As part of some work am doing on a joint project, I wanted to investigate an area of death studies and how death is represented in folklore.

The dictionary definition of folklore is about traditional beliefs, customs, stories and stories. Such stories often passed down through oral tradition. The definitions seem to cast folklore alongside fairy tales which to my mind implies fiction. The definitions that I have read, do not mention history. Maybe this is because such stories might be so old that initial experience been lost so it is difficult to discern truth from what been exaggerated or even invented?

The term folk-lore was first used with a hyphen in 1846 by historian William John Thoms to describe the “stories, fables, proverbs, ballads, and legends of the common people.” (Mark, Joshua, 2019) The idea of “the common people” speaks of rustic life perhaps isolated from modernity. Interestingly, there was originally a sense of fluidity and of a story changing with each telling. This also came with risk of loss should a culture die out. Later, the songs and stories started to be recorded and written and became static. The recording of folklore was maybe necessary due to population shifts for example the Highland Clearances in Scotland, the Great Famine in Ireland and the Industrial revolution and shift of population to the cities. We should consider who is recording or writing such stories. Are they a native of whichever language the stories told in and might meaning be lost in the translation? Does a song recorded come with actions and movement which isn’t recorded? What of audience? Does who is listening impact the telling of the tale? In recording folklore, there is a risk of corruption. It is easy to imagine that there might have been shaping and editing of the tales told to serve a particular purpose with respect to politics or commerce.

More recent academic definitions of folklore introduce historical context, the relationship between experiences from the past and current identity, social memory and that folklore being communicated through oral traditions includes language and music, but also that material objects can have biographies. There is also a link between folklore and mythology. (Pountney and Maric, 2021, p. 233,234).

How then does folklore tie in with death? I suppose, logically, if folklore is about stories of the people, then death will feature. It seems that maybe death within story telling can become more than just a full stop at the end of life and maybe, as part of a story, it becomes possible to convey death into broader concepts which might utilise symbolism such as the plants and flowers associated with death each linked with their own story which might be from ancient mythology or from a more local source. Death within a story can transform death into a figure or a spectre designed to cause fear or perhaps to introduce compassion to the fact of death. To investigate death and folklore I will research a common fairy tale; Hansel and Gretel. From my own memory this story is about a woodcutter and his wife who are starving and can no longer afford to care for their children and decide to take their children into the forest and leave them to fall victim to the wild creatures in the forest. The children survive by finding a cottage which is made from sweets which is the home of a witch who tries to lure unsuspecting travelers to her cottage so she can eat them. They trick the witch and push her into her own oven and somehow find their way home again and, as is the way of fairytales, they all live happily ever after, except, obviously, the witch. My research reveals that story was included in a volume of Kinder-und Hausmarchen published in 1812 by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm but that the brothers Grimm tales originated from much older stories to which the brothers tried to stay true to the original oral tradition. In this we also see a reason for recording these stories; namely that of preserving and so of enhancing the national heritage of the Nordic / Germanic peoples. (Kamenetsky, 1974, pp. 379, 383) It is also interesting to consider that the tales collected by the brothers Grimm were not originally done so with an audience of children in mind. “Although we call most of these stories ‘fairytales’ today, they did not start out with classical ‘fairytale endings’, and weren’t originally composed for a child audience.” (Fiscelli et al., 2018) The older roots of the Hansel and Gretel tale are more difficult to be certain of. There are similar tales which feature motifs of abandoned children, hunger, witches and ogres which feature in tales collected by Italian Giambattista Basile and published in the 1630s, in tales collected by Charles Perrault and Madam d’Aulnoy in the 1690s and in tales from Portugal and from Czechoslovakia. (Wei, 2018, pp. 10–11). Some sources claim that such tales were born in period of The Great Famine which started in Europe in 1315 thought to have been caused by cold winters and a sustained period of rain causing crops to fail over several years. (Jordan, 1996, pp. 7–8, 12, 17).  and up to one third of the European population although exact figures can be difficult to discover due to communication and how information was recorded at that time before food supplies were restored some 6 years later. The story of the shortage of food, of abandoning children or even of cannibalism during this period (Lucas, 1930, pp. 369–376) is a possible source for the folk tales recorded by the brothers Grimm. The famine contributed to huge price increases in daily goods and led to wars and is thought to have contributed to poor health which in turn made increases negative outcome of the Black Death when it arrived in Europe by 1347. Based on the widespread disasters which killed so much of the population it is perhaps no wonder that these stories such as Hansel and Gretel occur from many sources. It is perhaps also a sign of how common the oral tradition was before people could read as I might have imagined that after the Black Death much folklore might have become confused or lost altogether. There is another theory regarding such folklore by Austrian psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim who looks at fairy tales less about whether they might be rooted in truth but instead, that the belief in the magic contained in these stories provides strength later in life and as a treasure chest for the child. They help children to separate the sense of good from bad for example the difference between “eating and devouring” and aid development in the child providing a structure for what they read and applying these stories to their own personalities. (Bettelheim, 1991, pp. 44–50). If Bettelheim is correct with his psychoanalytical approach, then it is interesting to consider if how children think of death based of experience of stories such as Hansel and Gretel and whether it make the deaths of ‘good people’ such as the children less acceptable than those of ‘bad people’ such as the witch? It is also interesting to consider that who might be thought of as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ could be because how these figures are presented. The witch, it could be argued, was old woman who lived alone in the woods and who was hungry. Was she any more ‘bad’ that the parents who tried to get rid of their hungry children by losing them in the forest? Is this then a difference between the fairy tale and folklore; the happy ending and the signposting and simplification of character traits for the audience as opposed to something altogether more ambiguous? I wonder how such tales were told as a part of the oral tradition. Were these adult stories for after the children had gone to bed? How did the story teller, which might be thought of as a recounter of family history or of the history of the local community, deal with dark memories such as being so hungry people tried to kill their children or to indulge in cannibalism? Is the crossover between the truth and the fairy-tale a way of shifting the darkness of such tales to the realm of fiction and particularly, of childhood fiction and perhaps makes light of dark and brutal periods in history? Is the passage of time, the limitations of human memory and failings of oral history as an exact way to record the past, ways which help society disguise any real people and places involved in such events and so any hurtful truth can be hidden under the guise of the story being a ‘fairy-tale’? The Great Famine took place over 700 years ago. If I imagine those involved passing the stories of those to their children or grandchildren, this is a very long time for the people involved in these stories to have been forgotten. I wonder about this idea in a more modern depiction of a terrible event. It is hard for me to imagine the Holocaust being depicted as a fairy-tale but if I shift time onto the year 2635 then is it possible that much of what is familiar to us today will have been forgotten and so a depiction of a real event as child’s fairy-tale would not be so outlandish as it might at first seem?

