I've had enough people express an interest in reading my papers for my classes that I thought I'd post the first one. But a word to the wise, this is fairly theoretical and difficult. The next one will be easier, so maybe if you're not willing to attempt to wrap your head around how linguistic theory applies to folklore theory, then maybe you should skip this.
First a note on style: I am using a very peculiar style guide, all direct quotations are noted in single quotation marks, ex: 'quotation of other scholar'. All references were footnoted, which do not copypaste well, so I'm not including them. Please contact me if you really want them.
THE TENSION BETWEEN LORE AND LANGUAGE
Callan Stout
31 October 2008
As John Miles Foley suggests in his book, How to Read an Oral Poem, I propose to embark on a ‘pluralism of approach’ in exploring the relationship between lore and language. I will trace the history of folklore theory and how the terms lore and language have changed and been manipulated as the discipline has tripped and tumbled along its path, through various theoretical approaches and arguments over their practice.
The problem with defining the term lore is two fold; first, folklore scholars have not been able to agree on a single definition, and second, more often than not, a definition is only attempted as part of the term folklore. William John Thoms, the coiner of the term folklore, did not even venture a definition of lore in his scholarship-sparking letter, leaving folklore explained as ‘the Lore of the People’ (italics in original), which leaves us to assume folk means ‘people’.
Henry Glassie says, that by-and-large, Alan Dundes’ definition of folklore as ‘artistic communication in small groups’ is the most commonly accepted among folklorists. If ‘small groups’ means folk, lore is defined as ‘artistic communication’. This definition, however inadequate, leads us to the explicit inclusion of language in the realm of possible definitions of lore. Language is systematic communication, verbal communication being one of the many possible systems. Could lore exist without language? Is lore a product of language? If no form of communication existed at all, oral, written, signed, etc, anywhere, would lore exist?
Yet what is language? Does its definition shift and change like a sinking ship, the way the definition of lore does; Or has it been more successfully pinned down by linguists and linguistic anthropologists? Ferninand de Saussure says, ‘language has usually been considered as a function of something else’. Does that mean it can only be defined in relation to the elusive definition of lore?
Before the term folklore was officially (or unofficially) coined by William John Thoms in 1846, ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’ proposed, in an 1830 issue, substituting lore for the suffix ‘-ology’. Lore takes on the meaning ‘the study of’, which is not used in common modern practice. In this suggestion the meaning of folklore changes to the study of the folk, which is a conception that has only arisen in the twentieth century incarnation of the discipline.
Dan Ben-Amos says the term lore was pulled from the Romantic vocabulary of the Eighteenth Century, ‘particularly that of the Scottish poets who sought to revive their vernacular writing’. Right away lore is associated with rescuing pieces of old culture from the rubbish bin of history. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED hereafter) gives as its second definition of the noun, lore, ‘loss, destruction’ a connotation that has proved inescapable to modern folkloric studies, despite its otherwise archaic status. J. Derrick McClure points out, ‘the fine tradition of folk literature and folklore […] has never ceased to flourish in Scotland’, but to the layperson lore is lost in the mists of time. In one of the many attempts to explain why I came to Scotland to study folklore, it was commented to me, ‘there are more castles in Scotland’ than in the United States. Somehow folklore is inexplicitly tied up in images of ruined castles in the popular imagination.
Language, however, has never been anything but a current phenomenon. Many languages not spoken by large populations are bemoaned to be dying out and language death does actually occur. Anthropologists and linguists often attempt to record dying languages before they expire. Since 1776 many commentators on the Scots language have lamented its presumed impending death. However, the general public does not commonly think of their language as something that can die. Lore on the other hand, is more commonly believed to be dying out.
When Thoms’s letter was published in The Athenaeum the predominate definition of lore, according to the OED, was ‘1. The act of teaching’ and ‘2. That which is taught’. Not until the fourth entry do we get ‘[s]omething that is spoken; information; story; language’, which the OED lists as obscure and only used between 1350 and 1450. This is closest to the definition attached to Thoms’s use of folklore and applied in the infancy of the subject. It is also the only definition that explicitly includes language.
