 One narrative event enactment reported in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive of the plot known to scholars as "The Solid Cement Cadillac" ends with the performer's comment, "I have no idea if that's true or not. " 45 Another narrative event enactment in the Archive of the plot usually called "The Vanishing Hitchhiker" begins as a personal experience story but then ends with the performer's comment, "I confess. I heard it at school, but it sounds better this way."46 Always, the unspoken consideration is how it sounds, how it performs. Toelken said of belief, "It would not be difficult to presume that performance of in-group values and demonstration of cultural 'know-how' have always been as important as 'belief', especially in the immediate moment of live articulation. "47 His statement is true of narrative event enactment too. Narrative events may be viewed or enacted by performers in ways which exhibit a wide variety of degree of belief and nonbelief, and the performance of in-group values is much more significant than whether or not performers believe or do not believe their plots. The narrative event performance is the thing; belief concerning the plot of the narrative may range from absolute to rhetorical stance to non-existent.

Notes

1. The organisation of the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research is the most visible demonstration of this developing scholarly interest. 2. See for example the series of Perspectives on Contemporary Legend books published in England by the University of Sheffield: Paul Smith, ed., Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend, Sheffield, July 1982, Sheffield, Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, 1984; Gillian Bennett, Paul Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 13

Smith and J.D.A. Widdowson, eds., Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, Volume II, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1987, Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds., Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, Volume III, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1988; Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds., The Questing Beast: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, Volume IV, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1989; Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds., Contemporary Legend: The First Five Years, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1990; Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith, eds., A Nest of Vipers, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1990. 3. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction, New York, Norton, 1986, pp.165-70. 4. Rodney Dale, The Tumour in the Whale: A Collection of Modern Myths, London, Duckworth, 1978. 5. Tristram P. Coffin, ed., Indian Tales of North America: An Anthology for the Adult Reader, Philadelphia, American Folklore Society, 1961, p.x. 6. William Bascom, "The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives", Journal of American Folklore 78 (1965), 3-20. 7. Gillian Bennett, "Legend: Performance and Truth", in Bennett and Smith, (1988). 8. Bennett (1988), p.34. 9. Joel Sherzer and Anthony C. Woodbury, eds., Native American Discourse: Poetics and Rhetoric, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1987. 10. Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, Prospect Heights, IL, Waveland Press, 1977. 11. Barre Toelken, The Dynamics of Folklore, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1979, p.266. 12. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Choking Dobermen and Other {(New" Urban Legends, New York, Norton, 1984, pp.103-4. 13. AFF SC88-CL1, collected November 1, 1988, from a twenty two year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Citations beginning AFF refer to items in the Arizona Friends of Folklore Archive, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona.) 14. AFF SC88-CL2, collected November 6, 1988, from a forty five year old female in Tucson, Arizona. 15. Dale (1978). 16. AFF SC88-CL3, collected November 6, 1988, from a twenty eight year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. 17. Barre Toelken, "The Performative Aspect of Northwest Superstition and Popular Belief'', Northwest Folklore 4:1 (1985), 13-22. 18. Toelken (1985), 19. 19. Toelken (1985), 19. 20. Toelken (1985), 20. 21. Toelken (1985), 20. 22. Toelken (1985), 20. 23. Toelken (1985), 20. 24. Toelken (1985), 20. 25. Toelken (1985), 20. 14 Keith Cunningham

26. Toelken (1985), 21. 27. AFF SC87-CL1, collected July 5, 1987, from a forty six year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. 28. Toelken (1985), 19. 29. Toelken (1985), 20. 30. AFF SC87-CL2, collected March 16, 1987, from a twenty five year old female in Albany, New York. 31. Toelken (1985), 20. 32. Brunvand (1986), pp.165-70. 33. Gary Alan Fine, "The Kentucky Fried Rat: Legends and Modem Mass Society", Journal of the Folklore Institute 17 (1980), 222-43. 34. AFF SC87 -CL3, collected October 4, 1987, from a twenty year old male in Flagstaff, Arizona. 35. Toelken (1985), 20. 36. AFF SC84-CL1, collected April 11,1984, from a twenty year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. 37. Toelken (1985), 20. 38. AFF SC87-CL4, collected July 6,1987, from a twenty two year old male in Flagstaff, Arizona. 39. Toelken (1985), 20. 40. AFF SC87-CL5, collected July 6,1987, from a twenty four year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. 41. Toelken (1985), 20. 42. AFF SC88-CL4, collected October 16, 1988, from a twenty eight year old female in Flagstaff, Arizona. 43. AFF SC88-CL5, collected December 5, 1988, from a thirty seven year old female in Winslow, Arizona. 44. Toelken (1985), 21. 45. AFF SC88-CL6, collected November 4, 1988, from a forty six year old male in Flagstaff, Arizona. 46. AFF SC88-CL7, collected December 3, 1988, from a thirty year old male in Prescott, Arizona. 4 7. Toelken ( 1985), 21 Department of English Northern Arizona University [Lore & Language 9/2 (1990) 15-37]

Collecting Folklore in Ireland

James G. Delaney

For thirty two years up to the time of retirement in 1986, I collected folklore in the Irish Midlands mostly. Starting with the old Irish Folklore Commission, the precursor of the present Department of Irish Folklore, University College, Dublin, on 1 July 1954 I was sent to my native County Wexford to follow in the footsteps of Patrick Kennedy (1801-73), who wrote about the customs and traditions mostly in the Barony of Bantry of that County at the foot of Mount Leinster, during the years from 1810 to about 1820, when he left Wexford, never to return except for a very short period in the early twenties. I have already written an account of old people I collected from in this district with some reference to the material they so generously gave me. 1 I do not therefore intend to go over that ground again except to say that I found my first experience of collecting folklore an excit­ ing and stimulating one, and most enjoyable. The old people were remark­ ably friendly, kind and above all, possessed of an astonishing gentleness and courtesy, so that it was a delight to be in their company. Not only in Wexford, but everywhere I went, they have been the soul of kindness, and remarkably patient, with one who was forever pestering them with questions about the past. I found, as a rule, as I kept visiting them, that their memories were stimulated and they recalled more and more with each visit. From Wexford, where I spent the first twelve months, I moved to Longford in July 1955. There, although I was on holidays, I began to visit old people in St. Joseph's Hospital, through the kindness of the matron, Sister Calasanctius, who was a friend of my wife's mother, whom she told about an old man who was an inmate at the time; he was from North Longford and would be worth visiting. There were other old people with good memories in the hospital who would have something worth while to tell. So I began to collect from Frank MacNaboe, familiarly known as "Frank, the Miller", because he was the owner of a com mill in the townland 16 James G. Delaney

of Rossduff, near the Cavan border on the picturesque shore of Lough Gowna, operated by himself and his younger brother John. He had such a fund of traditions, the richness of which amazed me, especially after my experience on the south and east coast of Wexford, that I wrote to the Director of the Irish Folklore Commission, Dr. J.H. Delargy, to tell him what I had discovered. I had planned to continue working in South Wexford, but on learning of the wealth of material to be found in Longford, the Director wrote back a laconic note: "stay where you are." Frank used to get homesick in the hospital and would go back to Rossduff, much against the wishes of the matron, who knew there was no one at home to look after him except his brother John, who was usually busy in the mill, especially in harvest and winter, when the local farmers would be bringing their oats to be ground into corn; for they kept up the old custom of growing enough to do the household for the year and feed the stock as well. The mill at Rossduff was the only one for miles around and was a busy place. In October 1955 I went to live in North Longford with a relation of my wife's who lived in the parish of Legga. It was a very strategic place from which the whole of North Longford was accessible by bicycle. It must be remembered that at this time I had no other means of transport but the push bicycle and the only means of recording was by notebook and pencil. The mill of Rossduff was only about five or six miles from where I was staying and so it was one of the first places I called, as Frank was at this time home from the hospital, but confined to bed. He was always glad to see me. John, though busy in the mill, at some part of the evening would appear with tea and toast for us both, and perhaps give me an account of some wake games he had remembered, a subject in which I was particularly interested at that time. John would be in and out at intervals from his work to see if Frank were in need of anything. The brothers were very united, and in fact, when Frank died, John, though much younger and very active, seemed to pine, and died within a short time. On one of my visits to Frank sometime in late December, he told me of a neighbour, a contemporary of his, named Patrick Reilly, who had been visiting him the day before. Frank had told him about me and advised me to go and see him; he would be worth talking to, and would give me much information, because he was "a very knowing class of a man", which was North Longford parlance for "he was very well up". When John came in with the tea I asked him about Patrick Reilly, and he agreed with Frank that Collecting Folklore in Ireland 17

I should visit him; he lived only a short distance away in the neighbouring townland of Enaghan, and he finished by saying he would bring me to his house. We appointed a day the following week for me to come to the mill, when I would be accompanied to Reilly's by John himself. Frank was very pleased with this arrangement as he was anxious for me to meet Reilly. I remember well it was a dull grey day in Christmas week 1955 when John and I set off cycling to Reilly's house, or rather I should say in the direction of the house. A short distance from the mill on the road to Arva we turned off into a by-road to the right, and in a short time reached the summit of a hill from which, below in a hollow, we could see a tall two storey house. "Now", says John, "that big house down there is Patrick Reilly's." And he dismounted from his bicycle and faced it for home. I looked at him in amazement, and when I recovered my faculties I said to him: "But, John, are you not coming down with me?" "I am not"-and this with emphasis. "And what am I going to say to that man when I go down there?" "You say to him that John MacNaboe sent you to tell him that there is a cast o' male (meal) ready for him at the mill." And he mounted his bicycle and went off home without another word. I was not at all at my ease, for I have always approached a strange house for the first time, especially when alone, with diffidence, not to say, some trepidation. However, I braced myself for the ordeal and went ahead slowly. When I went into the house there was no one there but an old man sitting at the fire, who had shouted to me to come in when I knocked at the open door. Presuming he was the one I sought, I gave him John's message. "And who are you?" "Frank told you about me", I said, "and he recommended me to come and see you. He said you were a very knowing class of a man." "Francie told me about you all right and I told him: 'If he's a proud man, he needn't come near me, for I'll have nothing to say to him!' " However, he made me welcome, and asked me what I was looking for, what kind of information? So I explained as well as I could without using the word folklore, which would have only confused him. He said he was glad I happened along; he was lonely, as all the family were away, except the son Michael, who was working outside about the farm. Patrick was a great seanchai (tradition-bearer), one of the best I met in all my years of collecting. He was very intelligent and a great talker. He had 18 James G. Delaney

many stories about 1898 and the Battle of Ballinamuck and its aftermath. It was late at night when I left his hospitable hearth. On subsequent visits I was made heartily welcome, and Patrick would talk into the small hours so that on leaving him my right arm would be banged from writing as fast as I could, for hours on end. With one old man sending me to another I began to be known in North Longford. One great thing in my favour was that my wife's parents were both well known and respected in this part of the county of which her father, who was no longer alive at this time, was a native. His name alone was enough to open any door with hospitality and kindness, so that collecting folklore there was not a task but a pleasure. I shall give one instance of how I went, unprepared, to see an old man for the first time. One day as I was walking up a steep hill with my bicycle a young man overtook me and dismounted from his machine to walk beside me. He knew I was a stranger, of course, and was wondering who I was. The Electricity Supply Board at this time was busily engaged in its rural electrification scheme and a great many of the staff were about the country­ side. He asked me was I working with the ESB? Without any hesitation I told him who I was and my business in the district. I have always noticed that an explanation of the kind of work I was doing immediately struck a responsive and sympathetic chord in the Irish countryman. So it was in this case. He became very friendly and began to ask me had I been to such a one and such a one? I told him some of the men I had been visiting. He told me of one particular old man living in Aughnacliffe, and his account of him was so enticing that I determined to go to see him as soon as possible. The next day I set out for Aughnacliffe, where this old man, Pat Hetherton, lived in a house once belonging to the defunct Co-operative Society. However, I neglected to ask the young man his name, and so had no one to mention as my sponsor when I arrived at Pat's door. When I knocked, a tall old white-haired man opened the door about six inches and, seeing a stranger, asked me what I wanted, in a not very friendly way. I was completely nonplused at this kind of reception, to which I was not accustomed. Usually the doors were hospitably open and one knocked and walked in. I did not know what to say, but I remember I muttered something about local history. "I know nothing about them things", says Pat, and began to close the door. In desperation I shouted out, "I'm the son-in-law of the late Matt Brady." "Oh, come in", he says, opening the door to its fullest extent. And so I entered. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, and it was eight o'clock Collecting Folklore in Ireland 19 before I left, and only then because Pat had to go "on his ceili", i.e. it was his nightly custom to visit a neighbour's house to chat and get the news of the day. In the meantime he told "old tales and sang old songs", made tea for me, and before I left we were on the most amicable terms, and ever after that I was sure of a hearty welcome whenever I called. Usually, after some hours collecting from him, we finished up with a visit to the pub just down the road. This, by the way, is a good way to cement one's friendship with the seanchai, get to know the neighbours, and become friendly with them. Often, too, in the casual conversation some excellent material is brought to light on which one can make notes for recording in full on the next visit. And thus with the family connections I had married in, one might say to North Longford, exemplifying the truth of the old Irish proverb "P6s bean 6n sliabh agus p6sfaidh tu an sliabh ar fad", (marry a woman from the mountain and you marry the whole mountain), I was accepted as one of themselves, almost. This was more important than perhaps anyone not acquainted with this part of the country would realise. The memories of the local people are long and the advent of a stranger is something to be feared and suspected. The memory of Castle spies, i.e. police spies sent from Dublin Castle, the headquarters of the old Royal Irish Constabulary under the British regime, was still very much alive. I was often told that if I had come around twenty years before no one would have talked to me. Even still, I was told by the local blacksmith, with whom I had become very friendly, that some of the old men thought I was up to no good, and was better avoided. An amusing incident illustrating this happened some months after I came to live in North Longford. It was in the Shrovetide of 1956, the traditional time for marriages. I was cycling out after lunch one day to visit some old man. There was a wedding the same day in a house about a quarter of a mile from where I was staying, and there were four or five elderly men and the local curate strolling about, evidently wedding guests, come out for a breath of fresh air after the wedding breakfast. I wished them "Good evening" as I cycled by and none of them answered my greeting except the priest. Afterwards the priest was talking to my landlady and related the incident to her. He said that he was surprised when no one replied to my greeting and he asked them: "Why did you not talk to that man, when he spoke to you?" One of them replied: "The less you have to say to them fellows with the collars and ties the better." I was fortunate in not meeting many such. Any of the old men I visited received me kindly, and did their best to help me. Because after my 20 James G. Delaney

experience with Pat Hetherton, mentioned above, which was a lesson I never forgot, I never went to any man for the first time without having the name of someone well known to and respected by him as an introduction and guarantee of my bona fides. Then when I returned to the man who had sent me, the first question he would ask me was, "How did ye get on?" and then: "did ye get tay (tea)?" When I would affirm that I got on well and was hospitably received and not let out without tea, the old man would be satisfied. I realised afterwards that if I had been churlishly received in any house I was sent to, the people of that house would have lost their good name forever. I continued living and working in North Longford until the Easter of 1956, when I bought a small secondhand car, and began to operate out of Longford town. I now had the whole of county Longford, part of east Leitrim between Drumlish and Mohill, part of Roscommon near the Longford-Leitrim border as my circuit, making an odd trip into North Longford to see old friends like Patrick Reilly, to whom and to whose family I had become very attached. All these places had a common tradition and dialect and belonged more to the province of Ulster than to Leinster or Connaught. South Longford had a lesser element of Ulster dialect than its northern part. For example, in South Longford one never heard of a man going on his ceilf, i.e. making a social call to a neighbour's house. "Rambling" was the word used to denote this, a word that was common in Offaly and Roscommon, and in the southern part of Ireland generally. Recently I was talking to an old man in the parish of Legan in southeast Longford about this word, and he said the only people he ever heard use the word ceili were returned Yanks, who had evidently brought it with them from America. But "rambling" was the local usage. Most of the years 1956 and 1957 were spent in the circuit I have outlined above, and there was little difficulty finding new sources of tradition, except in South Longford, where I found only one good seanchaf, though I was to find another two nearly twenty years afterwards through the good offices of the late Mel Lyons of Ardagh. In February 1956 I went to the Shrove fair of Lanesboro, which at one time was known as the "Runaway Fair", because of the great number of elopements that were such a prominent feature of the events of the fair. The friend with whom I went introduced me to a relation of his from the Connaught side named Pat Donohoe, whom we met at the fair, and over a few drinks I told him what I was doing at the fair, namely that I was on the lookout for new sources of local traditions. He became Collecting Folklore in Ireland 21 interested immediately, as most countrymen do, and gave me the name of an old man, a relative, who lived not far from Lanesboro on the Connaught side. Using Pat's name I was well received by his relative, and found him a very welcome addition to the old men I had already on my list. This was my first trip into South Roscommon and I was surprised to find it so completely different to the other parts of the Midlands which I had begun to know so well. Gradually I began to work more and more in South Roscommon, helped by friends who had come to live in the town, and in 1958 I went to live in Lisbride, just outside the town of Roscommon. At this time one of the first of several old men I began to collect from was James Grady in the parish of St. John's in South Roscommon. Dr. A.T. Lucas, who was then Director of the National Museum and a friend of mine, had written to me enquiring about a snipe trap, which he had come across in the Cork area, and wondered was it an importation; did I know anything about it? I was able to tell him that it was commonly used on the Connaught side of the Shannon, and procured two specimens of it, one from an old man in Kilteevan and another from James Grady. One night in Grady's we were discussing this particular trap, when a young man, a neighbour, who was present, told me of a man in Curraghboy, named John James Gately, who had lately made a trap of rods for some purpose; he did not know exactly whether it was to trap birds or animals. I decided to use the trap as an excuse to make his acquaintance, and find new sources of material. One had con­ tinually to be looking out for new sources of supply. And now I decided to change my tactics and use this snipe trap as an introduction to new people to whom I was unknown, using the National Museum as a guarantor of my bona fides. I have noted elsewhere that: "It was not until I began to collect in South Roscommon that the co-operation between the Director of the National Museum and myself became really fruitful, and of great benefit to us both",2 and went on to give an account of some of that co-operation in part of South Roscommon, which needs no repetition here. It is a fact that among country people the name of the National Museum strikes a responsive and sympathetic chord, and a desire to be of help. It dis­ arms all suspicion; and so I used this knowledge and the humble snipe trap to open up almost the whole of South Roscommon. I decided to go to John James Gately to see what kind of trap he had made. As I have already said it was only an excuse to enlarge my field of operations. I was received very kindly and warmly by John James and his good wife, with whom I after­ wards became very friendly. John James, who has lately gone to his reward, 22 James G. Delaney

was then a young, vigorous man. His trap was not of interest to the Museum, but during the time I was talking to him I noticed an old man in the comer, who was a silent spectator of all that went on. I marked him down as one whose acquaintance would be worth cultivating, and as I was leaving asked John James was the old man his father? He was. I then said I should like to come back to talk to him, and that I was interested in many more things than traps and snares. I was interested especially in anything an old man had to tell about his young days. He said I was welcome to come any time I liked to talk to his father, who was eighty four years old at this time and enjoying a green old age. It must be emphasised at this point that the tradition of the seanchai, as known in the Irish speaking districts had not existed in the Midlands for many years. It had died with the Irish language. The storyteller in the Irish language was a conscious artist. In all my years of collecting folklore I never met but once a storyteller of this kind, and that was Willie Rourke, of Castlerea, County Roscommon. Willie was a real artist and, as I have said elsewhere, "a well of folklore, undefiled. " 4 I shall have more to say of him later. Sean O'Sullivan, in that excellent little book, Irish Folk Custom and Belief, with his usual perspicacity, puts it in a few words: Even when our native culture was at its strongest, using the Irish language as its vehicle, the number of good storytellers or singers in any rural community was relatively small. True, there were far more than these who could, but rarely or never, did tell tales or sing songs. The tradition in both fields was kept alive and handed on by the few active bearers of it. It was so too with custom and belief,­ it was a small inner core of persons, within a sympathetic community, who kept these intact, and passed them on to succeeding generations ... The notion that all the folk in common were the bearers of all belief- and custom­ traditions is as wrong as to postulate that all of the folk in common invented their traditional tales and composed their songs before passing them on to those who came after them. No, it is to the active (not the passive) tradition-bearers among the ordinary people of Ireland and elsewhere that we owe thanks for the valuable stock of lore that has come down to us through the ages. 5 However, the active tradition-bearers in the Midlands were few and far between, and for the most part I had to be content with the passive ones who were not even recognised as such by the members of their own community. In fact, when it became known that I was visiting constantly some old man in the district and recording what he had to say, he became an object of respect and admiration, and to some of his critical contemporaries, even of jealousy. Collecting Folklore in Ireland 23

It was such passive bearers of tradition with whom I was most concerned, and with what they had to tell me of custom and belief they knew in their young days, and those of their forebears which they had learned from the generations that preceded them. Very rarely did I meet anyone who had folktales to tell, except Willie Rourke, and one man in Wexford named Patrick Redmond, of Forrestalstown, Clonroche. But there were men and women, especially in north Longford, who had fairy legends to tell, not as fiction, but as events that really happened, either in their own time or that of their fathers or grandfathers. Most of them firmly believed these tales. John Gately certainly did believe that the events he told me of the fairies really happened. John Gately was the ideal person from whom to collect. He was intelligent and had a good memory and never forgot anything he ever heard. He was only fourteen when he literally took over the reins from his father to do the spring ploughing, his father being too old to do so any longer. Then at night his father's old cronies would come rambling, as the phrase goes, to their house and he was an absorbed listener to their stories and accounts of bygone events, and he remembered so much because of his avid interest in all they had to tell. The memories of men like him were not handicapped by reliance on the written word, for they had little occasion or inclination for reading or writing. Anyone given to reading was looked upon as a useless and thriftless kind of person. Reading was not encouraged. At the time I began to collect from John Gately I used never to travel without that excellent vademecum, The Handbook of Irish Folklore, com­ piled by Sean O'Sullivan. I have always found it especially useful with men who were at their best in answering questions. Their memories were stimu­ lated by it and the current of their thoughts ran more smoothly. Opening my favourite sections on Wakes and Wake Usage, and on Marriage Customs, I got a wealth of material from old John Gately. With a man who is a fluent talker and has an amount of personal traditions and stories to relate there is no need to use the Handbook at first, but the tide begins to ebb sooner or later, and recourse must be had to the Handbook to set it flooding again. I have had experience of this many and many a time; when a man told me had had no more to tell, questions from the Hand book would show him how mistaken he was. I have found it always invaluable, and the only reason I ceased to carry it with me was because I had all the most important and relevant sections off by heart. Through the Gatelys I met some other excellent men, like Tom Kelly and 24 James G. Delaney

Tom Dolan, who were neighbours. Dolan was an old man, but Tom Kelly was about forty years of age, if that, when I met him first. He was, and is still, one of the best tradition-bearers I have ever met, which goes to show that knowledge of traditions does not depend on age. The only reason that the collector has to depend on old people is that they are the only ones who have the leisure to sit with him for long periods, and are only too glad to have someone to listen to their reminiscences of their youth. Tom Kelly took the time to talk to me because he used to visit me at night when his day's work was done, and often talked until the small hours. He is a very committed folklorist. Another man I met through the Gatelys was James Coyne of Dysart, an old man in his eighties, who still retained some of the Irish he had spoken as a child. Through Coyne I met his neighbour Patrick Gately, of the Deerpark, Dysart. He was passionately interested in the traditions and cus­ toms of South Roscommon, particularly of his native parish of Dysart, and eagerly anxious for their preservation. When he heard I was visiting and recording Coyne, he was delighted that something was at last being done to save the memory of the fast-dying beliefs and customs, and asked Coyne to bring me along to his house and do our recording there. So it became our usual custom for Coyne and me to repair to Gately's and many a pleasant hour we all spent at his hospitable fireside. Sometimes all three of us went to visit other neighbours whom Gately knew would have something worthwhile to tell, because he knew all the tradition-bearers in his own district and their respective repertoires. Gately used to enjoy these sessions immensely, and he did all in his power to see no tradition or custom was left unrecorded. Naturally, with this common interest we became very good friends, and a further strengthening of the bond was that he was a relative of John James of Castletown, whom I have already mentioned. It was a singularly happy time working with these kindhearted, hospitable and friendly people. I spent two years in Lisbride near Roscommon town, and a neighbour recommended me to go to an old woman, named Kate Ward, who lived near Athleague and was a relative of his. She received me very kindly as usual, and I recorded a good amount of material from her, especially some excellent fairy legends. Needless to remark, she believed that the events she related of the Good People actually to have happened. Most of the stories she heard happened in her father's time. One day she recommended me to go to the teacher in Mount Talbot, named Tim Cronin, who would be able to tell me more than she could. Collecting Folklore in Ireland 25

Although I had discovered by this time that the local priest or teacher is usually the last person in the parish to have any knowledge of the tradition­ bearers therein, for some reason I decided to go to Cronin. There are exceptions to every rule and Tim Cronin was one, because he knew everyone for miles around, including those who had folklore worth recording. Among the men he introduced me to was a comparatively young man about sixty years old, who lived with his sister about two miles west of Ballygar, in the county Galway near the Roscommon border. Michael Coughlan and his sister Brigid were the kind who cherished the old traditions and customs and kept them in observance. Michael was an active tradition-bearer and known as such. My wife and I became great friends of the Coughlans and remained so up to the time of their respective deaths, nearly twenty years after our first meeting. I always remember with nostalgia one meal we shared with them, on one occasion just coming up to the feast of St. Martin (11th November), when we had the fowl killed in honour of the saint for supper. They were some of the very few who still kept up the old St. Martin's Day custom. In June 1961, I changed to my present abode in the parish of Kiltoom, near Athlone, and I was not long there when a neighbour told me of an old man, named Kieran McManus of Nure, in South Roscommon, almost on the bank of the Shannon opposite, "St. Kieran's city fair", at Clonmacnois. Kieran was nearly ninety at this time, but surprisingly well preserved both physically and mentally. Nure is in the parish of Drum, which is under the patronage of St. Brigid, and is united to the town of Athlone parish of St. Peter's. Up to this my knowledge of Clonmacnois had been purely of a notional kind, but it became a very real place and its founder of great importance when I heard what Kieran had to relate. St. Kieran was no mere name of a bygone saint but someone who was vividly alive and a source of aid and comfort. Kieran had great devotion to his patron saint. The Shannon at this point is not very wide and all the people living on either bank had boats so that there was constant travelling back and forth from one side to the other. In fact one of Kieran's greatest friends, who lived even nearer the Shannon than he, used to go over every night to the Leinster side by boat to ramble, as it is called. So the people on either side of the river were well known to one another. These Connacht people near the Shannon never missed the "pattern" (patron or feastday celebration) of St. Kieran. It was the most popular and best frequented up to the present day of all the "patterns" of the Midlands. 26 James G. Delaney

Drum parish, where Kieran lived, lies west of Athlone, and the next parish westwards towards Ballinasloe is known as the parish of Moor, an island parish belonging to the Archdiocese of Tuam. I had never worked in this parish nor known anyone there, until one day a new man from the Electricity Supply Board came to read the meter, and naturally, according to my practice, I engaged him in conversation, telling him the kind of work I was doing. He was a countryman, from Drum parish, and immediately became interested and told me to go and see his brother, Pat Egan, who was married to a girl in the parish of Moor, and her father was a good story­ teller. Through Pat Egan I met his father-in-law, Willie Kenny, a shy, retiring man whom Pat persuaded to tell his stories to me. There were several other good men in the locality, including Mike Joe Killian, neigh­ bours of Pat Egan, who also had much to contribute to my notebooks, for up to this time I had no recording machine. So I had many old men on my visiting list in South Roscommon, and began to know every townland in the two parishes of Drum and Moor. I began in the early 1960s to look for fresh fields, and went south of Athlone on the Leinster side of the Shannon. About this time, Dr. Lucas was inspired to build up and add to his folklife section of the National Museum, the keepership of which he had retained for himself when he became Director. It was an excellent time for the purpose, because there was not as yet any popular demand, as happened shortly after, for old country furniture, such as dressers and settlebeds especially, and many other things too numerous to mention. The young women were throwing out all these things and replacing them with the shoddiest of plywood veneered kitchen cabinets, as they are called, and the like. There were many men in the Clonfanlough parish and the parish of Clonmacnois, to which it was united, who were still making and using a wide variety of baskets for their respective purposes. This was fortunate, because I was able to get a sample of each kind, and in some cases the Museum staff were able to film the baskets in the making. To be on the lookout for something for the National Museum was a wonderful oppor­ tunity to make new contacts. One of the most knowledgeable persons about the affairs and inhabitants of their own district is the local publican, male or female; the latter, as is to be expected, had the more extensive and wider knowledge of the two, as I know from experience. The publican knows everyone and hears all the news, and knows, above all, the good tradition-bearers in the district. There was one such man in the pub in Ballinahown, named Jimmy Flynn. He had Collecting Folklore in Ireland 21 inherited the pub from his father, and so was intimately acquainted with the district, which stretched from Athlone to Clonmacnois. Jimmy Flynn was a comparatively young man when I first met him, and his death a few years after was a great shock to all who knew him. Shortly after I met him and became friendly with him I told him about my search for suitable items for the Museum. He became interested and said that he would pass the word among his customers. Soon the pub became the local headquarters of the Folk Life Section of the National Museum and men would leave their names and addresses for me with Flynn, with the message that I was to call. As this district was most prolific in baskets of all kinds, my first item to acquire for the Museum was a small basket, shaped like a sand riddle, which was locally known as a skib. It has an interesting history. The man, the first of many in this part of Offaly with whom I became acquainted, was Kieran Darcy, of Clonascra, who had a skib, made by his late father, for sale. He was then a widower, in his forties, and has only recently gone to his reward. He was an entertaining companion, but he did not like to be recorded. Nevertheless, we became lifelong friends. He lived on the Old Pilgrim Road, probably one of the oldest in Ireland, overlooking the Shannon, and only a short distance from famed Clonmacnois. Through my search for items for the Museum I made many friends over the whole of North Offaly, as far as Belmont, which is about seven or eight miles on the far side of Shannonbridge. On my way into Kieran's house in Clonascra I had to pass through a narrow b6ithrin, 6 on the beginning of which, a few yards in from the main road to Clonmacnois, was a solitary thatched house, with a big flock of hens about the street. I often saw an old man walking about outside, who seemed to be living on his own. He seemed a very likely person for my purpose, for there is no better or more valuable or desirable acquisition to the collector of folklore than an old man living on his own, providing, of course, he has folklore to record. One day I remember asking Kieran about the old man in the b6ithrin, and asking if he thought he would be any good for my purpose. Kieran said that he certainly would, that his name was Bill Egan, and that he was familiarly known round about as "Bill, in the b6ithrin".7 He had just reached his seventieth year and was retired from farming. Would Kieran introduce me to him? I got the same laconic refusal as I had got from John MacNaboe when I asked him to introduce me to Patrick Reilly, as mentioned above. "How then am I to make his acquaintance?" 28 James G. Delaney

