Table Of ContentPATTERNS OF FOLKLORE
PATTERNS OF
FOLKLORE
Hilda Ellis Davidson
D. S. BREWER ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
© 1960, 1963, 1965, 1969, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1978
H. R. E. Davidson
Published by D. S. Brewer Ltd, P.O. Box 24, Ipswich IPI 1 JJ and
Rowman & Littlefield, 81 Adams Drive, Totowa, N.J. 07512,
USA.
First published in book form 1978. The articles were previously
published in Folklore, as follows : The Sword at the Wedding March
1960, Folklore and Man's Past Winter 1963, Thor's Hammer Spring
1965, The Legend of Lady Godiva Summer 1969, Folklore and History
Summer 1974, Folklore and Literature Summer 1975, Folklore and
Myth 1976.Í. They are reprinted by kind permission of the Editor
and the Folklore Society.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Davidson, Hilda Roderick Ellis
Patterns of Folklore.
1. Folk-lore - Essays
I. Title
398\08 GR71
ISBN 0-85991-042-3
Photoset by Benham & Company Limited, Sheepen Place,
Colchester, Essex C03 3LH, and printed in Great Britain by
Redwood Bum Ltd, Trowbridge & Esher.
CONTENTS
Preface v
Folklore and History 1
Folklore and Literature 21
Folklore and Myth 42
Folklore and Man’s Past 62
The Legend of Lady Godi va 80
The Sword at the Wedding 95
Thor’s Hammer 113
Index 128
PREFACE
As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
T. S. Eliot: East Coker
In the years leading up to 1978, when the London Folklore Society
celebrates the completion of its first hundred years, it seemed that
the time was right to look back on the progress made in folklore
studies, the insights gained, and the contribution which the study of
folklore has made and promises to make to other disciplines. This
then was the subject which I chose for my three obligatory
addresses as President of the Folklore Society from 1973-6, and it
proved at the same time an opportunity to look back over my own
work on the early history, literature and mythology of the Germanic
and Scandinavian peoples to see where folklore has helped me most
to understand the past. The additional papers collected here were
all published in the Society’s journal Folklore between 1960 and
1969, and I find, rather to my surprise, that they all have to do with
the significance of symbols in the mind of man. It seems that this is
the aspect of folklore which has the greatest importance for me.
Folklore is something produced when man is off his guard, acting
instinctively and unaware, with the unspoken conviction that what
he is doing is important, and that it must go on as it has done in the
past. If this conviction is no longer present, then the custom or rite
will disappear, just as oral tradition quietly ignores the parts of a
story or event which men do not want to keep alive, and lets it drop
out and be forgotten. Folklore in general develops when men come
together in groups, for work or amusement or celebration, or for
communal activities to do with the changing seasons of the year.
Therefore when we investigate folk tradition and discover recurrent
symbols incorporated in what at first sight may appear trivial or
wholly frivolous occasions, we may come to understand better not
vii
only the customs of the past but also the deeper springs by which
literature and mythology are nourished.
The nature of the symbols will vary greatly. They may be simple
visual ones, like the hammer or the whirling wheel, which may be
used as signs on memorial stones for the dead, or playthings for
communal merry-making, or amulets to bring luck and ward off
calamity. They may be the precious possessions of a family, like the
sword which is an heirloom, or the ancestral burial mound, or the
ancient tree beside the hall linking the generations. They may be
characters from the historic past, like Lady Godiva or Oliver
Cromwell, selected instinctively in the minds of the people to play a
definite role, without overmuch reliance on sober historical
evidence. They may be figures appearing repeatedly in folk and
fairy tales, like the oppressed wife, the slayer of monsters, or the
hero searching for a lost treasure, helped by birds and animals along
the way, characters who can also be recognized in more serious
works of literature. Moreover the various symbols form part of the
language of myth; they are linked with the natural world, with the
journeying sun and the lightning, the starry heavens and the seed in
the earth, and also with the crucial points of man’s pilgrimage
through life: birth, initiation into the adult world, marriage and
death.
We shall, however, be misled if we assume that such patterns are
stable and fixed; there is a rich complexity in their changing
development, and the symbols themselves may shift in form and
significance, being continually born anew. At one time it was
assumed that ballad or ceremony or myth could be traced back
along a recognized route to its origin among the folk of early times;
opinions differed with considerable vigour as to exactly what that
origin might be, but it was generally felt that if only we held the
necessary key, the process would be a direct and logical one. The
ballad collected in the remote countryside would go back either to a
minstrel or to spontaneous composition by the group in the golden
age of oral literature; the ceremony would once have formed part of
a dignified or barbarous ritual and then gradually deteriorated until
it was found as a game for children, or a superstitious practice of
simple-minded peasants. The most important revolution in our at
titude to folklore is the realization that there is no one well-defined
process for growth or decline; each song, tale or ceremony must
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