A fifth definition: ‘Also, in recent use, applied […] to the body of traditional facts, anecdotes, or beliefs relating to some particular subject’, comes closer to how folklore is conceived today, followed by a reference to the article in ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’. While this defintion concieves of lore in the magazine’s proposed way, it has not expanded into other disciplines and remains unique to folkloristics. Ben-Amos wonders if Thoms was aware of the ‘Gentlemen’s Magazine’ article or even the use of ‘lore’ for such purposes. If he was, folkloristics took a hundred years chasing itself around a bush before it got back to including the ‘people who have the lore’ in its study.
If Thoms was in fact harkening back to the definition of lore that included language, he would probably have conceived of language as, ‘The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure,’ the first definition in the OED. This definition focuses again on a group of people and their shared use of the same patterns of communication, which coincides with the definition of lore given by Ben-Amos, with only one major difference; Ben-Amos amends it to ‘artistic communication’. Ben-Amos’s definition is in line with his contemporary Noam Chomsky’s conception of speech production (more on that later). For the most part, in the early years of folklore, lore and language were separate entities, the mixing of the two as unlikely as a leopard changing his spots.
In our chronological survey of the chimera-like relationship between the terms lore and language, we must next look at the influence of Charles Darwin on the discipline. Darwin’s theory of evolution influenced more than just the natural sciences, the ideas also swept through the social sciences. Edward B. Tylor was the driving force behind the application of evolutionary theory to folklore. In this theory, humans went through three stages of development, savage, barbarism and civilization. The peasant societies of Britain and Europe were thought still to be in the stage of barbarism, while aristocrats were in a stage of civilization (folklorists included themselves in this group).
Shortly after the founding of the American Folklore Society in 1888 with its desire to collect the survivals of American folklore before they vanished, the editor of the society’s journal, William Wells Newell, ran into a unique problem; folklore was then defined as a survival from a society’s savage stage of development. American Indians were grouped in the savage stage, but researchers were collecting folklore from them. If folklore was a survival from the savage stage, could groups still in the savage stage have folklore? The term mythology was cultivated to solve this conundrum. Mythology ‘characterize[d] the living systems of tales and beliefs of primitive peoples’ (italics in original). With this distinction and the theory of human evolution, mythology could theoretically become folklore when a society progressed from savage to civilized, although this potential for transformation does not seem to have been explored.
Newell revised the definition of folklore to ‘oral tradition and belief handed down from generation to generation without the use of writing’. This definition foregrounded the oral nature of lore. Elliot Oring points out that the new definition expanded the conception of lore past the linguistic limits of the past. In Newell’s new definition of folklore, language is limited to unwritten sources, keeping with the prior trends of the discipline. The oral requirement restricted the definition of lore by parameters of language.
Unlike their theoretical predecessors, folklorists using the Philological approach, focused their research on written manifestations of folklore. A large part of philological inquiry explored the relations of the language of myths (they do not use the term lore) and their etymological roots. This approach relied heavily on the concept of ‘psychic unity’, or the idea that humans are psychologically the same, and therefore the products of human thoughts can be exactly the same. Aside from the inherent fault in believing all humans think the same way, despite any and all differences, the idea of psychic unity would often also assume unity through time, ignoring the option of a diachronic process of creation.
Through this method, scholars like Max Müller related vastly different Indo-European language myths to one another. Müller concluded all myths told the story of the sun’s journey across the sky. Through etymological comparison between Indo-European languages Müller traced word origins and meanings back to references to the sun, moon and stars. Müller was a Vedic scholar, and consequently used the Indian Veda as his ideal source of all Indo-European mythology. This complete focus on the written language of mythology has been relegated to the history of the discipline, however the extent some early folklorists (they probably called themselves Antiquarians) focused entirely on written language so soon after the coining of the scholastic title, points to the interconnectivity of lore and language, in this case, with language supplanting lore.
This approach is missing the forest for the trees, with each word the philologists traced a separate tree in our metaphorical forest. I am able to trace the word Middle-Earth through the many languages Tolkien invented for The Lord of the Rings and deduce that in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi the planet ‘Endor’ means middle-earth. The jump between The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, two very separate mythic worlds, is equivalent to the assumptions the Philologists made. The orality of lore has been stressed since the very beginning, and a problem arises when this fluidity of oral lore is ignored. When lore is fixed as written language and only the written words receive scholastic inquiry, orality is ejected from the equation. The oral prerequisite many scholars use to qualify an item as lore precludes language being defined as spoken communication. The multiplicity of oral variants makes using a fixed written form as the starting point for explorations into word-use practically a joke, or the Philologist’s Folly. Specific words were not necessarily used in every single variant of a piece of lore. They interpreted language in a way that would later be defined by structuralists as ‘langue,’ separate from the study of spoken language or what they called ‘parole’.