"He's a good man at working rods. Ask him to make a basket for you." On my way home that evening I put my head over Egan's half door. He was sitting at the fire by himself, and he came down to speak to me. He showed no surprise nor asked any questions when I asked him would he make a basket for the National Museum. He evidently knew me from passing in and out to Darcy's. And that is how I met one of the best bearers of tradi­ tion I had met up to this. I became very fond of Bill Egan, and felt a great sense of personal loss when he died nine years later. During that time I visited him regularly and I can honestly say that there was hardly a visit I made but I came away with an enhanced and deepened understanding of Irish folk tradition. About the same time that I met Bill Egan I happened to call into the pub in Ballinahown. There was no one in the bar except Jimmy Flynn himself, and as we were talking he said that it was not to him I should be talking but to an old man who was sitting in the lounge next door drinking a pint on his own. He brought me in and introduced me to Thomas Horan, an old man about eighty three years of age from Ballyduff, in County Offaly, about three miles away. Thomas was lonely, and delighted to have someone to talk to and share a drink with, and he was even more pleased when he heard that it was my business to try and collect as many of the old traditions and ways as possible and preserve them for future ages. He often said to me afterwards what a grand thing it was that those old traditional customs would be pre­ served. It was a great encouragement to me to meet someone who was so much aware of the importance of the work I was doing and who did so much to help me in every way he could. It was always a delight to be in his com­ pany, which was made more enjoyable by his droll humour and wit. He and I became very close friends up to the day of his death about five years later. The Spring of 1963 I always remember as one of the coldest and hardest of all my years of collecting, as I went to Shannonbridge in search of a "four-lace car", a cart peculiar to this part of Offaly.8 A teacher living in the village had been about the business of getting one for the National Museum, but had died before he could do so. Dr. Lucas asked me to do something about it. I was now on my way to interview the teacher's sister to see whether she knew anything about it. She did not. Across the street was old Mrs. Flynn's public house, a house of call for all the oldtimers for miles around. I decided to call to see her; she was always worth talking to. I had got to know her and became friendly with her some time before that when I called in one day with old Mike Joe Killian and Willie Kenny from the Collecting Folklore in Ireland 29 parish of Moor in South Roscommon. I had brought them over into Offaly to see the new Bord na Mona bog at Blackwater, about three miles south east of Shannonbridge. On the way back into Connacht it was, of course, the most natural thing in the world to pull up at Flynn' s for a drink, a pub they had both been frequenting for the last sixty years, and their fathers before them. Mrs. Flynn received them most warmly, as she had not seen either of them for some time. She made a great fuss of the two of them, and I was not left to feel a stranger. I found the experience most delightful. When we finished our drinks we were brought into another room and given tea, and that was, of course, out of friendship, and quite apart from any monetary transactions before that in the bar. After that I never passed through Shannonbridge without calling into Flynn's for a drink and a chat. Having failed in my enquiry at the teacher' s house I went across to Mrs. Flynn, who I knew would be able to help me. I remember well it was about twenty five past six of a February evening when I went into the bar, which was empty except for Mrs. Flynn herself. Having ordered a pint, and after some general conversation I asked her did she know anyone had a four-lace car? There was a big room off the bar with a good turf fire, and on hearing my question she shouted up to a man sitting at the fire: "Hey, Jack! D'ye know anyone has a four-lace car?'' A stockily built sturdy man about sixty years old came down to the bar with a half finished pint of Guinness in his hand, and said: "Me brother-in-law has one." When I asked him to have another pint he said regretfully that he had not time, as he was due at work at six thirty. He finished his pint at a gulp and went off. At this time, after almost ten years collecting folklore, I was able after a few moments' conversation to recognise the good tradition-bearer. I was certain that this man was one, and I asked Mrs. Flynn who he was. She said that his name was Jack Connaughton and that he lived in Lisduff in Belmont; he came in every evening around quarter or twenty past six, drank two pints and then went off to work at the Power Station in Shannonbridge just outside the village, that the Electricity Supply Board were building and where he was the night watchman. I had all the information I required, and I knew my friendship with Mrs. Flynn would be a good guarantee of my bona fides. The next evening I was at Flynn' s awaiting his arrival. And so I came to acknowledge John Connaughton as another great acquisition to my list of great bearers of tradition. For the next two years, while he was watchman at 30 James G. Delaney

Shannonbridge, hardly a week passed but I spent one night in his hut on the bank of the Shannon recording his stories and traditions. But even when he retired back to his farm in Lisduff, I was a frequent visitor there, and we remained good friends till the day of his death in February 1986. When I was recording an old man in South Roscommon in 1959 he once told me that an old neighbour woman, who was born and reared on the Leinster side of the Shannon near Ballinahown, told him in his young days that a man named Flynn had been hanged near Ballinahown in olden times. And that was all she knew, or all he remembered. One evening in the late 1960s, coming home from Kilcormac, County Offaly where I had been recording an excellent storyteller named Bill Talbot whom I had met through the good offices of the parish priest, Rev. Father Shaw, I suddenly remembered about the hanging of Flynn and went into Martin's pub in Doon to make enquiries. Louis Martin was alive at the time and knew all about Flynn, who was hanged during the Tithe War of the 1830s for attempting to rescue cattle that had been seized for the non-payment of tithes. He said that everyone in the district knew about Micky Flynn. He gave me the name of a man who knew one of the ballads-for there were more than one-"Tom, The Mason" Daly of Cloonaderrig, which was just inside County Offaly on the Westmeath border, about two miles west from Ballinahown village. I had a recording machine at this time and was able to record the ballad from Tom. He told me that another man named Patsy Johnson, who lived about four miles away, between Ballinahown and Moate, in the parish of Castledaly, also knew the ballad. I went to Patsy to ask him to record the ballad-but after some time. He made no demur, because by this time I was able to reel off names of men whom I had become friendly with in his own district. So on the first tape of Johnson's material, as an introduction to his excellent traditional lore, is the ballad of Micky Flynn, with the account of the events to which it gave rise. Johnson turned out to be one of the best of the old men I had ever met. He was in his eighties at this time but he had material that seemed to have escaped his contemporaries, for which I never could account. Most of it was what he had heard from his father, who came from a townland, off the beaten track, in near the Shannon, on the Leinster side, a district known as The Big Bog. But of all the good tradition-bearers I ever met, and Patsy Johnson was among the best, none of them could compare with an old man named Willie Rourke, of Cloonkeen, Castlerea. I never lost an opportunity of talking to Collecting Folklore in Ireland 31 strangers, especially countrymen whom I met casually. And it was through an encounter of this kind that I made the acquaintance of Willie Rourke. The Roscommon County Council workmen were widening the road that passes our door, and in the process had to cut down a fine copper beech belonging to us. They engaged to cut it for us in suitable lengths, and for this purpose they had hired a young man on contract, who travelled the county cutting up trees where required. When he arrived to cut our tree I went to talk to him, and found that he came from a district some four miles west of Castlerea town, a foreign country to me and therefore one with enticing prospects of as yet unexplored delights. How true that proved to be! Peter Flanagan was the young man's name, and when I asked him, after explaining to him the kind of work in which I was engaged, were there any good storytellers in his district, he replied that there was one, who was even better than the seanchaf on the radio, because he put a better skin on his stories. I was naturally excited to hear of such a storyteller and asked him to introduce me to him. He said he would get a neighbour to do so. So in a day or two afterwards I was in Cloonkeen recording Willie Rourke. On my first meeting him I realised that Peter Flanagan did not in any way exaggerate Rourke's gift of storytelling. As noted earlier, he was indeed a "well of folklore undefiled". He had a sense of style, and great histrionic ability, and he believed all the stories he told. In that he was no different from most of the old people from whom I collected. I always remember what my mother told me when we were discussing the folktales she used to tell us when we were children. She had heard them from the old women in her native Ballymitty, a district some twelve miles due west of Wexford town. She said that the old people who told them to her believed that these things really happened at one time, and that she also accepted them in the same way at the time, when she was about seven or eight years old, but that when she grew up she realised that they were only tales. Not many people realise this fact about these old storytellers like Willie Rourke, who was in the same tradi­ tion as those from whom my mother heard her folktales. Willie's favourite parenthesis was "there's no lie in it!" no matter how fantastic the story was. Collecting from him was a most delightful experience, and I still remember with affection and pleasure the happy hours I spent at his fireside, with the realisation that they were among the happiest of my life, "emotion remembered in tranquillity". Towards the end of the 1960s or the beginning of the 1970s I went back to Kinnity, a delightful village in South Offaly at the foot of the Slieve Bloom 32 James G. Delaney

Mountains, where I had made a few brief visits about eight years previously with not much success. At that time I had met a young man by the name of Paddy Lowry. Now I renewed acquaintance with him at a meeting in Tullamore and began to record him and a contemporary of his named Paddy Heaney. Through Lowry I became friendly with the local schoolteacher, Michael Dooley. One evening in late November 1975, about four o'clock, Michael and I were travelling towards Roscomroe on the road to Roscrea in his car, when, about three miles south of Kinnitty, I noticed a little old man making his way slowly across the road from the shop opposite his house. I asked Michael did he know him and when he replied in the affirmative, I asked him to stop and introduce me to him. The old man's name was William Boland, but he was familiarly known as Billy. He had just reached his own gate when we pulled up, and Michael introduced us. We talked for a while during the course of which I told him I was a native of Wexford County. Promptly came the reply: "Wesford, New Ross, Enniscorthy and Gorey." "Correct!" I said, adding "I see you met the scholars." Our conversation continued for a few minutes and Boland suddenly turned to Michael and said: "Mr. Delaney is not a proud man." I was delighted to hear this because I knew then that I had made a favourable impression, and so, taking advantage of the occasion, I asked him would he mind if I came to visit him some day soon. He replied: "You're as welcome as the flowers in May." Of course, the fact that I had been introduced to him by Michael Dooley, for whom he had a great respect, was a big factor in his welcoming me so willingly and so unhesitatingly. As I have noted earlier, it is always most important to have someone who is respected and trusted to vouch for one's bona fides. Billy Boland lived not more than a hundred yards from Longford Catholic church, which was attached to the parish of Kinnitty and belonged to the Diocese of Killaloe, while Billy's house was in the parish of Seir Kieran, locally called Clareen, and belonged to the Diocese of Ossory. He was such a popular and respected member of the community that he was asked to meet the bishop of Killaloe when he had come to Longford church for con­ firmation. And Billy told me on one occasion that he told the bishop, as they both stood in the main aisle of the church, that the dividing line between the dioceses of Killaloe and Ossory ran down the centre of the aisle, so that the Collecting Folklore in Ireland 3 3 bishop, being on the south side of the dividing line at that particular moment was actually standing in the diocese of Ossory, and not in his own diocese! From shortly after this first meeting with him in November 1975 until about three weeks before his death I visited and recorded him regularly, and I can say with truth that we both benefited thereby. I always enjoyed his company and he had plenty of seanchas. He was a most attractive person and full of fun and good humour. Vivacious is the word most appropriate to des­ cribe his personality. My last visit to him was on 17th December 1979, and I remember saying to him as I stood up to leave that in another week it would be Christmas. I was shocked at his reply: "I wonder will I live to see it." "Why wouldn't you?" I replied. But he never answered me. And I had seen no sign at all of his failing. And that was my last meeting with Billy. He died of a stroke on 5th January 1980. Before leaving Billy Boland I must revert to his remark, "Mr. Delaney is not a proud man." I was very much struck at hearing the like, for it was the second time in my career as a collector that I had heard the phrase "a proud man". Almost twenty years before that, Patrick Reilly of North Longford had voiced his vehement objection to talking to me if he discovered I was "a proud man". Now Boland used the same phrase, with approval, having con­ cluded from our brief encounter that I was not a proud man. I at once realised that both men had the same attitude to a person they thus described, namely that he was a person with whom neither of them could feel at ease; that therefore he was to be avoided and given short shrift. This was something to which I had given no thought until it was forced on my attention by Boland's remark, and then I realised that to be successful in gaining the confidence of the old country people, on whom I so much depended, it was necessary to approach them in a spirit of friendliness and enquiry, as having something to learn from them, and not with condescen­ sion and contumely. In fact my attitude had always been that I was there to learn from them, that I had nothing to teach them. And many a time I have said to Bill Egan, whom I visited constantly for nine years: "Well, Bill, I hardly ever come to you but I learn something new." And as Willie Rourke would say, "There was no lie in it." I did not say it by way of flattery, but Bill had disclosed some facet of folk belief or custom, of which up to then, in spite of my experience, I was completely unaware. And Bill was not exceptional in this. Many a time I have said something similar to some other old man. In fact this was what made collecting folklore so fascinating and 34 James G. Delaney exciting: that one was always adding to one's knowledge and understanding of tradition and custom, and one never knew from day to day what new story, tradition or custom was about to be revealed, what magic casement opened. But the proud man approaches Patrick Reilly, Bill Egan or Billy Boland with the attitude that he has nothing to learn from such unlettered people, but on the contrary could teach them many things and throw much light on the darkness of their understanding. Such an attitude, of course, stems from an overvaluation of the written word, as if it were the only reliable source for past history, and has no appreciation of the value of oral tradition, or "spoken history", as it is termed by George Ewart Evans, who spent a great part of his life battling against people with this attitude in his many excellent books. He has proved over and over again how valuable oral testimony from old people is and how it can throw light on what was obscure or hidden from modem eyes. But to return to Billy Boland: he was buried in the grounds of Longford Church, not a hundred yards from the hob on which he spent most of the last years of his life. I attended the requiem Mass and burial, after which I was invited by his nephew and namesake, another Billy Boland, to his house for refreshments. There I had the good fortune to meet old Billy's relative and contemporary, Michael Walsh of Aghancon, a district some six miles south of Longford Church, and just on the Tipperary border. Mickey, as he was known, was about the same age, eighty four, as Billy, and they had been good friends all their lives. As I listened to Mickey over the meal I realised that he was among the best tradition-bearers I had ever met since I started collecting folklore. All his talk was of the past, and he went on in an endless stream from one story to another so that I was in a state of the greatest excitement and anticipation, and determined to start recording him at the earliest possible moment. Michael Dooley and I brought him to his own house in Aghancon later that evening, where we met his granddaughter, Mrs. Margaret Hudson, who fell on my neck when she heard that I wanted to record her grandfather. It was something she had wanted done for a long time. And here I must pay a special tribute to her for the way she smoothed my path. She made over to Mickey and myself her best sitting room, shut off from the bustle and busi­ ness of the household, so that we were in complete privacy, with a good turf fire and something to cheer our hearts, as we carried on with the business of recording. It was something beyond the dreams of any collector of folklore. Collecting Folklore in Ireland 35

With Mickey it was business all the time, and he seemed to have an inexhaustible flow of folk traditions and tales. With Billy Boland my associa­ tion was more a sociable one than anything else, and the recording of folk­ lore was incidental, but with Mickey Walsh the emphasis was always on recording. I recorded him almost up to the day of his death at ninety years of age on 24 January 1986, a few months before my retirement from the Department of Irish Folklore. But Mickey Walsh was a perfect example of what I have written concerning the exciting and unexpected riches that one was continually meeting in the course of collecting. Here at the end of my career, after more than thirty years fieldwork, I came upon as fresh and pure and invigorating a stream as I had ever found, the opening again of magic casements that I had thought forever closed. All the old people from whom I collected had interesting traditions, stories and customs to relate. None of them was ever boring to talk to, and each one's material was stamped with his own individual mark. What he or she had heard at their own fireside was of especial interest, combined with what was heard in the rambling house, that great comprehensive school of local history, tradition and country crafts; of music, song and dance. Once I had recorded an old person's personal material, it was time then to have recourse to the Handbook, which contains questions on all aspects of traditional beliefs and customs, particularly the rites of passage, in which I was avidly interested. But before using the Handbook, when I had recorded what I considered the cream of the material, I always liked to take the old man on a trip around the district to familiarise myself with the scenes of the different events he had described. This trip was often the means of bringing fresh material to his memory. I also derived great benefit from it personally, for ever afterwards these places became familiar and alive to me, as I drove about the countryside. A journey, for example, from Athlone to Cloghan, or Clonmacnois, in County Offaly, was made interesting and enriched with the memories of the stories I had recorded during the years. So the whole Midlands became alive, and there were ... Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. This familiarisation of the landscape was a great help also when writing the material into the official manuscript. All the old people were remarkably good humoured, gentle and courteous in their manners. This innate courtesy was one of the first qualities that pre- 36 James G. Delaney possessed me in their favour, and made my work so pleasant. They were at peace, all passion spent. They were always ready to enjoy a joke, and their enjoyment of life in people of their advanced age was truly amazing. All were pleased to be recorded, not all for the same reason. Some of the more intelligent, like Patrick Reilly, Bill Egan or Thomas Horan, to name only a few, were very conscious of the fact that they were helping to preserve a social history of their own times, and that of their fathers, for future generations. Most of them were born between 1870 and 1900 into a world that was much nearer that of the Middle Ages than of modem times. Their fathers lived in the time when the only artificial light was of the kind made from strips of bogdeal, or rushes dipped in grease, when the humble tallow candle was a luxury. The only farm tools were the spade, scythe, sickle or hook, and the flail, though in their own time the plough had become common. Materially, therefore, they belonged to a very primitive civilisation. Culturally, they had inherited a rich oral tradition, going back for some two thousand years, that was handed on around the winter fireside especially. So they had a strong sense of identity with their own environment and with the past, and being thus so deeply rooted, there arose a comforting feeling of security, and a sympathy with the past that was ever present to them in their traditions. They all became my friends, some of them for many years, like John Connaughton, with whom I was friendly for twenty years. All of them save one have gone to their reward. They have shared most generously with me their own rich cultural heritage, and have enriched my own life immensely thereby. My understanding of my own people has been greatly deepened, not only by the material I recorded from them, but also by the generosity and richness of their own vivid and lively personalities, because even in their old age they were full of the joy of living. The heritage they have bequeathed to me has left me with the happiest of memories that are a never failing source of joy and delight-"happy fields where joy forever dwells".

Notes

1. Delaney, J.G., "At the Foot of Mount Leinster. The Past", Journal of the Ui Cinsealatgh Historical Society, Wexford, pp.3-27. 2. Delaney, J.G., "Fieldwork in South Roscommon", in 0. Danachair, ed., Essays in honour of A.T. Lucas, Dublin, R.S.A.I., 1976, pp.15-29. 3. Ibid. Collecting Folklore in Ireland 3 7

4 . Delaney, J .G., "Three Midland Storytellers", Bealoideas, Journal of The Folklore Society of Ireland, 50, Dublin, 1982, 44-53. 5. O'Sullivan, Sean, Irish Folk Custom and Belief, Dublin, Cultural Relations Committee of Ireland, p.l 0. 6. Boithrin: usually anglicised boreen, but I have retained its proper Irish spelling here because in this district the word is pronounced as a native Irish speaker would do so, retaining the slender -r. 7. See note 4 above. Bill Egan is one of the storytellers. 8 . The four-lace car was a light cart made especially for the district around Northwest Offaly. It had no boards but was all slatted work. A huge basket, the size of the cart was made to sit on top of it. It fitted in comfortably to the well of the cart. The basket was called a kish, and there were different kishes for special employments, for example, one called a dung basket used for nothing excepting carting dung to the field for sowing potatoes. There was another used for carting pigs to market, and a third for carrying people.

[Lore & Language 9/2 (1990) 39-53]

Witch or Wise-Woman?-women as healers through the ages

Sylvia Fox

The subject of women as healers covers many disciplines, historical, sociological, anthropological, but as folklorists we bring another discipline, which in a time of quiet revolution in medicine, appears to have been neglected. What is the general view of women as healers? Usually, the "old wife" or as a nurse. Their role is often seen as passive. " Old Wives Tales" is a pejorative term describing myth, not fact. Patients will often preface "woman" doctor, when speaking of her, as though this is an unusual pro­ fession for women. How has this situation arisen? Is it a true picture? Before examining the reasons, how many of us are familiar with the following names? Gladys Hobby-the first person to purify the Florey-Chain prototype Penicillin and to treat a patient with a penicillin injection. She also developed Terramycin. Elizabeth McCoy-discovered high yield penicillin. Dr. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin-became the third woman to win the Nobel prize for chemistry, determined the molecular structure of penicillin and made possible the synthetic production of penicillin. Without her, ordi­ nary people would probably not have been able to have afforded the drug. Dr. Florence Siebert-developed pure tuberculin. Dr. Dorothy Horstman-identified polio virus in the early stages, an important factor in developing a vaccine. Louise Pearce-co-invented sleeping sickness serum. Hattie Alexander--developed the meningitis serum. Anna W esse I Williams-isolated the Williams diphtheria antitoxin and made diphtheria a rare disease in most of the world. Invented a method to identify whether an animal is rabid and so saved many victims by rapid care. 40 Sylvia Fox

Elizabeth Hazen/Rachel Brown-discovered Nystatin-the first safe fungicide. Edith Quimby-developed the field of radiation therapy. Rosalyn Yalow-won the Nobel prize for the invention of radioim­ munoassay (RIA), which is used to diagnose diabetes, thyroid disease, hyper­ tension, sterility and some forms of cancer; it is also used by blood banks to test for hepatitis. Dr. Virginia Apgar-invented the Newborn Scoring System known as the Apgar Score which determines the health of a newborn baby. Dr. Lindsey Allen--co-developed heart surgery on a baby whilst the baby is still in its mother's womb. The above list offers a comprehensive cross-section of medical discov­ eries, but is far from complete. Ethlie Anne Yare and Greg Ptacek's book Mothers of Invention 1 lists many more. Women, far from playing a passive role, have been in the forefront of conquering the diseases that have deci­ mated populations over the ages. This is a far cry from the term old wife, as applied to the women who were midwives, healers and wartcharmers and were otherwise mostly indistinguishable from the community around. Only wart-charmers' (who were often the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter) know ledge was secret; all other know ledge was passed on and there was usually little or no money at stake. The women were mostly middle-aged or elderly, as these were virtues which gave wisdom and experience and it took time to acquire their knowledge. Old Wives' Tales are popular medical lore and were almost killed off by the monopoly of the medical profession. Unlike superstition-ritual devoid of context-this knowledge is coming back, and as folklorists we have a crucial role to play here. As "alternative" medicine quietly integrates into mainstream medicine, the knowledge we have culled of myth and superstition is invaluable in assisting people to isolate myth from magic, and examine the contemporary role of medicine. For three decades doctors have relied on antibiotics to treat patients but are finding these treatments are no longer working. It is no accident that there has been an upsurge in alternative medicine. If conventional medicine was fully effective this would not have occurred. Most people are not interested in going to a lot of trouble to keep healthy. If a pill works, people will use it. For doctors who have been raised to think of anything apart from surgery or antibiotics as "witchcraft" this has caused a severe crisis of confidence. In former times, the scapegoat, the "witch", was blamed for the failings of doctors. Until recently, the failure of a patient to respond had Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 41 again found a scapegoat, the patient, who was regarded as stressed, neurotic or "difficult". I was informed by a psychiatrist that he felt he should very often be treating the doctors in these cases rather than the patients they were referring. Patients are finding their own answers. Culpeper's Herbal is again being consulted, and many old superstitions are being relearned. Contemporary fringe medicine is the folklorist's pot of gold. How has this situation come about? To place women's role in medicine in its historical perspective, I have referred to Mary Chamberlain's Old Wives' Tales.2 The earliest expla­ nations of disease were religious. In early religions women were goddesses and priestesses and thus healers. In modem medicine we tend to think of Hippocrates as the "father" of modem medicine, although he was only one among many; we have a need to give medicine status by tracing it back to early origins. In Egypt, Greece, Assyria and other Mediterranean countries healing was in the hands of the priestesses and there is evidence that 5,000 years ago writing was developed there by women. Healing was in the hands of the priestesses and healing was mysterious. In Egypt they had knowledge of breast cancer and prolapse of the womb. Childbirth was separate, being a common mechanical event and we still had this division in Britain until about a decade ago. Following the Indo-European invasion history was rewritten and male gods became the norm. In Egypt men had always been the embalmers and also surgeons. Medicine then became very surgically based, treating just parts of the body and not the whole. Male medicine began to stand for knowledge and female for superstition. Women were first of all allowed to practise midwifery and then only allowed to carry out simple deliveries. Men were called upon to perform caesarian sections and other gynaecological surgery, and also turned the foetus into the birth position. The Hebrew religion was patriarchal, hierarchical and authoritarian. Moses trained in Egypt and Egyptian midwives practised in Israel. The serpent, the sign of downfall and also the sign of healing, signified that power should be taken away from women. The Greeks were not as dogmatic as the Hebrews; their goddesses were Hygeia and Panacea. Priestesses here in fact had high standing. It should be remembered that their apparently lowly standing is thought to be due to the biased reporting of nineteenth century scholars who imposed their own perception upon their discoveries. The Hippocratic school dominated European surgery, although it was only one among many, and women were excluded. The position had now been 42 Sylvia Fox

reached where women only treated people who could not afford medical practitioners. Women remained healers, but because of their connection with mysticism were looked on as a threat by the temples and were also thought to be poisoners-three of the early Christian martyrs were midwives. Women's healing practices were called paganism and sorcery, and healers were burned as witches; although the burnings were not all of healers, there were far more complex reasons for witchhunts. The Anglo-Saxons believed sickness was caused by spirits of sickness called elves or dwarfs, which gave elf-shot. This belief is still carried on in Christian exorcism rights. For Teutonic and Celtic tribes women were always the healers, but for Christians there was a problem: sickness was sin and healing was God's love. Any intervention in the healing process was looked on as sorcery by the Christian church. Despite this, the church ordered that a widow be appointed in each parish to assist women stricken by illness, thereby recognising women's unofficial role. Just as the church had built on the pagan sites, holy wells and holy relics replaced the magical springs, goddesses and amulets. The incantations were changed into prayers. The roadside shrines and small statues we see placed at wells in Ireland and in parts of continental Europe are the same manifesta­ tion, only the names being changed. In the Middle Ages there were many prosecutions of women healers for being too successful; they had practical rather than theoretical knowledge. Owing to the church's injunction against intervention, male doctors made no progress as they were not allowed to practise anatomy. The healing they used was often inferior to that of the wise woman, who could experiment and was intensely practical. Until 1512 women could practise as physicians and surgeons. The church then ordered that only after attending university could you become a doctor, and women were forbidden from entering university. In 1530 Henry VIII united the Corporation of Surgeons with that of Barbers, as people were not going to surgeons. Midwifery was excluded as it was not considered lucrative enough, which is why today every surgeon is called "Mr." except for a gynaecological surgeon who is correctly still called "Dr.". If women's healing practices were paganism and sorcery (and in 1544 Thomas Gale the Queen's Surgeon at St. Thomas's and Bart's said he saw 300 poor people whose health was damaged by witches, by women healers)3 then sorcery had to come under Satan-a male deity. Women as a separate entity were too much of a threat as they might achieve autonomy. This Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 43 increased the status of Satan and, conversely, increased the status of the witch. Hippocratic tradition held that women were governed by the womb and they were "naturally" hysterical and incapable of logic and reason. Despite being refused the means to learn and practise, a woman was expected to be able to diagnose illness, to make her own remedies and to administer to her family. Wealthy women were also expected to treat the sick and needy. This included treating fractures, dressing wounds and bums as well as illness. During the Civil War, Lady Anne Halkett was thanked by Charles II for her care of the wounded on the battlefield of Dunbar, and Mrs. Elizabeth Badell was a famous surgeon in the late seventeenth century. The treatment being provided by the wise woman was often exactly the same as that provided by the male doctor. The doctor, however, would charge quite highly for his services, whereas the wise woman would be giving these freely or for a contribution to her wellbeing. For many ailments, the herbs used were those within the immediate vicinity, hence a common herb was often credited with curing a variety of ills. It was often the doctor who decided whether a local wise woman was a witch. Witches were often described as "scolds"-busy with their tongue. The Poor Laws took away women's property rights and they had to become beggars to survive. People they asked for alms often refused (with the sub­ sequent guilt this aroused), and if misfortune followed they said they had been cursed, hence the woman was declared a witch. Midwifery was becoming lucrative and doctors tried to control midwives by ridicule. In the sixteenth century midwives organised themselves against male midwives who insisted on using forceps and surgical intervention, and this division has remained until quite recently. In the eighteenth century new drugs became available, prepared by the apothecaries, which meant that physicians had access to these and they were expensive. The wise woman could not compete and instead was appointed to look after the poor. The poor objected to what they perceived as second-class treatment and the wise woman's power gradually waned from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. With the rise of the new middle class, doctors made more money and the profession became even more restrictive. Middle class women were less likely to carry out their role of healing among the poor. The changed role of women, who were seen as "helpless", meant that knowledge was now denied to them. As more hospitals opened, the doctors now diagnosed patients 44 Sylvia Fox