This is interesting as I wonder about how threads of memory can survive the slow grind of time and which threads might survive and which will be erased. I wonder about my daughter’s death and I wonder about a child unborn and not even given a name. A single death in a huge world filled with millions of deaths over hundreds of thousands of years. The impossibility of creating a story worthy of being retold around such ordinary events. Is this why so many people turn to religion as the crushing inconsequence of our existence, starting from nothing and returning to nothing, is too much for many to deal with? There must be some kind of hidden reason or point to it all? I reject religion. Mine is a brutalist point of view for many. I believe when we die there is nothing left. There is no afterlife and we don’t get to see our loved ones after they die. Is that what Barthes meant when he said that he saw nothing in photographs but death? My challenge then of making a creative work capable of exploring these ideas and of finding an audience for whom this work resonates.

I initially thought that folklore was completely separate from my research into loss but have found many similarities and where I can see the same points perhaps viewed from different perspectives. Sheffield Hallam University hosts the Centre for Contemporary Legend. They list some research interests in this area (Centre for Contemporary Legend, no date). Such interests include hauntology which is about the persistence of facets of the social and cultural past often thought of as ghosts and moral panics which are public fear in response to something perceived as a threat to the values of society. I wonder if death itself can be viewed as such a challenge?

References

Bettelheim, B. (1991) The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage Books.

Centre for Contemporary Legend (no date) Sheffield Hallam University. Available at: https://www.shu.ac.uk/centre-culture-media-society/projects/centre-for-contemporary-legend (Accessed: 30 November 2023).

Fiscelli, G. et al. (2018) Seven Fantasy Classics for Children: Hansel and Gretel, University of Michegan Library. Available at: https://apps.lib.umich.edu/online-exhibits/exhibits/show/seven-fantasy-classics/hansel-and-gretel (Accessed: 26 July 2023).

Jordan, W. C. (1996) The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kamenetsky, C. (1974) ‘The Brothers Grimm: Folktale Style and Romantic Theories’, Elementary English, National Council of Teachers of English, 51(3), pp. 379–383. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41387176.

Lucas, H. S. (1930) ‘The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317’, The University of Chicago Press Journals for The Medieval Academy of America, 5(4), pp. 343–377. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2848143.

Mark, Joshua, J. (2019) Medieval Folklore, World History Encyclopedia. Available at: https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Folklore/ (Accessed: 26 July 2023).

Pountney, L. and Maric, T. (2021) Introducing Anthropology: What Makes Us Human? Second. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Wei, M. (2018) Hansel and Gretel on the Page and Stage: Literary and Operatic Adaptations of Grimm ’s Fairy-Tale. Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.