Язык. Фольклор. Литература. Ч. 2

Origins and Development of the Study of Folklore Folklore is the generic name used to denote those traditional beliefs, superstitions, manners, customs and observances of ordinary people which have persisted from earlier into later periods and which, in fragmentary, modified or comparatively unchanged form, have continued to exist outside the accepted pattern of contemporary knowledge and religion, in some cases down to modern times. <...> Folk tales, traditional ballads, folk songs and proverbs also come under this heading and, by a recent extension of meaning, certain aspects of material culture originally excluded by definition. <...> The word folklore was introduced into English usage by W.J. Thoms in a letter written under the pseudonym of Ambrose Merton which appeared in the Athenaeum in Aug. 1846. <...> In this he suggested that “a good Saxon compound Folk-Lore” could be more aptly used to describe “what we in England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature ….” This suggestion was made only in passing, the main object of the letter being to arrange for the publication in the Athenaeum of notes concerning superstitions, customs, ballads, sayings and other traditional survivals “of the olden times” still existing in Britain. <...> The word thus incidentally coined was quickly adopted and has since been absorbed into the languages of almost all the European and transatlantic countries where the science of folklore (now commonly spelled without a hyphen) is seriously studied. <...> Interest in what would now be called folklore had, of course, existed long before the subject acquired its modern name. <...> Among these may be mentioned Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses (1583), Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and H. Misson’s Memoirs and Observations in his Travels over England, first published in French in 1698 and translated into English by J. Ozell in 1719 John Aubrey recorded numerous superstitions and folk customs of his time in his Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (a collection of manuscript notes compiled in 1686-87 but not printed in full until 1881) and in his Miscellanies (1696). <...> Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries he had the true folklorist’s curiosity about such matters, and he was quick to observe that parallels to many of the examples he gives had existed in antiquity <...>