without asking what the patient felt was wrong, and so the standing of the doctor increased. As more people moved into the towns, overcrowding and the use of pawn­ shops helped to increase infectious diseases. Many doctors limited their practice to their middle class patients as being more lucrative, and for many physicians the diseases of the poor were virtually unknown. The wise woman lost her access to herbs and plants and her knowledge decreased. What remained, however, were the charms and ceremonies, and these could be used either without the herbs or with the patent medicines which were now becoming available from the new chemist's shops that were opening. It may appear that doctors were greedy and grasping, with no desire to ply their trade without being paid, but when we realise the conditions they would encounter, it is hardly surprising they knew that if much of their practice took place in these conditions they would not be paid and, quite understandably, might bring the fear of contracting contagious diseases to their fee-paying patients. Again I refer to Mary Chamberlain for this Medical Officer of Health's report of 1867: Men, women and children-scores of each using common privy. Grown men and women sleeping with their married parents. A woman in childbirth in the midst of men and women of three families of fellow lodgers in a single room. An adult son sharing his mother's bed during her confinement are just a few of the cases I have come across. 4 Mrs. Gaskell, the wife of a Nonconformist minister, had first-hand experi­ ence of these conditions and wrote about them in her books Mary Barton and North and South. A major movement in the nineteenth century was the self-help groups organised by the poor to take charge of their own bodies and environment by using only natural herbal remedies. This again helped the wise woman survive. The new Poor Law decreed that payments were made only if a person was not fit for work; those who were not fit were sent into the work­ house. In the workhouse medical care was virtually non-existent, and no bandages or drugs were provided under the Poor Law. In a survey it was found there were four nurses to twenty two workhouses.5 Lying-in hospitals would only treat married women and no first deliveries. The only women who went to the Poor Law infirmary were single, and doctors did not want to stay there for fear of infection, so they used instruments to hurry on birth. Other paupers had to care for the mothers and children; usually these were the aged or mentally handicapped, and Mary Chamberlain relates a Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 45 report of one case in which the pauper was told to bathe the newborn baby and did so in boiling water-the baby died, as often did other mothers and babies, hastened by the "deterrent gruel diet".6 Workhouse deliveries had ten times the mortality rate of the rest of the population. The working class set up sick clubs and friendly societies, but only the better-off workers could join, which did not include women workers. The clubs often went bankrupt and were locally based so that if a worker moved the subscriptions could not be transferred. There was no provision for wives and children; midwifery, serious diseases and chronic illnesses were excluded (very similar to the rules of such as BUPA until quite recently).7 Women had virtually no medical treatment. Their diets were poor because (as now) they deprived themselves of food for the sake of their husbands and children, and their health was poorer. Doctors did not want to treat mid­ wifery cases as there was virtually no remuneration. Obstetricians were excluded from the Royal College of Surgeons, and organised midwifery was bitterly opposed as it might start encroaching on middle class (lucrative) patients. It was not until 1902 that the Midwives Act was passed and until 1926 unregistered midwives were allowed to practise. The wise woman still continued to treat the poor, she also continued to treat women. Because of the lack of birth control she was known not only as the midwife, but also as the abortionist, and in this role continued to practise until the Abortion Act of 1968. Until 1936 there was no State requirement to provide midwifery services, therefore women healers continued to provide them. The midwives in the community did not use their hands and instruments as did doctors, and they cared for the mother and the rest of the children in the family for up to ten days at a quarter of the fee of a doctor's one visit. Despite the many advances of medical science, in part achieved by women listed above, for many, until the advent of the National Health Service, they were virtually non-existent. In each road would live an "old wife", or "street doctor" who helped at childbirth, who helped lay out the dead, who broke the diphtheria membrane across the throat and wrapped the patient in red flannel and tied red wool around the ankle, if she were superstitious, to ward off witches and smallpox. Her treatment of bronchitis by slicing up onions and brown sugar in a pan, covering it with a cloth for twenty four hours and giving the patient the juice to drink, was used instead of buying expensive Galloways.8 For a safe delivery at childbirth, it was usual for the mother to be given raspberry leaf tea for an easy delivery, and to have sage and mint sprinkled 46 Sylvia Fox

around the room. The midwife would climb on a chair holding a newborn baby aloft to bring it nearer to heaven, and blue woollen threads which should be inherited from the mother's mother (blue being the colour of healing) would be wrapped round the neck of the lactating woman to ward off ephemeral fever. Childbirth is still a time of danger, of life and death; one wonders how many mothers having their baby induced or by caesarian section would prefer a mixture of these methods and a similar amount of personal care. Holding a child over a freshly tarred road was believed to cure whooping cough, (how many expectorants contain creosote?), and was augmented by the "secret family recipe" for cough mixture handed to the herbalist or chemist, which a local chemist, Alice Minnett, said was always the same remedy-she just filled up the individual bottles from a large supply in the back of the shop.9 This, together with the advice and reassurance, when compared with the workhouse treatment, which still consisted of "cupping" and little else, was something that the "street doctor" could provide. You did have the "shilling doctor" in the 1920s but you could buy a meal for a shilling. Hospitals had a voucher system; these were vouchers that were either left with the almoner or you had to go personally from door to door to collect the vouchers; if you could not collect enough you could not have an operation. With the remedies passed from mother to daughter and gained from popular medical books, this was the limit of many people's medical care. Orthodox medicine intervenes in illness, whereas women healers were very conservative. Treatment provided specifically by women did not regard events such as birth, the menopause etc. as abnormal.10 Orthodox medicine has lost this perspective and regards only the male body as normal. A woman's body has abnormalities, i.e. a womb and hence the need to inter­ vene. In the field of gynaecology males reign supreme. When looking at women as healers we should remember the celebrated case of Wendy Savage, the gynaecologist who was suspended for refusing to intervene in childbirth, against the thinking of her male colleagues. In New York State, U.S.A., a woman was unable to become a midwife and in 1979 there were still no facilities for training female midwives. 11 A medical student was reported as saying he used forceps to get experience; there is no case in which forceps cannot be used, unless the woman delivers before you manage to use them. 12 Medicine can also be used to affect social behaviour. The woman healer Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 4 7 was not concerned with social behaviour, she assisted rather than intervened. Orthodox medicine is very private and the patient is subservient. The old wife's practice was very public and her knowledge accessible to all. With the introduction of the NHS (which coincided with the introduction of antibi­ otics) the wise woman's power waned. Or did it? Until about nine years ago I would have said yes, but who are the wise women of today? Let us look at the signs of a wise woman: non­ interventionist, accessible, using herbal remedies, indistinguishable from the surrounding community, sharing knowledge, knowledge of herbs, and essentially "filling the gaps" where orthodox medicine is not working and healing is dispensed by women. Nowadays, perhaps the most dramatic of those characterised by such signs are the aromatherapists. The use of essen­ tial oils of herbs and flowers has meant that many people, but predominantly women, have rediscovered knowledge of the qualities of herbs as set out in old herbals. I feel the term "essential oil" is misleading. For me it evoked the scent of fish and chip shops. A truer description would be "essence" of flowers and herbs. Many of the qualities and superstitions connected with these plants over the ages are now being disseminated through books, tele­ vision and radio. Knowledge is gained through adult education classes (where tutors are mainly women), books, and by women sharing their knowledge with each other. Treatments are often given at low cost or freely. Aromatherapy is being used by people from all walks of life, and nurses are now being trained to provide such treatment in hospitals. In physiotherapy departments, lavender oil is used to reduce scarring, and is used with cancer patients with very beneficial effects. Research is presently taking place to discover whether it is the massage, the oil or the scent (what other sense is more evocative than smell?) which is beneficial. Let us look at just one of these oils, rosemary, originally planted at your front door to keep away witches, and compare a herb which was used by Greek students to twine in their hair for memory when studying for exams; it was immortalised in Shakespeare "Here's rosemary for remembrance", used in bride's bouquets and funeral wreaths as a symbol of lasting remem­ brance and friendship, and included in the wreath dropped into the sea by survivors of the crew of the Zeebrugge disaster. Culpeper informs us that rosemary is used for weak memory, as well as for the bowels and the chest.13 It also helps sight, scurvy and bleeding of the gums. If we look at Shirley Price's Practical Aromatherapy14 we see that rosemary is used for strengthening memory, for mental fatigue, dandruff and scalp disorders, 4 8 Sylvia Fox

coughs, bronchitis, cleansing wounds, and for stomach pains and constipa­ tion. It is a herb also reputed to help baldness. The oil is an antiseptic; the powdered leaves were used by the Arabs on the umbilical cords of infants and young animals, and of course it is used in cooking. How many shampoos, hair preparations and cough mixtures have you seen that contain rosemary? Price and Culpeper also advise of those herbs which must not be used by pregnant women, as they may induce a miscarriage-knowledge which again had been lost and is now rediscovered. In a society where doctors may now be regarded as having replaced priests, 15 we have women healers providing their skills to the community in a positive way, responding to perceived practical needs, as they have through the ages. In many cases this is now seen as a complementary skill. In aromatherapy, surrounded by the reassuring smells of happy times, with the soothing human contact perhaps never felt since babyhood, the body is relaxed and the mind is aroused to heal itself. Pressure points are used, such as massaging the base of the little finger to prevent a migraine at its onset, and the body is healed without the use of powerful artificial drugs. Doctors usually make no comment on such therapy, and more importantly society does not recognise or reimburse women healers for this complementary role. In reflexology the whole body is thought to be set out on the feet, and massage and the use of pressure points are said to assist in treating condi­ tions. In shiatsu, the pressure points of the body are manipulated to treat and cure conditions, and in acupuncture we find the treatment of conditions by needles placed in pressure points of the body. Osteopathy is now almost accepted as orthodox medicine, and homeopathy, the treatment of illnesses by administering minute doses of potions which "mimic" the illness itself, is also widely practised. Indeed all these forms of treatment are becoming more widely known and used. The amulets used by our pagan forebears have been replaced by the copper bracelet used to cure rheumatism and arthritis and I have in front of me a Daily Telegraph Reader Offer for copper comfort elastic supports. Our need for amulets has not diminished. Bach Flower Remedies, despite their name, are mainly composed of remedies gathered from the bark and leaves of trees. The mixing of say five drops of "rescue remedy" with forty drops of "pure spring water", as can be seen, makes much use of ritual with their cures for depression, rheumatism and many other complaints. Whether the preservative (whisky) I detected Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 49 when trying one of these remedies makes any difference, I do not know. The healing quality of water and trees does not appear to have been forgotten in these remedies. We also have far more fringe activities such as colour therapies where the use of colour is thought to assist healing, especially the colour blue. A recent article in the Observer is headlined "Healing light hailed as fact"16 where we learn that neurologists are using light from the blue spectrum to cure SAD, Seasonal Affective Depression, for those who suffer from depression, lack of ovulation and anorexia nervosa, and of course, we must not forget that other famous woman we see dressed in blue. In faith healing, the picturing of a blue light round the afflicted person is thought to be protective. Are these so different from the blue woollen lactating threads or cords formerly worn by the new mother, mentioned earlier? Then there is crystal therapy­ what is this but "solid water"? Until the second half of this century and the discovery of the sulphide drugs and thereafter antibiotics, the treatment bought over the counter at chemists or dispensed by the "street doctor" differed little in the constitution of the remedies; only the healer differed. Old superstitions and ritual were thrown a way and new ones replaced them. Woe betide the doctor who recommended salt water gargles instead of prescribing antibiotics. Doctors became victims of their own success. Alongside this ran their Hippocratic training which treated individual parts of the body. People were asking far more of their healers; doctors' training did not equip them for this, so they carried on prescribing more tablets and treating more parts of the body, very rarely the patient as a whole. Then their drugs became less effective and patients realised the inheritance of addiction which accompanied many of the drugs used for the conditions doctors could not treat. 17 With the upsurge of AIDS and cancer, our knowledge of the dangers of factory farming of animals and the destruction of the rain forests (we talk of the "rape of the earth"--evocative of the earth mother) there is a conscious­ ness of natural things. The structure of the National Health Service is currently being examined. Just as in the nineteenth century selfhelp groups, mentioned earlier, people worked together to look after their bodies and environment, so they are again doing today. Although our external world may appear very different, human nature, its aspirations and fears remain the same. There is usually a ninety year cycle for the rediscovery of knowledge on the one hand, and fears and supersti­ tions on the other. Folklorists are used to being greeted, on informing 50 Sylvia Fox people of their interest, with "Oh, witches and that, dancing around fires at midnight?". Understandably, folklorists are not too keen on this image. Their interest nevertheless lies in a branch of traditional culture which is closely tied to superstitions of life and death, and where for thousands of years women retained literally the power over life and death. Our present patriarchial society is merely a wrinkle in the canvas of time. Rather than running away from this image of folklorists which is so deeply set in the psyche, we could gain far more knowledge of present day attitudes to myth and magic if we asked people why they have such an image. We happily look at previous generations and remark on their ignorance and superstition, whilst ignoring the fact that alongside this superstition and veneration of old ways run the strands that have created our modern day society. At the outset I listed the names and achievements of women who have made many of the discoveries that have brought our society out of medieval times-names which I had certainly not heard of previously. Just as there were many reasons for the witchhunts of the sixteenth century and the refusal to accept women's role as healers then, so women's scientific achieve­ ments are not recorded in the mainstream of our educational records now. It is too farfetched to say that this is due to society's fear of witches, but it is rather society's need to maintain a status quo. After all, in a society which relies heavily on women's unpaid or poorly paid services it would create too much of an economic upheaval if girls had so many positive images to follow and relinquished their traditional roles. When examining people's belief in superstition, we must look at the age that creates it. In a time when there is little general knowledge of a method, it takes on magical qualities. Thus, in a time when patients knew little of high technology, it was found that when operating on angina patients­ carrying out exactly the same pre- and post-operation procedures, and each patient receiving the same scars-forty percent of those who had received treatment recovered and seventy percent of those who had not received treatment recovered. 18 One wonders who was affected the most by this, as in many cases it appears to be the belief of the healer in the cure, rather than the belief of the healed, which finally achieves the result. As any teacher can tell you, often to their cost, a new teaching method can achieve wonderful successes with pupils when the teachers really believe in the method, but when disseminated throughout the school system without this initial enthusi­ asm and belief, the results are often abysmal. For many people who have visited faith healers, they have used the faith healer just as they use a zebra Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 51 crossing: they do not believe in the faith healer's art, just as they do not believe in the protection offered by a zebra crossing, but it still works for them. It is the faith healer's belief, not theirs, that works. Again, for others, their faith is in the healer, not the methods. How many of us have heard a patient, on being told s/he has a terminal illness, immediately say, " I have every faith in my doctor, s/he is wonderful"; to profess doubt would be to give up all hope. In all times there are charlatans, quacks-and healers. In our efforts to develop the "science" of our discipline, let us not lose the art. Science is often a poor recorder of facts. To scientists raised to believe something "proved" to them, this then becomes fact--even if their eyes and emotions are deceived. As folklorists we examine people's "unscientific" beliefs and record them. Just as our nineteenth century forebears brought their own prejudices to their interpretation and to their discoveries, so we bring ours. We are far happier examining the safe aberrations of our ancestors than we are our own. The knowledge passed from mother to daughter and through­ out the family is only a grandparent away. My own interest in this subject came about through my work-settling personal injury claims. For many years, following accidents, orthopaedic surgeon's reports would monotonously contain the phrase "functional over­ lay"--even though a patient is physically cured s/he is still suffering the same symptoms, or "litigation neurosis"-a recognised condition, in which, through no fault of patients, they suffer symptoms until they receive com­ pensation, after which the symptoms disappear or abate-the mind being satisfied that the condition is at an end. When settling claims, insurance com­ panies would only reimburse recognised hospital fees, refusing even so esoteric a practitioner as an osteopath. Over the past few years, patients of all ages and all walks of life, after being told by their hospital consultant that there is no further treatment for their condition, are submitting their own bills for reflexologists, aromatherapists and osteopaths, and these are being paid. Patients are no longer being reported as suffering from "functional overlay" and "litigation neurosis", and subsequent medical reports are advising of improvement where previous organic examination professed little likelihood of this. This is the "quiet revolution" I spoke of: doctors are no longer objecting to their patients seeking alternative treatments which com­ plement their own and, most importantly, are not exclusive, i.e. the doctor is not excluded. There are still a few cases of "functional overlay", but these are found in patients who have not explored other complementary methods. 52 Sylvia Fox

Will this complementary treatment be absorbed into the mainstream? If it hurts medical administrators (rather than doctors) economically, pressure may be applied. It will be interesting to compare the reasons given for any controls. The holistic treatment that patients are seeking for themselves, in addition to their orthodox treatment, brings with it old beliefs and supposi­ tions. By talking to our friends, colleagues, family and relatives, we can provide explanations, facts and theories for future generations.

Notes

1. Ethlie Anne Yare and Greg Ptacek, Mothers of Invention, New York, Morrow/Quill, 1987, pp.118-119, 120-121, 123-133, 141, 156-157,206-218. 2. M. Chamberlain, Old Wives Tales, London, Virago, 1981. 3. Quoted by E. Maple, Magic Medicine and Quackery, London, Robert Hale, 1968, p.66. 4. Chamberlain, p.124, quoting John Simon writing in "Public Health Reports", 1867. 5. Chamberlain, p.101: M.W. Flynn, "Medical Services under the Poor Law". 6. Chamberlain, p.11 0: "How the Minority Report deals with the Sick, the Infirm and the Infants' National Committee to Promote the Break-up of the Poor Law", p.5 7. BUPACare, "Your Guide to Private Medicine", January, 1991, Rule 1: Definitions: (1.7) Treatment: Surgical or medical procedures the whole purpose of which is the cure or relief of acute illness or injury. Rule 5.3. "Benefits shall not be payable for: (a) Any treat­ ment of any illness or injury which originated prior to the date of issue of a registration certificate ... (b) Any treatment arising from pregnancy or childbirth ... (c) Charges for services received in health hydros, nature cure clinics or similar establishments ... ". 8. I.e. Galloway's Cough Syrup: "Relieves coughs and hoarseness of sore throats" (established 1890); ingredients: ipecacuanha, squill, vinegar, acetic acid, chloroform, ether. 9. "Can we afford the Doctor?", An Age Exchange Publication, 11, Blackheath, London SE3, 1985, p.22. 10. "Orthodox medicine has lost this perspective and regards only the male body as normal"; see Anne Scott, "Spare Rib", edn. 22: "I went to Cambridge to do Second M.B .... Doing anatomy taught me a lot about the extent to which the human body has been defined as male. Women are described only when their anatomy differs from men's." 11. Reported to me in 1979/80 by a nurse who had come to England to obtain her mid­ wifery certificate, which would be valid at her hospital in New York State. On her return to her hospital she was told that as she had not practised for twelve months, she must retake the final year of the nurses' examination in order to practise nursing again in New York State. 12. S. Kitsinger, "The American Way of Birth", The Times Literary Supplement (1st August, 1980). 13. Culpeper's Complete Herbal, Slough, N. Culpeper (1616-1654), n.d. p.303. Witch or Wise-Woman?-Women as Healers through the Ages 53

14. Shirley Price, Practical Aromatherapy, Wellingborough, Thorsons Publishers, 1983, pp.123-124. 15. Interview with Dr. Kwame McKenzie, psychiatrist with St. Thomas's Hospital, London, SE1, on 25th March 1991: "I am very conscious in my practice of the fact that patients increasingly consult their doctors for problems where formerly they may have con­ sulted their priest. I also increasingly have referred to me patients whose problems are not necessarily medical in origin, such as sadness and loneliness. This is very noticeable when compared with patients from the local African population who attend the evangelical churches, where people consult their priests on everything, including psychotic illnesses." He added: "It is something that people are aware of--our society is increasingly secular-but where you will find a reference to the fact, I do not know, but it is my experience and also the experience of the whole of our team." 16. The Observer, "Healing Light hailed as Fact" (25 February, 1990), 82, byline Robert McKie. 17. British National Formulary, No. 21 (March 1991), British Medical Association and Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, pp.123, 214; Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, Vol. 25, No. 15 (27 July, 1987), London, Consumers Association, 57/59: "Dependence is now a recognised hazard of Benzodiazepine treatment. . . Alternative methods of coping with anxiety and tension include explanation, reassurance, relaxation tapes and techniques for managing anxiety. They can be provided by general practitioners or by clinical psycho­ logists, practice nurses and others", John Henry, ed., The British Medical Association's Guide to Medicines and Drugs, London, Dorling Kindersley, 1988, p.23. 18. The American Journal of Cardiology (April, 1960), quoted in Ted Kaptchuk and Michael Croucher, The Healing Arts, London, BBC Publications, 1968, p .105. Survey of ult,s all double Dutch to me, The expression "It's all double Dutch to me", meaning that something is incomprehensible, is common here in Ireland. Also in use, but heard less frequent, are: "It's all Greek (or Chinese) to me." For the purpose of research I am collecting international variants of this expression and I would be extremely grateful for any examples in other languages, or in English from different parts of the world, which you could send to me.

Fionnuala Williams 32 Ravenhill Park Belfast, BT6 ODE Ireland

Correction

Lore and Language, Vol. 8, No. 1. To p.94: for readers who have not identified his distinctive style, the writer of the letter to the editor, dated 8 November, 1988, was Brian McConnell, the legendary eminence grise behind the "Old Codgers" column in "The Daily Mirror", a column recently and shortsightedly discontinued. We apologise for the inadvertant omission of his name. [Lore & Language 9/2 (1990) 55-68]

The Politics of Dialectology

Robert Penhallurick

The origin of this paper was a thought, a thought that, maybe, dialectology is not doing what we should expect dialectology to be doing above all else: analysing speech. Perhaps I have to say real speech. By that I mean everyday speech, in everyday contexts, ordinary conversations in varying situations, interconnected, extended stretches of speech. Perhaps I should say spoken discourse. That thought then gave rise to a sequence of questions. The first, obvious one is: does dialectology ignore spoken discourse? What does dialectology do? What has it done? What have dialectologists said about dialectology, about what it does, what it should do, and how it should be done? What have been the debates, the "politics" of dialectology? Where have these debates taken us? And, inevitably, what is dialectology? And if we find that every­ day, extended speech remains foreign territory, how might dialectology handle it? Can it be handled? What would dialectology look for? What would it say with its findings? Why might spoken discourse be a concern of dialec­ tology? Here is another reason for the use of the word "politics": what is the potential of dialectology? What more can it say? I would like to proceed by attempting answers to these questions.

Firstly, what is dialectology?

I choose this question first because of its centrality and because a broad definition of dialectology need not be problematic, especially if left available to some refinement. Dialectology these days is many things. A glance at the proceedings of one of the most recent international conferences on methods in dialectology (Thomas 1988), held at the University College of North Wales, from 3rd- 56 Robert Penhallurick

7th August 1987, reveals a considerable range of interests and approaches. There are papers on Sea Island Creole, Welsh, Black American English, on hockey talk, slander and defamation, on urban survey methodology, on con­ structing a rural sociolinguistic corpus, on the use of computers, to mention only a few. In his Preface, Alan Thomas points out that the proceedings "well illustrate the dilemma of the pedant who seeks an inviolate line of demarcation between 'dialectology' and 'sociolinguistics'". He goes on: The defining criterion for dialectology, perhaps, is its central concern with varia­ tion in the spatial parameter and with diffusion through space and time, in addition to refinement of the data by an enhanced awareness of the significance of factors of communal social structure (Thomas 1988, v). This at least supplies us with a suitable working definition. Certain implica­ tions of this paper's argument, however, will not rest easy with the relega­ tion of awareness of "factors of communal social structure" solely to a "refining" influence.

What has dialectology done? What have dialectologists said about dialectology?

Now I need to make it clear that my discussion will focus specifically on British dialectology, or more precisely, on dialectology that has studied varieties of British English. The Survey of English Dialects, or SED, is one of the major achievements of British dialectology this century. Taken together, the SED's thirteen Basic Material volumes (Orton et al. 1962-1971), Word Geography of England, or WGE (Orton and Wright 1974), and Linguistic Atlas of England, or LAE (Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1978) represent the culmination of so called "traditional" dialectology, which developed out of the work of, in particular, A.J. Ellis and Joseph Wright, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. I intend no disrespect here to the other "traditional", national dialect surveys of Britain, as I will explain shortly. The SED has also been at the centre of what is probably the major controversy in British dialectology. For both these reasons I will spend some time discussing the merits and demerits, and the nature, of the SED. Fuller accounts of the history and development of the SED can be found elsewhere. The Introduction to the LAE presents a straightforward documentary description, perhaps slightly defensive in tone here and there. Wakelin 1977 (51-58) and Viereck 1973 give factual accounts and reviews that are favourably disposed towards the The Politics of Dialectology 57

Survey. Petyt 1980 (88-93) is concise and incisive. Sanderson and Widdowson 1985 is in part a response to the SED's critics, presenting a view of the Survey that is properly corrective. The essential facts concerning the Survey of English Dialects are as follows. Work on it began in 1946, under the joint-directorship of Eugen Dieth, of the University of Zurich, and Harold Orton, of the University of Leeds. The Survey was based at Leeds. After Dieth's death in 1956, Orton became the Survey's driving force. According to those who worked with him, he was a great motivator, energetic and singleminded in his leadership of the project. The Survey was concerned with the speech of elderly, rural, working-class people, of minimal education, and usually members of the agricultural community. Its basic tool was a questionnaire designed by Dieth and Orton (Dieth and Orton 1952). This was, according to Orton, "linguistically comprehensive" (Orton 1962, 14 ), containing 1322 questions designed to elicit phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical infor­ mation. Fieldwork took place mainly between 1950 and 1961, in a total of 313 localities, conducted by (altogether) eleven trained fieldworkers. In choosing the localities, preference was given to those with a relatively stable population, normally about 400-500 inhabitants, of whom usually between one to five representatives were interviewed. The Questionnaire was asked in its entirety once only in each locality. I have already mentioned the main publications of the SED, i.e. the Basic Material or BM, WGE, and the LAE. Although the decision to publish the four volumes of BM, each with three parts, giving a comprehensive list of informant responses to the Questionnaire, was taken out of economic neces­ sity, it is this BM that has proved most valuable to dialect researchers of all persuasions. After the final volume of BM appeared in 1971, the publication programme of the SED became increasingly fragmented, a process definitely influenced by Orton's death in 1975 and the eventual disintegration of the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies at Leeds by 1983. What is the nature of the controversy surrounding the SED? K.M. Petyt, referring, in 1982, to the publication in the late 1970s of the LAE and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland, or LAS (Mather and Speitel 1975, 1977), says: But dialectology had moved on: several years before these works actually appeared, their whole approach had been challenged-both by linguists and by social scientists. Many scholars felt that the findings of the great dialect surveys, concerned as they were almost exclusively with "genuine dialect"-to be observed now only among a declining number of elderly rural-dwellers, whose speech 58 Robert Penhallurick

showed the development of an earlier system "uncorrupted" by contact with standard varieties-were hardly relevant to the description of the population at large. A truer picture, it was claimed, would be obtained by examining a represen­ tative sample of the population of the towns, seeking the present-day system rather than the development of a Middle English one, and showing the variation between standard and non-standard forms in various sections of the community (Petyt 1982,192-93). Such criticisms, where the key targets are "traditional" dialectology's quest for "genuine dialect" and thereby its inability to produce a representative analysis of present-day speech, are to be found also in Petyt 1980, Chambers and Trudgill 1980, and Edwards, Trudgill and Weltens 1984. Although, as far as I can discover, Harold Orton never used the term "genuine dialect" in print, I believe that these criticisms have their roots in certain statements made by Orton, e.g.: Dialect today is best preserved by the farming community (Orton 1962, 44) ... for after all it is they [the older generation] who are likely to have preserved the traditional dialect best (Orton 1962, 46) The precise achievement of the Questionnaire in eliciting genuine vernacular ... (Orton 1962, 15) ... traditional vernacular, genuine and old (Orton 1960, cited by Petyt 1980, 205, no page reference given). There is no doubt then that Orton, occasionally, identified his "traditional" dialect or vernacular with "true" or "genuine" dialect. Nevertheless, I feel that this does not undermine the validity of the SED. Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson present a rather different perspective on the Survey's primary aims, which include: to establish a linguistically comprehensive database for the speech of one particu­ lar stratum of society at an especially critical period of social and technological change (Sanderson and Widdowson 1985, 39). I have worked since 1977 for one of the national dialect surveys associated with "traditional" dialectology (the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects), and I worked for the SED for a shorter period, and I have never assumed that I was studying "genuine dialect". Rather, I was looking at the speech of one, restricted, section of society. Of course, this speech is therefore not repre­ sentative of "the population at large", although a description of it surely is of relevance to any description of the speech of other sections of society. Also, it must be emphasised that the SED was a major undertaking, a national survey. It collected, and published, a huge wealth of material, from a large number of localities, and the claim that it is "linguistically compre- The Politics of Dialectology 59 hensive" has some basis. The new sociolinguistic, urban studies of the late 1960s and the 1970s which headed the "challenge" to "traditional" dialec­ tology were not national, and tended to concentrate their efforts on a limited number of phonological variables, for very good reasons. However, this sort of restriction on the linguistic data does facilitate the detailed correlations with comparable social and stylistic factors, and the assessment of patterns of linguistic change, carried out by, for example, Labov 1966, Trudgill 1974, Macaulay 1977 and Petyt 1985. Analysis of this kind is not possible using SED data alone; that data comes from one age group and primarily from one social class, and is mainly in the form of short answers to field workers' questions. But it is also characterised by a remarkably liberal spread of linguistic forms: phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic. In this respect surely the SED is "representative", more "representative" than those surveys which concentrate on phonology.

