The study of American folklore

МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ

РОССИЙСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ СОЦИАЛЬНЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

Факультет иностранных языков

Кафедра английской филологии

КУРСОВАЯ РАБОТА

«Influence on the American folklore»

по дисциплине «История и культура стран изучаемых языков»

Специальность: лингвистика

Выполнила:

студентка 2 курса группы ЛИН-Б-1-Д- 2011

Маркина Любовь Валерьевна

Научный руководитель:

к. культурологии доцент

Левашкина Ольга Юрьевна

Москва 2012

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTIION……………………………………………………………..3

CHAPTER I…………………………………………………………………….5

1.1 Folklore………………………………………………………………5

1.2 The study of folklore…………………………………………………7

1.3 Classifying Folklore………………………………………………….9

CHAPTER II…………………………………………………………………..14

2.1 American folklore……………………………………………………14

2.2 The study of American folklore……………………………………...16

2.3 Immigrant Folklore…………………………………………………..19

2.4 Influence on the American folklore………………………………….23

2.5 Сontemporary Folklore………………………………………………28

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………32

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………34

INTRODUCTION

The relevance of the research.

The question of the folklore of the indigenous population of North America - the American Indians has always been actual.

American folklore has a long history. At first it developed independently, but in Age of Exploration a huge influence on it was rendered by Europeans who settled on the continent. They made a part of their culture to the culture of the Indian nations, influenced by religion and language.

Folklore is a soul of the people. The history of every nation is original and unique. It is fixed not only in chronology of events, but also in folklore. As scientists note: " The folklore of all people traces the roots back to fight for release." A person must know well the past, history and cultural heritage to go confidently into the future. A genuine culture can not be created in isolation from the folk art.

The object of the researchis the American folklore.

The subject of the researchis the variety of American folklore and its development from the very beginning up to our days.

The aim of the researchis to find influence of Europeans on the American folklore.

The tasks of the research are:

- to consider the concept of folklore and the history of its origin;

- to determine what methods conduct the folklore studying, what science is engaged in the folklore and as the folklore is connected with other sciences;

- to create a classification of folklore and to consider its genres;

- to consider such genres as «legend» and «myth»;

- to consider the American folklore and its origin;

- to identify the influence of Europeans and their perception of American culture;

- to define the role of folklore in contemporary life;

- to identify characteristic features of the American folklore and its uniqueness.

The novelty of the research.The research stands out against a background of other researches, devoted to this theme, because in this current work we touch upon the problem of the influence on the unique culture. In spite of the fact that the American folklore had been subject to significant influence, it kept the original features. The American folklore is a complicated system, which was formed not only during centuries, but also by different nations. It consists of Indian, Nigger and European cultures, so it is the largest base of knowledge about the Past.

In our work.we also create the classification of all types of the American folklore.

The hypothesis of the research.Some scientists consider that such concept as "The American folklore" doesn't exist, because of the great mixture of nations, which have affected the development of this culture. But the folklore initially has a huge impact on the way of life, mentality and cultural values of the people. The contemporary world is also based on folklore. The American folklore includes culture of many nations, but it only increases its uniqueness. No interventions could root out the main features of folklore of the people.

The research materialincludes information about American folklore, history of Indian people and dictionaries.

The structure of the research.The paper consists ofintroduction, 2 chapters, conclusion, bibliography.

Chapter I

Folklore

Folklore is the popular heritage of a group joined together by common interests. It includes legends, songs, tales, beliefs, common ways of speaking, jests, games, homely wisdom, festivals,dances, music, dances, crafts, customs, crafts, folk arts, etc. [Folklore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folklore ]

Folklore divided into four areas of study: artifact, describable and transmissible entity (oral tradition), culture, and behavior (rituals). These areas don't stand alone, but, as often a particular item or element can fit into more than one of these areas. [1, p.8]