The structuralist movement of the twentieth century came in two phases, first the syntagmatic structuralists taking direct cues from Vladimar Propp in Russia and later paradigmatic structuralists building deeper applications of structuralism past the basic outline of a folktale.
Syntagmatic structuralism broke variants of folktales down into pieces based on actions, resulting in a plot structure. The plot structures of different variants of the same tale were compared for differences. In this way, the basic plot of a folktale with multiple variants could be derived. Syntagmatic structuralism did not completely ignore language, but neither did it not acknowledge the variability of the language of each telling of a folktale, to stay with the same example. The words used in each variant were deprioritized and viewed as unique to each storyteller, but not important in the overall plot structure of the larger story.
For example, the ‘Cinderella Story’ exists in many different forms all over the world. The basic story structure could be as follows:
1) Widowed man is raising daughter, or daughters alone.
2) Widowed man marries, and new wife as two daughters.
3) Widowed man dies, or is rendered incapable.
4) Youngest daughter (Cinderella/heroine) is made to do all the cooking and cleaning by her older sisters, or stepsisters and stepmother.
5) The opportunity to marry some one of a higher status (hero) is presented (usually a prince, but in Native America a celestial being).
6) The sisters make Cinderella help them prepare to impress the hero.
7) The sisters fail to win the hero, because of some inherent personality or physical flaw.
8) Cinderella wins the hero’s love, because of her inherent kind nature.
9) Cinderella and hero marry.
10) Sisters are punished.
The actions of the plot can then be analysed for their relation to each other. Anatoly Liberman, in his introduction to Propp’s Theory and History of Folklore, reminds us that ‘a literary text [or folktale] is of course a system: its parts are organized in such a way that they […] refer to other parts in the same text’. Structuralists would analyze the plot points for internal patterns. In Cinderella the wedding at the beginning and end of the tale would be considered a balance, for example. This form of analysis was also applied to single variants of a folktale or ballad, however this method lacks any specific exploration of language other than as a bearer of the action of the plot.
The second movement, paradigmatic structuralism, was developed from linguistic structuralism and was led by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The new emphasis borrowed the linguistic vocabulary of de Saussure’s structuralism to talk about story (or ballad) structure. Saussure’s approach to structuralism lay in the relationship between things; an element of a system was only as important as its relationship to the other parts of the system, but not alone. He used the terms langue and parole to differentiate between the rules of the language as they exist in a speaker’s head and the actual spoken words, respectively.
The paradigmatic structuralism of Noam Chomsky, a later linguistic structuralist, separated language into two similar categories: Deep structure, a person’s understanding of their language, their basic grasp on all the rules; and Surface structure, the manifestation of these rules in speech, which includes all the supposed mistakes a speaker makes. Deep structure corresponds to langue and surface structure to parole. Chomsky’s terms seem more appropriate as they imply that the two levels of understanding have their own structures, which can be subjected to analysis, although Lévi-Strauss’s terms make the connection to language more obvious.
Structuralism has direct application to folklore, in particular the study of storytelling. Paradigmatic structuralists saw the syntagmatic structure (all possible plot variations of a single tale) as the deep structure of an item and all the spoken and written variants of this tale as the manifestation or surface structure. Bertrand Bronson described a ballad as ‘a fluid entity soluble in the mind, to be concretely realized at will in words and music’. Here the ‘fluid entity’ is the deep structure and the ‘words and music’ is the surface structure.
The plot action listed above would be considered the deep structure of the Cinderella tale. A particular telling or variant, for example the Disney movie, would be considered surface structure. The creation of images through the use of specific words could be a focus for the analysis of surface structure. Using linguistic theory to describe folktales unites lore and language in a way that makes them impossible to separate. Liberman explains that ‘Folklore presents an ideal case: “improvised” texts are related to the text known to the community and to active bearers of tradition exactly as speech is related to language.’ Specific wordings can foreground an aspect of the tale that is especially relevant to the community at the instant of telling, reinforcing the relevance of the tale in the modern community.