The antagonism between "traditional" dialectology and that area of socio­ linguistics which focuses on spoken dialects, often referred to as either "modem" dialectology or urban dialectology, has persisted, although it is becoming increasingly clear that this split is indeed "an untenable dichotomy" (Sanderson and Widdowson 1985, 40). The remaining national dialect surveys of Britain, which are surveys normally seen as representatives of "traditional" dialectology, are using approaches which either differ significantly from or modify significantly that used by the SED. The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, or SAWD, based at the University College of Swansea, was instigated in 1968 with the intention of providing information about Welsh English that would complement that gathered on English English by the SED. It used a modified version of the Dieth-Orton Questionnaire, and to date two volumes of findings have been published (Parry 1977, 1979). A forthcoming publication, edited by David Parry, director of SA WD, takes account of criticisms levelled against the SED concerning its lack of any methodological apparatus derived from modern linguistics, especially in its treatment of phonological material. (See, for example, the review of LAE by J.C. Wells in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association 9, 1979, 39-42: ... for Orton and his followers "phonological" is not a more sophisticated way of saying "phonemic". It does not imply a concern with distinctive sound-units as opposed to allophonic variants, with abstract underlying representations as 60 Robert Penhallurick

opposed to phonetic realisations. The stance the Atlas editors adopt antedates such notions by half a century or more: for them, the phonological maps are those which reflect the modern fates of the sounds of Middle English (Wells 1979, 39). Wells detracts rather from these comments by concluding his review with the unnecessary exclamation: "when I compare it [LAE] with what has been achieved in the United States or even in Scotland, I am ashamed for my country" (42). Parry's Grammar and Glossary of the Conservative Anglo­ Welsh Dialects will include a scrupulously full phonemic analysis of data collected from each of SAWD's 90 localities. Also, a Phase 2 of SA WD has been inaugurated. It will look at present-day urban Welsh English. Material has already been collected from several Welsh towns and cities, e.g. Swansea, the Grangetown area of Cardiff, Caernarfon, Wrexham, Carmarthen and Neath. So far the emphasis has been on the elicitation of phonological, and, to a lesser extent, syntactic material, using a combination of questionnaire and conversational interview modes. Locally born and bred informants have been interviewed, several each from three broadly delimited age-groups. The Tape-recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech, or TRS, also owes a debt to the SED. Two of its directors, M .V. Barry and P.M. Tilling, worked, like Parry, for the SED. Adams, Barry and Tilling (1985) explains that: The purpose of the survey was to provide a picture of the English speech of Ireland which would complement that provided for England by the Survey of English Dialects and for Scotland by the Linguistic Survey of Scotland (67). But they point out too that the TRS, a phonological survey, "also sought to take advantage of other recent dialect research and to take account of the criticisms made of 'traditional' dialect surveys" (loc. cit.). The above­ mentioned paper gives an excellent summary of TRS's sometimes innovative methodology. Of especial interest is its selection of informants from three representative age-groups. The Linguistic Survey of Scotland, or LSS, although, like the SED, having rural, traditional dialect as its area of interest, has in other ways always pur­ sued a rather different path. The lexis mapped in Volumes 1 and 2 of the LAS (Mather and Speitel 197 5, 1977) was collected by postal questionnaire. Volume 3, however, on phonology, is, the editors believe, the first large-scale presentation of a phonological survey on functional lines, that is, by means of the technique of contrasts and oppositions of the stressed vowels of the recorded speech-sounds (Mather, Speitel and Leslie 1986, xi). The Politics of Dialectology 61

Thus, I identify two distinct brands of "traditional" British dialectology. The first is that school of dialectology which belongs at the tail-end of pre­ "modem linguistics" comparative philology. I can now clarify my earlier remark: the SED, I believe, represents the culmination of this body of work. The second brand, although owing much to the first, and usually placed in the same category, more appropriately belongs in the field of modem linguistics. The three national surveys mentioned above-SAWD, TRS, and LSS-are obvious examples of work on present-day British English being done by this very active branch of dialectology. The term "traditional" may still be applied to these surveys, and others which in one way or another are perceived to have relatively close associations with the SED or with linguis­ tic or dialect geography; but, the criticisms that were levelled in particular at the SED are much less justifiable with regard to "modem, traditional" dialectology. "Modem traditional" dialectology is still mainly concerned with linguistic geography, but it possesses that "enhanced awareness of the significance of factors of communal social structure" mentioned in Alan Thomas' definition (Thomas 1988, v), together with approaches much more informed than before by the notions of modem linguistics, especially structuralist linguis­ tics. Not all of post-SED "traditional" dialectology can be characterised thus, but this definitely is the trend, of which SAWD and TRS, and also, for example, the work of David North on the south-east of England and Cornwall (North 1982a, 1982b, 1983, 1985), are prime examples. There is no doubt that recent "traditional" dialectology has learnt much from the insights provided and criticisms made by the "modernists" involved in urban, sociolinguistic dialectology. But a sense of injustice lingers, a feeling that there has been insufficient balanced appreciation of the achieve­ ments of, and problems inherent in, the national dialect surveys. Take, for example, the following comments from Adams, Barry and Tilling 1985: The directors of TRS are well aware of the views of sociolinguists and have attempted, in some way, to reconcile their views with the "traditional" dialect survey method. Of course, practical limitations make this task somewhat difficult. A nationwide survey cannot do more than collect a limited amount of data from a limited number of informants, and in any case none of the sociolinguists has done a nationwide survey (ibid. 72). Sanderson and Widdowson (1985, 38), referring to the SED and LSS, talk of practical difficulties "disregarded, and one suspects unimagined, by some critics". One crucial factor, often overlooked, is the unavailability of port- 62 Robert Penhallurick

able tape recorders during critical stages of the older surveys. There also seems to have been little acknowledgement, from the "modernist" quarter, of the progressive nature of much post-SED "traditional" dialectology. However, there is too no doubt that the real revolution in recent dialec­ tology had its origins in sociolinguistics. "Modem", urban, sociolinguistic dialectology introduced a formidable array of fresh insights and method­ ologies to the discipline. Its development is well-documented (in detail in Chambers and Trudgill 1980, Petyt 1980, and Francis 1983; briefly in Macaulay 1988). The new surveys which followed in the wake of the pioneering work of William Labov (viz. Labov 1963, 1966, 1972) focused on single, urban localities, rather than networks of rural localities. The factor of region and its influence on the linguistic data was considered in the context of a number of other social variables, such as social class, sex of speaker, age, and style of speech. The increasing accessibility of portable tape recorders allowed a much greater emphasis on quantitative methods of analysis. The effects of this revolution were several: the horizons of dialec­ tology were widened considerably; dialectology could no longer be equated with linguistic geography; today any research which recognises the impor­ tance of the factor of region, and incorporates it into its analysis, could come within the scope of dialectology; dialectology was pushed back towards mainstream linguistics, from which it had steadily become estranged; the factor of region could no longer be considered in isolation from the wider social context. "Traditional" dialectology is more aware now of the influence of the wider social context, but is perhaps still unwilling to consider its centrality to the description of regional English. "Modem" dialectology is unwilling to acknowledge in a consistent way that region is in itself a social factor, that need not be somehow bracketed off from all the other social variables. Both "dialectologies" could address themselves further to the issue of context.

This brings me back to my list of questions and, at last, to my original thought. Where are we now? And what about extended, everyday spoken discourse? We are now at a point where we can say that dialectology has incorporated a wealth of ideas and methods from a range of related fields, most notably modem theoretical linguistics, social science, and human geography. It is also possible to perceive a more unified discipline. Both trends would benefit if dialectology paid more attention to extended spoken discourse. The Politics of Dialectology 63

Dialectology has not ignored spoken discourse. The published Proceedings of Methods VI (Thomas 1988) includes, amongst its great variety of topics, a paper entitled "Discourse Variation and the Study of Communicative Competence" by Gary R. Butler (ibid. 11-19). This aims to "present some of the possible applications of the variationist perspective to the study of natu­ rally occurring discourse", whilst also pointing out that dialectology has seriously neglected the study of "variation at the level beyond the sentence; that is, at the level of discourse" (ibid. 11 ). A similar point is made by Ronald K.S. Macaulay in his 1988 paper "What Happened to Sociolinguistics?". He notes that mainstream sociolinguistics has "largely concentrated on decon­ textualised tokens of phonological variables", and, that a paradoxical situation has arisen. Sociolinguists who are interested in the use of language in its social context have tended to ignore the linguistic context in which their linguistic variables are embedded; discourse analysts ... who pay attention to the linguistic context have tended to ignore the social context in which the language is located. It is difficult to believe that this division of labour is beneficial (ibid. 158). These are observations of critical relevance to dialectology, both "traditional" and "modem". Dialectology, throughout its history, has been particularly guilty of isolating segments of its linguistic data; up till now, even syntax has received relatively little consideration. Macaulay's paper, and Butler's, which is centred on analysis of traditional narratives, indicate a new departure point for dialectology, although it is a departure point that has been awaiting full recognition for some time (see, for example, Labov 1972, ch. 9).

How might dialectology apply itself to the larger linguistic context? Here are some suggestions, grouped around two basic data-collecting methods. The first data-collecting method is the more familiar. It is that where the dialectologist is present, a part of the discourse to a greater or lesser degree. This supplies, in one-to-one situations, mainly monologues or narratives from the informant, or in group situations, interactive conversation. It is possible for the dialectologist to maintain a comparatively low profile, but nevertheless his or her mere presence influences the discourse, which will always then occur within a "conversational interview" framework. This method has in fact already collected vast amounts of continuous, extended speech which remains unanalysed as discourse. To take an example from "traditional" dialectology, the venerable Dieth-Orton Questionnaire was so 64 Robert Penhallurick

designed that it would stimulate free-flowing conversation. Its earlier sections do this very well. During fieldwork for my doctoral thesis (Penhallurick 1986) and SAWD in North Wales between 1980 and 1982, I recorded many hours of this so-called "Incidental Material", using the Dieth­ Orton Questionnaire. I extricated segments-phonological, lexical, morpho­ logical, syntactic-from this material, but did not fully consider these segments as functioning elements of the larger, connected discourse. Neither did I consider those syntactic or suprasentential features that are not apparent to a "decontextualising" analysis. The SA WD archives contain much similar material, as do the SED archives. The second method is more problematic. This is when the dialectologist is absent from the immediate data-collecting scene. There are obvious but no insurmountable difficulties involved in tape recording discourse without being present to control proceedings. But it is this controlling influence that has to be eliminated in order for the dialectologist to get as close as possible to obtaining "real", everyday, extended discourse. Discourse Analysis has already shown that detailed naturally occurring discourse events can be tape recorded without undue disruption, although dialectology would want to include amongst its objectives the collection of mundane, ordinary conversa­ tion from, say, a pub or community centre, or any number of different social gathering places-which is trickier to achieve than surreptitiously recording more enclosed exchanges of the doctor-patient, classroom or telephone type. Sociolinguistics has paid much attention to patterns of variation in dif­ fering styles of speech; analysis of extended everyday discourse would pro­ vide a significantly more detailed description of variation within a variety of "casual" styles. It is likely to clarify the extent to which present-day native British English speakers are "bilingual", especially in terms of phonology, employing a range of forms which shift between the two terminals of "broad" dialect and RP. In my experience, recording long samples of extended conversation is the best way to obtain many non-standard syntactic features which it is virtually impossible to elicit by direct questionnaire methods, e.g. in Wales, the pro­ gressive periphrastic verb constructions associated with the habitual aspect, or double-negative constructions. Collection of monologues and everyday conversation will allow dialec­ tologists to attempt to discover new correlations between discourse features and the factor of region. Macaulay 1988 suggests a number of such features, The Politics of Dialectology 65 e.g. proportion of subordinate clauses to total number of finite clauses, type of subordinate clause used, use of highlighting devices (such as clefting), occurrence of "discourse markers" or "terminal tags". Work elsewhere in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis will suggest others, e.g. interruptions, simultaneous speech, thematic fronting, ritual greetings and other boundary markers. We cannot be sure that such features are not affected by region; we can be sure now that some are. It is also obvious that more than ever before dialectology would have to address the interplay between all the social factors influencing linguistic performance: social background of speakers, sex of speakers, age, and of course the social setting in which performance occurs. This means that, if both major strands of dialectology begin to grapple with the problems of discourse, the effect on the discipline will be a unifying one.

In 1982 K.M. Petyt asked the question, "Who is really doing dialectology?" In 1985 Sanderson and Widdowson answered: "All of those who study dialects" (48). This standpoint argues ultimately for a discipline without a framework, a discipline that is not a discipline. In fact, their paper's final sentence talks of "two related disciplines" (ibid. 48), undermining their earlier reference to an "untenable dichotomy" between "traditional" and "modem" dialectology (ibid. 40). This paper has implicitly argued for a unified, though broad, framework. Although a dialectologist may choose to examine his or her data in specific relation to a restricted number of or even one social factor, such as region, he or she cannot ignore the influence and importance of the larger linguistic and social contexts. In the concluding chapter of their 1980 Dialectology, J.K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill describe dialectology as a unified discipline that marks the "confluence" of "three streams-dialect geography, urban dialectology, and human geography" (ibid. 206). It is now time to think about adding a fourth, emanating from discourse analysis. Chambers and Trudgill, dissatisfied with the association of the term "dialectology" with "dialect geography" only, suggested a new one for their unified discipline: geolinguistics. I believe that we are stuck with "dialec­ tology", if only because we are still stuck with the term "dialect", despite the introduction of "regional variety". Both "dialectology" and "dialect" can have negative connotations for every dialectologist, perhaps especially if he or she is a British dialectologist. To the non-linguist, "dialect" can still suggest sub-standard, rural, interesting but old-fashioned, quaint etc. styles 66 Robert Penhallurick of speech, and a dialectologist might be someone who studies these. Indeed, one could argue that the dominance of linguistic geography (concerned as it was mainly with rural dialects) within dialectology until recent times has helped foster this view, and contributed to Chambers' and Trudgill's objection to the term. It is not enough for dialectologists to continue to show that dialects are in no way intrinsically sub-standard. More important is the continued expansion of the discipline into other branches of linguistics by turning more of its attention towards the study of larger units of everyday discourse, and thereby recognising the unavoidable relevance of an increas­ ingly wide range of variables to the factor of linguistic region. Perhaps then the converse will also be given greater emphasis, i.e. the recognition that the factor of region is important to an increasingly wide range of sociolinguistic and discourse investigations. Even within the British Isles, the vast majority of native English speakers do not speak pure Standard English. They speak some form of dialectal English, sometimes substantially modified in the direction of Standard English. Dialectologists can justly assert that Standard English is to be defined according to the absence of regional features, rather than that dialectal English has to be described with reference to Standard English. In so doing, the factor of region, in its interaction with other social factors, will be given the privileged status it deserves within descriptive linguistics. And by the same token, dialectology would be accorded the privileged status it has unassumingly, even unnoticeably, always possessed.

References Adams, G.B., M .V. Barry and P .M.Tilling, "The Tape-recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech: A Reappraisal of the Techniques of Traditional Dialect Geography", in Kirk, Sanderson and Widdowson, 1985, pp.67 -80. Butler, Gary R., "Discourse Variation and the Study of Communicative Competence, in Thomas, 1988, pp.11-19. Chambers, J.K. and Peter Trudgill, Dialectology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980. Corsaro, William A ., "Sociological Approaches to Discourse Analysis", in van Dijk, 1985, pp. 167-192. Coulthard, Malcom, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, London, Longman, 1985. Dieth, Eugen and Harold Orton, A Questionnaire for a Linguistic Atlas of England, 1952, reprinted in Orton 1962. Duranti, Alessandro, "Sociocultural Dimensions of Discourse", in van Dijk, 1985, pp.193- 230. The Politics of Dialectology 61

Edwards, V.K., Peter Trudgill and B. Weltens, The Grammar of English Dialect: A Survey of Research. A Report to the ESRC Education and Human Development Committee, London, Economic and Social Research Council, 1984. Francis, W. Nelson, Dialectology: An Introduction, London, Longman, 1983. Ihalainen, Ossi, "Creating Linguistic Databases from Machine-Readable Dialect Texts", in Thomas, 1988, pp.569-584. Kirk, John M., Stewart Sanderson and J.D.A. Widdowson, Studies in Linguistic Geography, London, Croom Helm, 1985. Labov, William, "The social motivation of a sound change", Word 19, 1963, pp.273-309. Labov, William, The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington D.C., Center for Applied Linguistics, 1966. Labov, William, Language in the Inner City, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972 Macauley, Ronald K.S., Language, Social Class and Education: a Glasgow Study, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Macauley, Ronald K.S., "What Happened to Sociolinguistics?", English World-Wide 9:2, 1988, pp.153-169. Mather, James Y. and H.-H. Speital, The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots Section (LAS), Vols. 1 and 2, London, Croom Helm, 1975, 1977. Mather, James Y. and G.W.Leslie, The Linguistic Atlas of Scotland: Scots Section, Vol. 3, London, Croom Helm, 1986. North, David J., The Importance of Local Systems in Dialectology, Papers in Folk Life Studies 2, The School of English, University of Leeds, 1982. North, David J., Aspects of the phonology and agricultural terminology of the rural dialects of Surrey, Kent and Sussex, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1982. North, David J., Studies in Anglo-Cornish Phonology, Redruth, Institute of Cornish Studies, 1983. North, David J., "Spatial aspects of linguistic change in Surrey, Kent and Sussex", in Viereck, Wolfgang, ed., Focus on: England and Wales, Varieties of English Around the World, General Series, Vol. 4, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 1985. Orton, Harold, "An English Dialect Survey: Linguistic Atlas of England", Orbis 9, 1960, pp.331-341. Orton, Harold, Survey of English Dialects (A): Introduction (SED), Leeds, E.J. Arnold, 1962. Orton, Harold, et al., Survey of English Dialects (B): The Basic Material (BM), Vols. 1-4, Leeds, E.J. Arnold, 1962-1971. Orton, Harold and Nathalia Wright, A Word Geography of England (WGE), London, Seminar Press, 197 4. Orton, Harold, Stewart Sanderson and J.D.A Widdowson, The Linguistic Atlas of England (LA£), London, Croom Helm, 1978. Parry, David R., The Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD), Vols. 1 and 2, Swansea, privately published, 1977, 1979. 68 Robert Penhallurick

Parry, David R., forthcoming, A Grammar and Glossary of the Conservative Anglo-Welsh Dialects. Penhallurick, R.J., The Anglo-Welsh Dialects of North Wales: A Survey of Conservative Rural Spoken English in the Counties of Gwyndd and Clwyd, unpublished PhD thesis, University College of Swansea, 1986. Petyt, K.M., The Study of Dialect: An Introduction to Dialectology, London, Andre Deutsch, 1980. Petyt, K.M., "Who is really doing dialectology?", in Crystal, David, ed., Linguistic Controversies, London, Edward Arnold, 1982. Petyt, K.M., Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire, Varieties of English Around the World, General Series, Vol. 6, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 1985. Sanderson, Stewart and J.D.A.Widdowson, "Linguistic Geography in England: Progress and Prospects", in Kirk, Sanderson and Widdowson, 1985, pp.35-40. Thomas, Alan R., Methods in Dialectology: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference Held at the University College of North Wales, 3rd-7th August 1987, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1988. Trudgill, Peter, The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 13, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974. Upton, Clive, Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson, Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England, London, Croom Helm, 1978. van Dijk, Teun A., Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Vol. 1, London, Academic Press, 1985. Viereck, Wolfgang, "A Critical Appraisal of the Survey of English Dialects", Orbis 22:1, 1973, pp.72-84. Wakelin, Martyn F., English Dialects: An Introduction, revised edn, London, Athlone Press, 1977. Wells, J.C., review of LAE Journal of the International Phonetic Association 9, 1979, pp.39-42.

Department of English University of Tampere, Finland [Lore & Language 9/2 (1990) 69-83]

Review Article

Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow1

1. Introduction In Glasgow, Caroline Macafee, formerly Lecturer in Scottish Language at the University of Glasgow, sets out to demonstrate the distinctiveness of the English language in Glasgow. Her aim is to describe it in terms of its differ­ ences from Standard English, especially its peculiarities of lexis and gram­ mar, and to exemplify it by anthologising transcriptions of spoken recordings and local written texts, and by providing, from these representative texts, a glossary. Faced with the diversity of speech and writing (especially literary) styles involved, as well as other functions for which the standard spoken language is used (e.g. lecturing or broadcasting), the label "Glaswegian" is barely adequate. As a linguistic area, Glasgow is complex and diffuse, displaying uniqueness, diversity, and much that is common with colloquial speech generally, all of which are admirably documented and accounted for here. In structural terms, the English language of Glasgow represents a merger of two previously distinct languages, Scots and English, and as there is both a great deal of common ground as well as divergence between the two, it is often hard to draw the dividing line. As Macafee stresses, however, Glasgow English is not only structurally as divergent from RP-accented Standard English (i.e. Standard English English) as any British dialect, it is doubly stigmatised by also being divergent from the culturally prestigious varieties of Scots, notably traditional literary Scots. Glasgow is essentially split into four parts: an Introduction, a description of "the English of Glasgow", an anthology of texts (twenty four spoken and forty nine written, varying in length from four-lined children's jingles to extracts from novels, lectures, radio broadcasts and conversations, a few accompanied by translations), and a glossary. The introduction deals with the 70 J.M. Kirk

historical background to the formation and development of Glasgow English, with the social composition and structure of present-day Glasgow, and with a number of other external factors which are relevant to the language's des­ cription. The spoken texts have been variously transcribed orthographically, phonetically, and prosodically, with acknowledged assistance from Paul Johnston, and there is an accompanying tape to which the text refers. Macafee has gone out of her way to relate the texts to the description as well as the glossary to the texts (and vice versa), so that many illustrative examples in the description or items in the glossary are helpfully cross­ referred to an original context. Macafee's approach to her subject is primary philological-no doubt in line with the guidelines for the series in which it is published. In addition, however, her comments are sometimes inspired and valuably supplemented by insights from recent work in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and text analy­ sis, so that she is able to offer comments about local uses of language for which philology would not have an explanation. Macafee's most original contribution is perhaps in her treatment of standard, dialect and politeness strategies. The reader is envisaged not as a man in the street or child at school but as a fellow linguist, bringing his or her own knowledge about the structure of language for decoding the references. In short, this is an excellent academic study both of its subject and of its type, and Macafee succeeds in her aims most commendably-most notably in the comprehensiveness both of its object (the texts which are anthologised and commented upon) and of the treatment of its subject (the English of Glasgow). Other strong points are to be found in the quality of the indi­ vidual text choices, many of which have never been published before and all of which, in their representativeness and typicality, would be hard to improve upon, and also in her treatment of them, which, while sometimes too brief, and occasionally terse, is admirably sharp and always stimulating. Having outlined the general structure of this book, I now wish to single out several specific areas for detailed comment. These are Macafee 's use of descriptive labels for Scots, her lexical categorisations, her glossary, her grammatical description, her treatment of politeness, and her treatment of literary texts. Valuable points are made about spelling and phonology, such as her demonstration that Scottish Standard English and Glasgow Scots (but Scots dialects in general) share a common phonemic inventory but differ in incidence and in their phonetic distribution and realisation, but it is not possible to deal with them here. Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 71

2. Descriptive Labels for Scots As a variety of English, Macafee demonstrates beyond doubt that the language of Glasgow is not only a merger of Scots and English, but it encompasses a great many subvarieties composed of greater or lesser combi­ nations of the two. Although structurally now heteronomously English (cp. Kirk 1987), no matter how divergent (cp. Kirk in press), the language of Glasgow is often thought of as Scots, out of nationalistic sentiment and understandable grounds of social history. Thus the following are used for contrastive identification: Scots or General Scots, used to refer to all the varieties and to refer to words or phrases still used among Scots which have no precise English equivalent, e.g. but-an' -ben (for a two-roomed cottage), clishmaclavers (for "gossip"), collieshangie (for "uproar"), the inflections -na for negatives and -it for past participles, and the elision of of in quantifiers, as in a wee drap tea, as well as words which substitute for English equivalents deemed to be ideologically alien, such as college for university; Colloquial Scots used to refer to the spoken vernacular in widespread use, e.g. ye best (for "you had best"), breadsnapper (for "child"), that (as a relative pronoun), beddie-baw (baby­ talk), sure (as an interrogative marker), the phrase is he age?, that minnay (intensified form of "so many"), and backs (for "back courtyards"); Dialect Scots, which is typical of only a large area or a number of areas and not of the whole territory, e.g. wean (in the West of Scotland for child, as opposed to bairn), or chiel (in the North East for "fellow"), or piggies (in the East of Scotland for small broken pieces of china used for playing by children) or simmit (in the West of Scotland for a man's undervest); Glasgow Scots, used to refer to the localised dialect, sometimes called Localised Scots, e.g. gallus (with its many meanings), peery-heidit (literally "spinning-top headed", i.e. in a state of confusion), borrowings from Hibemo-English, e.g. begob (by God!), Dan (for a Roman Catholic), dudyen (a pipe), and jorrie (a peerie), and lots of terms used in childlore; Literary Scots, used to refer to the language used by writes and sometimes called Lallans or Traditional Scots, e.g. gloamin (for "twilight"), or the preposition frae (instead of Scots fae) or calques on St.E. idiom such as gien up the ghaist (for "given up the ghost"); Traditional Scots, used formerly in speech and as the basis for Literary Scots and candidates as stereotypes, e.g. ay (for "always"), couthie, and cognates of the type nicht (for night), and verb forms rarely heard such as cam or tak. 72 J.M. Kirk

The English of Glasgow is variously referred to, depending on circum­ stances of use, as Scottish Standard English or Colloquial Scottish Standard English, or in terms of structure and other circumstances of use as Non­ Standard English or Non-Standard British English (e.g. int for isn't), wint (for wasn't or weren't), dint (for don't or the use of never to refer to a single occasion). Other linguistic types are slang, which is dealt with further in section 2, formal speech (e.g. the use of must to mean obligation, as in St.E., or the use of rhetorical devices such as inversion of invocations to the deity, and proper speech, satirised in text 37, all of which are accompanied by social correlates. There are, of course, other types not included here, such as Occasional Scots (used to refer to the mostly colloquial Scots sometimes used by Scots whose usual speech is Standard English, e.g. the real Mackay, or a dram, or to come into the body of the kirk), and Technical Scots (used to refer to occupational or trade-related language, e.g. hutch (small wagon used in a coal-mine) or mell (a heavy hammer), snag (to clean out a building after construction). In view of all this variety which exists side by side, as one code is switched by another, by different speakers, with different social backgrounds, for different functions, in different modes, the language of Glasgow is charac­ terised only by diversity, and it is clear that the concept of "Glaswegian" is no more than a stereotype. The result is eclecticism; as Macafee expresses it: "the literary register of Scots influences Glasgow writers to different extents up to the present time and makes it impossible to use the evidence of earlier texts negatively to establish the non-existence of forms. Traditional spellings, in particular, may or may not conceal localised variants" (p.lOO). In view of Glasgow's literary background which encompasses as readily traditional as well as realistic styles, Glasgow is conspicuously rich in linguistic variation, and the range of styles or codes available to the Glasgow speaker, although by no means exclusive, must be among the highest.

3. Lexical Categorisations Although Macafee' s description offers a valuably rounded description of Glasgow lexis and its processes of contemporary formation, the text notes include a number of other categories which highlight the diversity in the dialect's lexical structure. Some of these categories which are recognised Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 7 3 include: "calques" (e.g. gien up the ghaist (p.l02) or the length of myself (p.140)); "colloquialisms" (e.g. ye best (p.104), breadsnapper and that (as a relative pronoun for who) (p.106), beddie-baw, sure (as an interrogative particle) (p.108), that minnay (for so minnay) (p.114), backs (for back courts) (p.62)); "hypercorrections" (e.g. with for by as in surrounded with balloons) (p.109) "obselete words" (e.g. twa/', saxteen and ghaist (p.102), M' Ostrich (for Mac-) or words which, while occurring in traditional liter­ ary writing in Scots, would rarely occur in speech and are thus old­ fashioned, e.g. braks, cam, naething, and tak (from the play Willie Rough); "solecisms" (e.g. bairnin (for "giving birth") (p.l 06); "stereotypes" (e.g. couthie, chief, porridge (p.102), as Scottish stereotypes, but others are also indicated, e.g. finito (p.126) (as Italian stereotype), my man and I do declare (upper class stereotype), I wish (for vernacular I want) as proper Standard English), and so on. Although some other categorisations are important in the discussion of the use of language in texts, they would be unlikely to feature in a description of the dialect: for instance, mispronunciations (as erconomic, formerlerly, innerduction, skelington (for skeleton)), or malapropisms (expertiseness for expertise, counter-inflatability for counter-inflation, besiege for beseech).

4. The Glossary The glossary comprises a list of the non-standard lexical items occurring in the texts or mentioned in the book but excludes words with recognisable Scottish cognates. Its 324 items are distributed among Macafee's five princi­ pal labelling categories: General Scots, Local Glasgow dialect Scots, Scottish Standard English, slang, and miscellaneous, as follows:

n. % General Scots 143 44 Dialect Scots 51 16 Sc.St.E. 3 0 Slang 97 30 Miscellaneous 30 10 Total 342 100 Only in the glossary, impressionistically, is the extent of local features given in quantitative terms: a mere sixteen percent. The rest of the words are com­ mon either in Scots elsewhere (including literary writing) or in colloquial 74 J.M. Kirk

English. What the glossary reveals perhaps most conspicuously is the degree of slang: thirty percent-almost twice as much as the local dialect. Although slang is notoriously difficult to identify or agree about, Macafee bases her analysis on the unquestionable authority of Partridge. In the glossary, Macafee' s method has been to restrict her wordlist to the texts and any items cited in the introduction, and to rely for their classification on the established authorities for Scots of The Scottish National Dictionary and for slang Partridge's Dictionary of Slang. In addition, use is made of the slang material in Agutter and Cowan (1981). While the above distribution was yielded from her statistical calculations, it is unfortunately not interpreted. From these 324 words, there is surprisingly little which is labelled Glasgow. Some of the Glasgow items are labelled as West Central Scots, and only three words are labelled Glasgow and slang: bampot, bamstick, and boggin. Although some British slang seems to have originated in Glasgow (e.g. click, melt,fly, chin, miraculous and warmer), much of it appears not to be local but general. It might be illuminating to exemplify these five categories. Some of the fifty one Glasgow words are from children's games (bing-bang-skoosh, bogey, gemmie, keys, piggies, smowts, and snooks), some are regional vari­ ants of general Scots lexis (e.g. netterie, sapples and simmit), some are labelled pejorative (e.g. boot, hairy, hingoot and keelie) although now apparently not viewed as such by the more recent glossaries, or as jocular (e.g. breadmapper or skelington), and some appear unrecorded elsewhere (e.g. bing-bang-skoosh, boot, boufing, breadsnapper, hing on, magic, riddle, sanny, shrieking, skelington, smowts, snapper, mooks, staikie, stank, Tim, and waarmur. With the appearance of Mackie (1984), Mason (1987) and especially Munro (1985), these and lots more Glaswegianisms are now firmly recorded, no doubt for incorporation into future revisions of the Scots dictionaries. Some of Macafee' s glosses appear open to question. Is a hairy really only restricted to "a hatless young woman"? There is some evidence to suggest that its usual meaning of "prostitute" is generalising into a slighting refer­ ence to any young woman. And is a keelie a pejorative term for a young man? Is not this a term for any Glaswegian which can be used affectionately or insultingly as appropriate in the context? And how is polyfiller a hyperdialectism for polyfilla? The miscellaneous words include literary idiosyncrasies, such as in J.J. Bell's Wee MacGreegor: nick and peery-heidit; or in MacArthur and Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 7 5

Long's No Mean City: clabber, jigging or jorrie (although clabber and jorrie are common Ulsterisms and as such have been imported but have remained unrecorded); or in Cliff Hanley's writings: nyuck; or in Hibemo-Englishisms such as begob or dudgeon; or Americanisms such as destruct; or nonce words such as floompy or scrimle or weiber; or solecisms such as flyte; or words from colloquial British English such as mental; or from St.E. such as shag, slasher, or sweitin; or words from the North of England, such as shakerin or Tallyman. The three words attributed to Sc.St.E. are bucket (a "bin"), kerry-oot (a "take-away") and tawse (a "schoolmaster's belt or strap"). While I agree about bucket (much to the confusion of any of my interlocutors on the subject), tawse is surely General Scots and kerry-oot colloquial Scots. Throughout the book, Macafee returns to the notion of "thick" or "thin" Scots. Although these impressionistic labels are never actually substantiated by empirical quantification, the glossary suggests that the amount of lexis which is local to Glasgow is actually less than some might think. These epithets of "thickness" and "thinness" are sometimes used in connection with literary Scots, where there is obviously much greater scope for word selec­ tion and text craftmanship. From the texts, Macafee is able to demonstrate that realistic Scots is actually "thin" Scots, "thicker Scots" being characteris­ tic not of speech but of traditional literature. The texts serve to corroborate A gutter and Cowan's findings that urban Scots has been changing in quality and currency: declining in Scots lexis, but gaining in innovations, borrowings and coinages from Standard English.