Folklore is the term which was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms. He wanted to replace the phrase «Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature». Nearly a century earlier, Bishop Thomas Persy had popularized the collecting of English and Scottish ballads; and in 1812-15 Grimm brothers in Germany issued their epoch-making book of children’s household tales. In America Professor Francis J. Child, of Harvard, published his scholarly edition of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads from 1882 to 1898 [16, p. 2-3]

American folklore studied were fixed by the appearance in 1888 of the Journal of American Folklore as the official organ of the American scholars, amateur collectors, popular entertainers, and creative artists. [9, p. 89]

It tells us, then, folklore may be defined as those materials in culture which circulate traditionally among members of any group in different versions, whether in oral form or by means of customary example, as well as the processes of traditional performance and communication [1, p. 24]

.

Although oral or customary tradition and the presence of different versions serve to define folklore, the two other qualities, anonymity and formularization, are important enough to belong in a complete description. Folklore is usually anonymous simply because authors' names are seldom part of texts that are orally transmitted and folk artifacts are seldom signed, but sometimes a ballad may contain the unreal name or initials of its composer in the last verse and sometimes local tradition preserves the name of a notable folk composer or artisan. On occasion, too, research has unearthed the identity of a creator of folklore, but the most of folklore bears no trace of its authorship, and even the time and place of its origin may be a mystery.

The folklore was connected with national a life. Various purpose of works generated genres, with their various subjects, images, style. In the most ancient period the majority of the people had patrimonial legends, labor and ceremonial songs, mythological stories, plots. Emergence of the fairy tale divided folklore and mythology. In ancient and medieval society was formed a heroic epos. There were also legends and the songs reflecting religious beliefs.

In spite the bright national coloring of the folklore texts, many motives, images and even plots at the different nation are similar. So, comparative studying of plots of the European folklore led scientists to a conclusion that about two thirds of plots of fairy tales of each nation have parallels in fairy tales of other nationalities.

The folklore can contain religious mythic or religious elements, it equally concerns itself with the sometimes ordinary traditions of everyday life [ Folklore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folklore]. Folklore often ties the practical and the esoteric into one narrative package. It has frequently been conflated with mythology, and vice versa, because it has been assumed that any figurative story that does not pertain to the dominant beliefs of the time is not of the same status as those dominant beliefs. Thus, Roman religion is called "myth" by today's dominant religions.So both "myth" and "folklore" have become universal terms for all figurative narratives which don't correspond with the dominant belief structure [Folklore: http://www.answers.com/topic/folklore-1 ].

Study of folklore

Folkloristics is the term which prefer to use by academic folklorists for the formal, academic discipline devoted to the study of folklore. The term itself originates from the nineteenth-century German designation folkloristik. Finally, the term folkloristics is used to differentiate between the materials studied, folklore, and the study of folklore, folkloristics. In scholarly utilization, folkloristics represents an emphasis on the contemporary, social aspects of expressive culture, in contrast to the more literary or historical study of cultural texts. [1, p. 5]

The study of folklore attempts to analyze these traditions so as to display the common life of the human mind apart from what is contained in the formal records of culture which compose the heritage of a people. [1, p. 16]

This type of research has been a respected academic specialty in Europe for generations. But in the United States the field of folklore is relatively new, and it tends to be narrowly understood by many people who may have been attracted to it through treatments in the popular media, where the world «folklore» is very loosely applied to several kinds of non-folk materials.

The study of folklore leads one onto many fields. Ballads, songs, folk tales and legends may be considered in relationship to parallel types of standard literature; folk speech, folk saying, and dialects are subjects for linguistic research; popular customs, beliefs, and bits of folk wisdom may be explained by the aid of psychology and sociology and may even contribute to these sciences; folk arts and crafts may inspire new direction in the fine arts.

Anthropology, philosophy, religions, and history are other learned disciplines that cover many of the fields of human activity that the folklorist also approaches; but he has his own special purpose or points of view and his own somewhat different methods.