While syntagmatic structuralism allowed a researcher to identify related or similar plots of a tale, paradigmatic structuralism allowed the variants of a single plot to be explored in terms of their differences of action, or language. Although the discussion was not explicitly always about the language used in the expression of lore, the borrowing of terms from linguistics added a dimension that made language inseparable from lore. This differentiation is the first time folkloristics was truly removed from relying on any form of language as its study. Structuralism was the first theory to venture into the realm of the unexpressed (or later, the un-performed) aspect of folklore. This held particular saliency for Lévi-Strauss who stated that ‘to speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing’ a statement with which Chomsky would probably agree.
The Philologists Folly worked on the assumption that the manifestation of a story was the definitive version. The distinction between the underlying rules or plot and the manifestation of these rules had not yet been conceived.
Chomsky’s theory of a generative grammar, which speculates on how a person converts deep structure into surface structure, leads right into performance theory. Performance theory looked at the entire event of a folktale performance. Performance theory aspires to examine all aspects of a storytelling event (to keep with our previous example). For our purposes we will narrow the field a little and focus on a single aspect. Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes have explored pausing, or the lack of speaking, in performance, which perhaps is the ultimate tension between language and lore. Without pausing, words would run together and a speaker would be very difficult to understand. Other types of pauses are used to enhance the story by building suspense or some such thing. Operating within performance theory, does the pause belong to the researcher focusing on language of folktales or a researcher focusing on lore? If you told the tale in another language would you still use the pause? Tedlock explores its use in Zuni oral literature and I am familiar with its existence in American English story telling, therefore the pause must belong to lore. What if I just tell a different story, in the same language, and use a pause for the same reason? Justifiably the pause must belong to the realm of language in this latter case. Perhaps there is no way to know for sure, and things like pauses must be studied as both a part of language and a part of lore.
To switch around the prefix folk and use it in conjunction with language rather than lore, sociolinguists have started exploring what they are calling folklinguistics. Folklinguistics deals with a group’s perception of their language use, how they perceive the language use of other groups and how they think other groups view their language use. This body of knowledge encompasses what I would call language-lore. Language-lore beliefs including thinking that people who use Valley Girl English are stupid, or that Southern American English users are uneducated, or that speakers with the Boston Brahmin accent are snobby. I have even heard multiple stories about a foreigner to America, who is a non-native speaker of English, mispronounce the word sheet to that it sounds more like shit and have to deal with the ensuing consequences. Stories in this vein make up the as of yet barely explored body of language-lore.
The relationship of lore and language in the study of folklore is like two siblings going through puberty together, you never know which one is going to start yelling first or which one is going to wind up being the focus of study during which decade. However, the continuous interplay between the two terms does point to their co-dependence in folkloristics. Perhaps the exact nature of the relationship will never be enumerated in a list, but the see-saw of lore and language should continue to be pushed as long as folklore is studied. As Bronislaw Malinowski concluded Myth and Primitive Psychology, so conclude I:
'Without words, whether framed in sober rational conversation, or launched in magical spells, or used to entreat superior divinities, man would not have been able to embark upon his great odyssey of cultural adventure and achievement.'
In Hawai'ian myth the spirits of the dead journey across the ocean to the horizon, and there, where the sea forever washes the sky in his cooling water, there, there is a gap. Just big enough for spirits to pass. They is where you all travel on our last journey. Past the end of the road and over the ocean, through the gap in the world and into Lua o Milu. A land of eternal sunsets. There we wait for the ones we love to chase the sun to the edge of the world, but we wait patiently, their road is long and they shouldn't rush. But we wait none the less. 
This is a rainbow that lasted ALL DAY (and some cows. I'm not sure how long they lasted). We were able to see the ENTIRE rainbow. Both sides. That's good luck in Hawai'i. 
That's Achie(that's not the spelling, but that's how it sounded) Brae stone circle and Callan's classmate's kid offering herself as a virgin sacrifice. 
This is Callan trying to break into the house of a brownie (its like a Scottish leprachaun, or a hobbit or a menehune. A small man like thing, essentially. I think they are legended to have powers. Now look at all that good folklore I'm learning. I could also teach you how to fry oatmeal. yes, seriously. This is a really long parenthetical).
This is a really blurry picture of the article I wrote for the University Paper. Which I have included below (because I don't have any more interesting pictures). This is mostly what it looked like in print. I was too lazy to double check all of what the editor cut out (mostly the interesting part. No, I'm kidding. I think my original was more bias. Fancy that, me being biased. The editor did a good job making it more fair.)