5. Grammatical Description Macafee's section on grammar is perhaps the most disappointing. While it lists those morphological and syntactic features which seem peculiar to Glasgow and are reflected in the illustrative texts, and very occasionally a stylistic comment is added, what is not provided, however, is a systematic approach which integrates the particular features into the relevant paradigm or overall system. Moreover, there are no semantic or pragmatic inter­ pretations, and no indication is given of frequency distributions, so it is not possible to draw the complete picture or to judge whether these special Glasgow items are additions to or substitutions for the basic (standard) English system. Having written more expansively about such matters on an earlier occasion (Macafee 1980), albeit not with those particular texts, and in 76 J.M. Kirk

view of Macafee's aims to identify contrasting styles as well as styles in common, it is a pity that not more of this valuable and unpublished descrip­ tion could have been accommodated. While in line with her approach that she has at least recorded forms both of long standing and of recent innovation in Glasgow speech which future research can then take on board for fuller investigation (e.g. Kirk 1986), Macafee' s achievement, although undoubtedly real, reflects the limitations of such an approach as partial, uninterpreted, and unrevealing about the overall structure as well as about the semantic interpretation of particular items, no doubt many of them correlating with a pragmatic context. In the grammar section, inevitably, there are numerous details which lend themselves to a quarrel. Macafee explains the HAD + have + past participle construction (for her the double HAVE construction) by reference to Adams (1948) but it is usually explained by reference to the merged cliticised forms of WOULD and HAD as -'d (Michael Montgomery, personal communica­ tion). Collective focuses on such high frequency verbs as HAVE and GET and on their wide range of functions and meanings would have been desir­ able. Since modal auxiliaries and the semantics of modality generally are important issues, it seems a pity that Macafee' s treatment should be so piecemeal. The description only mentions the will can do it construction as a double modal construction (is this merely the occurrence of can non­ standardly as an infinitive? Or can the double modal be generalised to any modal, in any position?), whereas WILL, MUST and the expression of Obligation and Necessity are dealt with in text notes. In her zeal for con­ cision, some statements appear too strong, suggesting, for instance, that any stressed realisation of DO, with positive polarity, in the third person of the present tense, would be div, whereas her example is of a reinforcing tag. And why are tag particles (e.g. it's raining, isn't it?) referred to as "mitigating tags"? Perhaps her most general claim provides the strongest challenge. Macafee claims that the grammar of Scots differs from English in only superficial features and as examples cites the forms of inflections and function words (morphology) and the rules of concord (syntax). Elsewhere, Macafee talks of divergence between the two. Divergence has attracted considerable interest in dialectology recently, and those who have claimed it as the relationship between dialects have cited a non-identity between common forms and their semantic interpretation, usually on the grounds of differ­ ently structured paradigms. So Harris (1984) shows on the basis of tense Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 77 paradigm that Hiberno-English and Standard English are divergent dialects. And, following earlier research in the area by Miller and Brown (1982) and which is cited by Macafee, Kirk (to appear) shows that on the basis of the modal auxiliary paradigm Scots and Standard English are divergent dialects. If Macafee is right in her unargued assertions about divergence, then the differences between the dialects concerned are hardly "superficial".

6. Politeness Macafee is possibly at her best when she identifies instances of codeswitching, where the speaker-whether as a person in real life or as an imaginative character in literature-shifts his style of speaking. In the case of speech by the protagonist in Willie Rough (text 40), for instance, it is shown that rhetorical features such as inversion and the invocation of the deity are mixed with dialectal and colloquial forms. In the description of Glasgow English, Macafee spends some time dis­ cussing the politeness model (para. 1.8.1-1.8.2) as put forward by Brown and Lennson (1978 and 1987) and where all her examples are from dramatic texts. She begins by discussing four different strategies in the performance of a face-threatening act: to perform it, openly and unapologetically (e.g. Shut yer face, you!); to perform it openly, but offering some gesture towards the hearer's positive face (e.g. Gettin his strength up. Ah mean, a lovely girl like you); to perform it openly, but offering some gesture towards the hearer's negative face (e.g. Ah know ah' m goin on aboot this. But ... ); and to perform it indirectly, by hints, irony, sarcasm, and all kinds of indirect speech acts (e.g. You better get brains, son). In her discussion of the selection of these strategies, and in particular the choice between the more cautious strategy and the rest, Macafee recognises that two other factors are involved: the power differential and the social distance (cp. sir and hen). Macafee is able to reflect upon the Brown/Levinson politeness model con­ structively. Dialects may be transient varieties in the speech of individuals, she considers, but they may also be permanent varieties associated with par­ ticular socially and geographically located speech communities. Any use of dialect is thus inseparable from the values with which it is permanently associated, so that, from the rival value systems of standard and dialect, speakers of each derive a different kind of power. Macafee' s subsequent discussion of the interchange of dialect and standard 78 J.M. Kirk

in The Revellers is perhaps one of her finest insights. The manager's power is derived from his institutional role-ultimately the power to hire and fire. The foreman's power is derived from his skill and experience in the work­ place, which makes him effectively indispensable. Each does not converge towards the style of the other and each identifies himself through language with his respective power base. In the following exchange which she dis­ cusses, it is to these different power roles that each is responding: TEXT42 Just then, LESLIE hurries down the stair. LESLIE: Hold it, Bob. Hold it, boys. BOB: Hold it? We've jist got tae hold it. We cannae drap it on the fuckin fl. err. 5 LESLIE: No need to use that language in front of young boys, Bob. BOB: These young boys have got words we've never even heard o. Whit's the panic? LESLIE: You didn't forget that bowl, did you? BOB: Christ, is that a' ye want tae ask? We're staunin here wi this thing in 10 wur hauns, an' you're worry in a boot some stupid article that some half- arsed cowboy'll use for a chanty in the middle o the night. LESLIE: You don't have to be so crude. BOB: It's lyin ower therr. Gie it a wipe, an' it'll be champion. LESLIE: You managed to get the mark out? 15 BOB: Aye, aye. Noo, will ye kindly take a walk up these sterrs an' leave us in peace? LESLIE: You might be the foreman here, Bob, but you are talking to the manager. BOB: The manager that didnae gie me much co-operation when I was askin fur yur ideas a wee while ago. It wis up tae me, ye said. A'right, then, it's up 20 tae me an' ah'll see the job done. Away you an' staun up at the front door an' scratch yur arse. LESLIE leaves. For Macafee, such an exchange is a marked exchange. Moreover, there can be no unmarked, unproblematical dialogue between dialect and standard speakers. If standard speakers do not know the dialect, the exchange can only be constructed in the standard, but in these circumstances, the use of the standard is still socially meaningful because one speaker is forced to use a variety which is not native to him, but which is native to the other. Thus Macafee shows that code-switching is not a symmetrical phenomenon, because the relationship between the varieties is not symmetrical. For the Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 79 dialect speaker to use the standard is negative politeness-he avoids using a local and minority norm; for the standard speaker to use dialect, however, is positive politeness, because this is a specific compliment to the hearer (and assumed to be welcomed). Following on from Brown and Levinson's claim that dialect as such is a positive politeness strategy, Macafee suggests that dialect exchanges between dialect speakers are unmarked, for they simply confirm their place in society; but that all other exchanges are marked, for they require explanation in terms of the confrontation, mutual accommodation, and manipulation of rival ideologies. Dialect in the working class is not so much a politeness strategy at the micro-level but an expression of solidarity at the macro-level. Linguistic choices thus invite inferences about the speaker and his situation. With these insights, Macafee has valuably extended the paradigm of socio­ linguistic variation.

7. Literature As Macafee ( 1980) earlier showed, few other varieties of English anywhere can rival the distinctiveness of literary writing which is characteristic of Glasgow. Writers admired by Macafee for their success in creating effectively a literary language which is both realistic and plausible as the protagonist's own speech include Alan Spence (whose dialogue is considered to be rich in localised and idiomatic language), Jim Kelman and Alex Hamilton (who separately have made the transition from Scots in dialogue to Scots in narrative, thus creating a type of non-dialogue prose which retains the context of a monologue and the markers of a speaking voice, thus moti­ vating the use of dialect and allowing the character not to become alienated from the action, and yet at the same time conveying an orientation towards an addressee), Tom Leonard (who is admired for his inventiveness on finding ways to represent local variants orthographically), and Stephen Mulrine (who uses the standard for the most part but with a nonstandard spelling, thus drawing attention to the localised accent behind the words). Any narrator is circumscribed by the language assigned to him, and Macafee's excerpts are sufficient to demonstrate that narrators using Standard English not only distance themselves from the action but also from the local reader. As evidence for the English of Glasgow, Macafee's use of literary texts amounts to a source of information that is valuable because it is presumed to be based on careful observation by skilful craftsmen, and moreover their 80 J.M. Kirk description lends itself to the formulation of hypotheses which further research can then test. Her assumption that Scots is realistic for speech, how­ ever, is challenged by the practice of traditional writing, and forces a clear distinction between Traditional Literary Scots and the innovatory Glasgow Scots which has entered the literary arena during the last twenty years or so. In lexical terms, Literary Scots is characterised by a rich dialect vocabulary, used copiously, and an eschewal of any of the markers of current colloquial speech. Realistic Scots is characterised by a virtual absence of traditional Scots vocabulary, even, increasingly, it seems, of those Scots word forms which are cognate with English (nicht being replaced by night, for instance), and an allowance of colloquialisms, including as many swear- and slang words as characters in their real lives would permit themselves. These alone constitute different styles and very different underlying ideologies. In addi­ tion, syntactically, Traditional Scots reflects the syntax of Standard written English (after all, what other model was available for literary writing?) whereas Realistic Scots imitates directly the syntax of speech. Both styles share a common basic Scots morphology, but Realistic Scots is augmented by importations from general nonstandard speech (e.g. in tit?). Traditional Scots, being exclusively written, is static and exudes prescriptivism, whereas Realistic Scots is open-ended and infinitely flexible, being influenced by and reflective of current developments in speech. Some writers, however, in their attempts to be realistic in Scots, fall back on the resources of Traditional Scots (after all, what other model in Scots is available?) and Macafee is at times critical of their successes. A poem about the Glasgow barrows by Edith Little (text 54) is claimed not to be effective because of the density of its Traditional Scots lexis; Ian Hamilton Finlay (text 56) is challenged about the unlikeliness of his dialect words syne and neest; likewise the journalist Albert Mackie is taken to task for the overrichness of his Scots lexis in a newspaper style (text 68); and the writer Alex Mitchell (text 67), who has written extensively for the popular comedian Stanley Baxter, is taken to task for his merging of the language of several genera­ tions. Dramatic writers as popular as Bill Bryden and the late Roddy McMillan (texts 40 and 41), despite effective stage performances, are also criticised for their resort, in the written text, to literary Scots when the going gets tough. Perhaps the most fascinating text constitutes the reincarnation of an animal (text 57, by Ian Hamilton Finlay), in which the onomatopoeia suggests the breathing of the animal: Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 81

hooch a heilan coo wis mair liker it the hiker s hoo hoos ferr feart oma herr-do Macafee thus displays an impressive and rather enviable skill at identifying the markers of different kinds of Scots within even relatively brief passages. Her insights are the essence of practical criticism (the "discuss how the writer achieves his effects" syndrome) and deserves imitation and emulation by all parties at all interested in the use of language in Scottish literary texts. Texts discussed include novels, short stories, dramas, poetry, songs and jokes (including one-liners and creative insults-all part of the renowned Glasgow patter), as well as journalism and reminiscences. Macafee's primary aim was not to reflect the range of literary variation (the writer sometimes claimed to be currently Glasgow's finest, Alastair Gray, is not even included) but rather the range of linguistic variation, and she succeeds admirably. In this context, it is hardly surprising that it is those writers who are most radical in their use and structuring of language who come off best. Although there are occasional comparisons with the speech of Edinburgh, as far as realistic vernacular writing is concerned, Glasgow has nothing to fear. Although Macafee is persuasive about the usefulness of texts for hypothe­ sis testing, she also recognises that, for other purposes, such as the status of Glasgow as focal or relic area or the application of the gravity model within the dialect structure of Lowland Scots, the information yielded in this way is insufficient. There is clearly a great deal of research on all aspects of the structure and use of English in Glasgow which remains to be done. Although itself the result of enterprising and at times pioneering research, it points the way forward for future work in virtually every area with which it deals. Many of its assumptions and hypotheses lend themselves to confirmation or validation, and it is only to be hoped that some will rise to the challenge, not least Macafee herself. All the same, Glasgow constitutes a milestone in the linguistic documenta­ tion of this invigorating and progressive city and acts as a useful guide both for the local student as well as for the non-native scholar. For anyone at all 82 J.M. Kirk interested in the language of Glasgow, despite recent glossaries, there is simply nothing better. At the same time, in its use and exemplary treatment of the wide range of spoken and written texts which became available to Macafee during her preparatory research, it sets new standards for dialect monographs in the future. Its recognition of the importance of politeness in the use of language takes the description of urban dialects a genuine stage further. 2

Notes

1. Reflections arising from C. Macafee, Glasgow, Amsterdam (John Benjamins, 1983), Varieties of English Around the World Text Series, vol. 3, from which, wherever possible, cited examples are taken. 2. A numberoftypographicalerrorshavebeen spotted: p.21, 1. 15, so should be do; p.33, 1. 29, then should be than; p.35, 1. 2, realisation should be realisations; p.50, ex. 37 is not an example of learn as expected; p.56, 11. 7 and 22, repititions should be repetitions; p. 71, 1. 2, should usual not read as unusual? p.73, notes 11. 5-6, occasioal should be occasional; p.88, text 17, 1. 12, exhilirating should be exhilarating; p.106, text 30, 1. 11, ofshould be or; p.122, 1. 6, degaded should be degraded; p.132, text 57, notes 1. 3, repitition should be repetition, and 1. 5, seperation should be separation.

References

Agutter, A.J.L. and L.N. Cowan (1981) "Changes in the Vocabulary of Lowland Scots Dialect", in Scottish Literary Journal Supplement, no. 14,49-62. Brown, P. and S. Levinson (1978) "Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena", in E.N. Goody, ed., Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp.56-289. Brown, P. and S. Levinson (1987) Politeness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kirk, J.M. (1986) Aspects of the Grammar in a Corpus of Dramatic Texts, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield. Kirk, J.M. (1987) "The Heteronomy of Scots with Standard English", in C. Macafee and I. Macleod, eds., The Nuttis Schell: Essays on the Scots Language Presented to A.J. Aitken, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, pp.166-181. Kirk, J.M. (to appear) "Language Contact and Scots", in S . Ureland and G. Broderick, eds., Language Contact in the British Isles, Tiibingen, Niemeyer. Macafee, C. (1980) "Characteristics of Nonstandard Grammar in Scotland", unpublished typescript. Macafee, C. (I 982) "Glasgow Dialect in Literature", Scottish Language, vol. 1, 45-57. Mackie, A . (1984) An Illustrated Glasgow Glossary, Belfast, Blackstaff. Mason, P . (1987) C'mon Geeze Yer Patter!, Port Glasgow, Seanachaidh Presentations. Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 8 3

Miller, J. and K. Brown (1982) "Aspects of Scottish English Syntax", English World-Wide, vol. 3, 3-17. Munro, M. (1985) The Patter: A Guide to Current Glasgow Usage, Glasgow, Glasgow District Libraries.

J.M. Kirk The Queen's University of Belfast N orthem Ireland The Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize The Michaelis-Jena Ratcliff Prize is supported by an endowment established by the late Ruth Michaelis-Jena (Mrs. Ratcliff) and will be awarded annually for an important contribution to study of Folklore or Folklife. Individual applicants including students, candidates for higher degrees and established scholars are invited to present material for the award. Contributions, which must be printed or typewritten in English, may be a monograph, thesis, dissertation, an annotated and interpreted collection of materials or a text book. Articles and brief monographs will not be considered. Applications are invited from persons interested in the Folklore and Folklife of Great Britain and Ireland to enter their contributions for this prestigious prize. The prize will be £4000 for the winning entry. Please apply in the first instance for application forms and detailed guide­ lines to John K. Burleigh, W.S., Drummond Miller, W.S., 31/32 Moray Place, Edinburgh, EH3 6BZ. The last date for submitting entries is 31 December. The judges reserve the right to make no award in a given year if no suitable entries are received. Reviews

BALDWIN, Norman, Fae abune th' hill, Kirkwall, Orkney, The Orkney View, 1987, 87pp., £4.25. This short book of only 87 pages must surely be one of the most peaceful volumes of wartime reminiscences ever written! It is the account of one man's stay in Orkney for a period of nearly three years during the 1939-1945 war. The writer, who describes himself simply as "one of the lowliest of ranks" in the Royal Air Force, tells of his meeting and friendship with Orcadians, being made welcome in their homes and becoming fascinated by their dialect, a form of English but with numerous colourful expressions often culled from their Norse-rooted past. He recounts something of their history and way of life, often of hardship and hunger and always of hard work but with, apparently, contentment and a sense of humour. On many later visits to Orkney, the author finds that the way of life has changed and the dialect is dying out and he hopes his book will help to record some of this before it is too late. Norman Baldwin succeeds in passing on to his readers something of his own love of Orkney and Orcadians, although, in trying to appreciate the dialect, one inevitably misses "that upward lilting stress on the last syllable" which he "loved to hear" . The illustrations are by the author himself, both the cover painting and the charming black-and-white drawings which fit the text so aptly throughout the book. K.M. Hollins

BANKS, R.A. and F.D.A. BURNS, Advanced Level English Language, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1987, 222pp., £6.95. English language as an "A" level subject has increased in popularity enormously over the last few years and so it is not surprising that books to help teachers prepare their students for it should appear. Many teachers in schools and colleges have themselves done little work on language as part of their degree or teacher's certificate, and so such books are in principle to be welcomed. There are, however, problems in writing them. English Language at "0" level, and now at GCSE level involves little formal work in language, and so students who offer it at "A" level have little formal grammar or language work as a basis for their study. The "A" level syllabuses themselves do not examine much in the way of formal linguistic knowledge, but they presuppose that the students have that knowledge in order to be able to undertake their exams and projects satisfactorily. The problem for writers of books for English Language at "A" Level is whether they provide the basic knowledge, or the matter examined at "A" level, or the ways in which the practical work may be approached and presented; or they can try to do all of these. This book is divided into seven parts: approaches to the study of language; varieties of English; spoken and written English; terminology; grammar; exercises; and language pro­ jects. It tries to offer something on all aspects of language work as undertaken at "A" level. This inevitably means that insufficient time can be given to any one aspect. Often the book 86 Reviews seems to be little more than an expanded dictionary which gives explanatory entries about the important items in linguistics. Inevitably such explanations are often going to be tendentious or not very helpful. The chapter on grammar contains ten pages (97-106) and yet it deals with traditional grammar, immediate constituent grammars, structural grammars, post­ structural grammars, and transformational generative grammar. It is unlikely that most "A" level students would get anything out of this account other than confusion and incomprehen­ sion. That there are different approaches to grammar is good for them to know, but at this stage it is probably better for them to concentrate on a single type which they can use in their projects. It seems perverse to attempt so much if the ultimate result is going to lead to confu­ sion and perhaps even fright at the concept of grammar. To make sense of this book students would need a sympathetic and well-informed teacher to guide them. It is not necessarily that the information provided is wrong, but rather that the approach is not very user-friendly. But the problem is how much information one should give at this stage. In my opinion these authors have not gotten the balance right, though I admit that the ideal solution is going to be very difficult to find. This book does contain a lot of useful information, and the exercises are helpful. The authors may simply have tried to accomplish too much. N.F. Blake

BLACKING, John, {A Commonsense View of All Music', Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, 201pp., £19.50. Taking Percy Grainger's views as a starting point- a Grainger quotation heads each chapter- John Blacking discusses issues relevant to contemporary complexities of ethno­ musicology. Endorsing Grainger's views on complex "folk" music, Professor Blacking also considers three features that Grainger thought particularly characteristic of unwritten music: "lovely" melodies, "democratic" polyphony and rhythmic patterns considered "irregular". Grainger's idea that art can not only reflect life but can also generate it is expertly discussed by Professor Blacking in the light of his own research. The discoveries in ethnomusicology as applied to music education occupy the final chapters. An appendix reprints a synopsis of twelve lectures given by Grainger in 1934, together with a list of the records that he used to illustrate them. Incisive and observative, {A commonsense view of all music' is just that! W. Bennett

BARTHES, Roland, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard HOWARD, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, ix, 373pp., £27.50 hardback, £8.95 paper. In the last sixteen years of his life, Barthes wrote eleven books, and over 200 other pieces of writing were published. Behind language (spoken or written), and behind the narrative and structure, creation and intention, there is "noise" where there should be silence. Within com­ munication (especially literary communication) there is more than is intended to meet the eye. A Marxist has to believe this anyhow, because to him or her the literary creation can only be a part of the merchandise that is permitted as a minor opiate of the people under capitalism. If Reviews 87 the critic is very radical, he may also detect a similar screech coming from behind the language of literary creation under Stalinist or subsequent Leninist regimes. This noise is the "Rustle of Language" of this book's title. The conclusions are essentially negative: language is a slave system, and can only be drained or exploited. This posture enabled Barthes to make a long career of writing and speaking about words, keeping up with fashionable destructive criticism of creativity under capitalism and making his own contributions to that dismal nonscience. His output was accepted by those who accepted it, with the deference that was due to a professor in the College de France. Richard Howard's translation seems to be entirely competent. D.E. Bland

BECKER, Lawrence C., Reciprocity, London, Routledge, 1986, xii, 436pp., £20.00. Redefine a word in your own way, and then make a literary meal of it: that is an old formula for writing a book, and it is employed effectively by Professor Becker. The idea that under­ lies the book is that reciprocity (the return by another agent of sentiment or behaviour of approximately the same kind and value as the agent has received from oneself) is a positive and beneficial source of social cohesion. The basic argument is not unlike that which characterises Lord Morley's Essay on Compromise and a wide range of other liberal writings on the subject of nonvoluntary social obligations. Becker draws on the panoply of modern social sciences to support his primarily philosophical argument. The book is dynamic and clearly presented. It marks an interesting step in the development of thought in this field. D.E. Bland

BENES, Peter, ed., Families and Children, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife; Annual Proceedings, 1985, Boston, Boston University, 1987, 160pp., $8.00. This is a nice little book to bok at and to read. It comprises seven essays of the sixteen papers that were heard at this seminar, which (despite its name) was held in the U.S.A. The last piece, which is unfortunately only (though amply) illustrated in black and white, describes the painted family trees that have survived from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in coastal areas of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Connecticut. They have characteristic design, stemming from two hearts and presenting the descendant of the originating pair as pods on a growing tree. The origin of this tradition is not known, but Peter Benes (himself the author of this contribution) reports interestingly on the artwork and what lies behind it. Earlier pieces deal with courtship in the eighteenth century, breast feeding and weaning, infant clothing and schooling. Each of them is informative and nicely written. Where appro­ priate, as with the baby clothes, there is useful illustration. The range of the studies is broad, and this is always a disadvantage: people interested in the social history of medicine have perhaps the broadest range of relevant topics to refer to from this collection. It is a welcome addition to the shelves of the C.E.C.T.A.L. library. D.E. Bland 88 Reviews

BENSON, Larry D., ed., The Riverside Chaucer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1988, xliii, 1327pp., £8.95. Although called the Riverside Chaucer, this is really the third edition of the F.N. Robinson collected works of Chaucer. The general editor is Larry D. Benson of Harvard, but he has had a whole army of helpers to edit or to comment on individual texts. It is not easy, there­ fore, to review the book briefly. The general presentation of the volume is much like its predecessors, though there are some important differences. The order of the texts is the same and the same texts are included. The whole of The Romaunt of the Rose is included, even though it is not all by Chaucer, and The Equatorie of the Planetis is not included, although it probably is by Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales comes first and the order of the works follows the Robinson model, though it is one which has little justification. The texts are printed in double columns, and as the page size is standard quarto, the size of type is relatively small and it will be hard on the eyes to read much of the book at one sitting. However, at the foot of each page of text there are some glosses and occasional explanations of proper names. This represents a great improvement on earlier editions in which it was often difficult to establish the meaning of many words. The texts are followed by a section of explanatory notes and another of textual notes. This perpetuates the separation of these two features of the text, which is unfortunate because a particular reading often has an immediate bearing on the interpretation of the pass­ age in question. For most students it will probably mean that they will never consult the textual notes and so they will never realise how problematic some readings are. There is a glos­ sary, which now has references to particular examples and includes a great number of words. This glossary is far superior to its predecessors. There is also an index of proper names. The texts themselves have been treated variously. The Canterbury Tales has been changed little. The editor has followed the Ellesmere manuscript and generally adopted the spellings found in the earlier Robinson editions. The wide acceptance of the primacy of Hengwrt finds no response in this edition. Other texts have been altered somewhat more than this one, though the changes are never very far-reaching. In most ways this edition is traditional in its text and tends to gloss over much of the textual discussion which has been carried on over the last decade or more. It would be difficult to find out from this edition that there had been any discussion over the genuineness of lines 31-96 in The Book of the Duchess. All that a reader finds is that these lines are not in the manuscripts and only in the first printed edition. There is no discussion of the appropriateness of the title Gentilesse for that short poem, even though that word only occurs in two witnesses, the rest having gentilnesse which seems more likely to be the original reading. It is very welcome to have a new edition of Robinson and at the price of £8.95 for the paperback it represents good value for money. It is in most ways, but perhaps not textually, a great improvement on its predecessors. It is, however, rather bulky as a paperback and could easily disintegrate under student use. The size of the type will also invoke frequent curses from its student users. There is no doubt that despite these drawbacks it will continue to the text which will appear on most set-book lists. N.F. Blake Reviews 89

BINSBERGEN, Wim van, and Matthew SCHOFFELEERS, Theoretical Explorations in African Religion, London, KPI, 1985, x, 389pp., $30.00. There is an introduction and eleven discrete papers in this volume, covering a wide range of Christian, Islamic and indigenous African religious topics. The approaches vary from the Marxist to the clearly non-Marxist, and there is a good spread both of observed fact and of analytical stance. Theological papers were not included in this publication. None of the con­ tributors is a native African, but all are deeply involved in the work that is committed to pre­ serving cultural forms which are subject to heavy strain in the economics of development and dependency. D.E. Bland

BORMAN, Kathryn M., The Social Life of Children in a Changing Society, London, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982, xvii, 294pp., £19.95. This is the book of the symposium, which was attend by anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists and "interdisciplinary" developmental scientists. The core of the volume is con­ cerned with language development, defining the norm and the treatment of developmentally delayed children. Fashionable cross-cultural comparison gets its due attention, and the con­ cept of a changing society is always good for a title page. The pieces vary greatly in content, and it is invidious to select any for special analysis here. They all contain research reporting and analytical work. The overall effect is one of a useful workshop, though the delay between publication and the date of this review makes the book something of a period piece. D.E. Bland

BOUCICAULT, DION, London Assurance, ed. James L. SMITH, London, Adam and Charles Black, 1984, 137pp., £3.95 paper. This is the first fully-annotated edition of the play produced in 1841 by the neglected Irish playwright and skilful adapter of plays from novels or plays by other hands,Dionysius (Dion) Lardner Boucicault (originally Bourcicault). Only a handful of plays endure which can claim the authorship of this selfish, extravagant, deceitful, dissolute yet witty bigamist and charmer. London Assurance was his first success, opening at Covent Garden in 1841 to become the hit of the season. In a contemporary climate obsessed with moral laxity, it is con­ ceivable that a play covering the life and times of this astonishing man-probably the son of Dr. Dionysius Lardner, bohemian scientist and engineer, and not of his mother's husband, an elderly wine merchant on hard times- would almost certainly become the hit of the pre­ sent season. The introduction's account of Dion 's marriage in 1845 to Anne Guiot, a French widow "who was reported to have slipped to her death in the Alps soon after, leaving Diona small fortune" reads like the text of a Victorian melodrama. Lifestyles such as his-similar perhaps, except for sexual diversity factors, to that of Oscar Wilde, a contemporary influ­ enced by Boucicault's early comedies- tend to block a true criticism of the written word. A 90 Reviews reassessment of London Assurance can be research well rewarded in James L. Smith's New Mermaid edition which has the lively text-reinforced with lively characters like Lady Gay Spanker-preceding two informative appendices on the author's and current opinion of the play. Your interest will be well protected with London Assurance! W. Bennett

BRINK, C.O., English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman, Cambridge, James Clarke, 1985, x, 243pp., £11.95. It is natural that an Emeritus Professor of Latin of the University of Cambridge should write up a lecture series on classical scholarship in the two old English universities as a book. This gives his ruminations on some of the acknowledged great men of the field the chance of coming to a wider audience. Although classical studies have declined in the past couple of decades from their peak in the Robbins expansion era, there remain far more scholars working in these fields, in a couple of dozen United Kingdom universities, than there have been in any period before 1960. These people have better technique, better technology and better analytical apparatus to help them than any of their forbears had. So the idea (implicit in the title of Brink's third chapter) that the "great age of classical scholarship" was between 1691 and 1698 might perhaps be challenged. Brink makes available to those who may find it interesting a limited vision of a few of the teachers and researchers in the classics who enlivened those subjects for a captive audience of pupils whose careers (usually as clergymen or schoolmasters) would depend on satisfying their teachers in oral examinations. The world that he illustrates comes into the twentieth century, and modem times are mentioned at the end, but the primary concern of the author is to indulge himself and his reader in a view of that different world where classicists did not need to explain to anybody why they should exist. D.E. Bland

BRINTON, William M., A Pole for the Small Press: Publishing in a Global Village, San Francisco, Mercury House, 1987, ii, 207 + 14pp. This slightly chaotic book is an attempt to take the reader through what the writer discovered about publishing. What can you publish legally in the U.S.A.? How much does it cost? How do you get a book printed and marketed? These and other questions are asked and answered by an amateur for amateurs. It offers an interesting squint into a small business world in the U.S.A. in the middle 1980s. D.E. Bland

BROCK, William, Scotus Americanus: A survey of the sources for links between Scotland and America in the eighteenth century, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1982, viii, 293pp., £10.00.