Folklore includes the unrecorder traditions of a people. The study of folklore analyzes and records these traditions because they display the commons life of the mind below the level of «high» or formal culture, which is recorded by civilization as the learned heritage of their times. Only by turning to the folklore of peoples, analyzing into its meanings and functions, and searching for links between different bodies of tradition may we hope to understand the spiritual and intellectual life of man in its broadest dimensions.

From early on folklorists sought to classify the material they collected. Really, the main shift in folkloristics was a move from collection and categorization , to a new focus on synthesis. The new generation of folklorists acknowledge the interactions between how an individual tells a story and how the audiences react and interact, and interrelationships between art, architecture and other expressive elements of culture. Folklorists today look at the dynamic relations between the socially given, the traditional, and the creative individual. The field has double checked itself from a focus on the traditional and ready-made, to a focus on the balance of traditional and emergent, socially given and creative [12, p.36].

Such synthetic work looks to better understand the world by recognizing the circular system of individual, group, and expression. Folklorists today have and use theories, but they also strive to maintain an empirical richness in their study, letting the fieldwork, the data, and the people involved direct the big picture as much as possible [1, p. 89].

Classifying Folklore

Collected folklore texts, descriptions of customs, or artifacts are of little use to a scholar until identified by category and ar­ranged systematically in an archive (or museum) or published [1, p.27]. Classification of the myriad forms of folklore facilitates their study just as classification systems do for the natural sciences: without standardized terminology and arrangement, we could not communicate effectively or gather data from archives and published collections. The difficulty is that ethnic or “native” categories differ a great deal from culture to culture or even from person to person. The more abstract “analytical” categories devised by scholars have not always yielded mutually exclusive systems, nor have they won universal scholarly acceptance. Any classification, it should be borne in mind, is always for a purpose; and, for the purpose of organizing data for analysis, certain traditional categories have become established in the voluminous reference works for motifs, tales, ballads, superstitions, riddles, proverbs, and other forms. These classification systems, whatever their shortcom­ings, have yet to be superseded; they structure the balance of this book and are cited in the appropriate bibliographic notes.

There are many types of folklore:

Verbal folklore, the type most commonly studied in the United States, may be logically classified from the simplest to the most complex varieties.

Partly verbal folklore, as the term indicates. Traditional phrases and sentences make up the area of folk proverbs and proverbial sayings, while traditional questions are folk riddles.

Party verbal folklore, as the term indicates, is folklore made up of both verbal and non-verbal elements. Popular beliefs and superstitions. Other manifestation of party verbal models of existence are folk games, folk dramas, folk dences, folk customs and folk festivals.

Non-verbal folklore includes both traditional materials of folk architecture, arts, crafts, cistumes, and foods, and the nonmaterial traditions of gestures and folk music [10, p. 57].

Also folkloreis divided into two big groups -ceremonial and not ceremonial.

Ceremonial folklore treat: calendar folklore (Christmas carols, Pancake week songs, vesnyanka), family folklore (family stories, lullabies, wedding songs, lamentations), occasional.

Not ceremonial folklore is devided into four groups: folklore drama, poetry, prose and folklore of speech situations. The folklore drama treat: Parsley theater, vertepny drama, religious drama [13, p.156].

Folklore poetry treat: ballad , bylina, spiritual verse, lyrical song, cruel romance, chastooshka, children's poetic songs (poetic parodies), historical song , sadistic rhymes. The folklore prose besides shares on two groups: fantastic and not fantastic. Fantastic prose treat: the fairy tale (which, in turn, happens four types: magic fairy tale, fairy tale on animals, household fairy tale, cumulative fairy tale) and joke. Not fantastic prose treat: the legend, a legend, a bylichka, the mythological story, the story about a dream. Folklore of speech situations treat: proverbs, sayings, blagopozhelaniye, damnations, nicknames, draznilka, dialogue graffiti, riddles, tongue twisters and some other. There are also written forms of folklore, such as letters of happiness, graffiti, albums.

