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PATTERNS OF FOLKLORE PATTERNS OF FOLKLORE Hilda Ellis Davidson D. S. BREWER ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD © 1960, 1963, 1965, 1969, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978 H. R. E. Davidson Published by D. S. Brewer Ltd, P.O. Box 24, Ipswich IPI 1 JJ and Rowman & Littlefield, 81 Adams Drive, Totowa, N.J. 07512, USA. First published in book form 1978. The articles were previously published in Folklore, as follows : The Sword at the Wedding March 1960, Folklore and Man's Past Winter 1963, Thor's Hammer Spring 1965, The Legend of Lady Godiva Summer 1969, Folklore and History Summer 1974, Folklore and Literature Summer 1975, Folklore and Myth 1976.Í. They are reprinted by kind permission of the Editor and the Folklore Society. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis Patterns of Folklore. 1. Folk-lore - Essays I. Title 398\08 GR71 ISBN 0-85991-042-3 Photoset by Benham & Company Limited, Sheepen Place, Colchester, Essex C03 3LH, and printed in Great Britain by Redwood Bum Ltd, Trowbridge & Esher. CONTENTS Preface v Folklore and History 1 Folklore and Literature 21 Folklore and Myth 42 Folklore and Man’s Past 62 The Legend of Lady Godi va 80 The Sword at the Wedding 95 Thor’s Hammer 113 Index 128 PREFACE As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. T. S. Eliot: East Coker In the years leading up to 1978, when the London Folklore Society celebrates the completion of its first hundred years, it seemed that the time was right to look back on the progress made in folklore studies, the insights gained, and the contribution which the study of folklore has made and promises to make to other disciplines. This then was the subject which I chose for my three obligatory addresses as President of the Folklore Society from 1973-6, and it proved at the same time an opportunity to look back over my own work on the early history, literature and mythology of the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples to see where folklore has helped me most to understand the past. The additional papers collected here were all published in the Society’s journal Folklore between 1960 and 1969, and I find, rather to my surprise, that they all have to do with the significance of symbols in the mind of man. It seems that this is the aspect of folklore which has the greatest importance for me. Folklore is something produced when man is off his guard, acting instinctively and unaware, with the unspoken conviction that what he is doing is important, and that it must go on as it has done in the past. If this conviction is no longer present, then the custom or rite will disappear, just as oral tradition quietly ignores the parts of a story or event which men do not want to keep alive, and lets it drop out and be forgotten. Folklore in general develops when men come together in groups, for work or amusement or celebration, or for communal activities to do with the changing seasons of the year. Therefore when we investigate folk tradition and discover recurrent symbols incorporated in what at first sight may appear trivial or wholly frivolous occasions, we may come to understand better not vii only the customs of the past but also the deeper springs by which literature and mythology are nourished. The nature of the symbols will vary greatly. They may be simple visual ones, like the hammer or the whirling wheel, which may be used as signs on memorial stones for the dead, or playthings for communal merry-making, or amulets to bring luck and ward off calamity. They may be the precious possessions of a family, like the sword which is an heirloom, or the ancestral burial mound, or the ancient tree beside the hall linking the generations. They may be characters from the historic past, like Lady Godiva or Oliver Cromwell, selected instinctively in the minds of the people to play a definite role, without overmuch reliance on sober historical evidence. They may be figures appearing repeatedly in folk and fairy tales, like the oppressed wife, the slayer of monsters, or the hero searching for a lost treasure, helped by birds and animals along the way, characters who can also be recognized in more serious works of literature. Moreover the various symbols form part of the language of myth; they are linked with the natural world, with the journeying sun and the lightning, the starry heavens and the seed in the earth, and also with the crucial points of man’s pilgrimage through life: birth, initiation into the adult world, marriage and death. We shall, however, be misled if we assume that such patterns are stable and fixed; there is a rich complexity in their changing development, and the symbols themselves may shift in form and significance, being continually born anew. At one time it was assumed that ballad or ceremony or myth could be traced back along a recognized route to its origin among the folk of early times; opinions differed with considerable vigour as to exactly what that origin might be, but it was generally felt that if only we held the necessary key, the process would be a direct and logical one. The ballad collected in the remote countryside would go back either to a minstrel or to spontaneous composition by the group in the golden age of oral literature; the ceremony would once have formed part of a dignified or barbarous ritual and then gradually deteriorated until it was found as a game for children, or a superstitious practice of simple-minded peasants. The most important revolution in our at titude to folklore is the realization that there is no one well-defined process for growth or decline; each song, tale or ceremony must viii