MetaFilter posts tagged with Folklore

Namahage (生剥)

KokuRyu — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:44:57 -0800

Namahage (生剥) is a Japanese ritual which is observed throughout Oga Peninsula, Akita Prefecture in northern Honshū, Japan. It is saidto have originated as a ritual for cleansing people's souls, and for blessing the new year. On New Year's Eve, a group of young men dressed up as fierce demons or bogeymen, Namahage, visit each house in the village, shouting: "any misbehaving kids live here?" They then scare children in the houses, telling them not to be lazy or cry, though little children often do burst into tears. Then the parents will assure the Namahage that there is no bad child in their house, and give food or traditional Japanese alcoholic beverages to the demons. Other regions of Japan have similar ceremonies. The Noto Peninsula welcomes February with Amamehagi. The masks are crudely carved, and real knives are sometimes still brandished at the children.

Jewish Exorcisms

ServSci — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:27:33 -0800

“We got a bit excited because we realized that people have collected lots of dybbuk stories, but our fragment describes a real event, where you see how they come together and pray in order to exorcise the ghost from a widow,”

"If a person practices "occult rites" and the content thereof is a mumble of strange words, bizarre costumes, or strange rites, it is either bogus or evil. It usually is bogus, but in those cases that he has tapped into these powers, it is evil for he has divorced it from God. The great rabbis who performed supernatural acts, were using them to bring home a message about God. They enjoined people to recognize the Creator, develop their character, be kind to others, be honest and faithful, reign in their drives, etc. Understood in the larger context of God, Torah and morality, these unusual miracles were indeed Divine revelations." - Witchcraft* & Judaism

*= 'witchcraft' in the sense of the Witch of Endor speaking with the dead. not a reference to European witches or modern Neopagans.

Bulgarian Days

tellurian — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 14:09:25 -0800

Happy Bear's Day, a Saint Day on the Bulgarian Festival Calendar. Some others that caught my eye: Fire dancing Nestinars. Makaveyan Days – "all the sons-in-law gather in their fathers-in-law houses. After the meal the eldest son-in-law starts chasing the younger in the threshing-floor with a stick and beats them." Also The House of Humour and Satire in Grabovo [Proverb – A WORD makes no hole, a pinch tears no underskirt. Superstition – Sin 1. To give a child a spoon to play with].

The sleep of reason

Artw — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 12:07:45 -0800

"Common images are bearded, goblin-like demons laughing or whispering sinister speech, a faceless girl (usually covering her face with hair, moving around in bed moaning and feeling my body), hands appearing from the wall and attempting to strangle me. A hung man talking in the corner of the room, and some of the most bizarre experiences may include up to a dozen 'critter' entities (think Gremlins movie) laughing and talking about me. The environment tends to feel like a holographic dollhouse, the experience peaks and then the hallucinations mysteriously vanish when I regain control of my body."- The bizarre world of sleep paralysis, a form of hypnagogia and root of many folkloric figures such as succubi or incubi and the night hag.

"He had stolen a bound devil from a priest in Franconia, using it to practice sorcery. He later sold in for five guilders."

orthogonality — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:26:46 -0800

No collection of Folklore and Mythology would be complete without Anti-Semitic Legends, tales of infanticide and changelings, the Christianizing of Faeries, or incest. (previously, previously)

Burst of Beaden

filthy light thief — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 15:25:36 -0800

Jon Klassen is an illustrator and designer, with a blog and a lovely website full of artwork, including The Miser (3:53, 2004, made with Kyle McQueen and Dan Rodrigues), An Eye for Annai (5:27, 2005, previously, also made with Dan Rodrigues, .MOV video link), an interpretation of a Mayan folktale (available in full in Flight vol 4, previously), The Adventures of Ship, a family art project, visual development and drawings for sets and props for the movie adaptation of Coraline (a couple previous), amongst other bits and bobs. Illustration Mundo had an interview with Klassen earlier this year.

Old Weird Brittanica

Miko — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:59:31 -0800

This entrancing 17-minute film compiled from footage of British folk celebrations was put together in honor of a new project created by set designer Simon Costin. Finding much of his artistic inspiration in the folklore of Great Britain, Costin wondered why there was no national center or museum dedicated to studying and collecting these traditional customs. So he's decided to start one, The Museum of British Folklore, and is launching the project this summer by outfitting a 1976 caravan and traveling to folk festivals around the country. The expedition is intended to build interest in the museum project, and to collect and document some of the surprising variety of more than 700 annual, seasonal, often pre-Christian festival celebrations that continue to this day. What's going on in the movie? Depicted in the film (as near as I can tell from the short snippets lacking notes and based upon pieced together clues, so IDs are probably not 100% accurate): Gloucestershire Cheese-rolling Abbots Bromley Horn Dance Morris dancing Mari Lywd Wassail Tar Barrel Burning Padstow May Day Border Morris Mummer's Day, also known as "Darkie Day" Molly Dancing for Plough Monday Jack-in-the-Green Sean-Nos (old style Irish step dancing) The Hunting of the Earl of Rone The Burry Man The Battle Bonfire

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle

hermitosis — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 10:00:25 -0800

Home of the Double-Headed Eagle is a short film by Ali Colleen Neff and Brian Graves, featuring the kaleidoscopic work of visionary architecture created by Reverend H. D. Dennis and his wife, Margaret Dennis.