Myths are the stories of the gods and other supernatural beings. Usually in prose, they explain natural phenomena; often they parallel the religions of advanced cultures, forming the basis of the individual’s adjustment to his universe and the unseen powers in it. In America different Indian tribes had their own bodies of myths, with common characteristics but varying in response to a tribe’s peculiar environment and history.

A myth is a story with a specific purpose. It tries to explain how the world is arranged. Myths also tells about the relationship between gods and humans. Even in spite of the events in a myth are usually impossible, they try to send a message that has an important social or religious meaning.

People have always tried to find out from common questions like who made the universe or questions like what causes a storm. Religion, gods, and myths were created when people tried to make sense out of these questions. For early people myths were like science because they explain how things work. They also explained other questions that are now answered through contemporary science.

Legends are stories of what supposedly took place in earlier times. Sometimes the details are difficult to confirm, but usually the story names people and identifies locations. The person who telling the story usually doesn't claim to be an eyewitness to the events, but heard it from someone who knows someone who heard it from someone who was really there.

Legends often contain a moral or a lesson and are told to uphold the values of the community. They often involve supernatural or religious elements [Legends: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/Exhibitions/Folklore/english/legendese/legendesintro.htm]. Traditions are the inherited explanations, attitudes, and responses orally transmitted as a part of folk educa­tion. They may concern events, objects, people, places, or behavior patterns.

Myths may be subdivided into such classifications as ritual myths, origin myths, incidents involving the lives of the gods, trickster tales, journeys to the other world, stories of culture heroes, human and animal marriages, adaptations of old world myths, and retellings of biblical stories.

Legends and traditions may be grouped under the following headings: place legends, buried treasure legends, miracle stories, saints’ legends, migration legends, stories of natural wonders or extraordinary places, tales of legendary characters, stories of sacred objects, stories of ghosts, devils, vampires, witches, ogres, and haunted houses, accounts of transformation and supernatural appearances, and accounts of mythical animals [10, p.53].

If legends are folk history, then folktales are the prose fiction of oral literature. Folktales are traditional narratives that are strictly fictional and told primarily for entertainment, although they may also illustrate a truth or a moral. Folktales range in length and subject matter from some European stories about fantastic wonders and magical events that take hours—even days—of narration, to brief American topical jokes with concentrated plots and snappy punch lines that are told in minutes. The term “folktale” usually connotes the complex, so-called fairy tale, familiar in children’s literature. But there is no valid justification for ignoring recent tales that may have more realistic plots. Not only have these recent types of folktale replaced fairy tales in most American and many foreign oral traditions, but also, more often than not, these contemporary tales turn out upon investigation to have ancient parallels.

The folktales of the world, like the myths and legends, encompass a great variety of different narrative elements contained in a fairly limited array of basic forms, and both the details and the general outlines of specific folktales appear in widespread cultures and through great reaches of time. The recognition of these similarities spurred attempts in Europe in the early nineteenth century to organize comparative folktale research and to trace tales back to their origins. By the late nineteenth century a standard methodology had emerged, along with the first of several important reference publications; since analogous folktale materials and similar methods of study are found in the United States, it is appropriate to review this European background [10, p.86].

Thus in the first chapter we have come to the following conclusion:

1.1 Historical value of folklore in the fact that he is a spiritual biography of the working nation, the poetic chronicle of its centuries-old life and fight. National creativity has reflected all stages of development of human nature, the development of his consciousness.

Folklore gives not only the historical picture of the spiritual development of the people. From the works of all its genres is multi-faceted and at the same time a whole and unique character of all the people.

1.2 The science folkloristics is engaged in studying of folklore. This a new direction, which covers many different species. The study of folklore is very important, because only by knowing our past, we can judge about the present and future of the world. Folklorists analyze and compare the legends, myths and traditions between the different Nations, find similarities and differences, study the relationship between nations and their influence on each other. There are many methods to the study of folklore.