This is a good and interesting book, whose title is most unlikely to attract the readership that Reviews 91 it certainly deserves. It is most intelligently organised, with chapters that move from the general appreciation of the great adventure of crossing the Atlantic (normally, for non­ sailors, a once in a lifetime experience), through a section on the most successful commercial link (from Scotland's point of view, the tobacco trade into Glasgow) to accounts of the mass movement of unskilled Highlanders and the selective migration of professional men, includ­ ing especially those medical practitioners whose careers are indicated in an additional chapter by C. Helen Brock. Then come three chapters that show how Scots on both sides of the Atlantic coped with the War of Independence and its aftermath. The use of sources is impressive, and this work shows both for English and American readers in particular how distinct from the history of England is that of Scotland. This book is a distinguished contribution to Scottish, American and transatlantic history. D.E. Bland

BROWN, George Mackay, Portrait of Orkney, London, John Murray, 1988, 128pp., illus., £6.95. George Mackay Brown paints a compelling picture of Orkney in this attractively produced book with photographs by Gunnie Moberg and drawings by Erlend Brown. As one of the leading writers of Orkney, he is well qualified to write about it. After a chapter introducing the people of Orkney, he goes on to describe his childhood, a marvellously evocative description. He remembers the magic of it, the old customs, the first footers, the Lammas Fair at the beginning of September. Each season had its own delights, summer with its breaking up from school, winter with Christmas dominating. Other chapter headings are Kirkwall and Stromness, land, sea, stone, religion, occupations, war, song and sign, lore and a nature anthology. For a book of only 128 pages it packs in a lot of information, concisely and beautifully written. M. Knight

BURKE, Peter and Roy PORTER, eds., The Social History of Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, x, 219pp., £25.00 hardback, £8.95 paper. This small book makes a lively contribution to an important study. The history of language is the best quarry for analysis of the use of language, the change in language and the variety of language that any individual or group has employed. The strongest impression that comes from these papers is of the importance of language as a political and economic tool. Not the simple, direct use of language but the employment of terms that combine economy with the truth and a code or second language (which may just be the power of literacy, as in the eighth essay, on the "trickery" of the English in getting Maori chiefs to sign the Treaty of Waitangi). By being able to use words that have a hidden meaning, or which convey abuse while not actually being "abusive words", social and politi­ cal messages can be passed with a minimum chance of painful comeback to the utterer. Each of the pieces in this book, from early modern Italy through the France of the 92 Reviews

Revolution (three fascinatingly different aspects) to the linguistic unification of Italy and the introduction of writing to New Zealand, is informative and has aspects of originality in its presentation. Roy Porter's piece on The Language of Quackery in England, 1660-1800 is a lovely mixture of historical scholarship and fine comedy. This is an interesting book, which it is a pleasure to read. D.E. Bland

BURROW, J.A., Medieval Writers and their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background 1100-1500, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982, 148pp., £3.95 paper. This book is intended as an introduction to Middle English literature for readers who approach it only, or mainly, from a background experience of more recent English writings. It deals with subjects as fundamental as the medieval concept of literature in general, pub­ lishing, writers, listeners and readers, genres, modes of meaning, and the reception and influence of Middle English literature into more modem times. Being a relatively short book, it is inevitably selective, but does not concentrate exclusively on the literary monuments of the period. A beginner who uses it in conjunction with a more straightforward background account or survey will be in a good position to avoid many of the false assumptions to which present-day habits of reading inevitably give rise. G.A. Lester

BURTON-ROBERTS, Noel, Analysing Sentences: An Introduction to English Syntax, London, Longman, 1986, ix, 265pp., £5.95 paper. This textbook about the syntactic analysis of sentences succinctly defines syntax as "the study of the form, positioning, and grouping, of the elements that go to make up sentences". It is intended to provide the reader without previous knowledge of the subject with a method of describing the syntax of English as well as a vocabulary with which to start thinking about syntax "in terms of which the puzzles can be identified and solutions sought". To this end, it is also an introduction to the practical analysis of English sentences, rather than an introduction to linguistic theory. Burton-Roberts' textbook is exemplary and masterful, and to be commended thoroughly. It is written in a direct, second-person style which is not only appropriate for the abundance of exercises, where the reader has to be told what to do, but also for the initiation and accu­ mulative creation, for the reader, of an understanding of syntactic structure and of the moti­ vations for the particular analysis of phrase-marker configuration which is proposed. Related to the efficiency and effectiveness of this pedagogical stylistic mode is an easeful and envi­ able clarity of presentation, which is reinforced by the use of a number of contrastive type fonts. Moreover, by availing himself judiciously of an eclecticism among existing concepts and arguments in the paradigm inspired by transformational generative grammar, the author succeeds in providing a model of analysis which is unified, consistent, and rigorously inte­ grated, especially at the level of tree configuration. Finally, he provides an abundance of Reviews 93 exercises both within chapters, for the establishment of a point of argument or of a crucial insight of understanding, and at the end of chapters, by drilling, for consolidation, and by subsequent discussion for reinforcement. For all these different and accumulative reasons, Analysing Sentences is a superb achievement and is surely destined to have a long working life. As one might expect, its ten substantial chapters deal respectively with constituents, functions, categories, the verb phrase, modifiers in the verb phrase, the verb group, noun phrases, sentences within sen­ tences, WH-clauses, and nonfinite clauses. Each section is characterised by the use, wherever relevant, of negative evidence and its implications. There is also an epilogue which places the concerns of the book in a wider context, thus raising some of the general aims and principles of syntactic analysis. Some of the key ideas within syntax from which the discus­ sion is repeatedly informed and which become critical for the validity of a syntactic argument include movability, omissibility, single-word substitution, and displacement, and these are sometimes augmented by sense tests, question tests, and cleft-sentence tests. Much of what Burton-Roberts attributes to function can be thought of as semantic interpretation, but it is clear that in an attempt to focus singlemindedly on syntax, talk of semantics has been carefully suppressed. Although the obvious brilliance and success of this textbook is due to the rigorousness of its eclecticism and integration, in the final, pedantic, analysis it becomes, unavoidably, idiosyncratic, but, of course, none the worse for that. Tutors well versed in the TG tradition, however, might need to be on the alert for the innovations which will unwittingly be taken by their students as gospel. Some of the surprises include the creation of double VP node through the presence of an adjunct, or the creation of a double S node through the presence of a conjunct or disjunct; others are in the verb group--for instance, AUX is analysed in terms of marked forms where the function is performed by an auxiliary (but surely a lexical verb is also marked, for instance, as progressive or for voice by being unmarked?); the position of the negative particle (p.131); the realisation of TENSE as a node (as opposed to a feature) only with DO; the analysis of BE always as an auxiliary, thus leading to an empty verb slot in its copular uses (is HAVE as in Have you a light? to be analysed similarly?); the retention of the classification of complementation types (discussed in chapter 4) for lexical verbs which are followed by a finite clause complement (cp. the distinction between transi­ tive and ditransitive verbs on p. 172, e.g. John believes that the sea was calm that day and John persuaded Bill that the sea was calm that day), whereas verbs which are followed by a finite clause become reclassified as types I and II, albeit on the similar grounds of the status of the noun phrase or phrases between the superordinate and subordinate verbs (cp. John believes the sea to have been calm that day and John persuaded Peter to enter the race). If there is no need to include the notation of type I or II in the phrase marker in the case of finite clause complements, is there a need for its inclusion in the case of non finite complements? After all, "type I" and "type II" are rather opaque as feature labels and seem rather ad hoc, perhaps too post hoc? Whereas both analyses avoid the conventional discussion in terms of "raising" and "equi-NP deletion", which are dealt with in terms of the presence of animate NPs and the control of the empty subject NP of the nonfinite clause, the problem of agree­ ment associated with the transitive NP in John promised Bill to write the letter and John 94 Reviews

persuaded Bill to write the letter remains unresolved. It seems a pity that the rigorousness of the book should give way in its last lap--a lexical classification being offered unconvincingly as a semantic compromise to a syntactic problem. Such points of issue are fortunately extremely few in comparison with the abundance of excellent proposals and analyses elsewhere. Particularly good sections are the presentation of arguments for sister dependent constituents and for governor-complement relationships; the criteria for defining categories, which make use of the negative evidence of the ill-formed coordination of different categories; the types of verb complementation in simple sentences, in which the verb group is considered the governor, and the following constituents the com­ plement; the discussion of noun phrases which occur between superordinate and subordinate clauses; the discussion of scope or the function of a constituent extending over a sequence of words (cp. both the man's eyes and both the men's eyes); the distinction between participial phrases: the leering manager, a faded dream, sliced cakes (which might be adverbially modified but not graded) and "certain true adjectives" (which may be graded but not adverbially modified) (pp. 1456): e.g. uninterested, relieved, surprising, or unexpected; nesting structures in complex, multiword, nouns; the use of the S-bar notation in comple­ ment clauses and finite adverbial clauses; and the types and functions of non-finite clauses. I recommend this book from experience with unreserved convic tion. J.M. Kirk

COATES, Jennifer, Women, Men and Language: Studies in Language and Linguistics, Harlow, Longman, 1986, 178pp., £5.95. This book serves as an introduction for students, not only to the subject of its title, but also as a demonstration of the technique of observing and analysing linguistic variations and the functions of such variations. Reading it one recalls the saying, " Language was created in order to enable man to conceal his thoughts" . It is possible to appreciate how conversational interaction can conceal assumptions that can lead to miscommunications. Differences in con­ versational style between all-female and all-male groups are shown to be reflections of sub­ cultural differences. The author indicates that unless these differences are recognised they can conceal the complexities of the interaction of women talking to women and women talking to men. This book makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the linguistic relation­ ship between the sexes. D. Bates

CONNOLE, Nellie, ed. Barbara WHITEHEAD, Dark at Seven: The Life of a Derbyshire Miner, York, Whitehead Books, 1988, 108pp., £6.00. Over the last decade, the eliciting of life-histories by local and social historians has become well-established. However, such documentation was virtually unknown in the 1930s, when the data for this book was written. Reminiscences which Nellie Connole gleaned from her neighbour, Joseph Sharpe, go back as far as the 1860s, and it is only now that her daughter has edited and published them. The result is a fascinating account of the life and work of a Reviews 95 miner from Coal Aston near Dronfield, in northeast Derbyshire. Told in the first person, it shows how vast the changes have been, the hardships endured and the hardiness of the ordinary people in an age only three or four generations removed from our own. Perhaps I do Mr. Sharpe an injustice in using the word "ordinary". His perception of life showed much strength, wit and resilience--or perhaps the unusual factor is that he had a confidante to write down his reminiscences. Geoffrey Senior's numerous drawings of places and buildings mentioned in the text add to the enjoyment of reading this book, though a title under the illustration itself, instead of in a list at the beginning of the volume, would have been welcomed, especially by people unfamiliar with the area. The current fates of mines known to Mr. Sharpe are found in notes at the end of the book, as are extracts about Coal Aston taken from local "directories" and "histories", along with relevant census details about the Sharpe family. J.C. Massey

COULTHARD, Malcolm and Martin MONTGOMERY, eds. , Studies in Discourse Analysis, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981,£6.95. With the passing of time since the publication of this volume of studies, it has become possible to see how monumental it has become. Following the pioneering study of discourse analysis by John Sinclair and Malcolm Coulthard entitled Towards an Analysis of Discourse published in 1975, work continued on the revision and refinement of the rank-scaled model, with its acts, moves, exchanges, transactions, and texts, and with its potential for application to, and for subsequent adaptation because of, different speech situations. The present volume presents the findings of this work by that time. In later textbooks, such as the second edition of Coulthard's own Introduction to Discourse Analysis published in 1985, it is now possible to see the extent of the influence which these present papers have had, and how they have become some of the standard references. This not only concerns the several papers by Coulthard and Montgomery, which deal with the original model, the object of study (spoken discourse) and the structure of discourse exchanges, it also concerns those by David Brazil on Intonation, by John Esling on Kinesics, by Michael Stubbs on Exchange Structure (and picked up by Coulthard and Montgomery), by Kay Richardson, which all add to the model, sometimes critically, and also those by Margaret Berry on the usefulness in discourse analy­ sis of a systemic linguistic approach, and by Deirdre Burton on the extension of the model to spontaneous, naturally occurring, everyday conversation. Although all the papers have become seminal, I have found several of them more useful than others. Brazil is, as always, especially interesting on the role of intonation in discourse because he does not restrict himself to a traditional prosodic approach but incorporates a pragmatic one: intonation not only carries a meaning but also an interpersonal value. Stubbs is valuable for its extraordinarily powerful idea that utterances in discourse are either pre­ dicting or predicted (cp. "What time is it?" " Three o'clock."). It is a big step from a restricted and rather institutionalised register like classroom discourse to the open discourse of ordinary conversation, but with the help of some additional categories already described elsewhere by Halliday and Hasan, Deirdre Burton valuably shows how this is possible. For anyone inter- 96 Reviews

ested in dramatic texts, this is also a most relevant contribution, as it develops work by Burton on dramatic texts reported elsewhere (Burton 1980). Her approach could well be followed by others. Margaret Berry demonstrates, on the basis of two series of subtly varied and quite unforgettable quiz-show-styled question and answer exchanges, that systemic linguistics can assist discourse analysts and also how such analysis might be done. Characteristically, the paper is full of intellectual rigour and is immaculately clear, but it has perhaps had less impact subsequently than some of the others I have mentioned. This is one of the key texts in the British evolution of discourse analysis. It is a standard "set-text", and no-one interested in the subject can afford to be without it. J.M. Kirk

CUSHING, Frank Hamilton, Zuni Folk Tales, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1986, xxix, 474pp., $12.95.

ESMAN, Mrujorie R., Henderson, Louisiana: Cultural Adaptation in a Cajun Community, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985, 137pp., £6.95. THOMPSON, John M.A., et al., eds., Manual of Curatorship: A Guide to Museum Practice, London, Butterworths, 1984, 553pp., £40.00. TYLER, Hamilton A., Pueblo Gods and Myths, Norman and London, University of Oklahoma Press, 1986, 312pp., £9.25. WATSON, James, What is Communication Studies?, London, Edward Arnold, 1985, viii, 88pp., £2.95. ZITKALA-SA (Gertrude Bonnin), Old Indian Legends, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 165pp., $5.95. ZITKALA-SA (Gertrude Bonnin), American Indian Stories, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 195pp., $5.95.

Cultural Gatekeepers As James Watson points out in What is Cummnication Studies?, in all walks of life there are gatekeepers, who can open gates to communication or keep them firmly shut. He cites secre­ taries protecting their bosses as examples of this. The whole of his book can be seen as an attempt to throw open the gates to a subject area, to enable outsiders to look in. Watson sees communication studies as a disciplinary "boundary-crosser" serving as "an antidote to over­ specialisation". The publishers commend the volume to both interested outsiders and students thinking of taking courses in communication. In addition it is claimed to be an intro­ ductory textbook for undergraduates. It certainly succeeds in the former and all who read it should be able to use the communication skills to bypass many gatekeepers within their own culture, but not those between cultures. Only individuals who are to some extent bicultural can bypass intercultural gatekeepers. While only Watson and Esman use the term gatekeeper in their analyses, all the volumes under review herein could have done so with advantage. Reviews 97

Zitkala-Sa (1876-1938) was a cultural gatekeeper who attempted to show some aspects of her Sioux inheritance to non-Siouxs. She did this at the beginning of the century with the initial publication of her Old Indian Legends in 1901 and various autobiographical essays and short stories in Harpers and Atlantic Monthly in 1900 and 1901. These articles were first published in book form in her American Indian Stories in 1921. The earlier volume presented to the whites a written English version of Sioux oral literature and the later one a description of the difficulties of being brought up on the boundaries between red and white cultures, together with some fictional tales of other Indians in such situations. Both volumes have been seen as pioneering works of Sioux literature and can be read as such. In addition they furnish data for folklorists both in the tales told and the details of the teller. Zitkala-Sa's sub­ sequent career concerned another aspect of cultural gatekeeping. She lobbied for the Indian cause in Washington, edited an Indian journal and collaborated in the production of the opera SunDance. While gatekeepers are frequently members of the social institutions involved, they can also be outsiders. Zitkala-Sa's essay on "America's Indian problem" in her American Indian Stories describes one of the whiteman 's gatekeepers for the Amerindians, The Bureau of Indian Affairs, as seen by the Indian. Since members of the Bureau were also recording Indian folklore, it is worthwhile comparing and contrasting her writing of her people's tales with those collected amongst the Zuni and translated by her near contemporary Frank Cushing (1857-1900). He was employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and lived for five years with the Zuni. Despite his vast knowledge of them, his English versions of Indian tales are colder and not so heartfelt as are those of Zitkala-Sa. In addition, Cushing introduced European folklore to the Zuni and one of the most fascinating sections of the Pueblo volume is a comparison between an Italian tale of the cock and the mouse, which he told, and a version of it that he subsequently collected from a member of his Zuni audience. Cushing's Zuni Folk Tales was posthumously published in 1901. The new edition has an added introduction locating Cushing and his work in a historical context. Austin rightly praises him for not forcing the tales into the whiteman 's folklore conventions, as many of his contemporaries did. While his work communicated less well transculturally, it is academi­ cally more valuable because it exemplifies traditional narrative structures. While some of his tales are introduced by "translator's introductions" the collection needs a cultural gatekeeper. One such is Tyler's volume, Pueblo Gods and Myths, which came into being because he asked "Why do the Pueblos still dance? For whom do they dance? What do they mean by their dancing?" While accepting the answer "for rain", Tyler shows how much lay behind this apparently simple answer. If he had been an anthropologist or folklorist his theoretical explanations and his choice of comparative data would have been different, but the study succeeds in demonstrating how the Pueblos are still there and why they are still dancing. A monograph that demonstrates the role of both insiders and outsiders as cultural gate­ keepers is the anthropological study of Henderson, Louisiana. In it Esman discusses indige­ nous gatekeepers, with analyses of Cajun waitresses and restaurants. They serve up less spicy versions of Cajun food to outsiders and similarly explain their culture to the visitors without really letting them see the real thing! They thus open the gate a crack while pre­ tending to throw it open wide. The book by Esman attempts to widen the aperture. In so 98 Reviews

doing she acts as another gatekeeper. As the study is part of the publisher's series Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology, she has had to fit in with the editorial policy of George and Louise Spindler who explained in their "Teaching and Learning Anthropology: The Case Study Approach" (in G. Spindler, ed., Education and Cultural Process: Anthropological Approaches, Waveland Press, 1987), that these studies "present the material in a way analagous to learning about a culture in the field-without much abstracted interpretation". Esman introduces the outsider to the community in two ways. Initially, an overview of Cajun history is followed by a local history of Henderson and the crawfish industry. Secondly, like the tourist, the reader is introduced to the culture via the restaurants, but instead of being stopped by the indigenous gatekeepers Esman goes on to discuss kinship, social life, poli­ tics, economics and leisure activities. She closes the study with discussions of how Henderson's relationship with neighbouring communities and tourists helped create the Cajuns' self-image. This leads on to a discussion of the survival of ethnic identity despite their changing culture. Museum curators, like anthropologists, are professional gatekeepers to alien cultures. They thus attempt to show aspects of cultures to outsiders. They are, however, constrained by the problems of the availability of items for display, the methods of display and the con­ servation of the items both in storage and on display. These restrictions are well described in Manual of Curatorship, the volume edited by Thompson for The Museum Association. Museums can also display the culture in which they are located. In the local museum to which I am attached, this process is similar to that of the waitresses of Henderson. The dis­ plays could be called "cultural presentations of self', in a paraphrase of Goffman. In addi­ tion, curators are gatekeepers for artefacts which they accept as collectable and/or displayable or reject totally. In so doing they categorise items as artistic, genuinely valuable or worthless. This can cause great problems, as are demonstrated by the sections in the Manual of Curatorship by Duggan on ethics and Cannon-Brokes on collection policy. While Thompson's volume is orientated towards the management of museums, its sections on the museum context, collection management, visitor services and administration could also be seen in terms of communication models. Indeed, they would have been improved if this aspect had not been relegated to, an admittedly superb, paper by Belcher. To sum up: while only two of the volumes reviewed mention gatekeepers, all of them offer insights into the phenomenon. The range of indigenous gatekeepers presented by them includes creative artists (e.g. Zitkala-Sa), academics (e.g. Picotte) restaurant personnel (in Henderson) and museumologists. Such gatekeepers tend to make more use of their role of shutting gates, than outsiders who act as gatekeepers. Though even they may sometimes restrict access to cultural data (e.g. cp. S.L. Andreski, Social Science as Sorcery, Deutsch, 1972). Outsiders can work in gatekeeping institutions like the Bureau of Indian Affairs, museums, or departments of Anthropology and Folklore. In addition the authors and editors of the anthropological and folkloric texts also act as cultural gatekeepers when they produce texts accessible to outsiders. While all the volumes discussed in this review can be con­ sidered as opening doors to outsiders, Thompson's collection does this less than the others as the reader would have to know a fair amount about museumology before finding it of use. One of the various editions of G. Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work (Nashville, Reviews 99

The American Association for State and Local History), would be better for the novice. Both, however, would be improved by a section similar to Watson's "How to read a picture", concerned with how to read a museum display. The collections of tales reviewed here would also have been improved by the addition of appendices giving comparative data. C.J.M.R. Gullick

DOUGLAS, Sheila, The King o the Black Art and Other Folk Tales, Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1987, 170pp., £12.90 hardback, £7.95 paper. The King o the Black Art and Other Folk Tales is a collection of stories told to Sheila Douglas by storytellers Alex, John and Belle Stewart, and Willie MacPhee, whose family and personal stories are also outlined. Dr. Douglas also explains the history and the cate­ gories of the tales handed down through a Scots story tradition descended from Scots craftsmen-silversmiths and armourers to the clans-who travelled the country and beyond. The storytellers here are now called travelling people, a diminishing group who are becoming more and more integrated with settled communities, and with the songs and stories of their great grandparents fast disappearing, it is essential that their folktales are documented. Dr Douglas's collection contains tales, tragic ones, familiar stories recognised universally­ The Devil' s Money, The Old Fisherman and the Devil, and those peculiar to Gaelic folklore-The King o the Black Art, the title story, can be found as "Fichaire Gobha" (Fichaire the Smith). One item at the front of this book puzzles me: Why is the British Library Cataloguing category 1. Short stories, English 2. English fiction? W. Bennett

ELDER, Eileen, Lincolnshire Country Food, Scunthorpe, Scunthorpe Borough Museum, 1985, 114pp., with map of Lindsey, glossary and index, £4.95 + p. and p. This attractively produced paperback volume, with line drawings by Valerie Littlewood, combines traditional Lincolnshire recipes, collected in the old county of Lindsey, with an account of former country customs and methods of food production (there is a hair-raisingly matter-of-fact account of how to kill your pig, hang it, scald it, scrape it, decapitate it, etc­ the pig sticker's job in a nutshell). In the first part of the book, the descriptive sections on "grain", "the Cow", "the Pig", "the Garden", etc. are printed on yellow paper, followed in the second part by recipes arranged under the same headings and printed on green paper, which makes the book both easy to use and attractive to look at. The recipes themselves are, as one would expect, not exactly haute cusine: e.g. curds, buttermilk bread and egg custard in the "Cow" section; lots of boiled bacon in the "Pig" section; pickles, chutneys and preserves in the "Garden" section. The breads are good, and the yeasted plum bread from Swaby, which I tried, is excellent. On the debit side, the book is eccentrically punctuated and features some weird and wonderful spellings. J.H. Hunter 100 Reviews

EL GUINDI, Fadwa (with the collaboration of Abel Hernandez Jimenez), The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Zapotec Life-Crisis Rituals, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1986, xvii, 147pp., $22.95. Over the years 1967-1978 the author spent twenty five months (mostly summer vacations) in the town of Lachigol6, nine miles from Oaxaca City, Mexico. The population of around 1,000 people are Zapotec Indians, who are mostly bilingual in Zapotec and Spanish. One individual, Abel Hernandez Jimenez, was examined in depth, and from his repetitive but randomly varied accounts of rituals a mass of data was acquired to which the techniques of structural analysis were applied. This formed the core of the data collection, which, it is claimed, was supplemented by other fieldwork. Having introduced the text, the author gives us three chapters of naive data on a child's christening, the funeral of an unmarried person and the funeral of a married person. Then, in the brief final chapter, the great discovery is reported: the Zapotec people bury unmarried young adults according to the ritual for a child. A man of twenty one was thus buried during the fieldwork period. The writer clearly does not know that this is common in tradition all over the world (or, if she does, she makes no reference to the fact). The peasants of the Carpathians, particularly in Romania, deck out a cut tree in marriage colours and carry it to the grave; dozens of other rituals worldwide make marriage the mark of distinction between infancy and adulthood. The lack of comparative insight is a great weakness in this book which merely seeks to perform an introspective analysis on the lines advocated by Levi­ Strauss. The descriptions of types of event are not uninteresting, but they are neither power­ fully rendered nor effectively analysed. D.E. Bland

FIRESTONE, Melvin, ed., Anthropological Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, Tempe, Arizona State University, 1982, 147pp. This do-it-yourself paperback is the product of a seminar that was held in the University of Arizona in 1979. The papers are all succinct and their range is limited. Only one of them deals with Ireland, touching on the hoary question of how Celtic are the Irish who are not of post-1200 British descent? The role of the "little people" as a defeated ancestral race to the Celts is not stressed, but the existence in Irish Celtic culture of many strands that can be inferred to come from an assimilated population is made clear enough. Robert J. Theodoratus reproduces a Welsh view of the Welsh as a people of small communities and isolated shrines; and he argues that the lack of a more modern focus to Welsh institutions (e.g. in the loose federal structure of the University of Wales) is the heir to that tradition. The two studies of the English mainland travel well trodden paths as well. Skin colour among the English varies with age, and tends to be lighter in Northern cities than among the agricultural minority in the South! Intermarriage within small communities accounts for a smaller percentage of unions now than it did in peasant England before the Agricultural Revolution; or so it appears from surname analysis. No surprise there. The remaining four papers are about the often navigated waters used by fishermen and coastal traders. Once more, they stick safely to the traditional received wisdom. Reviews 101

Someone ignorant of British local history or social structure might find here something of interest, that could lead them on to seek out some fuller and deeper study of the topic. These art "taster" papers; as such, each is competent. D.E. Bland

FOWKE, Edith, Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods, Toronto, NC Press, 1985, 232pp., £21.95 cloth, £12.95 paper. All those familiar with the work of Edith Fowke, internationally-known folklorist, will know what to expect from her latest collection. They will not be disappointed in Lumbering Songs which has many examples not published elsewhere. The lumbercamps were part of the heritage of Ontario and adjoining areas of Quebec, the husky lumbermen inspiring the largest group of native songs found in this region of Canada. Professor Fowke's collection of sixty five songs, recorded from former shanty-boys, has the texts and music complemented by adequate documentation. The score of the music suffers from a somewhat erratic quality of printing, which fortunately does not spoil the excellence of Norman Cazden' s transcription of the tunes. Their forms exhibit ideal concepts of the tunes, of which many have been rendered simpler to read and are of a vocal range suitable for most voices by their transposi­ tion to an accepted pitch level. Mr. Cazden has coped well with the hypothesis for classifying traditional tunes that encourages flexibility toward a musical genre that keeps turning up vari­ ants-his meticulous analysis of the traditional tunes deserves more space on the back cover's laudation. Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods is a well-crafted textual and tuneful team effort. W. Bennett

FOWKE, Edith, Ring Around the Moon, Toronto, NC Press Limited, 1987, 160pp., $12.95. Ring Around the Moon is a collection of two hundred songs, tongue twisters, riddles and rhymes for children, illustrated by Judith Gwyn Brown and published in Toronto. In the introduction, Edith Fowke writes: "My first collection of children's lore, 'Sally Go Round the Sun', contained singing games, skipping, ball bouncing and clapping rhymes, foot and finger plays, counting-out rhymes, and taunts and teases-the kind of chants that are heard on every playground and circulate among children between the ages of about five and eleven." This book is designed for slightly older children and presents a somewhat different type of lore: riddles rounds, tongue twisters, animal songs, endless songs, charms and omens, answer-back songs, and verses about love and marriage. It has more and longer songs, and fewer short verses; quite a few of those in 'Ring Around the Moon' are songs that children learn from adults." These are drawn from the oral tradition of North America and are clearly set out with a simple score. But to the British reader some are familiar: "Soldier, soldier, won't you marry me", "Lavender's blue; dilly-dilly", "Where are you going, my pretty maid?" and "Where have you been, Billy boy?", to name but a few. The book is divided into chapters for ease of finding "Rounds", "Riddles in Rhyme", 102 Reviews