Dude, I never made it to this screen before!

Miko — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:19:34 -0800

The niftiest thing at Coin Op World? The mp3 files of Classic Arcade Sounds. "We recorded our video game experiences from 1982 until 1988 in a variety of locations on the east coast. Most of the recordings come from Ithaca, NY, Albany, NY and Ocean City, MD. Other locations include Lancaster, PA, Falmouth, MA, Rehoboth Beach, DE and Key West, FL. Luckily I stored all fourteen audio tapes in a safe place and rediscovered them when I moved the rest of my stuff out of my parents house in 1997. In the last several years I digitized these nostalgic recordings to preserve and share them."

Urban Legends In War

huskerdont — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:16:31 -0800

Now that the fighting in Gaza is over for the time being, it's time for urban legends to arise out of the morass. One story now making the rounds on the Israeli side involves soldiers claiming the Biblical matriarch Rachel warned them of Hamas ambushes and guided them away from booby-trapped homes. Strangely, Rachel supposedly appeared as an Arabic-speaking older woman. Meanwhile, American soldiers during the second Iraq war spawned their own urban legends. But these stories are just the latest entries in a long tradition. The Angels of Mons
The Ghost Pilot
Pippo
The Amputee's Letter
The American Soldiers' Ghosts
The Homing Pigeon Kidnap Plot

"Many times when the women were sewing they would cry."

Miko — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:24:49 -0800

Weavings of War: Fabrics of Memory , an online exhibit of comtemporary textiles created (mostly) by women living in war zones.

If you meet a 10-foot-tall woman in a snow storm, run

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 09:05:55 -0800

Have you met the Yuki-onna? You might meet her in a snow storm, and recognize her by her pure white robe marked only with a splattering of blood and her lack of feet. She might kill you with icy breath, or lead you into the storm to die of exposure, or seduce you, only to steal your soul. She's the subject of one of Japan's better known ghost stories (the climax of which was depicted in Tanaka Tokuzo's 1968 film Kaidan Yuki Onna) and has also made an appearance in Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (2:50).

For Ourselves and Our Posterity

Miko — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:54:38 -0800

Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project The Library of Congress invites you to submit digital audio or video recordings of speeches made between January 16 and january 25, 2009 on the occasion of Barack Obama's inauguration. The speeches will be archived in a collection for future scholarship, much like the Day of Infamyand other collections capturing signifcant American moments.

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore publishes original academic studies in folklore studies, comparative mythological research, cultural anthropology and related fields.

pita — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 15:15:23 -0800

Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore publishes original academic studies in folklore studies, comparative mythological research, cultural anthropology and related fields. Previously.

Turkish folktales

Kattullus — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 07:40:40 -0800

The Uysal - Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative is an immense repository of folktales from modern Anatolia. The full list of stories but luckily there's a search function. But that's not all, oh no, there's also a music section, with downloadable mp3s and a whole nother section with more stories and Turkish literature and mp3s. Here's a somewhat random selection of stories to get you started (all links pdf): Nasreddin Hoca's Brilliant Donkey, A Saint Urinates in Public, The Girl Disguised as a Monk and the Padishah's Youngest Son, Behlül Dane Discourses with the Dung Heap and finally, Elia Kazan in Kayseri (yes, that Elia Kazan).

I will teach you, Walter, why I carry thorns in the moon

taz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:46:48 -0800

In an intriguing blog entry the mysterious jasminembla muses about the man in the moon, and his relationship with thorns, linking finally to a most remarkable collection of sourced and footnoted Victorian Moon Lore authored by a Rev. Timothy Harley, 1885. In the "Man in the Moon" section, we learn that, indeed, the man in the moon has been traditionally linked with thorns, variously being exiled to the moon for stealing a bundle of brambles, strewing brambles on the path to church to hinder the pious, or cutting wood on the Sabbath, among other infractions - and that this folktale has existed since at least 1157, when an English abbot asks, in Latin, "Do you not know what the people call the rustic in the moon who carries the thorns? Whence one vulgarly speaking says, "The Rustic in the moon / Whose burden weighs him down / This changeless truth reveals / He profits not who steals." Furthermore, no less a personage than Shakespeare has mentioned the thorny situation of the poor man in the moon... and most interesting, perhaps, the rather convincing theory that the bramble-burdened man in the moon may very well be an older "Jack" of Jack and Jill fame, who did not steal, but was stolen by the moon, along with his sister. There's much, much more in the Moon Lore collection, including The Woman in the Moon, The Hare in the Moon, The Toad in the Moon, other moon myths, moon as deity, superstitions about the moon, and a serious examination of the question "is the moon inhabited?"