1.3 There are different classification features and characteristics, because folklore is very versatile. It is mainly divided into Verbal, Nonverbal, Party verbal folklore and Partly verbal folklore. But there are also a Ceremonial folklore and non - Ceremonial folklore.

Separately, we can identify the myths and legends. Most often it is made-up stories which explain different phenomena of nature, stories of heroes and the creation of the world.

Folklore works are anonymous. Their author - the nations. Any of them is created on the basis of tradition.

CHAPTER II

American folklore

American folklore has three main sources: Folklore Indians, blacks, and folklore of the white settlers. The question of the folklore of the indigenous population of North America - the American Indians has always been actual. Discussions on this issue usually went beyond the narrow limits of scientists dispute, always had the public interest. It is not surprising. As we know, the Indians on the time of the discovery of the New world achieved relatively high levels of culture. Of course, they were inferior to Europeans in the culture of metal or land, in the culture of construction, etc.But if we talk about the "culture of freedom," they were always on the top. They didn't become slaves of white, even when white deprived of their main livelihood and destroyed all bisons — the main source of life of North American Indians [4, p.7].

This need of Indians to feel always free is also a key for understanding of their folklore. Indian Fairy tales resurrect the beauty of virgin forests and endless prairies, sing brave and harmonious character of an Indian hunter, an Indian warrior an Indian leader. They narrate about the tender love and loving heart, the brave deeds in the name of love; their heroes struggle with the evil, and cunning, upholding honesty, integrity and nobility. In the fairy tales Indians simply talk to trees and animals, with stars, with the Moon and the Sun, with mountains and a wind. Fantastic and real for them it is inseparable. So we can see perception of life Indians.

A new nation, born suddenly in a seventeenth-century wilderness, possessed neither cultural nor folk traditions to call its own. Yet in a relatively short span an American civilization has arisen on the naked earth, endowed with distinctive institutions, literature, behavior, and folklore. The shaping of this folklore commenced with the first landings of explorers, and drew from two heritages, the uprooted European and the native Indian, blended in the crucible of a strange, fierce land.

The European settlers who crossed the Atlantic ocean in the seventeenth century brought with them a host of supernatural beliefs which colored their views of the universe. Learned men and common folk alike gave credence to demons and hags, ghouls and specters of the midnight darkness and regulated their lives with signs, charms, and exorcisms innumerable [4, p.9]. In the eighteenth century the tides of rationalism would sweep away many “vulgar errors,” as Sir Thomas Browne had called the grosser superstitions. But for the first hundred years of colonization, supernatural explanations in terms of God and the Devil ruled the thinking of governor and cleric as well as fanner and servant. English colonists viewed the fantastic world they encountered, and interpreted their novel experiences through the concepts of witchcraft, demonology, and divine providences. Hence the settlement of America generated powerful folk traditions which would form an enduring, if little understood, legacy of American civilization. What we may call American folklore resulted from the grafting of Old World beliefs onto the New World environment, and the generation of new folk fancies within old forms.

These fantastic stories being exchanged, in the gossipy report of one seventeenth-century traveler to New England, John Josselyn. Approaching the American coast in 1638, his ship sighted two sail bound for Newfoundland and hove to for news. “They told us of a general earthquake in New England, of the birth of a monster at Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay a mortality.” After landing and joining a group of “Neighboring gentlemen” who came to welcome him into the new country, Josselyn heard more of these wondrous occurrences in fuller detail. One told of a young lion killed at Piscataway by an Indian, and another of a sea serpent coiled up like a cable on a rock at Cape Ann, which an Englishman in a passing boat would have shot, had not two Indians dissuaded him, saying if he were not killed outright they would all be in danger of their lives. Thereupon a Mr. Mittin capped them both with an account of a merman who tried to clamber into his canoe while he was out fowling in Maine’s Casco Bay; he chopped off the creature’s hand with a hatchet, and the merman sunk beneath the water, staining it with purple blood. Now under the heat of the story-swapping, Mr. Fox- well came forth and related how he had passed a night at sea in a small shallop, hugging the shore but afraid to land; suddenly at midnight a loud voice called him, “Foxwell, Foxwell, come ashore,” and upon the beach he beheld a great fire ringed by dancing men and women. After an hour they vanished, and next morning Foxwell put ashore and found their footprints and brands’ ends on the sand. But no living Englishman or Indian could he find on shore or in the woods.

