England—The Land without Folklore?1

Jonathan Roper

With the “German Popular Stories” translated from Grimm’s inestimable little volumes . . . we must close our list of English works on the subject of Legendary Lore. Not one of them, alas! dedicated to the preservation of the Legends of our “Father Land.”2 These words of William Thoms at the beginning of the Victorian era can be seen standing at the beginning of a tradition—a tradition of complaint about the lack of attention paid to English vernacular culture and folklore. This lament has continued to be sounded throughout the subsequent cen- tury and three-quarters, and is still to be heard today. Thoms voices this lament immediately after listing works on “legendary lore” in (or trans- lated into) English, a list which includes the publications of Scott, Price, Keightley, and Grimm. In other words, those writing on folklore up to his day had turned their attentions to Scandinavia, Germany, and the Celtic nations of the British Isles, rather than to England. This focus has also remained essentially the same in the intervening years. Latterly, the tra- ditional complaint of lack of attention paid to folklore has merged with and morphed into the somewhat different complaint (and, in some hands, accusation) that England lacks folklore. One expression of this is found in Neil Philip’s judgement: “Of all the major folk literatures, that of England is probably the scantiest.”3 Philip is well-placed to make such a judgement given his editorial work on a variety of national and international collec- tions of folk narrative. In the “Introduction” to his collection of English stories, he chasteningly notes that even the mere handful of folktales (four to be precise) that “the leading authority of his day, could come up with in

1 This research was supported by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Centre of Excellence CECT). 2 William Thoms, Lays and Legends of Various Countries: Germany (London: G. Cowie, 1834), p. viii. 3 Neil Philip, The Penguin Book of English Folktales (London: Penguin, 1992), p. xiii. 228 jonathan roper

1890 as ‘English folktales that have been taken down from the lips of the people’ ”, were really no such thing.4 Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud who, a century and a half after Thoms’ lament, were the first authors to take England “as the basis for a book covering all folklore genres”, have suggested that the two complaint traditions are intimately related in a chicken-and-egg manner, that the lack of interest in English folklore has led to the lack of its documentation, revival or valorisation, further deepening its neglect: there has always been great stress on Scottish, Welsh, and Irish traditions as richer, more ancient, and more worth preserving than those of England. This became a self-fulfilling theory; the more scholars thronged to study them, the larger grew their archives, and the duller England seemed in comparison.5 And yet there is, on the face of it, a mighty paradox here—that the land in which the term ‘folklore’ was coined is precisely the one with “the scantiest folk literature”. But perhaps there is no paradox. Should we not expect that it is precisely the place where “folklore” would be invented as a word a dozen years later should be the same heavily industrializing and rapidly urbanizing country in which folklore (or at least, in its classically- acknowledged genres) was first on the way out? Can pre-industrial culture only be valorised in an industrial culture, rural culture in an urban cul- ture, folk poetry in a world of mass-published copyright-holding individ- ual poets, folk belief in a world of scientific thought, folk music in a world of Great Composers, oral narrative in a world of novels? So what if much early work on identifying (or constructing) and valorising the concept of folklore happened in England, this need be no indication of the presence of folklore in England. Indeed, it might suggest precisely the opposite. If in the words of the Edwardian canard, England was, ‘the land without music’, was it also the land without folklore? We can begin to answer this question by starting with William John Thoms, the coiner of the word ‘folklore’. Little work has been done on what this foundational figure thought. While he has also featured as a straw man in certain manifesto works, these writings do not pretend to

4 English Folktales, p. xvii. Three of these tales were in fact reconstructed by their hear- ers two decades after the event, and the fourth supposedly “English” tale had been told in Romany by a Welsh Gypsy. And yet, unbeknownst to this metropolitan, non-fieldworking ‘leading authority’, English folktales had been taken down ‘from the lips of the people’ by Sternberg and Baring Gould (amongst others), and published, for example, in the pages of Notes and Queries. 5 Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. v.