#folklore studies

[concertsasgrouptherapy]

my brain every five damn days: "but WHAT IF...we got a degree in folklore studies*???"

*it's not always folklore studies but it's usually some kind of study of myth, folklore, or old literature

[vyvilha]

the IP-brainedness of some people discussing mythology, folklore and religion makes me soooo unreasonably mad. the notion of natural cultural exchange, folkloric tropes and archetypes, traditions where every participant is an equal contributor, a culture changing religion but keeping their traditional customs alive, the concept of every traditional myth not being one definite story written by one definite author but instead an endless conversation that spuns thousands of years between people of one culture as well as people of different cultures — all nonexistent to a significant amount of people. btw i wrote this post inspired by a comment i saw saying that achilles is plagiarized from gilgamesh, just so you can imagine how hard i am gritting my teeth right now

[vyvilha]

it is true that in modern media very often the nakedness of the hag is used as a disgust factor but i have to say that in folklore the reason for the hag's nudity is because nudity is a liminal marker. clothes are a sign of civilization, they signify your place & your status in society. the naked hag is beyond those borders, she is a woman that is kind of a beast, a woman that is kind of a dead (or un-born) person

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

Wait, why are elves related to cain? (also autocorrect first wrote "why is Elvis related to china")

great question! the short answer is that it says so in Beowulf, lines 106-114

the best-guess-at-how-this-belief-arose answer is that when Chrisitanity encountered pre-Christian belief in Elves, which in this culture were seen as far less powerful than gods but far more powerful than humans, of shifting morals and dwelling in wild/liminal/"outer" places, and, rather than these beliefs being seen as heretical (because again, note, elves are not "Other Gods") they came to be understood through the lens of Cain's exile and the monstrous act that caused it- in short, a monsterous man driven to the edges of the world is the ancestor of the nonhuman, man-like things that live on the edges of the Human World*.

*sometimes referring to an actual place or set of boundaries, more broadly referring to reality as experienced, understood and effected by humans during their mortal/earthly lifespans

the answer that fits this whole thing into their broader worldview, if we try to reconstruct the mindsets of the time....

hoooooooooo boy.

this gets very weird very fast. I'll be citing Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England for my claims here, it is free to torrent on AnnasArchive so please check out that endless, dense, baffling, wonderful tome if you have a free month to spend having your brain chemistry altered by Wildly Unhinged Elf Lore.

so. the Elf (or Ælf) is a very enigmatic yet widely present entity in Anglo-Saxon culture. they are referenced most often as part of names (Ælfræd = Elf-Counciled, Ælfgifu = Elves'-Gift) where they have connotations of power and beauty, and in the names of diseases like Ælfadl (elf-sickness, no further details known) or Ælfscot (elf-shot, a sudden stabbing pain/weakness/lameness with no apparent cause, striking humans or livestock, possibly literally blamed on elves or possibly named metaphorically), or the names of poisonous or psychotropic plants such as Ælfþone (deadly nightshade). Elves are called on in charms against illness, either naming the illness as the "Elf" or calling on Elves or similar creatures to help chase the pain out of the body. Obviously none of this says much about what Elves ARE, so Hall turns to similar cultures where these traditions survived Christianization more inact. this mainly means looking Old Norse, where exactly one absolute mad bastard named Snorri wrote down every prechristian belief he could find under the guise of preserving old tales of "legendary human heroes", and at Scotland as late as the 1800s, where the failure of the Norman Conquest and its resultant Anglo-Normans to conquer Scotland allowed their shared culture with the Pre-Norman Anglo-Saxons to persist relatively unchanged by France, or by strict Continental religious oversight, for centuries.

so, what do these cultures have to say?

well, according to Hall's work, the only detailed description of Elves (Alfar) in the Old Norse record is a nearly verbatim copy of a description of Angels found in a Swedish text that Snorri (the guy who wrote all the norse stuff down, remember) would have reasonably had access to. folk belief across England, Scotland and Scandinavia (EDIT: and Ireland!) all the way up to the Victorian era back this up (see John Gregorson Campbell's various works on Fairy Tales in the Scottish Highlands for more recent accounts) (EDIT: see works of Lady Jane Wilde & contemporaries for more recent records of these traditions in Ireland), with a widespread belief that Elves and/or Fairies are, in fact

*deep, tired sigh*

....they're seen as fallen angels who were "too bad for heaven but too good for hell", and so are stuck on earth, just Elfing around I guess. if this seems like Christianization of local spirits, IT IS!

but somehow there's yet another layer to this. because Hall also records a lot of glosses (recordings of which word translates to which between different languages, especially common with harder-to-translate words such as plant names or religious/mythic concepts) for "Elf" and similar words, that show them corresponding to terms like "Nymph" or "Dryad", in the Greek sense. SO NOW ANCIENT GREECE IS INVOLVED HERE.

and now I must introduce a concept, present in both Old English and Old Norse traditions, that I like to refer to as "Schrodinger's Gigantomachia". "Gigantomachia" roughly means "Giant-fighting" in Greek, and usually refers to the battle between the Gods and the Giants in Greek (later adapted to Roman) mythology. Old English (and Old Norse) -speaking peoples had access to this story through the preservation of Greek and Roman texts by scholars in the employ of state and religious leaders such as Charlemagne, who I suppose did one good thing in his life there, and for some reason Old English and Old Norse peoples specifically LOVED Old Greek Stuff. The Anglo-Saxons (using as synonym for Old English speaking peoples here) also had access, through both descent from Nordic cultures and continued interaction with them, to the story of Odin and his brothers' slaying of the giant Ymir to create Midgard (Earth), and the subsequent battles between gods and giants throughout the Norse mythos. The Anglo-Saxons ALSO ALSO had access to, and increasingly placed sole and exclusive belief in, the Bible.