The study of American folklore

The study of American folklore is still a relatively young and flexible academic discipline, either in its own boundaries or as applied to outside subjects [9, p 44].

American scientists who turned to issues of systematization of Indian folklore, leading him in the system of folklore U.S. special and rather isolated place. The problem is not only in scale and a strongly pronounced originality of national and poetic creativity of Indians of North America: some of its «isolation» is considerably connected with traditions of its perception in the USA. The attitude of the euroamericans to oral national creativity of Indians is difficult to separate from the fate of of all culture of natives, which has influenced the specific historical and political factors connected with methods of development of the North American continent. Steady representation that American Indian, native there is no national-American, but something alien to America in the sense of prospects for social development, prevailed in American society for centuries [11, p.86].

Thus, it is necessary to remember a sharpness of a problem of American Indian heritage of the USA, which emerged at the dawn of the American state and the American culture, when the native population of North America was a "natural" political antagonist of languages of newcomers from Europe. Historical dispute on the ground possession, being solved every possible violent methods, up to genocide, found reflection and in "conflict" of esthetic values.

In process of continent development by Europeans, in process of deepening of their contacts to American Indian tribes the overall picture of American Indian folklore little by little cleared up. However, a very long time, many of the crucial elements of its components were not considered - in fact, until the last quarter of the XIX century [16, p.39].

Some genres of American Indian folklore were perceived by Anglo-Americans more readily, causing analogies to the European cultural experience [7, p.65]. So. the dominant place in American science, turned to the study of Indian folklore, long since was occupied by the myth in variety of its stadial modifications, ethnic and genre types. The tradition goes back to G. R. Skulkrafta who not only collected for the first time narrative folklore of one tribe, but also described a mythological cycle about Manabozo; the American anthropology showed subsequently classical models of research of American Indian myths and was engaged in active development of the theoretical aspects connected with myths.

Meaning of myth as a priority subject of study in anthropology remains in anthropology USA today. However, at the present time in his study of the observed one-sidedness. In the second half of the XX century when under the influence of historical circumstances interest to the myth revived on a new basis, studying of the myth appeared in the power of various formalistic schools. The myth is perceived today by scientists, as well as "popularizers" like J. Rothenberg as a system of formally organized elements of the text; it came down to find a variety of formulas, in accordance with the methodology of the school Perry-Lord. Scientists are interested primarily with recording and interpreting the text.

What humanists and social scientists share when they study folklore is an interest in finding out how, why, and which traditional cultural mentifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts develop, vary, and are passed on. From observations and records of these materials they hope to reconstruct something of the unrecorded intellectual life of people of the past and present [7, p.102]. The findings of such folklore research are applicable to many fields. Some literary scholars are interested, for instance, in the folk roots of epic and other narrative poetry and in the stylistic or thematic use of folklore in literature. Students of the fine arts may similarly consider the background of their subjects in folk music and folk art. Historians find that oral traditions, although seldom factually accurate, furnish insights into grass-roots attitudes toward historical events. Psychologists have long held that folklore, in common with dreams and other manifestations of fantasy, contains clues to the subconscious. Sociologists may study folklore (especially protest lore) along with other data on group life and behavior. While such applications of folklore study to other fields (such as the natural sciences) are still in an early stage, other and new applications (such as studying the efficacy of folk medicine) are also emerging. In fact, probably every field of study involving people and their works will in some way eventually make use of evidence from folklore as folklorists continue to refine and publicize their work. And the unified (or holistic) approach of recent folklore research holds even more promise for the application of findings to other fields [1, p.280].