"Animal Fair" and so on. It is attractive and readable, with good illustrations and should appeal to all ages. M. Knight

FOWKE, Edith and Carole H. CARPENTER, Explorations in Canadian Folklore, Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1985, 400pp., $14.95. Here is a veritable feast of Canadian folklore the like of which, for the price, has never been seen before. A variety of articles by major folklore scholars complemented by contributions from interested collectors and informants, cover oral traditions drawn from many sub­ cultural groups, including Canadians of English, Scottish, Irish, French, German, Jewish, Mennonite, Ukrainian, American-Indian, and Inuit ancestry. The material is arranged in four groups: contacts with Indians and Inuit and an article on Newfoundland dialect; personal experiences and descriptions of old customs among Scots in Nova Scotia and Mennonites in Ontario, plus a traditional singer's description of her family background; collectors' experi­ ences with informants; comprehensive surveys of folktales, folk dancing, fiddling and folk medicine. The last section deals with the analysis of folklore studies as it affects form and function within their communities. It was most interesting to establish contact again with Herbert Halpert through his tall tale account of " The Cut-off Head Frozen On" and John Widdowson with his doctoral dissertation on "The Function of Threats in Newfoundland Folklore". These pioneering greats of Canadian folklore set the pace for the rest of this cultural document which bristles with lively diversity. W. Bennett

GERITZ, Albert J., ed., John Rastell: " The Pastyme of People" and "A New Boke of Purgatory", London and New York, Garland, 1985, 507pp., $70.00. HART, D.J., ed., John Ford: "The Fancies, Chast and Noble", London and New York, Garland, 1985, 300pp., $40.00. These are scholarly editions of obscure plays by John Rastell (c. 1475-1536) and John Ford (1486-c. 1641). Hart's edition provides detailed textual and contextual introductions, explanatory and textual notes, lists of substantive variants between the text and the early editions, detailed tables of variants in text, of speech prefixes and of running titles, and a bibliography. This is reproduced from camera-ready typescript, which does not clearly differentiate text from apparatus. The edition of Geritz is differently arranged, having a substantial introduction, followed by a facsimile of the c. 1529 print of The Pastyme of People, a transcription of the same, a transcription of A New Boke of Purgatory, a small section of notes to both plays, and a brief glossary to both. The facsimile is reduced so as to be almost unreadable in places, though I could not find any reference to the size of the original. The non-facsimile sections are also reproduced from typescript. These books will no doubt be useful to scholars and research students of Renaissance drama in English, but neither editor will realistically entertain the hope that these arid and Reviews 103 over-elaborate texts will be at all widely read, and they certainly will not make any impact on present-day theatre. G.A. Lester

GRIMAL, Pierre, The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, 603pp., £22.50. Every library, public or private, great or small, should have a copy of this handsomely pro­ duced, well illustrated, readable and user-friendly volume. A classic in its own right, this Dictionary offers us a full account of the Greek and Roman myths, with maps of the ancient world, a reference section in which every mention of every character in classical literature is listed and attributed, a table of sources, and forty genealogical tables in which the intricate relationships between gods and gods, and gods and men, are set out. Cross references are provided in the Index, and Greek names are given in Greek as well as in transcription. Although the entries give an account of any variants of the myths to which they refer, the reference section does not attribute these variants to specific authors. The book is not, there­ fore, in the same mould as Robert Graves' volumes on The Greek Myths, but what it thereby loses in detail it more than makes up for in usability: the layout is unfussy and there are no footnotes. There are some inaccuracies. Of the seven references to Nausicaa in the index, for example, two are wrong and one is supernumerary. And occasional oddities in the text must be attributed to careless proofreading. In the entry on Orpheus we read: "Hades and Persephone agreed to restore Eurydice her husband" (p.332) where clearly a preposition has gone missing. J. Hunter

GRIMM, Joe, ed. and comp., Michigan Voices, Michigan, Detroit Free Press and Wayne State University Press, 1987, 207pp., $12.50. Using their own words, Michigan's miners, merchants, loggers, and lakers tell their stories through their letters, diaries and journals. The period covered stretches from 1700 to 1986-- 286 years of history written in the frank, honest language of those who forged its culture. Michigan Voices shout loudly for recognition, accompanied by photographs and other illustrations that reveals the state's history in a most illuminating way. This is a most interesting book that brings to life over two centuries of American state culture. W. Bennett

GUDYKUNST, William B., ed., Intergroup Communication, London, Edward Arnold, 1986, 212pp., £12.95. Most of us have a dream: one day we will write the ultimate, the definitive academic article. Some hold tight to the dream. For some of us the dream fades with age as we find the final draft is a compromise-workmanlike, but not the definitive statement we sought. Reading 104 Reviews this collection of papers the impression is that it is possible that one or more of the contribu­ tors can identify with these remarks. The book set out to "put new life into old issues" and to "correct the situation wherein language and communications hold a peripheral status". It attempts to contribute to a coherent social psychology approach to the debate. The preface states that the contributors will be at pains to stress that they do not see a psychological approach as more than an important com­ plement to equally important perspectives in language and communications. We are also assured that the contributors are actually interdisciplinarians at heart. A critique of convergence theory is given in paper eight. It is described in terms of being a causal influence of communication and information exchange, with the tendency for indi­ viduals to move towards another, and to unite in a common interest of focus. This could serve as a definition of an interdisciplinary approach. It would be nice to think that this book could unite those with a common interest in language and communications in the manner of the Milroys' (1980-1987) study of language and social networks. Unfortunately, dreams of the definitive fade . . . D. Bates

HAWTHORN, Jeremy, ed., Narrative: From Malory to Motion Pictures, London, Edward Arnold, 1985, xvi, 167pp., £6.95. Time was when to study the technique of telling the story of a novel was just one of those conventional studies in literary criticism in which one had to examine " the style" of the work as a complement to its "theme". In modem times, the art of the narrative has become such a complex matter that its study has gradually evolved into a distinct discipline, called "narratology", which means "the poetics of fiction". "Narratology" is the subject of this book, and it recognises that the narrative art or the telling of a story is a phenomenon that cuts across many cultural boundaries, and may not concern itself solely with the novel, or "narrative fiction". The narrative focuses attention on a story: a series of sequences of events in which the reader (or listener) fixes his eyes on the narrator, the mediator of the events of the story, while his mind, comprising his mental eyes and ears, is on what the narrator is saying. To the listener or reader, the narrator is present but at the same time absent, and if the audience stares at him, the stare is not at the person but at an intangible medium through which a voice manifests. In the so-called realistic novel, the narrator is faceless and therefore cannot be a personification of anybody, whether the "teller" of the story or the author. This view of course implies a formalist approach to the appreciation of the narrative, and at the polar oppo­ site of this approach is the humanist argument which holds that the individual artist cannot be totally distanced from his work; he does have a "narrative perspective" which implies not only the manner in which he tells his story but also his attitude to his subject-matter, which attitude is the result of the author's personal sensibility and understanding. Between these two extremes there have been varieties of theorising on the narrative art. But all these views highlight the elements that occupy attention in modern study of the novel genre, and these elements emphasise such terms as author, story,fabula, plot, discourse, narrative voice, Reviews 105 narrative presence, order, duration, mood, narrative perspective and point of view. Narrative features contributors of different national origins on the subject. These essays reveal that the relationship between the formal and the historical/ideological perspectives on the narrative is evidently dialectical, for changes in economics and social organisations lead to new patterns of consciousness, which in turn precipitate new genres of the novel. Indeed, as he becomes more literate, the modern reader, a product of a culture of literacy, may find it difficult to enter into the mind of an author who writes in a culture of "illiteracy"; the reader's narrative expectations are conditioned by the conventions and habits of interpretation charac­ teristic of the modern age, and these may quite appropriately be applied in the interpretation of a much earlier work of fiction. This is what the article by Nick Davis here attampts to show, but it also demonstrates that there is an advantage in this development, for the modern reader is enabled to reassess and reinterpret the past in the light of the privileged knowledge of the present. The article by Malcolm Smith is significant because it recognises the development of new forms of the narrative art (e.g. in the media) in the present century, and the oral prerogatives of many narratives. This then implies the examination of narrative in a wider context than just print. It is this oral identity of the narrative that establishes a link between the new forms of the present and the conventional ones of the past. This is explored further by the articles by Gordon Williams and Kiernan Ryan, who uses examples of narratives that emerged from societies undominated by the print culture to illustrate this "oral" base of narratives. W.J. McCormack adds fresh insight to an area already made familiar by such popular theorists on the novel as Ian Watts over the importance of ideological factors in narratives. Wolfgang Wicht's examination of the link between narrative perspective and historical and ideological factors as regards the twentieth century explores this further, and Jakob Lothe's contribution is a tentative general conclusion on the significance of repetition in the novel, a significance which he is wary in pointing out, for the relationship between structuralist and post-structuralist poetics of the narrtive on the one hand, and historical and thematic research on the other, is a complicated one, and cannot be adequately explored by a mere mechanical literary diagnosis. A. Ebeogu

HEATH, Shirley Brice, Ways with Words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, 421pp., £25.00 hardback, £11.50 paper. As the subtitle reveals, this is yet another study of children learning to use language at home and school in the two contrasting communities of black and white. In this present climate which sees a glut of similar social science offerings it would appear that any modification between these works consists only of the topographical region under review. Investigated in this instance are two places only a few miles apart in the south eastern region of the United States-"Roadville", a white working-class community, and "Trackton", a black working­ class area. As their ways with words differ so too does the townspeople's pattern of speech rooted in multi-cultural power-sharing positions. Cambridge University Press has kindly 106 Reviews given Ways with Words a leg up the ladder of trendy language publications. This apart, the book is a good example of its kind and well written for those whom the author calls "learning researchers", academics and non-academics alike. With no concession given to an exact phonetic representation of the speech of Roadville, Trackton, and the townspeople, and with "eye-dialect" to distinguish the varieties of English used, perhaps the non-academic partially has the edge. This reviewer's lack of "ivory tower" gentility and abundance of serendipitous coarseness produced the smiles that came at her very English interpretation of the author's view that young black and white couples who do not yet have children often reject local living options, choosing instead " ... condominia in Alberta, which offers far more entertainment possibilities than surrounding towns." Where there's a word, there's a way! W. Bennett

HEY, David, Family History and Local History in England, London, Longman, 1987, xv, 276pp., £7.95 paper. This book has a simply stated purpose, to help and encourage people who have already become interested in the history of their family. Many thousands of people have developed this interest, and it will undoubtedly grow as the opportunity to engage in intellectually active leisure pursuits grows. The tracing of family history for oneself involves travel, meticulous checking of leads and being prepared for many setbacks. By using his own family history, and showing how he discovered it, David Hey is able to take a reader through the experience of doing the necessary research. The book goes at a lively pace, showing what the inquirer should look for and sets the major themes in their historical context. A family is lucky if it can trace its ancestry back to Tudor times, and the author rightly concentrates the great bulk of his volume on the more accessible recent past. Where to find registers and how to read them, how to link data with individuals, are laid out with great clarity. David Hey is an experienced adult educator, and in this book he succeeds in com­ bining encouragement and information within a narrative that retains the reader's interest. Once it has been read, it can be retained both as a reference book of individual data and as a manual on how data can be discovered. It is an extremely effective work, which fully lives up to its objectives. D.E. Bland

ROAD, T.F., ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, 552pp., £12.95. This work is intended to provide "an essential adjunct to any popular dictionary". It sets out to provide "a succinct account of the origin, history and development in meaning of a great many basic words and a wide selection of derivatives". When a selection of headwords is checked against entries in other hardback dictionaries, the editor appears to have met these objectives. For example, under the headword folk the route to folk-lore is given as Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German and Germanic though no date is given for its entry Reviews 107 into the language. The two volume 1970 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives folk-lore as a headword with its earliest known occurrence as 1846. The route fromfolk is given as Old English, Old Norse, Swedish, Danish, Old Teutonic. The benefit of the additional information here must be, literally, weighed against the compact size of the Concise com­ pared to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary-one and a half pounds to nine and a half pounds! Two factors influencing the choice between the two are of course one's own personal requirements and the date of publication of one's existing dictionary-truly a choice between conflicting possibilities. D. Bates

HOROWITZ, Michael M. and Thomas M. PAINTER, eds., Anthropology and Rural Development in West Africa, Boulder, Westview Press, 1986, xv, 323pp., £20.75. Available from Wildwood Distribution Services, Unit 3, Lower Farnham Road, Aldershot, Rants., GU12 4DY. This volume undertakes to translate and formulate anthropological knowledge into opera­ tional propositions relevant for experts in various areas of development programmes. For example, in the area of African agriculture, the "integrated rural development" programmes of the 1970s in Africa failed to yield the expected economic and social growth because of an improper assessment and understanding of the production-supporting institutions in the con­ tinent, especially the decisive role which peasant farming plays as the basis of units of agricultural production. The household or compound is the foundation of African economy, and only anthropologists have given this unit of social organisation sufficient attention. It is the argument of the book that the family farm unit is the most important and yet least explored and understood basis for African development; policy makers must therefore make the family farm unit the centrepiece of development projects. Because anthropologists and sociolinguists accord significant attention to the kin-group, the family or household as a unit of analysis, they are in a position to recognise how this unit must be the focus of the African development process. But it is not sufficient that anthro­ pologists and sociologists possess this special knowledge of the spirit of the kin-based units of production organisation in Africa; it is also necessary that this knowledge must strategi­ cally be applied in the practical areas of agrotechnology. Policy makers in most African countries are so obsessed with the macro-structures of development that they ignore this micro-level of analysis which anthropologists and sociologists have investigated with poten­ tially relieving results, and this policy of ignorance or neglect makes it impossible for the necessary linkages to be established between the macro- and the micro-imperatives of economic development. The authors believe that for virtually every scheme at the macro-level of economic development, there is an implied reflection at the micro-level of the family or household which must be recognised as the basis for the production consumption pattern in the society. The focus of agricultural development must therefore be the family farm which ought to constitute the priority area in macro-based development schemes. The special characteristics of African basic farming units must be properly understood, and the signifi­ cant role which anthropologists would have to play in this regard cannot be underestimated. 108 Reviews

However, for good results to be yielded from this rapport between anthropologists and policy makers, the myth of one fossilised traditional African family structure must be dis­ carded. Researches by sociolinguists and anthropologists over the years reveal differences in the family structures of various cultures and the complex changes in settlement patterns, household composition, inheritance patterns, access to land and labour, which have taken place in these cultures over the years. Thus, African families must be seen in the context of pragmatic, adaptive and transitory configurations which derive from the practical economic and environmental needs of contemporary times. Cognisance must be taken of these changes in any modern rural development in Africa. A continual reassessment and revision of research priorities, e.g. in polygyny, by anthropologists is necessary, so that the information provided for policy makers and development planners would be up-to-date. As these studies reveal, planning at the level of macro-organisations and institution-building which so far characterises African development programmes must be reoriented to stimulate, organise, or reinforce local grassroots organisation. The authors further suggest the various ways in which these local organisations can be reorganised and made viable through the incorporation of basic and applied anthropological knowledge into development programmes and policies. A. Ebeogu

JACKSON, Irene V., ed., More than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1985, 207pp., £35.00. This book of essays on African and Afro-Latin American music and musicians has been pre­ pared under the auspices of the Center for Ethnic Music, Howard University. Such essay titles as "Women and Music in Sudanic Africa", "A Look at the Ewe of Ghana", and "A Yoruba/Nago 'Melotype' for Religious Songs in the African Diaspora" can only further my sense of identification with the second essay in this book: "All Musical Cultures Are About Equally Complex". The verbal torrent which currently examines-through social and politi­ cal channels-the diaspora (the dispersion of a group of people) of those of African origins has spread to the culture of music. My sympathies are with the elderly black American jazz musician-the subject of a former review-who, upon being asked if his music was emanci­ patory in its message, replied: "Don't know anything about that, man, ah just play it and enjoy it." W. Bennett

JEFFREYS, John, Second Book of Songs, Aylesbury, Roberton Publications, 1984, 125pp., £10.00. Having reviewed John Jeffreys' first book of songs, it is with great pleasure that I play and then comment on this Second Book of Songs from this talented composer. His work has a sensitivity that is poetic in its rhythm and style-the latter shown over a wide range in this collection. From the free rhythm and modal tone of the first song "Black Stitchel'' to the boisterous and con spirito vigour of the seventeenth century tavern ballad in penultimate Reviews 109 position, the mood changes; quiet settings such as that of Thomas Dekker's "Golden Slumbers" are dignified whilst "In Pride of May" is joyful with its antiphonal effects between voice and piano; love songs and lullabies, sad songs and gay, the mood swings but the music complements right up to the final brief and quite roguish setting of the anonymous "My Mistress Frowns". It was pleasing to see that Mr. Jeffreys had not fallen into the trap of emulating the saucy rhythm of Shakespeare's "Where the bee sucks" in his simple, easy­ paced setting of Thomas Hardy's "This is the weather". This composer writes parts for singers which can be performed without great difficulty and yet engender a wholly satisfying fulfilment. His songs will present the sensitive pianist-both amateur and professional­ with no problems in the capacity of accompanist to the singers of this Second Book of Songs: success has come before the songs are sung! W. Bennett

JOHNS-LEWIS, Catherine, ed., Intonation in Discourse, London, Croom Helm, 1986, xxxvi, 302pp., £21.00. This collection of thirteen papers presented at a 1982 conference at Aston seeks to illustrate the wide variety of approaches in the current field of intonation research. Intonation is a difficult subject and any contribution to the relatively small body of existent literature is potentially interesting and welcome; one. that simultaneously addresses the issue of discourse is doubly so. The papers following will be discussed in the order in which they appear in the book. Wiktor Jassem and Grazyna Demenko claim to be able to establish the "functional units" of intonation which are perceptually relevant for the listener. They describe the factors that affect the fundamental frequency trace and by a process of normalisation, or altering one source of variation at a time, extract linguistically relevant and informative distinctions from pairs of phonetically equivalent utterances. Daniel Hirst, like Jassem and Demenko, argues the case for perceptually relevant pitch movement and suggests that any pitch contour can be represented by a binary feature system in which High and Low are the only two relevant phonological variables. He advocates the use of a hierarchical model of intonation in which the acoustic/physical parameters of Fo, segmental duration and intensity are generated by the linguistic structures. Briony Williams attempts to illustrate differences between the acoustic basis of stress per­ ception in Welsh and English by means of spectrograms and an amplitude display. In passing, she gives a brief but useful summary of the acoustic correlates of stress in English and goes on to say that, in English, stress coincides with pitch change, whereas in Welsh, pitch prominence is not connected with stress. The results of listening tests show that English speakers judged stressed vowels to have pitch glide, longer duration and greater amplitude, while the same speakers did not respond to the Welsh stress on the penultimate syllable. She claims that the pattern of low pitch on a stressed syllable followed by a higher pitch on the next stressed syllable is exclusive to Welsh, and that it is not accounted for within Bolinger's (1958) system of pitch accent. However, that this is not such an unusual pattern in English is suggested by the fact that O'Connor and Arnold (1973) allow it in their 110 Reviews standard description of intonation and refer to it as the "low rise". The point ought to be simply that the pattern is marked in English, and not in Welsh, but even this statement needs qualification; it would not, for example, hold true for Belfast intonation (see Jarman and Cruttenden 1976) or that of English cities such as Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham. In these varieties, the neutral declarative is characterised, as is Welsh, by a low pitch on the stressed syllable. Bolinger does in fact account for this pattern as a variation of his "A" accent (1958:143); it is "a sub-type of A" which "puts the accentable syllable at a lower pitch than the one immediately following it." Williams concludes by denying the existence of any relationship between Welsh intonation and rhythm, but this viewpoint seems to be somewhat inconsistent with what has gone before; intonation was defined in terms of stress, and stress is the backbone of rhythm. It would have been interesting to see how particular grammatical categories other than the declarative in Welsh related to pitch movement, such as those with contrastive stress occur­ ring towards the left of the sentence. William H.G. Wells analyses the acoustic cues to focus and gives a comprehensive list of focus constituents. Prominence, as judged by native speakers, ranges along a four point scale from maximal to minimal, and correlates with the features of pitch, loudness and tempo. The data analysed here consists of out-of-context sentences, a rather clinical environ­ ment in which information structure is conveyed to the listener by means of sentence internal features, without any contribution from background or shared material. An examination of how the notion of focus is affected and its domain altered by connected speech would have provided a full picture of the subject. It is somewhat unusual for postnuclear accents to be examined in any great detail, since investigators tend to agree that there is "no inherent linguistic contrastivity" within them (Crystal 1969). Carlos Gussenhoven, however, analyses quasi-spontaneous speech and pre­ sents a long and comprehensive classification of tail types. He defends the single tonic view­ point on the grounds that it allows broader segmentation than does the compound tonic and it also clarifies the relationship between nuclear and postnuclear elements. D. Robert Ladd, Klaus Scherer and Kim Silverman outline two approaches to the study of intonational meaning involving the manipulation of experimental stimuli. The first of these, "A", is the semantic differential approach, whereby listeners rate the emotions being expressed on the basis of paralinguistic cues, and the second, "B", concerns contours which are of a specifiable form, and which express categorical distinctions. The difference between the two approaches is one of context, which can have a strong effect on the judgement of atti­ tude. The authors conclude that the "B" approach is preferable, since it permits formal con­ trasts and separates intonation from paralinguistics, so that its own particular role in the expression of attitude can be examined. Anne Cutler and Mark Pearson explore the prosodic features which mark tum finality and conclude that listeners judge low nuclear tones to be more final than high ones. Where con­ tours are downstepped, turn-final judgements resulted, while rising contours brought about turn-medial judgements. Peter French and John Local discuss the phonetic characteristics of interruptive speech and identify pitch height and loudness as important factors in the management of interruptions; Reviews 111 conversational participants who wish to interrupt do so by raising the voice along both parameters. The picture would be fuller with the inclusion of the variables of social register and speaker identity; such stylistic and pragmatic factors are likely to have considerable influence on interruptions. In a separate paper, Local uses the framework of discourse analysis and identifies the functional exponents of intonation in conversational Tyneside speech. He discovers that the common patterns are low risers for declaratives, high falls for yes-no echo questions and high rises on WH echo questions. The data is not linked with similar patterns in other localised varieties of English. Catherine Johns-Lewis directs herself towards the two areas that have been absent in both French and Local, and Wells: those of stylistic variation and long term pitch trends. She begins by giving a very useful summary of past research on discourse modes and speech styles. Aware of the lack of a satisfactory base for discourse typology, she is concerned with the role of intonation in a prosodic model as a means of analysing the spoken text. She shows how different speech styles are prosodically distinctive; mean pitch and pitch range are greater in reading aloud than in conversation and greater still in acted speech. Increased pitch height therefore has the function of focusing attention. The effect of conversational context upon long term pitch trends is also treated by David Graddol, who shows the same two parameters of pitch and pitch range to be greater in the reading of a dialogue than in the reading of a technical description. Situational and discourse variables as a source of pitch variation are investigated statistically. Philip Lieberman discusses the biological acquisition of intonation, and shows that human linguistic behaviour is structured by physiologic mechanism. In describing the acquisition of intonation by children, Lieberman discusses elements of a newborn child's cry which are comparable to adults' intonation patterns, and attributes the similarities to physiological universals. He rejects the accepted notion that progressive declination underlies speech pro­ duction and prefers to think of the pitch drop in terms of a terminal fall, since it is at the end of the expiration that the alveolar air pressure falls most rapidly. Ben Maassen attempts to define in terms of suprasegmental features why it is that prelin­ gual deaf speakers are hard to understand. He examines the role of fundamental frequency in the perception of deaf speech because incorrect pitch movements correlate more with unintel­ ligibility than do temporal factors such as rhythm. In the correction of speech errors, Maassen advocates the transformational method involving digital processing methods which transform separate speech sounds, temporal structure and intonation. He describes its potential for speech improvement, in both the segmental and suprasegmental areas, in terms of social acceptability and not intelligibility. These, then, in brief, are the thirteen papers. There are several errors in the layout which tend to impede a smooth reading of the text. Some examples are unmarked and then referred to as though they were (pp.26, 28). Subsections are not correctly marked (p.170), there is need­ less repetition of pages (pp.180, 198) and a reference missing from the bibliography (p.20). As a presentation of some of the experimental work in progress on intonation, this volume is undoubtedly valuable. It is certainly not an introductory textbook nor one which evolves a central model of intonation; the editor promises in her preface only "to give a sense of the 112 Reviews breadth and focus of activity in the field". The relevance of the title may occasionally be called into question by papers not directly related to the role of intonation in discourse but this is nonetheless an informative and stimulating book. References Bolinger, D., "A theory of pitch accent in English", Word, 14, (1958), 109-149. Crystal, D., Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969. Jarman, E. and A. Cruttenden, "Belfast Intonation and the myth of the Fall", Journal of Phonetics, 6 (1976), 4-12. J. Rahilly

JOHNSON, Geraldine Niva, Weaving Rag Rugs, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1985, 180 pp. With the subtitle A Women's Craft in Western Maryland, this record of the weavers of Garrett and Allegany counties Weaving Rag Rugs is a documentary of a folk art that had its roots in pre-revolutionary days. The author's travels among the women has produced an absorbing account of the weavers and their surroundings and twenty five illustrations show the rugs in rich, vibrant colours. British readers will discover that immigrants from the British Isles contributed many distinctive influences to the weaving of rag rugs in Western Maryland that shaped the American rugmaking traditions. With three communities of crafts­ women shown here--each with a story and speech pattern as distinctive as the products of their looms-this book will satisfy the reader's needs for an expression of traditional values which stress the importance of home and family. W. Bennett

JONES, Michael Owen, BruceGIULIAND, and Roberta KRELL, eds., Foodways and Eating Habits: Directions for Research, Los Angeles, California Folklore Society, 1983, 137pp. Why do people eat what they eat? This question has inspired the thirteen articles divided into five sections that all address one set of problems in this volume. Working on the premise that food choice has often depended on what is accessible or attainable because of historical and technological developments or the economic conditions prevailing at one time has produced generalisations which these essays seek to identify. With articles on consumer behaviour, social roles, regional variations, festive events and the artistic process giving a taste of the major concerns of foodways encapsulated in this volume, students from various disciplines in American culture and folklore can identify with the text completely. The collection is a firm foundation for the choice of potential research topics: understanding what is distinctive about eating can be a source of much symbolic meaning which can lend itself to penetrating insights into the social and cultural aspects of food use. W. Bennett Reviews 113

LETHBRIDGE, T.C., The Power of the Pendulum, London, Arkana, 1984, 138pp., £3.50 paper. The most ambitious book yet of the late T.C. Lethbridge, The Power of the Pendulum is a powerful conclusion to the author's intensive research into the worlds of the occult and unexplained. The "occult revival" began in the early 1960s in France, and spread within a few years to all parts of the world. T .C. Lethbridge believed that he had stumbled on a realm of reality beyond our earthbound existence, conducting experiments with the pendulum and working on dreams to advance his theory that the "soul" is probably immortal. "What is magic today will be science tomorrow" he says in one of his many books, illustrating in this final effort of his interesting life such powers of the pendulum as the well-known one of sexing unborn children by suspending a wedding ring on a piece of thread above the mother­ to-be's abdomen. The theories and experiments of T.C. Lethbridge are so advanced as to render them "occult" in the true sense of the word. W. Bennett

McCRICKARD, Janet E., The Bodhrtin, The Background to the Traditional Irish Drum, Glastonbury, Fieldfare Arts and Design, 1987, 66pp., $1.95. Janet E. McCrickard is the multi-talented artist of Fieldfare Arts, an organisation that offers a range of beautiful books on traditions, folklore and nythology. I make no apology for giving her address: 2 Thorndun House, Wells Road, Glastonbury, Somerset, from where a current list can be had in exchange for a stamped and addressed envelope. Janet McCrickard has written, calligraphed and illustrated The Bodhrtin: The Background to the Traditional Irish Drum. The only exceptions are nine reproductions attributed to the Dover Pictorial Archive. Useful contacts are given at the back of the book for anyone who would like to play the bodhnin or purchase this specialised drum. Read about it first in this enjoyable, presentable volume. W. Bennett

MORGAN, Lewis Henry, Ancient Society, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1985, 560pp., $14.95. This book, first published in 1877, is believed to be the first modern inquiry into social evolution. Receiving much attention from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ancient Society made a great impact on historians of the last century and influenced general anthropology. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) is recognised as a founding father of anthropological science; students of this discipline should benefit from the republication of a volume that sets out the concerns, methodologies, and ideas of anthropological practice. W. Bennett 114 Reviews

MOSSMAN, Jennifer, ed., Pseudonyms and Nicknames Dictionary, 3rd edn., 2 vols., Detroit, Gale, 1987, 2207pp., $225.00. Folklorists would probably suggest that nicknames arise from the need to distinguish one John, Mary or William from numerous others in the same village, this practice leading to the adoption of some nicknames as surnames. The compilers of this dictionary give very differ­ ent reasons for changes of name. They claim that while engaged on their task they found it difficult to pick up a newspaper without discovering new names. A variety of circumstances lead to this phenomenon, the methods of selecting new names being as varied as the reasons for their coinage. These can include seeking a protection of privacy, promoting a different image, or concealing a shameful past. With 55,000 original names and 80,000 assumed names there are plenty to exercise the mind upon, from actors, rogues and saints, through to Wyoming's outstanding deceased citizen. Entries are historical and topical. Historically that G.O.M., William Ewart Gladstone, has eighteen entries, while Dizzy only had fourteen. Topically Tina has a total of fifteen entries. This is a useful reference book without which I would never have known that it was Frances Gumm who made famous the song "Somewhere over the Rainbow". D. Bates