so what happened is they looked at the gigantomachia, the fights between the Norse gods (Æsir) and giants (Jotnar), and the biblical/Christain-apocrypha giants/nephilim/etc, and went "oh yeah, the time way back at the beginning of human history when God and The Heroes fought off the Giants, we've all heard of it. we've all heard of the Giant War, that's a thing that happened and all of these stories talk about it". so if you were able to go back in time and talk to an Anglo-Saxon (...or you could also just talk to me lmao, pretty close to the real thing) and you mentioned the Giant War, they would understand immediately, with that understanding being of a singular War Against The Giants that is told accurately in the Bible, and with some distortions in Greek, Roman, Norse, Pre-Christian English, and other sources (thse "distortions"- ie the presence of polytheisic deities- being blamed either on centuries/millenia of verbal transmission through non-Christian cultures, or more kindly on the natural desire of a given population to focus their retelling of the Giant War on whichever of their own Legendary Ancestors (definitely not gods) had been there).

SO.

If greek and norse myths are canon as distorted, but not totally useless or demonic, retellings of the Christian canon... and the nephilim of the bible are the giants of myth.... and Elves, being neither human nor god, are in a separate class of "other", which is notably also where Giants are categorized (see Hall again) (also see Greek nature spirits and minor natural-feature deities, which Elves were considered equivalent to, and their frequent ancestral, if not parental, ties to a Titan, Giant or other pre-Gigantomachia powerful non-olympian entity).... and if the radiant beauty of Elves is mapped onto angels, despite Elves often being malicious entities... then, naturally, Elves are seen, along with Giants, as surviving offspring of the unholy union of fallen (specifically earthbound) Angels (aside from when the Elves themselves are fallen angels of course, but in that case it does seem to be implied that they'd have children, who would be born Elves) and pre-flood human women.

and according to popular biblical apocrypha and folk belief, who were the sinful human women for whom angels fell to earth and fathered such children?

they were the daughters of Cain's line.

aaaaand that's why Elves are seen as related to Cain in this culture. Yes, it is actually as confusing as it all looks.

[vyvilha]

@will-ruadh sharing my favorite works on ukrainian folklore, all of which can be found online for free. overall, i can recommend any works of foundational ukrainian folklorists & ethnographists: pavlo chubynskyi, mykhailo maksymovych, mykola sumtsov, khvedir vovk, mykhailo dragomanov, mykola kostomarov, volodymyr hnatiuk, philaret kolessa, oleksa voropai, oleksandr potebnya. just google their works and you can read, as they are all in free access. but below are things where you may start

mythology & demonology

• "Первісна міфологія українського фольклору", Віктор Давидюк.

• "Нарис української міфології" та "Знадоби до української демонології", Володимир Гнатюк

• "Українська міфологія", Володимир Галайчук

• "Звичаї нашого народу. Етнографічний нарис", Олекса Воропай. comes in two tomes. it's both mythology and calendar rituals, so it's kind of in-between topics

calendar rituals & liminal rites

• "Дни и месяцы украинского селянина", Михайло Максимович. ukrainian academic, but worked during russian empire, so the work is in pre-revolutionary russian.

• "Обряды: родины, крестины, свадьба, похороны", Павло Чубинський. again, russian empire ukrainian academic, written in pre-revolutionary russian.

• "Переправа через воду, как представление брака", Олександр Потебня. same as above

• "Хлеб в обрядах и песнях", Микола Сумцов. same as above

ethnomusicology

• "Ритміка українських народних пісень", Філарет Колесса.

• "Студії над українськими народними піснями", Іван Франко

• "Український музичний фольклор: навчальний посібник", Анатолій Іваницький

customary law

• "Звичаєве право в Україні", Олена Івановська

cultural anthropology

• "Студії з української етнографії та антропології", Федір Вовк.

[pusong-mangga]

never felt hungrier for a table of contents

(book is "off with their heads! fairy tales and the culture of childhood" by maria tatar)

[opticflux]

Were Giants Real? Ancient Myths Vs Science

You’ve likely heard tales of giants in ancient myths, but science shows these stories stem from symbolic storytelling rather than real beings. Fossils of large prehistoric animals and genetic conditions like gigantism may have inspired such legends. Giants often symbolize natural forces or cultural values, reflecting society’s attempts to explain the unknown. While no credible evidence supports…

Were Giants Real? Ancient Myths Vs Science

[theloretrix]

The Loretrix Reviews Old Games:

The Children of Clay

Recommended accompaniments: At least one creepy objet d'art, blackout curtains, Eastern European food.

Use as a text for high school and college courses studying the history of archaeology (how would this game be different if set in modern day?), folklore, or such genres as the Ruritanian romance or cosmic horror.

Oh, man, I LIKED this. Fifteen-minute play time, the perfect bite-sized chiller, with simple mouse-and-keyboard controls but complex, exploratory play.

Clear and simple art direction, too, which is SO nice to see here in the era of everything being 3D and hyper-realistic ... it's actually stop-motion-animated!

Unreservedly recommended!