Immigrant Folklore

Local Legends are closely associated with specific places, either with their names, their geographic features, or their histories. Presumably these legends are unique regional creations, but in reality many of them are simply localized versions of migratory legends; even one that originates from a local feature or event tends to spread outward, changing and being localized as it moves. A good example of the transplanted migratory legend is the Maine-woods story of “The Man Who Plucked the Gorbey”, who later was plucked of his own hair while he slept. This tale evidently goes back to a Scottish and North- Country English legend about plucking a sparrow, but it has become solidly entrenched in Maine and New Brunswick, being locally credited there to some thirty different characters [3, p.224].

Local historical legends are a largely still-uncollected aspect of American narrative folklore, although folk ballads based on historical events have long interested folksong scholars. Such occurrences as lynchings, feuds, sensational crimes, scandals, fires and other natural disasters, Indian massacres, and labor disputes have generated legends that become formularized in characteristic ways as they pass in oral tradition and that eventually accumulate supernatural and other motifs [3, p.256]. Probably because of their preoccupation with other forms of folklore or because such legends may seem to be simply garbled local history of little value, few collectors have awarded them the attention, for example, that Dorson did in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with “The Lynching of the McDonald Boys” and 'How Crystal Falls Stole the Courthouse from Iron River,” or that William Ivey did in the same region with “The 1913 Disaster,” a legend from the community of Calumet. Countless other legends based on local history could be collected and studied elsewhere.

Was colonial American folklore, then, nothing more than transplanted English folk beliefs? Not quite. Some minor variations may be noted. The covenant theology developed by American Puritans came to include covenanting relations between devils, witches, and sinners as well as between God and His saints. In effect New England theologians extended the covenant idea' to cover the figures of folk supematuralism. Tribal Indians presented a wholly novel element that distinguished the American scene from the English. Yet the Indians, whose odd manners and customs were described in repetitive detail by colonial writers, rapidly became incorporated into the existing religious folklore of the settlers. Believing in magicians and demons, they •readily credited the preternatural feats and marvels claimed by the Indian powaws [10, p. 188]. In 1621 Robert Burton, musing in his Anatomy of Melancholy over the state of magic in England, complained that “Sorcerers are too common, Cunning men, Wisards and white-witches... in every village.”⁵ These “cunning folk” occupied an ambiguous position in English society. They practiced the beneficent white magic of fortunetelling, healing, finding lost goods, and combatting witchcraft, but they also used their powers for harm, depending on which client they were serving, and some were themselves indicted as witches. The same ambiguity cloaks the powaws, who today would be called shamans or medicine men. Cotton Mather told of an Indian on Martha’s Vineyard, sick and tormented from witchcraft, who was cured by the very powaw who had enchanted him. In another like case a greater powaw relieved the suffering of a woman be witched by a lesser powaw through a fervent prayer to his god.

The prayer effected the release of the spirit of a drowned Englishman that had entered the woman, and the powaw trapped it in a deerskin. He advised the woman to move away, for the spirit being English, he could not contain it long. On another occasion a settler wishing to recover stolen goods repaired to a powaw, who insisted as a prerequisite that his client place faith in the Indian god. As with the “cunning folk” of English villages, so the powaws offered advice primarily on matters of health and lost property. From Maine to the Carolinas, settlers and planters reported wondrous eyewitness tales of Indian conjurations; Uniformly they ascribed the magic of the powaws to their traffic with the Devil. Writing of the red men, Edward Johnson, who led a westward trek from Boston to Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1640, sneered, “As for any religious observation, they were the most destitute of any people yet heard of, the Devil having them in very great subjection, not using, craft to delude them, as he ordinarily doth in most parts of the world, but keeping them in a continual slavish fear of him.” Johnson added that the powaws sometimes recovered their sick folk through charms used with help from the Devil, whom they consequently esteemed all the more. Instead of contributing a new element to folklore in the colonies, the Indians were fitted into the world-view and supernatural concepts of the Englishman [8, p.151].