OAKES, Enid, Stories for Blyth, 1988, to mark the Centenary of St. Mary and St. Martin, Blyth, in the County of Nottinghamshire, 79pp. Stories for Blyth runs through the centuries from 1088-1988, marking each century's eighty eighth year with a delightful story appropriate to the time. The language is plain yet profes­ sionally skilful, the landscape familiar to northern readers, with its regional features blending well with local colour and placenames. As Ronald Blythe remarks in his introduction, Nottinghamshire is indeed a fascinating county-more so now, perhaps, than Derbyshire which suffers greatly from commercialism. The beautiful Blyth church, of which this book marks the centenary, should be visited at least once-preferably more-to feel that inner peace and happiness of a soul reaching up to God. Enid Oakes has done so much to spread the word of Blyth's traditional heritage. Celebrate the long life of her particular community by reading her Stories for Blyth. W. Benn ett

PALMER, F.R., The English Verb, 2nd edn., London, Longman, 1987, xii, 268pp., £7.95. In 1965 Professor Palmer published his A Linguistic Study of the English Verb, and a revision of that book appeared in 1974 as The English Verb. It is the latter work which has been republished now in a second revised edition. The book has stood the test of time well and it is widely used in institutions of higher education. Although all chapters are revised, the major changes are in the treatment of voice and the modals and in the discussion of have. The book retains its readable style and apt illustrations. It is likely to remain on reading lists for a long time to come. N.F. Blake Reviews 115

PEGG, Mark, Broadcasting and Society 1918-1939, London, Croom Helm, 1983, 263pp., £14.95. This book provides the first comprehensive study of the social, political and cultural influence of British broadcasting before 1939. The early years of the wireless-before it became the more sophisticated radio--did much to create a sense of stability and national identity which modern society seems to have lost along the way. Dr. Pegg has completed research that makes an important contribution to our understanding of British social and cultural history during the early twentieth century. Those studying communications and the mass media, sociology and a literature bound up with popular culture will find valuable insights into the world of Broadcasting and Society 1918-1939. W. Bennett

POWER, E .G., Hanged for a Sheep: Crime and Punishment in Bygone Derbyshire, Cromford, Scarthin Books, 1981, reprinted 1982, 77pp., £2.85. This Derbyshire material looks at crime, its detection and the often harsh treatment of crimi­ nals in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century Derbyshire. A teacher, local historian and educational writer, George Power, here investigates past attitudes toward various aspects of crime and punishment. The text is lively in its documentary style, but it is the exuberance of the illustration that catches the eye. From the chapter illustrative headings to the photographs of museum exhibits and buildings, the accent is on easy looking and learning. Hanged for a Sheep is a deceptively slim volume packed with much to enjoy in its well-documented evidence. W. Bennett

RICKS, Christopher, The Force of Poetry, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, xiii, 447pp., £5.95. This is a collection of Christopher Ricks' essays written at different times on such poets as Johnson, Wordsworth and Milton and modern poets such as Empson, Stevie Smith and Geoffrey Hill. He also writes on such minor figures as A.E. Houseman and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and the collection ends with four chapters on cliches, lies, Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold and misquotation, and American English and the inherently transitory. In the prefa­ tory note, Professor Ricks says, "This is a gathering of essays, not a march of chapters, but the essays have some interdependence in that each attends to an aspect, feature or resource of the language manifested in poetry." The essay on Milton focuses on sound and sense. Ricks folows Leavis's argument that Milton works from the outside. He notes that, "For although the highest art is the dramatic inwardness of Shakespeare ... it is not true that no great poetry can be external or can work from the outside." He goes on to say that "Many of the great Miltonic moments are of imagining something which cannot be felt, or rather can be felt only in the imagination." In support of this he quotes the line in Book 3 of Paradise Lost:

Love without end, end without measure grace . 116 Reviews and demonstrates how the sense is helped by the sound-grace rhyming withface two lines earlier and again with grace three lines later. The essay subtly and engagingly reveals again and again this marriage of sound and sense. In an essay on a very different poet, Stevie Smith, ricks explores the resources of bathos, and notes that in her poetry "the Accents are those of a child; yet the poems are continually allusive, alive with literary echoes as no child's utterance is." Her two great subjects are children and death. Amongst others, he analyses hermost famous poem, "Not Waving but Drowning". All in all, this is a very stimulating and worthwhile collection which should reach a wide audience. M. Knight

SILVERLIGHT, John, More Words, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1987, 126pp., £12.95 hardback, £4.95 paper. This continuation of a first collection of John Silverlight's columns in the Observer which seek to inform and entertain by reporting has an added element. The part played in the column by the readers has been developed in this second collection so that the inclusion of letters and the replies to them alongside the reprinted pieces can constitute a forum of informed dialogue on the use of English. Not only are words like yuppie here-which we learn has been used in the United States as yumpie for the "mobile" representation-but the issues of racist and sexist language are not shirked when the connotations of "black/white" are discussed. Having a personal interest in the cultural tradition of Hertfordshire, I owe gratitude to this book for its discussion of the word leisurely and its 1486 examples: "Than softe and layserly fall oppon youre kneys" from The bokys of haukyng and huntyng and also of cootarmuris . . . and the boke of blasyng of armys translayt and compylt at Seynt olbons. Being also interested in the blason populaire tradition, I was delighted to see Observer reader D.W.R. Whicker's version of the old title of the Book of St. Albans: The Books of Hawking and Hunting and also of Heraldry (Coats of Arms) . .. and the Book of Blazonry translated and compiled at Saint Albans. We eagerly await more words from John Silverlight! W. Bennett

SIMPSON, Jacqueline, trans. and ed., Scandinavian Folktales, London, Penguin, 1988, xii, 244pp., £6.99. This is a most welcome addition to the few collections of Scandinavian folktales available to English readers: notably Sir George Webbe Dasent's Popular Tales from the Norse, his translation of Asbjornsen and Moe's Norske Folkeeventyr which The Bodley Head reissued in 1969 and which are exclusively Marchen; and the present translator's collection of Icelandic Folktales and Legends (University of California Press, 1972), which do not include Marchen. (Ten of the Icelandic legends are reprinted here.) Now at last we have a volume of legends from all the Norse-speaking Scandinavian countries, and it is interesting to see the family resemblance between them, though there are Reviews 117 differences too: e.g. all four countries acknowledge the existence of trolls, but the belief that the rising sun turns them to stone is peculiar to Norway and Iceland only (p. 14). And although the tradition of the friendly house spirit, the tomte, or nisse, or tunkall, is wide­ spread throughout continental Scandinavia, Iceland, oddly enough, has no such tradition (p.166). As in her previous, Icelandic, collection of legends, the translator has arranged her mate­ rial under various headings: "Legends of the landscape", "Historical Legends", "Mortality, Fates and Punishments", "The Dead", "Magicians, Witches, Shapechangers", "Fairies round the Homestead", and "Fairies of Mountains, Forests and Water". In addition to a general introduction, there are introductions specific to each of these categories of tales, so that the general reader will not only derive much pleasure and entertainment from this book, but also incidentally learn quite a lot about folktale and folktale scholarship. The book has been attractively produced: the illustrations by Caroline Gowdy, in colour on the cover and repeated in monochrome inside, are a very apt and effective combination of the childlike and the primitive. J.H. Hunter

SMITH, Grahame, The Novel and Society: Defoe to George Eliot, London, Batsford, 1984, 240pp., £14.95 hardback, £6.95 paper. In seeking neither to theorise the articulation of the social referent structured within the literary text nor yet to survey the production of fictions against their socio-historical context, this is not a sociological text but a literary and critical study. Grahame Smith's criteria are essentially aesthetic and his selection of texts and his comments on them are so framed. "It is surely more interesting," he writes, "to discuss great works and great writers than to scruti­ nise the less good in however much detail" (p.7). That "surely" begs many questions but even if we reserve our judgement on those, setting out from his own premises Smith arrives at a number of conclusions which can be widely applauded. Thus he argues that the development of the novel "might be validly related to objective social change and to changes in the conceptions men and women have of their social world" (p.40). This relationship moreover cannot be reduced to the mechanical determinism of much marxisant sociological theorising. It is simply that great writers are aware of the world in which they live and at the same time, perhaps like the rest of us, learn from other writers too. However, they are neither the passive instruments of a dominant ideology nor of a prevailing literary tradition. "The fact that we are social beings involves no fundamental loss of individuality, just as the fact that the novel may be a social form involves no loss of its artistic integrity" (p.43). Smith's close textual analysis begins with Defoe and Smollett and the emergence of society as an object for literature. It continues with Richardson's Clarissa which represents the first emergence of the psychological novel. In Tom Jones, he argues, Fielding represents society as subject to rational understanding and in Jane Austen's last completed novel Persuasion Smith discovers her beginning to explore the interplay of individual personality and social context with a new subtlety. He sees Vanity Fair as an imperfectly successful por­ trayal of a corrupt society that imprints itself in the lives of actors who can only play the parts 118 Reviews it assigns to them. In the episodic early novels of Dickens, characters from classes hitherto present only as background figures are given voice and purpose of their own, while in the melodramatic plots he finds a reflection of the startling juxtapositions and uncertainties of a rapidly changing urbanised and commercialised society. Finally Smith argues that in Daniel Deronda George Eliot transcends her supreme account of the interplay of individual wills in the social microcosm of Middlemarch, and attempts to explore the underlying psychological depths of motivation and identity of characters faced with what has become a soulless world. The development of the classic English novel, Smith proposes, has been discontinuous, experimental, "making a series of fresh starts . .. "which each embody a new conception of the changing social world. The sweeping generalisation of "realism" is wholly inadequate to comprehend this diversity of presentation and invention. Those classic English novels, he maintains, involve an opposition between mundane reality and, on the one hand, the delu­ sions of class, snobbery, money and materialism and, on the other, a response "which can infuse reality with an otherwise absent poweer and beauty" (p.219). If then "the heart of the enterprise is aesthetic" (p.8), we must judge Smith's book in those terms and it may be that we nevertheless have some aesthetic reservations. To begin with, the criteria employed in his critical examinations seem to be applied inconsistently and arbitrarily. Most notably perhaps, he seems quite unsympathetic towards Thackeray and totally immune to the subtleties of Becky Sharp, who might have won more respectful comparison with the heroines of Richardson and Eliot at the hands of a more catholic critic. Similarly, in focusing on Roderick Random rather than on the later Humphrey Clinker, Smith devalues Smollett's art as a novelist. Then the absence of Troll ope from a review of the novel and society, and its termination before reaching Hardy seems arbitrary, notwithstanding Smith's disclaimer of any intention toward comprehensiveness. However, he convincingly makes his case that "depiction of society is part of the aesthetics of the classic English novel" (p.212), and like criticism at its most worthwhile he renews and deepens our appreciation of those works he has discussed. This is then a book I would be happy to recommend to students of English Literature to read with interest and enjoyment and a little cautious reserve. T. Noble

SOMMER, Elyse and Mike SOMMER, eds., Similes Dictionary, Detroit, Gale, 1988, 950pp., $68.00. It often seems that it is in the nature of books of quotations and similes that they hardly ever seem to contain (a) your own favourite quotation or (b) provide the name of the author of a particular elusive quotation. This dictionary goes a long way towards overcoming these problems: similes can be located through five hundred thematic categories. They can also be found by reference to the author index, under which entry cross-referenced thematic headings can be found. Similes can also be located through the bibliography of some two thousand books from which they have been culled. With a total of some 16,000 entries many will find something useful to replace their tried, and often tired, quotations. D. Bates Reviews 119

SPEARS, Richard A., The Slang and Jargon of Drugs and Drink, Metuchen and London, Scarecrow Press, 1986, xv, 585pp., £42.50.

This dictionary focuses on the words related to drugs and drink. It is essentially a work which relies on what others have collected, for it draws its examples from other published work. Occasionally, a word is cited from a personal communication to the editor or from some otherwise unidentified personal source. There is no attempt to collect current words systematically through fieldwork or questionnaire, although drugs and drink are very much part of the culture of many marginalised social groups whose vocabulary does not neces­ sarily get into print very easily. The timespan covered is from approximately 1700 to the pre­ sent day, though historical evidence is not exhaustively treated. Most entries consist of the headword, its meanings and a source or sources. The meanings are treated very briefly, and no attempt is made to suggest occasions for use or sociolinguistic factors. The level of colloquiality a word had is also ignored. Related terms are noted, but cross-referencing of this kind is not extensive. The sources used are dated, but there is no indication in the entry whether a word has been in use for some time or whether it is still in use. Etymology does not have a place in the collection either, but the sources used are noted and an enquirer can naturally continue his investigations by turning to the source which may well contain further details. There is a very brief introduction which does little more than explain the principles of organisation; there is no discussion of the types of words found. It is useful to have this collection of words and the compiler is to be congratulated on the energy he has spent on collecting them together; but those interested in the vocabulary of drugs and drink will have to go elsewhere to supplement the information found here. N.F. Blake

STOREY, Richard, Primary Sources for Victorian Studies: An updating, Leicester, University of Leicester, Victorian Studies Centre, 1987, 38pp. This slim booklet is an updating of occasional papers in bibliography, developed from Primary Sources for Victorian Studies by Richard Storey and Lionel Madden (published by Phillimore in 1977 and still in print). This present work represents Richard Storey's view of selected developments in the field of primary sources for nineteenth century studies. New information is brought together in a convenient format which should prove invaluable for the postgraduate researcher engaged in Victorian studies. W. Bennett

TAJIMA, Matsuji, Old and Middle English Studies: A Classified Bibliography, 1923-1985, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 1988, 424pp. Although students of Old English literature have benefitted from the excellent bibliography produced by Stanley Greenfield and Fred Robinson, their colleagues with linguistic interests have been in a less fortunate position, and apart from specialised author bibliographies, Middle English language specialists have been no better served. It is more than sixty years 120 Reviews

since a bibliographer systematically surveyed the work accumulating on the language during the Old and Middle English periods. Now, Dr. Tajima's book happily remedies the deficiency. His net is cast very wide, including not only books and articles, but essays hidden in festschrifts, dissertations and, in the case of more important works, reference to reviews. Although this is essentially an analytic bibliography, notes on the content of articles are provided in cases where titles are especially opaque. The classification is by subject, but within each subject division by chronology along the lines General, Old English, Middle English. Subject divisions are: Bibliographies; Dictionaries, Concordances, and Glossaries; Histories of the English Language; Grammars; General and Miscellaneous; Language of Individual Authors or Works; Orthography and Punctuation; Phonology and Phonetics; Morphology; Syntax; Lexicology, Lexicography, and Word­ Formation; Onomastics; Dialectology; Stylistics. The book is completed by an index of names. The book is thorough and well-produced and can be recommended. The only similar work in English, Jacek Fisiak's Bibliography of Writings for the History of the English Language, covers a much greater timespan, from Old English to the present, and is consequently less full in its coverage of Old and Middle English. Tajima's work is unlikely to be superseded for many years to come. J.D. Burnley

TAWNEY, Cyril, Grey Funnel Lines: Traditional Song and Verse of the Royal Navy 1900- 1970, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987,177pp., £10.95. This compilation of nautical folk songs, subtitled Traditional So ng and Verse of the Royal Navy 1900-1970, is a delightful collection of "ditty-box" memories generously acknowl­ edged by Cyril Tawney as the work of the "true authors"-the enthusiastic contributors to the book, many of them ex-service personnel. The tributes Mr Tawney pays to these tradition bearers is rare in this area of compilation literature and the modesty he shows reflects well on this ex-Royal Navy man and noted folksinger. His interesting interwoven commentary proves an excellent complement to the songs themselves. Mr. Tawney dispels the notion that the contemporary sailor indulges only in the smutty lyric-although he who would "rather fuck than fight" is an active participant here-and Chiefy, the Skipper and Cook of the Mess enjoy equal billing with Gosport Nan and the Chinese Maiden's Lament. Adding spice to the variety are the accompanying black-and-white illustrations which show that a naval latrine could be cleaner than the " Commander's wife" who in one corner of her hat carried " the wardroom stove, my lads, the brightwork and the paint, And in the other corner language to shock a saint." With four appendices featuring tunes, traditions, fragments and a shared repertoire with other services, an informative gloss­ ary and a well-rounded Sternpiece, this is a fine body of Royal Navy songs. Here is one "navel" I could contemplate for some considerable time! W. Bennett Reviews 121

TRIBE, Ivan M., Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia, Lexington, Kentucky, University Press of Kentucky, 1984, 233pp., £26.50. This book covers Country Music in West Virginia, particularly those live broadcasts from the Mountain State that families gathered round their sets to hear on Saturday nights. Ivan M. Tribe shows in Mountaineer Jamboree the country music radio programming which, from the 1920s to the 1950s, made West Virginia a mecca for the singers and instrumentalists who assembled there from all parts of the United States. Wheeling's "WWVA Jamboree", first broadcast in 1933, attracted a wide audience--especially after 1942 when the radio station increased its power. This audience was reduced during the 1960s when Nashville donned the country music crown, the lessening of influence causing young performers to seek fame out­ side their native state. The heritage of country music's "mountain mama" is kept alive by many old-time musicians and a sprinkling of young ones: the name of John Denver springs to mind with his recording of Country Roads. At this time, this young man is trying to hitch a ride on a Russian space shuttle for which he will have to pay about £15,000,000 and learn Russian; perhaps it will be in this language that John Denver will be singing: "Take me back to the place where I belong, West Virginia." Members of the Jamboree helped to popularise the theme of this song with "Almost heaven, West Virginia" in the late 1960s; Ivan M. Tribe is the Good Samaritan who helps the traveller along the country road to the Mountaineer Jamboree. W. Bennett

URDANG, Laurence, Ceila Dame ROBBINS, et al., eds., Mottoes, Detroit, Gale, 1986, 1162pp., $75.00. In order that the reader may understand the intention of this collection, it is best to quote the book's long subtitle: A Compilation of More Than 9,000 Mottoes from Around the World and Throughout History, with Foreign Examples Identified and Translated into English, the Entries Arranged in the Text under Thematic Categories, Supplemented by Alphabetic Indexes of All Mottoes and of the Families, Institutions, Individuals &c., to which They Are Attributed. The book consists of a brief How to Use This Book section (one page), a Bibliography (five items), a Table of Thematic Categories (24 pages), the collection itself of the mottoes (817 pages), and the two indexes devoted respectively to mottoes and categories; and source information. The mottoes are arranged under thematic categories in principle, though in practice this is not always so. Thematic categories include, for example, school mottoes and institutional mottoes. A motto may thus appear under several different heads in the main collection. Most mottoes collected here are from institutions of one sort or another, though many come also from families. The motto is quoted first. If it is in a language other than English, a note records which language it is in and this is followed by a translation. Where the motto is found is then recorded. It is not easy to find out what sources have been exploited and almost no dates are given. Hence the extent of mottoes or their development and tradition are difficult to explore from this volume. Better organisation and more compre­ hensive information would have made this a much more useful collection. N.F. Blake 122 Reviews

URDANG, Laurence, and Frank R. ABATE, eds., Loanwords Dictionary: Words and Phrases Encountered in English Contexts That Are Not Fully Assimilated into English, Detroit, Gale, 1987, xviii, 324pp., $80.00. An annoyance, when reading, is to come across an unfamiliar phrase, especially when, having reached for a dictionary, that particular word or phrase is not listed. At such times one feels like a shlimazel! Frequently, the reason is that although used in an English context the word is not of "English origin". It is a "loanword" borrowed from another language. Literal trans­ lations of such terms into English "often do not carry the same connotation as the original". The authors of the dictionary have collected some 6,500 of these "loanwords". Selection has been determined by the fact that (a) the term has a widely recognised association with a specific non-English language or culture, (b) the term is freely and commonly used in English contexts, and (c) the term has become generalised. Not a book for the hoi polloi, but a dictionary which after 1992 you might need di piu in piu. D. Bates

WINTLE, Justin, Dragon's Almanac, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, 226pp., £3.95. The Dragon's Almanac is a collection of Chinese, Japanese and other Far Eastern proverbs exhibited, day by day, in the form of a calendar. An overall movement of mood and theme is expressed through the placing of proverbs relating to sex and "sap rising" in Spring months, and weightier, religious proverbs in Winter months. It is no surprise that the Oriental expresses himself in the the thought-forms of the past. Kotowaza-words that work-is what the Japanese call the proverb. The feminist of the western world will not be pleased with the sexist nature of some proverbs: "A door to the backyard is not really a door, and a woman is not really a human being" (Chinese); "The thoughts of a woman never travel beyond the end of her nose" (Japanese); but as the Chinese also say: "Teach your son in the hall, teach your wife on the pillow." Readers can gain a clear word-picture of Eastern culture gathered from an area where proverbs are as common as grains of rice. I followed the Malayan directive to "go as a meat pie, come back as a sandwich" and found myself caught between the two levels of learning that this volume offers-education and elucidation. This schizophrenic state enables one to "see through a glass darkly" and yet "face to face", for as the Malay proverb says: "The man who sticks bananas in your mouth will also stick thorns in your bottom." W. Bennett

YOUINGS, Joyce, ed., Raleigh in Exeter 1985: Privateering and Colonisation in the Reign of Elizabeth I, Exeter, University of Exeter, 1985, x, 117pp., £3.95 paper. This collection of papers hangs on a conference that marked the quartercentenary of Raleigh's Roanoke Island Colony, the original Virginia settlement. Like many such compilations, the Reviews 123 connection of the various papers with the primary topic is closer in some cases than in others. D.B. Quinn's piece on the Lost Colonists is the most directly relevant, dealing with the reports on the lost population from the next generation of settlers. The editor of the volume asks the rhetorical question "Did Raleigh's England Need Colonies?", though the first para­ graph recognises that it was Elizabeth Tudor's England. Joyce Youings looks at the contem­ porary suggestion that the country was overpopulated (especially with the unezmployed), and that plantations in Ireland neither met that need nor provided the necessary base for an expansion of overseas trade. She concludes that for Raleigh himself, as for other projectors of colonial settlement, the chief attraction was the opportunity to acquire landed estates which they could never afford in their home countries. M.J.G. Stanford looks at the "intangible inheritance" which was most of what Sir Walter Raleigh got from his father, and M.W. Turner gives a nice account of Raleigh's cocktail character by likening the phases of his life to Elgar's "Enigma Variations". Ian Friel gives a nice, simple account of the vessels that were available to Raleigh and his contemporaries, and two other pieces discuss the colonial drawings of John White and American historiography of Raleigh; the opening piece is a general review of Elizabethan privateering by K.R. Andrews. D.E. Bland

ZALESKI, Carol, Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experiences in Medieval and Modem Times, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987, ix, 275pp., £15.00. Resurrection myths are common among all the world's cultures, but only the greatest or holiest people (or gods) can be assumed to be endowed with the power or the grace to "rise from the dead". So it must be assumed of lesser mortals that they have "near-death experi­ ences". This, at least, is the most common way in which a person can avoid being accused of blasphemy on reporting ecstatic visions, bright lights, angels' wings or voices, or other marvellous sensations at a time when observers of their sick or injured bodies were beginning to mourn their deaths. Twentieth century medicine has increased the number of incidents of this sort dramati­ cally. As Carol Zaleski notes, "cardiologist Fred Schoomaker claims to have interviewed fifty-five patients who recovered from 'brain death' and had vivid memories of blissful visions." This sort of experience naturally leads the medical profession (and with it, psycho­ logists and social scientists) to push back the definition of death so that it excludes these phe­ nomena. Only when the mind (or spirit) is somehow separated from the body can "final" death be declared, according to some researchers; while others rest 'their case at the point where irrecoverable cellular decay has taken place. After recounting and analysing near-death experiences from many centuries and places, Zaleski's conclusion is that these "special" experiences are not very distinct psychologically from more common forms of imaginative experience. In addition to causing a redefinition of the time of death and the state of being dead, the proliferation of near-death experiences also 124 Reviews has a lot to teach about the way in which human beings form their images of the world and of the eternal. This is a challenging book, which pretends to offer no answers but which deals intrigu­ ingly and sensitively with fascinating questions.

D.E. Bland INDEX to LORE AND LANGUAGE VOLUMES 8 AND 9

AUTHORS

ANCONA, Frank, Myth: Matter of Mind?, 9.1:45-53 ASAGBA, Austin 0., Storytelling as Experimental Drama: A study ofEfua Sutherland's The Marriage of Anansewa, 8.2:43-50 BEALE, Paul, "And so Nobby Called to Smudger. .. ": Nicknames associated with individual surnames, 9.1:3-18 BENNETT, Winefride, The Blason Populaire Tradition in English Culture: A Dynamic Model of Social Structure, 9.1:19-35 CUNNINGHAM, Keith, "I Have No Idea Whether That's True or Not": Belief and Narrative Event Enactment, 9.2:3-14 DELANEY, James G ., Collecting Folklore in Ireland, 9.2:15-37 DELANEY, James G., David Thomson, 8.2:63-67 DELANEY, James G., The Cock in Irish tradition, with special reference to the Midlands, 9.1:61-72 DUVAL, Gilles, Divination, Morals and Courtesy: Some Aspects of English Chap-Literature of the Eighteenth Century, 8.1 :31-43 EBEOGU, Afam, Of Progress and Distortions: a pattern in the panegyric ethos in Igbo life and culture, 8.1:81-94 ELLIS, Bill, The Vanishing American Legend: Oral Narrative and Textmaking in the 1980s, 8.2:75-102 FOX, Sylvia, Witch or Wise Women?-women healers through the ages, 9.2:39-53 GORDON, Jan B., Gossip and the Letter: Ideologies of "Restoration" in "Jude the Obscure", 8.1:45-80 GREEN, Thomas A., Linguistic Manipulation in the Punch and Judy Script, 8.2:33-41 KIRK, J.M., Dialectology and Sociolinguistics in the 1980's, 9.1:73-86 KIRK, J.M., Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow, 9.2:69-83 LOVELACE, Martin J., Douglas Northover: "The Language of Old Burton, Burton Bradstock, Dorset", with notes of parallels to Newfoundland usage by Martin J. Lovelace, 8.2:3-31 NWACHUKWU-AGABADA, J.O.J., Nigerian Pidgin Proverbs, 9.1 :37-43 PENHALLURICK, Robert, The Politics of Dialectology, 9.2:55-68 POUSSA, Patricia, Hordocks in Lear's Crown, 8.2:73-74 SALZBERG, Albert C., Unintentional verbal Irony in Operatic Libretti: The Curse of Super­ titles, 9.1:55-59 SKINNER, John, Novelist as Mimic: a sociolinguistic study of Kingsley Amis, 8.1 :3-17 126 Index of Volumes 8 and 9

SMITH, J.B., "The Old Eel that Come Up through Breydon Water": Arthur Ransome's Work as a Key to Folklife and Folk Speech, 8.2:51-62 WILLIAMS, Douglas, "The Seafarer" as an Evangelical Poem, 8.1:19-30 INDEX to LORE AND LANGUAGE VOLUMES 8 AND 9

ARTICLES

"And so Nobby Called to Smudger. .. ": Nicknames associated with individual surnames, BEALE, Paul, 9.1:3-18 Blason Populaire Tradition in English Culture: A Dynamic Model of Social Structure, The, BENNETT, Winefride, 9.1:19-35 Cock in Irish tradition, with special reference to the Midlands, The, DELANEY, James G., 9.1:61-72 Collecting Folklore in Ireland, DELANEY, James G., 9.2:15-37 David Thomson, DELANEY, James G., 8.2:63-67 Dialectology and Sociolinguistics in the 1980's, KIRK, J.M., 9.1:73-86 Divination, Morals and Courtesy: Some Aspects of English Chap-Literature of the Eighteenth Century, DUVAL, Gilles, 8.1 :31-43 Douglas Northover: "The Language of Old Burton, Burton Bradstock, Dorset", with noptes of parallels to Newfoundland usage by Martin J. Lovelace, LOVELACE, Martin J., 8.2:3-31 Gossip and the Letter: Ideologies of "Restoration" in "Jued the Obscure", GORDON, Jan B., 8.1:45-80 Hordocks in Lear's Crown, POUSSA, Patricia, 8.2:73-74 "I Have No Idea Whether That's True or Not": Belief and Narrative Event Enactment, CUNNINGHAM, Keith, 9.2:3-14 Linguistic Manipulation in the Punch and Judy Script, GREEN, Thomas A., 8.2:33-41 Myth: MAtter of Mind?, ANCONA, Frank, 9.1:45-53 Nigerian Pidgin Proverbs, NWACHUKWU-AGABADA, J.O.J., 9.1:37-43 Novelist as Mimic: a sociolinguistic study of Kingsley Amis, SKINNER, John, 8.1:3-17 Of Progress and Distortions: a pattern in the panegyric ethos in Igbo life and culture, EBEOGU, Afam, 8.1:81-94 "Old Eel that Come Up through Breydon Water": Arthur Ransome's Work as a Key to Folklife and Folk Speech, The, SMITH, J.B., 8.2:51-62 Politics of Dialectology, The, PENHALLURICK, Robert, 9.2:55-68 Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow, KIRK, J.M., 9.2:69-83 "Seafarer" as an Evangelical Poem, The, WILLIAMS, Douglas, 8.1:19-30 Storytelling as Experimental Drama: A study of Efua Sutherland's The Marriage of Anansewa, ASAGBA, Austin 0., 8.2:43-50 Unintentional verbal Irony in Operatic Libretti: The Curse of Super-titles, SALZBERG, Albert C., 9.1:55-59 Lore & Language

JOURNAL FOR THE CENTRE FOR ENGLISH CULTURAL TRADITION AND LANGUAGE

Volume 9, Number 2 June 1990

CONTENTS

KEITH CUNNINGHAM "I Have no Idea Whether That's True or Not": Belief and Narrative Event Enactment 3-14 JAMES G. DELANEY Collecting Folklore in Ireland 15-37 SYLVIA FOX Witch or Wise Women ?-women as healers through the ages 39-53 ROBERT PENHALLURICK The Politics of Dialectology 55-68 J.M. KIRK Scots and English in the Speech and Writing of Glasgow 69-83

Reviews 85-124

Index of volumes 8 and 9 125-128

ISSN 0307-7144

Sheffield l \cadernic Press

ll