Cornbread Nation

Miko — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:07:03 -0800

The Southern Foodways Alliance is one weighed-down church-supper table, full of oral history/blog projects like The Tamale Trail, the Boudin Trail, interviews and recipes from the Bartenders of New Orleans, photo essay/interviews from Birmingham's Greek-Americans, a mess o'homemade films, and a passel of event and BBQ-shack photos on Flickr, all smothered in the tangy-sweet academic goodness of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. These folks get my vote for most flavorful, funkiest food-loving folklorists in the lower forty-eight. Tamales previously mentioned here, and Prince's Hot Chicken here, but the whole site is worth a bookmark and a long evening on the porch.

Cat's in the Cradle

Miko — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:53:54 -0800

String Figures Galore!

Ever Been Diddled?

Bookhouse — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 19:05:23 -0800

Excerpts from Pissing in the Snow, a collection of ribald folk tales collected in the first half of the twentieth century around the Ozarks by Vance Randolph. (NSFW language) From the introduction about the wonderfully dirty language within (note his count of dirty words is very, very low to the modern mind): "There are, in modern American English, some twenty-five words which refer to the excretory and sexual functions. Tolerated in common speech, these terms are considered offensive in print. About twenty of them are taboo to the extent that they do not appear in ordinary dictionaries.... Many folktales ... depend [on these words] for effect. Translate a vernacular legend into the language of the schools, and it is no longer a folktale. An honest folklorist cannot substitute feces for shit, or write copulate when his informant says fuck, diddle, roger, or tread. Why should one employ such a noun as penis, if the narrator prefers pecker, horn, jemson or tallywhacker. Many of these stories are innocent, even childish, but they do contain vulgar terms like cunt and twitchet . . . it is impossible to present a well-rounded picture of Ozark folklore without some obscene items."

John Henry was a steel-drivin' bastard

Roman Graves — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 23:34:42 -0800

You've got just over two weeks to make it to the John Henry celebration in Leeds, Alabama, where some folks believe the legendary steel driving contest actually took place. Maybe you already made it to John Henry Days in Talcott, West Virginia (or read a fictionalized account), where some more folks claim the same. John Garst, Scott Nelson, and other folklorists weigh in here, supplemented by a wealth of links and resources on the subject. While you think on it let Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Boss, Ralph Stanley, John Jackson, Merle Travis, and Jason Isbell tell their own versions. John Garst and his research mentioned previously.

Go ahead, kick that kitty! You're covered.

miss lynnster — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 11:44:58 -0800

Feel like you've racked up too many sins to be admitted into Heaven? Fret not, my evil friend... just hire a Sin Eater to gobble them all up for you. Voila! More here.

Code Breaking

Miko — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 13:27:30 -0800

Did Anyone Really Follow the Drinking Gourd? Were you taught that slaves in the antebellum South sang this traditional song to convey coded instructions for escaping Northward? Were you taught that quilt block patterns could be read as a map to freedom, or that quilts were hung outside safe houses as signals to escaping slaves?Though these are among the most often taught stories of the operation of the Underground Railroad, current scholarship indicates that these aren't survivals of pre-Civil War African-American folklore, but legends constructed and popularized within the twentieth century, frequently by white writers and performers. In today's New York Times, these legends battle it out with fact in debate over the proposed design of a new Frederick Douglass memorial [PDF].

You better watch out...

Miko — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 09:17:34 -0800

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, but do you know Stekkjarstaur, Giljagaur, Stufur, Thvorusleikir, Pottaskefill, Askasleikir, Hurdarskellir, Skyrgamur, Bjugnakraekir, Gluggagaegir, Gattathefur, Ketkrokur and Kertasnikir? They're the Jolasveinar, the impish "Yuletide Lads" of Iceland, and those are only some of their many names. During the thirteen days before Christmas, legend says that they do their best to monkeywrench the celebrations with hijinks like stealing sausages, milk, and candles, and peeping into windows and up skirts. The children of gruesome child-eating trolls Gryla and Leppaludi, who were known for snatching naughty children, the elves got their start in the 17th century. In the years since, their image has apparently mellowed, and now they leave children presents in their shoes and limit themselves to mild pranks.

The Line

Miko — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:18:48 -0800

Steppin' is an hour-long documentary on an African-American dance tradition, most closely associated with historically black fraternities and sororities (though it's also found in high schools, clubs, and professional dance companies). Combining footwork, hand-clapping, chanting, singing, use of props, and changing configurations of dancers, it's a tightly coordinated dance form in which teams vie for honors in competitions nationwide.

Skin

Miko — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 09:05:32 -0800

"In a close-knit Chesapeake Bay community, the world’s fastest muskrat skinners face off in a truly cutthroat competition at the National Outdoor Show. One lucky young lady gets to be their queen." [Warning: Fiddle tunes!] Muskrat Lovely, a documentary about the conflation of the world muskrat-skinning championships with the Miss Outdoors beauty competition. The film will air soon on the PBS program Independent Lens. Catch some of the brackish flavor of the Chesapeake Bay's traditional regional culture, including some muskrat recipes and skinning tips.. And don't miss the link to Everything Muskrat.