If colonial folklore borrowed most of its content from the mother country, it did not borrow all that was available. A notable omission in North American legendry from the major folk traditions of Tudor and Stuart England is the fairy belief. The generic term “fairy covered a host of unnatural creatures: imps, elves, brownies, bogles, sprites, pixies, boggarts, hobgoblins, changelings, Robin Goodfellows. These beings cavorted and made mischief throughout the isles of Britain, but failed to take passage with the emigrants sailing for America. One explanation may be that they were absorbed in the new environment by the stronger figures of witches, ghosts, and devils with which they were closely associated in the folk mind. In Chaucer’s day house hauntings had been attributed to fairies, by the time of Shakespeare they were being credited in good part to demons, and the Mathers spoke only of demons and evil spirits when reporting the sensational occurrences that afflicted certain New England domiciles. Cotton Mather conceived of armies of demons or devils inhabiting they were absorbed in the new environment by the stronger figures of witches, ghosts, and devils with which they were closely associated in the folk mind. In Chaucer’s day house hauntings had been attributed to fairies, by the time of Shakespeare they were being credited in good part to demons, and the Mathers spoke only of demons and evil spirits when reporting the sensational occurrences that afflicted certain New England domiciles. Cotton Mather conceived of armies of demons or devils inhabiting the invisible world, and such catchall terms easily swallowed up individualized imps and fairies.

But a still more compelling reason exists for the nonmigration of fatty beings, No European, African, or Asian people entering American shores have brought with them the folk creatures of their Heimat, the spirits rooted in the soil—as Devil, witch, and ghost were not—of the homeland. The water nymph, the mountain troll, the garden gnome, belong irrevocably to the old culture and the Old Country [5, p.211].

Following the Civil War a flood of immigration swept into the United States, rapidly replacing the giant human losses of that holocaust. The Irish cop, the Italian fruit merchant, the Chinese laundryman, the Hungarian steelworker, the Jewish clothing salesman, the Armenian rug merchant, become stock figures of the American metropolis. New nationalities, little known in the American population, continued to pour into the northern states from the 1870’s to the First World War. Scandinavians and East Europeans swarmed into the cities where the demands of industry had created huge labor markets, and drifted into the countryside from Massachusetts to Oregon, to harvest crops on the farms, shovel ore in the mines, cut timber in the forests. With them they brought every species of European folklore, even to the Slovenian, the Basque, the Luxembourger.

The impact of the immigrant differs considerably in rural regions and urban centers, for in the country he enters into regional folk culture. By contrast with the Louisiana French, Pennsylvania Germans, and New Mexican Spanish, who settled on virgin land in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these later arrivals enjoyed less than a single century to leave their imprint on an already established population. Still, in a regional area such as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the immigrant has already stamped the folk culture with indelible contributions. Into the Peninsula, colonized by the French early in the seventeenth century, came miners from Cornwall, nicknamed “Cousin Jacks,” hard upon copper and iron booms of the 1840’s. French Canadians from Quebec moved down to the white pine lumber camps of the Peninsula, sustaining the original French tradition. After the Civil War the Finns and the Swedes streamed into the country resembling their own, along with smaller groups from most of Europe: Italians, Germans, Irish, Belgians, Danes, Slovenians, Croats, Luxem- bourgers, Syrians. In the small, fraternal, easygoing, hard- drinking Upper Peninsula towns they mingled and intermarried. Meanwhile the Ojibwa Indians, whose legends Schoolcraft had collected and bequeathed to Longfellow for The Song of Hiawatha, stolidly held their reservation grants [4, p.130].

By 1940 the Peninsula presented a rich population complex of the aborigine, the pioneer, and the immigrant, channeled into the American occupations of farming, mining, lumbering, and sailing and fishing on the Great Lakes. A spate of separate folk traditions, both ethnic and occupational, coexisted, while arching over all a new regional folklore had emerged, in the dialect humor common to the whole Peninsula [4, p.136].

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