Quotes About Folklore

I know about various fictional and folkloric vampire mythoses the way other people know about the personal life of celebrities.

My own bias in folkloristics is decidedly psychoanalytic. I believe that the vast majority of folklore concerns fantasy, and because of that, I am persuaded that techniques of analyzing fantasy are relevant to folklore data.

There are lots of things in the folklore, like they can only be killed by a silver bullet, that don't realistically work, if you're trying to say they have existed for hundreds of years, unknown.

Baseball is more like a novel than a war. It is like an ongoing, hundred-year work of art, peopled with thousands of characters, full of improbable events, anecdotes, folklore and numbers.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

In my introductory course, Anthropology 160, the Forms of Folklore, I try to show the students what the major and minor genres of folklore are, and how they can be analyzed.

My father was a professor of folklore, and my mother was a teacher until she was married. I had a good relationship with them, and the only argument we had was when I went to university and wanted to go into the theater instead of studying to be a lawyer.

To be completely ignorant of the collective past seems to me to be another state of amnesia; you would be untethered, adrift in time. Which is why all societies have sought some kind of memory bank, whether by way of folklore, story-telling, recitation of the ancestors--from Homer to Genesis. And why the heritage industry does so well today; most people may not be particularly interested in the narrative of the past, in the detail or the discussion, but they are glad to know that it is there.

The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety;

The cure for tonsillitis was inspired. 'Take a fat cat, skin it, draw out the guts and take the grease of a hedgehog and the fat of a bear … All this crumble small and stuff the cat, roast it whole and gather the grease and anoint the patient therewith.

Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Hand, the senior of the gods and patron of all arts and crafts, was eventually demoted into Lugh-chromain, "stooping Lugh", and from there Anglicized into "leprechaun".

Shapeshifting in folklore is clearly connected with hallucination in morbid psychology.

All things from the north are devilish.

Have you ever heard the term 'the secret commonwealth' ?" "No. What does it refer to?" "To the world of half-seen things and half heard whispers. To things that are regarded by clever people as superstition. To fairies, spirits, hauntings, things of the night.

I once told him that the best way to break up a fight is to step between the two people and start singing ancient folk songs. But I'd never heard of anyone actually doing such a thing.

A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, "Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don't know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.

I met a Bulgarian. "In my country, you say to someone you hate, 'May you build a house from your kidney stones.

Hurston writes. "The white people had held my people in slavery in America. They had bought us, it is true and exploited us. But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on—that the white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away."24

For the folklore Hurston collected so meticulously as Franz Boas's student at Barnard became metaphors

As author, she functions as "a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law." The myths she describes so accurately are in fact "alternative modes for perceiving reality," and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.

Charlotte Mason considered herself not only a patron to black writers and artists but also a guardian of black folklore. She believed it her duty to protect it from those whites who, having "no more interesting things to investigate among themselves," were grabbing "in every direction material that by right belongs entirely to another race.

Zora," George Thomas informed me, "you come to de right place if lies is what you want. Ah'm gointer lie up a nation." Charlie Jones said, "Yeah, man. Me and my sworn buddy Gene Brazzle is here. Big Moose done come down from de mountain." "Now, you gointer hear lies above suspicion," Gene added.

Brother Anansi, the Spider, that great cultural hero of West Africa who is personated in Haiti by Ti Malice and in the United States by Brer Rabbit.

It was a modern folklorist name Adrienne Mayor who first noticed that the Ancient Greek stories of the griffin (which had the body of a lion, head and claws of an eagle, tail of a serpent) perfectly described a Protoceratops. The Greeks believed that the griffin guarded treasures of gold. Mayor discovered that fossilized skulls of Protoceratops were often found in Mongolia, where the Greeks traveled to trade for gold.